David Fuller
Fractional CMO & Board Advisor · Commercial Strategy · SaaS & Growth-Stage Companies
"I come in when the commercial problem is still ambiguous — before the execution layer, at the point where the right strategic framing changes everything. My work is diagnosis and architecture, not implementation."
Sectors: SaaS · Fintech · Maritime · Automotive · Sport · Travel · Media
For founders who need senior marketing leadership
Most growth-stage SaaS companies arrive at the same inflection point: the product works, early customers are in, but the commercial engine hasn't been designed yet. The messaging doesn't quite fit the buyer, the channels aren't sequenced, and the team is executing harder rather than differently. More marketing activity doesn't fix a structural problem.
That's the gap I work in. I identify the underlying constraint, design the framework, and hand a clear plan to the execution team. I'm most useful at the problem-definition stage — not running the day-to-day.
In practice that has looked like: diagnosing a positioning problem at a maritime SaaS platform that had been misread as a growth problem; rebuilding the commercial architecture for a two-sided fintech where two different buyers were being sold to with the same message; and generating AU$850K in partnership commitments in six months for an organisation that had no partnership structure at all.
I work fractionally — senior strategic input without the overhead of a full-time hire, typically for a defined period: problem identified, framework designed, team equipped to execute.
Sectors: SaaS · AI Startups · Professional Sports · Web3
For investors and founders who need a thinking partner at board level
The companies I tend to work with don't have a marketing problem. They have a commercial structure problem — the way the product reaches its buyer isn't designed correctly, the positioning doesn't reflect what the business actually is, or the revenue model is creating friction that looks like a sales problem.
At advisory and board level, I work at the moment before scale — when the strategic choices still compound and getting the architecture wrong means rebuilding it later at much greater cost. I don't sit on boards to attend meetings. I engage where there's a specific commercial problem that needs outside perspective and structural thinking.
Across three decades in the GCC, Southeast Asia, Europe, and Australia, I've built commercial practices from zero, repositioned businesses in markets they didn't yet understand, and designed market entry structures for products that didn't have a category name when we started. The sectors change. The structural problems tend to repeat.
Start Here....
The most useful first step is usually a short conversation — 30 minutes to understand where the commercial friction actually is. If there's a fit, it becomes clear quickly.