Growth Marketing Workshop · ONE Digital Tech Business Growth Programme 2024
Hosted by: Opportunity North East (ONE)
Date: Wednesday, 15 January 2025 · 1:00 – 4:00 pm
Location: ONE Tech Hub, Schoolhill, Aberdeen AB10 1JQ
About the workshop
As part of Opportunity North East’s Digital Tech Business Growth Programme, this workshop was delivered to help innovation-driven founders sharpen their strategy, strengthen their positioning, and build a practical path to scalable growth.
Led by Sid Kathirvel, Founder and Strategic Growth Partner at Unlock Growth, the session combined theory, lived experience, and battle-tested frameworks drawn from growth marketing, Jobs-to-Be-Done, positioning strategy, and MIT’s Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps. The goal: help founders get their strategy, positioning, and messaging right before they pour time and budget into tactical marketing.
Through stories, examples, and hands-on exercises, founders learned how to build a growth foundation that scales rather than scatter resources across random tactics.
What the session covered
- The role of brand strategy in growth: What “brand” really means and why clarity saves teams time, money, and stress.
- Understanding customers deeply: How to gather insight through customer interviews and map the journey from awareness to revenue.
- Positioning for success: Applying April Dunford’s frameworks to create differentiation and craft boilerplate messaging that actually resonates.
- North Star Metric & goal-setting: How to define a North Star Metric and set measurable, behaviour-aligned growth goals.
- Growth experimentation: A practical approach to testing channels, prioritising experiments, and allocating effort for maximum impact.
- Working with agencies & freelancers: How to brief well, stay aligned, and avoid wasted spend.
About the programme
Startup Fast-Track is a two-day sprint that gives students and recent graduates a hands-on taste of entrepreneurship. Participants come together to form teams, identify real-world problems, develop innovative solutions, and pitch their ideas to a panel of judges — all in one fast-moving weekend.
Through practical workshops and mentoring, the event helps future founders learn how to validate ideas, test assumptions, and tell a compelling story under pressure. It’s immersive, creative, and built to unlock the startup mindset.