Case Studies | Josh Martín

Josh Martín on stage accepting ASMC's Distinguished Corporate Member of the Year award for Decision Lens — Accepting ASMC's Distinguished Corporate Member of the Year award: proof that showing up for the community our buyers trust paid off.

01

Decision Lens → Diversis Capital

EVP Marketing (2020) → CMO (2022) → Chief Strategy Officer (2024–2025)

Team of 5 · Budget around $1M

$750K → $13M annual marketing-sourced pipeline

Identified where the real market opportunity was, found ways to break through the noise, and built a system for continued growth.

Context: Decision Lens was failing to find new markets to fuel the growth of its newest platform, Accelerate.
Problem: The commercial push wasn't finding product-market fit in a crowded field. Marketing was scattered across different verticals, and the results added up to less than the sum of their parts.
The call: After landscape analysis and marketing tests: “We need to go back to gov, full steam.” I positioned the company around a moment government cared about, modernizing the Pentagon's budget process (PPBE).

How we made it happen: Find the wedge
Made PPBE modernization the company's wedge, and wrote the brand bible so the whole company and its partners told the same story.
Build the engine
Years of groundwork: identifying our ICP, investing in the channels we knew they used, making a few big bets, and staying consistent across every touchpoint to earn brand equity.
Earn authority
Became part of the community our buyers trusted, the American Society of Military Comptrollers (now SDFM) and the Space Force Association, and was elected to leadership in both. ASMC named Decision Lens its Distinguished Corporate Member of the Year.
Put AI to work early
Used AI early and often. In mid-2024 I turned the brand bible into custom GPTs, so anyone could write blog posts, emails, and any market-facing copy that was on-brand, every time. Then an AI-assisted capture team took proposal submissions from 5 to 7 a year to 11 in a single quarter, adding $2M+ in pipeline.
Outcome: Annual marketing-sourced pipeline grew from $750K (2020) to $13M (2023) on a 25% budget increase.
Marketing delivered more than half of all new pipeline, at about $30 of pipeline for every $1 invested.
Built the growth narrative, management presentations, and diligence materials for the sale. Diversis Capital acquired Decision Lens in July 2024, then named me Chief Strategy Officer.
Lesson: Focus is critical to building a well-respected and trusted brand.

Gauntlet AI team and Austin Chamber members at the ribbon cutting outside the office — Opening our Austin office with the Austin Chamber. Showing up in person is part of how we build awareness.

02Current work

Gauntlet AI

First Chief Marketing Officer · Dec 2025 to present

Startup · Team of 4 · Budget around $1M · Admissions, B2B, and B2G

B2B leads: under 5 → 100+ a week

Repositioned Gauntlet as the best place to source AI talent, and pointed every go-to-market activity at that one idea.

Context: Gauntlet trains engineers to build with AI and connects them with companies that want to hire them. That means marketing to two audiences at once: engineers who apply, and the companies and government programs that hire them.
Problem: Marketing, admissions, partnerships, and business development ran as separate activities, the market was crowded, and marketing was producing fewer than 5 B2B leads a week.
The call: Focus on the core: we produce the best production AI engineers anywhere, and every go-to-market activity should say so.

How we made it happen: Find the wedge
Honed and defined the value proposition, and repositioned the company around being the best place to source AI talent.
Build the engine
Invested in interesting, innovative ways to build awareness: in person, with partners, and with new lead magnets. Powered by the Earned Attention Suite, seven production marketing apps the team uses every week.
Earn authority
Night School and an owned livestream series, plus a repeatable engine for earning the stage at conferences to build our credibility.
Outcome: Marketing-sourced B2B leads grew from fewer than 5 to more than 100 a week.
$1.5M in revenue from a new government channel.
In progress: an AI-first go-to-market, from upstream messaging to ad placement, SEO, and answer engines.
Lesson: Volume is now the commodity. The constraint is judgment, so build the judgment into the system.

03

Logi Analytics → Marlin Equity

Director, Product Marketing · 2016–2018

First time leading a team

Repositioned, then acquired by Marlin Equity

Stopped a losing fight with Tableau and found the buyers who actually needed us: developers.

Context: An analytics company burning through cash in a losing effort to take on Tableau in the broader business intelligence market.
Problem: End users were pretty happy with Tableau. Logi was losing that fight and spending to reach buyers who weren't going to switch.
The call: Stop chasing business users. Serve the developers and product teams building analytics into their own software, who were stuck with hard-to-use charting tools.

How we made it happen: Find the wedge
Went deep on developer psychology, workflows, and tools, and rebuilt the buyer personas and ideal customer profile from scratch. (Yes, including a deck mapping developer types to Myers-Briggs profiles, Elsa, and Draco Malfoy.)
Build the engine
Aligned product, sales, account management, and marketing around the new buyer and new messaging, and trained the global sales team and channel partners to sell it.
Earn authority
Wrote The State of Embedded Analytics, the company's flagship report and biggest source of demand, and led analyst relations, including Gartner Magic Quadrant submissions.
Outcome: The new targeting cut marketing spend by 20% with no loss in lead quality.
Marlin Equity acquired Logi in October 2017, announcing it as the company helping product teams embed analytics into their products.
Lesson: The best solution doesn't always win. Success is a game of positioning, marketing, and product-market fit.

Marlin's acquisition announcement

04

Strategy Analytics: AppTRAX

Director, Apps Research · 2010–2013

Built from zero

$1M+ in new revenue from a new product

Nobody was measuring the app economy, so I built the system that did.

Context: The iPhone had launched, Android was emerging, BlackBerry still led, and app stores were multiplying.
Problem: Entrenched brands were being upended by upstarts blazing a direct-to-consumer trail (Angry Birds was regularly beating Disney's apps), and nobody had a reliable way to measure the market.
The call: Don't write another report. Build the system that measures the market, then sell what it reveals.

How we made it happen: Find the wedge
Defined a new kind of research product: cross-platform app tracking and forecasting, when everyone else was still writing reports.
Build the engine
Designed the methodology, found the data sources, built the tooling, and built the forecast model for app volume and value.
Earn authority
Briefed executives at Apple, Samsung, Nokia, and BlackBerry, and became a go-to source for press like MarketWatch, TechCrunch, and PCMag.
Outcome: A first-of-its-kind research service that generated more than $1M in new revenue.
The volume forecasts proved 99% accurate, independently verified by companies including Apple.
It's where I taught myself to market and sell a product.
Lesson: If the thing you need doesn't exist yet, sometimes you just have to go build it yourself.

MarketWatch, 2008: on the App Store launch