http://robsobers.com | rob@robsobers.com
Hi, I'm Rob. I'm a developer/designer turned marketing exec. I care deeply about my craft. Have a look.
Director of Inbound Marketing - November 2011 to present
- Helped grow Varonis from $40M to $164M in revenue in 5 years (IPO).
- Lead all aspects of digital growth: SEO, content marketing, paid acquisition, email marketing, automation, social, etc.
- Managed product marketing for 7 distinct products.
- Built a scrappy, distributed team of growth marketers with diverse backgrounds and skills.
- Grew web traffic by 33%, inbound leads by 566%, and SQLs by 89% year-over-year in 2015.
- Wrote blog posts, did PR, public speaking, webinars, podcasts, and a YouTube show.
- Implemented HubSpot and related technology to help the team execute on marketing strategies.
- Built a custom analytics platform using Chartio and PostgreSQL for ROI analysis.
- Rolled out a growth framework for running marketing experiments and tracking results.
- Helped educate and enable worldwide sales staff (pitch training, sales process, objection handling).
- Provided sales support for SMB and enterprise deals (ran initial meetings, closed business).
- Lead analyst relations, routinely briefing security analysts at firms such as Gartner and Forrester.
Member of Technical Staff - February 2010 to December 2011
- Lead designer on FogBugz V8.
- Re-designed internal CRM tool.
- Designed, developed, and mounted a giant status board to help the support team operate (before it became trendy 😉).
- Started a profitable professional services division.
- Produced webinars, training guides, documentation, and screencasts to help onboard and retain customers.
- Helped form a developer-lead customer success team; became resident DVCS expert (git and Mercurial).
- Once helped provide feedback on some sketches which later became the design for Trello; might have helped coin the tagline "Organize anything, together."
Sr. Software Engineer / Product Manager - June 2003 to February 2010
- Was a product manager and developer on the world's leading ERP product for furniture and appliance retailers.
- Redesigned the Windows desktop client that powers the company's flagship product.
- Developed a SQL Server-powered data warehouse and companion reporting tools to provide retail executives with real-time business intelligence (this product was key 🔑 and made us a lot of money).
- Wrote an automatic software upgrade framework which saved millions of dollars in support costs and minimized downtime for customers.
- Lead key projects for high-profile clients including Ethan Allen and American Furniture: project management, risk analysis, custom software development.
- Lead a team of 4 engineers responsible for resolving bug reports and building custom plugins.
- Conducted weekly code reviews.
- Mentored junior team members in programming, database administration, and software design.
I created a SaaS app called Munchkin Report: easy online child activity tracking for parents, caregivers, and schools. It's a passion project that let's me keep my software development and design skills sharp, and acts as a guinea pig for marketing experiments.
In 2011 I created Learn Ruby The Hard Way, which is a free, open source book that has helped thousands of newbies learn the Ruby programming language. It's an adaptation of Zed Shaw's original work: Learn Python The Hard Way. You can read it for free online or buy a hard copy on Amazon!
Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration - May 2003
Magna Cum Laude. GPA: 3.83. Concentration in Information Systems Management, minor in Economics.
I love to draw, travel, and spend time with my wife and kids. I know an ungodly amount of trivia about A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones and have an obsession with the genius storytelling of George R.R. Martin.