#39 Raitis Purins: Building Printful's Marketing Machine to Unicorn, and His Shift to Chief Growth Officer at Mapon

Raitis Puriņš built Latvia's biggest marketing team almost from scratch and helped make Printful a unicorn. Now he's Chief Growth Officer, a new role with some overlaps, over in B2B fleet management.Raitis spent seven years as Head of Marketing at Printful, scaling the team from 5 to over 100 people and helping the company reach a $1B valuation, making it Latvia's first unicorn. Before that, he was a computers teacher, a sports journalist, and (still to this day) a top-level handball goalkeeper.Currently, Raitis is Chief Growth Officer at Mapon, a fleet management company on an acquisition spree across Europe. In this episode, Mauro sits down with Raitis to hear the full Printful story told with the benefit of hindsight, and learn what it's like rebuilding a marketing playbook in B2B SaaS.We discuss:🔍 How SEO became Printful's most powerful growth channel, and what happened when they cut all ad spend during COVID📧 The one email mistake that cost millions🏗️ How to build a marketing team of 100🎯 Category creation and turning "print-on-demand" from a niche into a global industry🤝 The Printful-Printify merger📢 Leadership principles from the Printful years⚖️ Brand vs. performance🏷️ Why he's "Chief Growth Officer" and not CMO at Mapon🔀 What translates from ecommerce to fleet management SaaS🇱🇻 The marketing community he's building for Latvian marketers targeting export marketsGive it a listen! 🎧 Follow Raitis on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/raitispurinsLearn more about Mapon: https://www.mapon.com/=================================================================Thanks for listening! For more, follow us on LinkedIn.Runway is a podcast started by Black Unicorn PR co-founders Julija Jegorova and Mauro Battellini to help startup founders, company builders and business leaders with insights, tools and advice from specialists in sales, marketing, PR and more.Black Unicorn PR is a London-based tech PR agency focused on startups, scaleups and VC.For more information visit: https://www.blackunicornpr.com/For even more advice, especially on PR, visit the Black Unicorn PR blog