Natalia Tonenka is a mentor at Pioneers Club and a seasoned marketing leader with more than 16 years of experience across Europe, the US, and Asia. In this interview, she shares how wartime resilience shaped her approach, why mentoring has become “career oxygen” for her, and what early-stage founders must do to build products customers truly want and investors immediately understand.
What key experiences have shaped you during your 16+ years in marketing, and how did working across different countries influence your approach?
Natalia Tonenka: I’m a marketing leader with over 16 years of hands-on experience in product-led tech companies across Ukraine, Europe, the US, and Southeast Asia. Before the full-scale war I built and ran marketing for Rocket, Moneyveo, Innovecs, Prom.ua, Foxtrot and a few others, usually coming in to create departments from zero, launch new brands, and deliver aggressive growth. My favorite war stories: taking Rocket to 45% market share in Ukraine in the first six months and successfully rolling out two completely new financial products for Moneyveo.
When the war started I moved with my family to Germany. In Berlin I first worked as a marketing strategist in a local agency, then stepped in as fractional CMO for a big Ukrainian logistics player to lead their German launch. In six months we brought in 200,000+ new users and took 3rd place at the Berlin Ecommerce Awards for the fastest expansion of the year.
I also tried building my own AI mental-health startup here, but closed it on purpose, I simply don’t want artificial intelligence poking around in people’s heads. Some things have to stay human. Now I run my own consulting practice and small agency, helping EU- and US-based startups build predictable marketing machines and scale internationally. Ukrainian reality trained me to operate in permanent turbulence; four years in DACH gave me deep local know-how. Put those two together and you get someone who can find growth fast, even when everything feels shaky, because shaky has been my normal for a very long time.
What made you join Pioneers Club as a mentor, and why does mentoring matter to you personally and professionally?
Natalia Tonenka: First of all, I’ve been on the receiving side many times. Mentors literally shaped my career, pulled me out of dead ends, and gave me the shortcuts I needed. I owe them a lot. Then I started mentoring marketing specialists who wanted to become heads of departments or CMOs. I quickly realised I genuinely love teaching: I ran a strategic marketing course for aspiring CMOs, taught digital marketing to Ukrainian refugees in Germany who were switching careers, and saw people land their first jobs here because of it. When I was building my own (now closed) AI mental-health startup, dozens of people gave me their time and advice for free.
The world runs on this simple rule: if you take, you give back. Mentoring startups is exactly that payback, plus I learn something new every single session. I get a front-row seat to projects that can actually change the world, and the energy I get from founders who are ready to move mountains is priceless. So for me mentoring is not charity work. It’s career oxygen, a way to stay sharp, and the best reminder that the knowledge in my head is only valuable when it helps someone else fly.
What signals tell you that an early-stage startup is truly moving forward?
Natalia Tonenka: For me, real progress at the early stage is when the team stops “inventing” and starts truly hearing their users. I know things are moving forward when: they’ve done proper custdev interviews and can articulate the problem and value in their customers’ own words — not their own assumptions. The business model is clear: they know exactly how much money they need, for what, when they’ll break even, and why an investor should care. There’s a realistic roadmap, a working MVP, a live website/app, and the first real users, customers or partners are already in.
The team is gradually filling the right roles. And the things I always pay closest attention to: how fast the founders can kill their favourite hypotheses (the best ones kill 8 out of 10 ideas before even testing). Whether they measure absolutely everything they possibly can, even if the dashboard is still tiny. Whether the product solves a problem people are willing to pay for right now — not “in two years once the market is ready”. When all of this is in place, I know the startup is alive and heading in the right direction.
What unique value do you bring to your mentoring sessions?
Natalia Tonenka: I bring 16 years of hands-on marketing experience from both chaotic Ukrainian startups and big corporations, plus 4 years of scaling in the rule-heavy DACH environment and my own (now closed) AI startup. This mix — startup survival mode, corporate discipline and the very fresh memory of being a founder myself — is what I use every mentoring session. It helps early teams spot fatal mistakes before they burn cash, build investor-ready metrics from day one, and separate “cool idea” from “people will actually pay for this right now”.
What are the most common mistakes you see early-stage founders make?
Natalia Tonenka: The biggest problem I see over and over again is that founders fall in love with their solution instead of falling in love with the customer’s problem. Most teams are terrified of talking to real people, so they guess, run superficial surveys at best, and end up launching yet another “me-too” product nobody truly needs. I fix this first: I give them simple, battle-tested scripts and techniques to find the right people, get them on a call, run proper depth interviews, and actually hear the pain in the customers’ own words. Once they have 15–20 real interviews, the product direction usually changes 180° — and for the better.
The second classic trap is money blindness: founders don’t know how much to ask from investors, how to calculate a realistic marketing budget, or which metrics actually matter. I walk them through unit economics from day one, build the first financial model together, and teach them to measure everything that moves. Suddenly the pitch stops being “we have a cool idea” and becomes “here’s the exact problem, here’s proof people will pay, here’s how we get to breakeven in 14 months”. The result? Investors stop seeing dreamers and start seeing future business owners who already think (and speak) like CEOs. That’s exactly how I help early teams turn vague excitement into a product customers want and a story investors can’t ignore.
How do you define the right balance between product focus and being data-driven?
Natalia Tonenka: Data-driven isn’t a religion for me — it’s a tool that has to be used at the right moment. At the very early stage (pre-sales, pre-PMF), there simply isn’t much meaningful data to track. Trying to be “data-driven” when you have 30 sign-ups is pointless and often paralyzing. At this point I look at one thing only: how fast and purposefully the team is moving along the roadmap, how quickly they test hypotheses and talk to real people. Speed of learning beats any dashboard. As soon as the first sales appear (even €100–500 a month), everything changes.
From that moment on we start tracking the key metrics at least in Excel: CAC, LTV, payback period, retention cohorts, conversion rates. Once these numbers are stable for 2–3 months and we understand what actually works, we build automated dashboards (Amplitude, Mixpanel, whatever fits the budget). My rule is simple: before first revenue → focus on speed of customer interviews and hypothesis killing. After first revenue → every euro and every day must be measured. Use data when it actually exists and can protect you from big mistakes.
How should founders shift the ratio between product and marketing as the startup evolves?
Natalia Tonenka: In my experience the balance isn’t 50/50 — it’s 80/20 in favour of product until you have repeatable sales, then it flips to 50/50 and eventually to 20/80 when you’re scaling aggressively. Pre-PMF (no repeatable sales yet): 80% product/build + 20% marketing/validation. Marketing’s only job is to bring real user feedback as fast and as cheaply as possible. Everything else is waste. First 10–50 paying customers: 50/50. Product keeps solving the core pain, marketing starts building the first predictable channel and proves unit economics. Post-PMF, growth stage: 20% product (iteration + retention) + 80% marketing/sales.
At this point the bottleneck is almost always distribution, not the product itself. I’ve seen dozens of startups die because technical founders kept polishing the product for months while marketing was “someone else’s job”. And I’ve seen the opposite — marketing burning cash on a product nobody wanted to pay for. The right ratio is brutal but simple: marketing weight must grow exactly in proportion to proven demand. No proven demand — no big marketing. Proven demand — marketing eats the oxygen.
What practical tools do you give to founders to help them move faster?
Natalia Tonenka: I support founders with limited resources simply by giving them everything I already have — for free. Ready-to-use tools from my 16 years that actually worked: customer interview script (15 questions that reveal real pain in 25 minutes), one-page Lean Canvas template I used for my own startup, one-page GTM plan that fits on an A4 sheet, simple unit-economics Excel that shows runway and breakeven from day one, pitch-deck structure that helped my teams raise money more than once. No theory, no paid courses, no “come back when you have budget”. Because I know exactly how it feels when there is no money yet, and every wasted day is critical. My job is to remove weeks of reinventing the wheel so they can start testing and talking to real users tomorrow morning.
Why is Pioneers Club such a valuable platform for founders?
Natalia Tonenka: Pioneers Club is one of the few communities in Germany that genuinely accelerates the path from idea to real funding. For startups it delivers hand-picked, battle-tested mentors who’ve already built and scaled what the founders are fighting for, direct matchmaking with active angels and VCs (including access to exclusive events and free tickets to top conferences where investors actually show up), a credibility badge that instantly attracts talent, partners, and follow-on interest. For mentors and talents like me it’s the best place to stay sharp, spot the strongest teams early, and sometimes join or co-invest. In short: the Club shortens the distance between “building in stealth” and “standing in front of the right investor” — dramatically.
How does the network support founders when teams need to grow or change?
Natalia Tonenka: I’m not sure I can give a strong answer here, because in the startups I’ve mentored so far the opposite has happened: new co-founders actually joined the teams, and nobody has left yet. But of course, if a founder does decide to move on, Pioneers Club makes the next step very natural. There’s an active job board where founders openly post exactly who they need (CTO, CMO, Head of Growth, etc.), and the network quickly connects the right people.
Which trends are shaping today’s startup landscape, and what does this mean for early teams?
Natalia Tonenka: The startup landscape has shifted dramatically over the past few years: from the “growth-at-any-cost” era to a much more disciplined, niche-focused, and sustainable reality. Markets reward deep specialization instead of universal platforms, user expectations have skyrocketed (personalization, trust, data safety, and seamless mobile experience are now table stakes), and company structures have become leaner, remote-first, and heavily AI-augmented. Investors pour money only into teams that prove strong unit economics early and embed responsibility (ethical AI, sustainability, transparent data use) into the core of the product from day one.
For new founders my advice is simple: stop chasing trends — solve a painful problem you truly understand, talk to real users weekly, build trust and retention before aggressive acquisition, and use AI as a force multiplier, not as a buzzword. The winners in 2025–2026 are the teams that combine ruthless focus on real customer value with clean numbers and a culture that can pivot overnight. Everything else gets filtered out fast.
What is your outlook on the DACH startup ecosystem, and what needs to change to unlock its full potential?
Natalia Tonenka: I’m genuinely optimistic about the DACH startup scene: we have the engineering talent, the capital is rising, and real strength in deeptech, fintech, greentech and healthtech that solve big, painful problems. Three things will decide whether we become a true global powerhouse or stay “very good but not explosive”: mentoring — it already saves founders 6–12 months, turns first-time founders into second-time founders without the scars, and opens direct doors to investors and corporates.
Diversity — the more women, immigrants, and non-traditional backgrounds we have in founding teams, the faster we create products that work globally and the higher the creativity and resilience of the entire ecosystem. Bureaucracy — the only real brake I see today; endless paperwork and slow processes for visas, funding programs, and even simple company registration still scare off too many international talents and slow down capital flow. Fix that one bottleneck, keep pushing mentoring, diversity and strong marketing, and DACH will start producing global category leaders on a regular basis.
Thank you Natalia Tonenka for the Interview
Statements of the author and the interviewee do not necessarily represent the editors and the publisher opinion again.
