After closing a $4.25M funding round, Octane AI looks to Adams to help build the brand and scale growth as it aims to empower ecommerce marketers with tools to differentiate and scale their stores

Octane AI, an all-in-one platform for engaging quizzes, data collection, and personalized Facebook Messenger and SMS automation, announces the hiring of digital marketing leader Heather Adams as its new Vice President of Marketing. Following a successful tenure as cloud development platform DigitalOcean’s Head of Global B2B & Partner Marketing, Adams will support Octane AI’s next stage of growth and lead efforts to scale its internal marketing team, accelerate new customer acquisition and optimize and diversify its content engine to grow and evolve the brand.

Octane AI, which recently announced a $4.25 million capital raise following a doubling of revenue during the pandemic, has been preparing for its next major play for expansion. Co-founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr were eager to identify the right partner for building upon that growth and reinvigorating their marketing initiatives.

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“With Heather, we felt lucky to find not only a highly-skilled and well-rounded marketer but a smart and curious business partner who would challenge us to find new ways to fulfill our mission of humanizing the ecommerce shopping experience,” said Matt Schlicht, co-founder and CEO of Octane AI.

“During her tenure at ShoeBuy.com, Heather walked in the shoes (pun intended) of our target audience, and thus has deep empathy for what today’s ecommerce marketers need in order to be successful. The way she lit up upon hearing about our new Shoppable Quiz product, we knew she innately understood and shared in our vision and excitement for what’s possible,” said Octane AI co-founder and President, Ben Parr.

Adams brings over 20 years of experience building best-in-class brands and teams for a range of companies — from digital agencies to small startups and recognized public companies. Most recently at cloud provider DigitalOcean, Adams’ focus was on customer acquisition — which included launching and scaling various partner programs that helped propel the company toward $300M in ARR. Previously, Adams held a number of marketing leadership roles where she was responsible for driving exponential growth, expanding marketing competencies and establishing robust analytics for driving ROI. These include VP Marketing at bootstrapped video hosting provider Wista, VP of Marketing at public global stock asset leader Shutterstock, SVP Marketing at large ecommerce shoe retailer Shoes.com (since acquired by Walmart), and Sr. Director of Acquisition at cloud backup provider Carbonite, where she delivered 5x customer growth to drive revenue from $20 million to over $100 million, leading to successful IPO midway through her tenure.

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“From the first conversation, I could tell there was something very special in the making at Octane AI that I wanted to be a part of. The founding team shows a rare coupling of product vision and humility, along with a laser focus on team culture and customer empathy. Given this strong alignment with my personal and professional values alongside the huge market opportunity and momentum they have, the choice was very clear and I’m elated to be joining this team,” says Adams.

As VP of Marketing, Adams’ immediate priorities will be to build out the marketing team in order to scale the self-serve acquisition engine and accelerate the enterprise sales lead pipeline for Octane AI. In particular, Adams is immediately looking for talent to fill positions in demand generation, lifecycle marketing and marketing operations roles. To realize this growth, she will help facilitate smart, personalized customer journeys that are powered by conversations, data, content, and technology, and will work closely with partners and agencies in the ecommerce ecosystem.

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Adams joins Octane AI following the launch of the Shoppable Quiz, its new solution that brings the retail consultation experience online with a personalized shopping experience, featuring a fully customizable and easy-to-use quiz builder integrated with Shopify, Shopify Plus, Klaviyo, ReCharge, Facebook Messenger, SMS and other best-in-class ecommerce technologies. Merchants are finding multiple ways to deliver growth with the quiz, from accelerating email opt-ins to driving higher conversion rates and unlocking new segments with larger average order values. Since first unveiling the Shoppable Quiz in private beta to select merchants at the beginning of June, Octane AI’s revenue has increased by 88%.

According to recent data from the Commerce Department, consumers spent $200.72 billion online, up 44.4% from $138.96 billion for the same quarter last year. This trend places Octane AI at the precipice of significant opportunity as the company aims to secure its leadership in humanizing the ecommerce shopping experience through deeper personalization.

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