Chris Bartik. Get in touch
Growth & Marketing Executive · B2B SaaS

Thirty years building growth for B2B SaaS. Now I build it with AI.

I lead marketing and growth for software companies in their next phase of scale. Executive, operator, and unusually hands-on with where AI actually earns its keep.

Open to leadership & fractional roles Dripping Springs, TX Growth · GTM · AI
The short version

I'm a growth and marketing executive with 30 years in B2B SaaS. I've led marketing in-house, run my own consulting practice, and built companies, building and mentoring teams and owning the numbers the whole way.

But here's what actually gets me out of bed right now.

For most of my career, the best ideas died in a queue. Swinging for the fences meant begging for developer time, design resources, and budget, and by the time anything shipped, it was already stale. I once spent months building an ROI calculator that was out of date the day it went live. The real constraint was never imagination. It was the cost and time of building the thing.

That constraint is gone.

Today, if I want an email-headline generator tuned to a specific persona, industry, and promotion, I build it in an afternoon. The dependencies that used to gate marketers, IT, developers, designers, are disappearing. For the first time, if it's in your head, it's reasonable to think you can bring it into the world.

And this isn't only about marketing. Every corner of a business is shedding these old constraints, and that should excite all of us. But AI still needs direction. It needs someone who knows which ideas are worth chasing and which are dead ends, someone with the scar tissue to tell the difference. That's where I come in. I've done just about everything, the right way and the wrong way, and that hard-won judgment is exactly what turns a powerful tool into real results. I'm the bridge between what's already been proven and what's newly possible. Put AI in capable hands and it helps. Put it in experienced ones and you get something greater than the sum of its parts. That's the part I can't wait to explore.

CB
Chris Bartik · Dripping Springs, TX
What's next

The role I'm looking for.

A senior marketing or growth leadership seat, VP, Head of, or CMO, at a B2B SaaS company that wants to build in this environment. Open to fractional and advisory work in the meantime.

I do my best work where marketing is treated as a growth driver rather than a service desk, and where doing meaningful work is expected to support a full life, not consume it. If that sounds like your team, let's talk.

Selected work

See what's possible.

The clearest proof of what I mean by hands-on AI. A few of the products and tools I've shipped, and what they did for the business.

An AI-generated homepage redesign shown across laptop, tablet, and phone
Founder · AI-native growth engine
Instasite

This is the clearest example of what I mean. A couple of years ago, building an entire platform to power a new go-to-market motion would have taken a team, a budget, and time that I didn't have. I built it in weeks, at almost no additional cost, and it became its own company.

Instasite scrapes a prospect's existing website, understands their business, and generates a complete AI redesign of their homepage automatically. That unlocked a go-to-market strategy that simply wasn't feasible before: reach out to a builder with a real, live preview of their redesigned site already built, and let "Free Homepage Redesign" become the hook for every ad and cold email.

~2x customer acquisition, at roughly half the CAC
Internal tool · private codebase
Pool Visualizer showing a backyard before and after an AI-rendered pool
Conversion tool for clients
Pool Visualizer

Builders already spend real money driving traffic. One of the highest-return moves is making sure that traffic actually converts, and the best way to do that is to give visitors genuine value right there on the page.

So I built a tool that does it: a homeowner uploads a photo of their backyard, sees an AI rendering of their dream pool, and requests an instant estimate. A couple of years ago, coding this would have been out of reach. Now the distance between the idea and the working tool is almost nothing.

~38% lift in conversions, early results across pilot clients
Tools I build to do the work

Instead of paying for tools that almost do what I need, I now just build the ones that do exactly what I need.

imgCRUSH batch image optimizer interface
imgCRUSH

Bulk-convert HEIC, HEIF, and AVIF files, resize them, and compress to under 50KB as WebP, all in one pass. That used to take three tools and real time. This one saves my team hours a week.

Try it live →
Screensize Studio showing a site across multiple device sizes
Screensize Studio

Plenty of responsive-preview tools exist, and it's a high-leverage task that used to cost my team hundreds a month. What I love about Screensize Studio is that it does exactly what I want, nothing I don't, and it's practically free.

Try it live →
Experience

A 30-year arc, still building.

2025 — Now
Instasite
Founder

Founded and built an AI-native website and lead-capture product for pool builders, spun out to the edge of the Poologics business. Owner of the model end to end: product, go-to-market, delivery, and the AI systems underneath.

2019 — 2026
Poologics
Co-Owner · COO · CMO

Co-owned and ran a bootstrapped pool-industry SaaS, leading it day to day across marketing, product, and operations. Built the demand-gen engine and HubSpot backbone, set the product roadmap, ran hiring and the P&L, and generated the qualified pipeline that funded the business.

2015 — Now
Inboundist Consulting
Founder & Principal Consultant

My consulting practice, where I've helped dozens of B2B SaaS startups and growth-stage companies build marketing engines that actually work: strategy, demand gen, and getting sales and marketing aligned around a single number. Today the focus is fractional and advisory work at the intersection of growth and AI.

Earlier leadership
Gemalto — Director, Customer Acquisition & Product Marketing
2010 — 2015
ShoreTel — Sr. Marketing Manager, Cloud Division
2012 — 2013
CrownPeak Technology — Director of Marketing
2006 — 2010
Earlier — Agency & marketing roles at SicolaMartin (Y&R) and Vignette (OpenText)
1996 — 2006
What I do

Where I create the most value.

01

Marketing Leadership

Building and mentoring teams, setting strategy, and owning the number. Leading the function, not just running the plays.

02

Growth & Demand Gen

Paid, content, SEO, ABM, and email, with the marketing-ops backbone underneath to make it measurable.

03

Product & GTM

Roadmaps, requirements, and positioning tied directly to how the company actually goes to market and sells.

04

AI in Marketing

Finding where AI genuinely moves the needle across the funnel and the delivery model, and where it's just noise.

05

Operations & P&L

Internal systems, hiring, and the business sense to understand how every marketing decision ripples across the org.

06

Founder's Instinct

Bootstrapped operator's bias for shipping. Comfortable with ambiguity, allergic to work that doesn't drive results.

Communities & masterminds

The rooms I choose to be in.

Leadership doesn't grow in isolation. These are the communities where I keep learning, stay honest with myself, and surround myself with people building things that matter.

Innovating with AI — An accelerator for operators putting AI to work on real products, not slideware.
Founding Member
Front Row Dads — A brotherhood of family-first entrepreneurs building great businesses without missing life.
Member
Royals Mastermind — A founder mastermind focused on identity, presence, and building with intention. royalsmastermind.com
Founding Member
In the community
Texas Natural Beekeepers Association — A community of Texas beekeepers dedicated to natural, treatment-free beekeeping.
Member
Dripping Springs Art League — Supporting local artists and the visual arts in the Dripping Springs community.
Member
Dripping Springs Theater Boosters — Championing the performing arts and the young performers of Dripping Springs.
Member
Get in touch
Let's build something
that matters. Grab time with me →