Two Years, Eight Months, and the Marketer I Became Anyway

We don't talk enough about the grief that comes with leaving a place where genuine impact was felt, not just through your job but also on you as a person.

To me, it’s harder than the grief of being fired or laid off. It’s like a complicated, bittersweet ache of choosing to walk away from something good because you know, somewhere deep in your bones, that staying would mean stopping, and stopping would mean you'd never discover who else you could become.

In tech jargon, I'd describe myself as the zero-to-one (0→1) hire at Fertitude. I joined when the company was still a collection of ideas scattered across docs, folders, and prototypes. Two years and eight months later, I'm finally passing the torch to the 1→10 hire, the person who will take what we've built and scale it into something even greater. I can’t tell you about this story without starting from the very beginning.

The Message That Changed Everything

In 2022, Kieva (Fertitude CEO) reached out to me on LinkedIn, Instagram, and even via email about a Marketing Associate role. This would teach me about Kieva and how thorough she can get.

The role fit me like a glove. I applied, barely making the deadline (bad behavior, I know🫠). She later told me I'd missed it by a hair's breadth, but she still wanted to interview me. I was the first of six candidates. A week later, I got an email: I was joining Zolt!

Yes, before Fertitude, there was Zolt, and that's the foundation upon which everything else was built. After a year, Kieva made a decision to shut down Zolt and start something new which would become Fertitude.

She gave me an out: a severance pay, recommendations to my next employer, and, any support I need to transition elsewhere.

But she also said, "If you want to keep building with me, I'll be delighted!". I honestly didn't think twice about the decision. I didn't bother to consult anyone. I said yes on the spot. Looking back, I can trace so much of who I am now to that single decision.

Joining Fertitude

Fertitude taught me so much!

How to write. How to communicate. How to manage people. How to lead. How to collaborate. How to fix things. How to think like a stakeholder. How to pick up skills fast. That was where I became a ‘big girl’.

I joined as a Content Marketer. I left as Growth and Product Marketing Lead.

A core memory that will always stay with me is launching our MVP, the first real version of Fertitude that actual users would experience and find valuable enough to keep using.

We’re a women’s health product, and in an industry like this, it was very important that we met our audience wherever they were. I joined over 45 women groups across Facebook, Telegram & WhatsApp, engaging, listening in on the conversations they have. Their questions, their wins, their needs and the modes they were used to.

For us, our mission was to find them wherever they gathered online, address their POVs and help them see that Fertitude was worth their time and attention.

Prior to launching the MVP, I had also built a sizeable community online across social media and email, we scaled some of our already performing content efforts using ads, combining that with the online outreach and community engagement Kieva and I embarked on.

In under a week, we had almost 1,000 users🎊

To this day, it remains one of my proudest achievements because prior to this, I hadn’t launched an app product before.

I will go ahead to launch several products within Fertitude until V4.0, the version I left.

In those 2 years and 8 months, Fertitude grew to over 15,000 women across 30+ countries, on a ridiculously low acquisition cost.

We’ve gone to launch super cool campaigns like Me & My Girls. The campaign literally took off, generating over 3 million views, thousands of leads and some brand equity.

We’ve closed partnerships with the likes of CcHub, Zikoko, WeNaija, etc.

Maintained a 4.5 ⭐️ on the App Store and PlayStores in those years

Built our marketing function from scratch and oversaw all channels leading to acquisition

There’s also the people that have held me through it all. In my time at Fertitude, the marketing team grew from myself to 4 amazing people.

The People

Fertitude's culture wasn't accidental. It also didn't happen by default.

Working in a startup kinda makes you superman because your job can be anything depending on the day. Outside being marketing manager; design, UX writing, project management, customer support, web page design, prototyping, amongst others were all shoes I filled at different points. Not once did any of it feel like a mismatch.

Kieva created and embodied a sense that we were all in it together, and that mattered more than any individual win or loss. There were open door policies that protected the team and gave everyone ownership.

Leaving was not an easy decision to come to because you don’t encounter experiences like this everywhere. Each time I had to tell someone that I was leaving, their reaction was the same- surprise. A lot of people had only ever known me as "the Fertitude person," and I was quite comfortable with that identity.

But now, it's time to pass the baton, literally. I’ve done real work and I close this chapter, proud because there’s impact to show for it.

On to new adventures 🌱