Marketing Spark (The B2B SaaS Marketing Podcast) Podcast By Mark Evans cover art

Marketing Spark (The B2B SaaS Marketing Podcast)

Marketing Spark (The B2B SaaS Marketing Podcast)

By: Mark Evans
Listen for free

Marketing Spark is a podcast for SaaS founders and marketers who want to understand how marketing decisions drive real business outcomes.

Through candid conversations with operators and entrepreneurs, the show explores positioning, growth, and the practical tradeoffs behind building demand, trust, and long-term growth.

2025 Mark Evans
Economics Leadership Management & Leadership Marketing Marketing & Sales
Episodes
  • How Donate.ly Helped Raise Millions and What AI Means for Nonprofit Fundraising | Javan Van Gronigen
    Mar 14 2026

    How do nonprofits compete for attention, donations, and impact in a noisy digital world?

    In this episode of the Marketing Spark podcast, host Mark Evans speaks with Javan Van Gronigen, co-founder of Donate.ly, a fundraising platform that has helped nonprofits raise hundreds of millions of dollars.

    Javan shares the story behind Donate.ly and how his experience working with nonprofits revealed a major gap in fundraising technology. Many organizations struggle with complex systems and tools that slow them down instead of helping them grow. Donate.ly was built to simplify fundraising while giving organizations the flexibility to scale.

    During the conversation, Javan and Mark explore:

    • Why many nonprofits struggle with fundraising technology
    • How campaigns like the Barstool Fund raised tens of millions of dollars for small businesses
    • The marketing strategies that helped Donate.ly grow in a competitive landscape
    • Why education and content marketing are essential for reaching nonprofit leaders
    • How AI is transforming marketing, automation, and fundraising strategy
    • Why founders and marketers need to experiment with AI now or risk falling behind

    Javan also shares his perspective on the future of fundraising technology and how AI-powered systems could soon automate large parts of marketing and donor engagement.

    Show more Show less
    31 mins
  • How Agenda Hero Is Using AI to Eliminate Manual Calendar Work
    Feb 11 2026

    In this episode of Marketing Spark, Mark Evans sits down with Caren Cioffi, co-founder and CEO of Agenda Hero, an AI-powered platform designed to eliminate manual calendar work and save billions of hours.

    After more than a decade at Brightcove, where she helped scale the company from startup to global public enterprise, Caren made the leap into entrepreneurship to solve a problem she experienced firsthand: the hidden time cost of managing schedules. What began as personal frustration with juggling work, travel, and family logistics evolved into a startup tackling one of the most persistent workplace inefficiencies.

    Caren explains how Agenda Hero uses AI to convert text, images, and PDFs into structured calendar events across Google, Outlook, Apple and more. She shares how the breakthrough came when AI made it possible to automate tedious form filling that calendars have required for decades.

    The conversation also explores:

    • How to validate product-market fit before scaling marketing
    • Why building a product people genuinely love is the best early marketing strategy
    • Lessons learned from pivoting within her own product
    • How she approached raising venture funding for the first time
    • The role of influencer and advocacy marketing in early-stage growth
    • Why founders need conviction and the right believers around them

    Show more Show less
    30 mins
  • Before AI: The Critical Knowledge Gap You're Overlooking
    Jan 29 2026

    Many companies are rushing to adopt AI tools hoping to unlock new levels of productivity and innovation — and failing. Why? According to Sarah Jeannault, former FinTech founder and now VP Marketing at ProcedureFlow, it’s because they skipped a crucial step: building a strong operational and knowledge foundation. In this episode, Sarah dives into why AI initiatives fall flat, how to fix broken knowledge systems, and what a true AI-ready organization actually looks like. We also talk about marketing’s evolving tech stack, change management, and why AI must empower frontline teams — not just leadership.

    Show more Show less
    30 mins
No reviews yet