Benjamin Hoehn is Head of Marketing at LightSource, an AI-native sourcing and procurement platform. A developer-turned-marketer, he has always operated at the intersection of technology and go-to-market, starting in B2C agency work, moving to B2B agencies, and then applying that experience to scale fast-growing startups. His approach starts with fundamentals — building a deep ICP and persona foundation through manual, non-pitch discovery — and only then accelerates with AI (curated NotebookLM knowledge centers, pain-point mining from call data, and enrichment). He joined LightSource knowing SaaS and startups but nothing about procurement, and rebuilt the company's ICP, personas, messaging, and product vision from the ground up. He writes about content and product marketing under his personal brand, Mojo Mogul.
“Before you begin marketing, before you start feeding anything into AI, you really do need to still do the fundamentals of figuring out who your audience is and figuring out your ICP.”
“I know marketing, I know SaaS, I know startups. I don't know anything about procurement. So I did a lot of manual outreach — I literally just need to talk to people.”
“People, especially if you're breaking into a new market, they don't want to see bad marketing. They wanted to see someone actually trying to get to know them.”
“There are like 11 to 15 people typically in a deal, mid-market to enterprise. So what you really need to do is find out who's in that room, who you're talking with, and what their role is in that room.”
“The implementers have veto powers. If your tech doesn't play nice or integrate with the current tech stack, they're going to boot you out. So you need to be able to speak to every single one of them.”
“This stuff is super nerdy and kind of boring for anyone outside of supply chain and procurement, but it's gold for our ICP.”
“As I was drafting that article, we actually got an inbound from Shark Ninja. It created a virtuous cycle.”
“Attribution is one of these arguments that you can get into and just spin your wheels with everyone almost endlessly.”