Justine Herlin Founding Marketer for startups
I’m a B2B marketing consultant based in Spain. I build marketing systems from zero for seed and Series A startups in Europe, working fractionally as a founding marketer. 12+ years of experience across 8+ industries including climate innovation, SaaS, professional services, edtech, and more.
Why I do this, and what I mean by "Founding Marketer"
The category I kept getting hired for didn’t describe the work I was actually doing.
Fractional CMO. Marketing consultant. Strategic advisor.
Those labels carry a specific implication: someone who thinks, recommends, and hands the work to someone else. That was not what was happening. I was building ICP definitions from scratch, setting up martech stacks, writing outbound sequences, building tracking infrastructure, documenting SOPs. Starting from a blank page and building the thing.
That is not advising. That is founding.
The difference matters because the failure mode is different. Most early-stage startups don’t stall on strategy. They stall on the gap between having a strategy and having someone responsible for making it run. The founding marketer closes that gap.
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TRACK RECORD
My background
Ten years of B2C, B2B, B2B2C marketing, built across every function and every stage of company maturity, from global agency accounts to EU-level nonprofits to seed-stage startups. The through-line is the same: no function, blank page, build the thing.
My career has run in three layers simultaneously. At the foundation: marketing systems. CRM migrations, MarTech infrastructure, lifecycle architecture, tracking. The kind of work that has to exist before anything else works. On top of that: GTM and demand generation, ICP definition, channel build, outbound, positioning. And underneath both: the operator instinct that comes from having built teams, managed vendor pools of 10+, and shipped product solo.
Geographically, the work has spanned France, Spain, the UK, and international expansion across the EU, US, Africa, and Japan. That breadth is not incidental. European GTM is not a translated version of US GTM. ICP assumptions shift. Channel mix changes. Messaging is adapted for country considerations.
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CONTINUOUS LEARNING
How I stay sharp
I keep my practice rooted in what works now. That means studying modern marketing systems, AI-powered workflows, product-led growth, and automation, and testing them, not just reading about them. Here is a sample of certifications I passed and communities I’m part of.
My story briefly
I’m from Lille, in northern France. Spain became home after an Erasmus exchange in Valladolid. I fell in love with the country and moved back after finishing my Master’s in International Marketing at IAE Lille. I’ve lived in Barcelona, Valencia, and now Bilbao, in the Spanish Basque Country.
Outside of work: walking my dogs on the coast, biking with my partner, pinchos with friends. I read, paint, I learn fast and broadly. Coding, product, AI, usually before I strictly need to.
The thread through the work I find most meaningful: companies building toward something worth building. That’s what draws me to climate, edtech, and mission-driven professional services. Not saving the world loudly, doing something that compounds.
When I’m not building marketing systems or exploring new tools and marketing strategies, you’ll find me walking my dogs on the coast, biking with my partner, or having a pincho with friends. I love nature, slow living, reading, painting, and learning new things.
That’s why I’m drawn to mission-driven organizations and businesses working toward a more sustainable, thoughtful future. I like helping teams that make the world better, not louder.
