Nicolas Bontoux

Product Marketing Manager • Customer Success Manager • Content Marketing Manager • Annecy, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, FR

Technical Writing

Team Building

Customer Service

Product Marketing

Available for hire fromNegotiable

Contracts

Challenge taker, product lover, team catalyst, they also call me mister good vibes

I'm a Software Engineer turned Product Marketer 🙃 Involved for 10+ years with open-source dev tools, CI/CD & DevSecOps adoption. My background blends in hands-on software engineering, with direct Customer Support, as well as Technical Product Marketing. I've led Customer Service and Marketing teams in multiple startups, driving adoption of dev tools in communities of millions of developers (thereby generating B2B demand across all verticals, e.g. growing a SAST install base of <100k to 250k+ instances).

Projects

Customer Support Leadership for SaaS Developer Tooling

For a recurring revenue SaaS-based product, Customer Service can't just be about diagnosing issues and fixing technical problems. It instead should be about accompanying customers in maximizing the value they get out of the product, so they get more and more benefits over time. More benefits, more satisfaction, more upsell revenue. Likewise, open community support online can play an essential role in generating demand for additional functionality and paid plans. Action: - grew team from 2 to 6+ engineers. No tiered levels of support, but a spirit to solve AND make proactive suggestions to improve customer's setup and get higher value. - Create channels for product feedback and suggestions, and automation to notify of new features/bugfixes released. - Community Support (e.g. StackOverflow) of open-core base. Launched a new community forum. - Routines with Engineering and Sales, to share product strengths, weaknesses, and upsell opportunities. Result: - Top-notch customer satisfaction and net renewal rate for $10M+ ARR world-leading products - Team smoothly handled a volume of inbound requests growing from 20-ish a week to 60+ a week - Strong satisfaction in Product Engineering: we help them stay focused on feature development, and we provide high quality feedback to drive efficient bugfixes - Sales Department happy: proactively notified of interesting usage facts or satisfaction/frustration points (upsell opportunities!) See More

New Customer and Upgrade Growth Strategy for SaaS players in the DevOps industry

Worked with multiple SaaS player in the DevOps market, looking to grow their business on both fronts: new customer acquisition, existing customer expansion. In the developer tooling space there is a fine-balance to strike between maintaining authenticity with the technical end-user base, and yet still driving revenue growth with actual businesses these developers are part of. Action: Defining and structuring a Marketing strategy that supports the end-to-end journey from awareness (e.g. web traffic) - initial signup (e.g. new account) - actual usage (product-qualified lead) - customer expansion (increased consumption of value). This ties together all tactics from initial SEO and campaigns, to conversion optimization, to in-product marketing and ultimately the customer nurture strategy. Result: Overall Marketing strategy to drive business growth on an 12-24 months timeframe. Equally important: connection points and expectations with Sales and Product orgs, to ensure success not just from a Marketing Delivery standpoint, but really from an end-user / end-customer journey perspective. Growing user-base from <100K instances to 250K+, customer count an order of magnitude up to 10K+ See More

Educational content on the benefits of Git-based tooling in dev communities

Client faced an opportunity to demonstrate leadership in a specific technical community, about how its Git-based tooling could enable for more reliable, faster and safer workflows for its users and customers. Taking up this opportunity was a means to grow awareness and become a voice of reference in the market. Action: Articulated a blog post series focusing on the problems/challenges faced by the community (a.k.a. pains to be relieved, or jobs to be done - JTBD). Wrote educational content about the origins of that problem, then thought-leadership pieces about the upcoming solutions to address these challenges, and finally more product-focused pieces on how concretely certain tools were demonstrating innovation and helping end-users improve their workflow. Result: Content being shared and re-shared in community forums. Clients gaining inbound organic traffic (SEO play), increasing their reputation, and ultimately seeing increased conversion. See More

Demand Generation strategy for open-source developer tooling

A company in the dev tooling space is looking to increase its inbound commercial pipeline. It has its free tier adopted by more than 100 thousand teams, but lacks awareness of its overall offering. Action: Broke the silos between open-source and commercial feature-set. Focused on product value, drove a positioning and messaging exercise to clearly articulate the journey and expansion path across pricing tiers. Adjusted website content and conversion paths to clearly guide prospects in their choice, implemented community content and educational resources (videos, webinars, guides) to raise awareness across the community, partnered with engineering to implement in-product marketing. Result: +50% Quarter-over-Quarter growth of Sales pipeline. Clear customer expansion strategy. Sales Enablement material to drive expansion of prospects and customers. See More

Work History

Marketing Lead

Blue CanvasApr 2022 - Apr 2024 • 2 yrs 1 moDriving adoption of Git-based DevOps tooling in the Salesforce community, to enable all Salesforce admins and developers to deploy faster and safely!

Head Of Marketing

SonarSourceMay 2019 - Dec 2021 • 2 yrs 8 mosSpearheaded the growth of the marketing team, focusing on product announcements and promotion of dev tools for code quality and security. Grew the user base significantly and contributed to the management team.

Product Marketing Manager

SonarSourceJun 2018 - May 2019 • 1 yrBuilt out the Product Marketing function from scratch, initiated product marketing strategies, and collaborated with tech partners to enhance product adoption.

Support Engineer

SonarSourceNov 2015 - Jun 2018 • 2 yrs 8 mosHelped customers and developers with continuous analysis of code quality and security, co-led the growth of the support team, and launched a new community forum.

Education

École des Mines de Saint-Étienne

Ingénieur Civil des Mines, Computer Science, Data Analysis, Statistical Methods, Management2008 - 2011

Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne

Master, Web Intelligence2010 - 2011

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