Natalie Cantave is a community builder and marketer who is building corporate and personal brands on an unconventional path as an early stage startup marketer. As the first Marketing hire at Estateably, she is helping estate and legal professionals meet the demands of the great wealth transfer through creative marketing.
Natalie grew up in New Jersey with her twin sister and her Haitian-American household. Her parents feared that their girls might one day graduate on the same day at different schools, but luckily – they both found a home at Dartmouth College.
Natalie’s sister was determined to be a doctor so she went the pre-med path while Natalie pursued the creative side of her brain as a Psychology major. She worked for Dartmouth College’s campus newspaper, taking pictures and serving as the Photo Editor her junior and senior years.
She also interned at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice, automating hospital records. The experience was an accidental early brush with natural language processing, well before that was cool. While it could have seemed monotonous, the role helped stoke an interest in technology as Natalie witnessed how automation could help drive progress and create better workflow experiences.
Upon graduation, she knew New York would be the easy choice close to her parents but a lot of her classmates were moving to Boston so she thought she’d give it a try. And hey, Boston was where she received her first job offer. She moved to Somerville for five years before relocating to East Boston. Through her time in the city she’s loved experiencing the different neighborhoods and especially this current fall season. Because who doesn’t want to live in Boston in the fall? It’s the best season around here. Let’s just not talk about the winter.
Her first role was in Product Marketing at Dimensional Insight, a software analytics company serving healthcare companies, wine & spirits, and manufacturing verticals. Three important verticals that need software solutions as long as they’re not combined from a product perspective. Sounds a little dangerous.
Natalie got a lot of experience with a small team but still didn’t exactly know what venture backed startups were as Dimensional Insight was bootstrapped and founded in the late 80’s. On her commutes north into the Burlington office she met Mike Schumann, a friendly startup leader from the neighborhood. Mike made her aware of an opportunity at local non-profit accelerator Mass Challenge. She interviewed as a Marketing Coordinator with Nick Dougherty, landed the job, and dove deep into the startup ecosystem.
After a couple of years at Mass Challenge. Natalie wanted to go “in house” at a startup and found Cohere Health through a recruiter. She learned a lot about healthtech during a challenging time for the industry in the middle of Covid. Next she transitioned to Electives, an education technology startup, as their first marketer.
When market forces changed the trajectory of that opportunity, Natalie did some contract work with Candoor. Candoor helps Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other underserved candidates build community and connect candidly with professionals working in their dream jobs. She honed her skills there for a few months before she landed her current full time opportunity at Estateably, a B2B legal tech / fintech company focused on digitizing trust & estate administration that closely affects the great wealth transfer.
Like many of us early in our careers, Natalie had to jump through a few hoops across verticals, market forces, and industries. It’s the career jungle gym after all. Back in 2018, Natalie met fellow marketer Gabrielle Dalvet while at a digital marketing conference. They talked about their careers, navigating startups, being early stage marketers, and their experiences as females in tech.
Both Gabrielle & Natalie wanted to feel more connected to marketers in Boston and beyond, so they attempted to create a support system for other women in the field. There were successful groups like Chief and the American Marketing Association but they envisioned a community that would fit their needs a little bit more closely.
So then, in early 2021 they launched MKTG WMN. In less than two and a half years, they have grown to 800+ members around the world spanning digital marketers, agency owners, B2B & B2C members, and freelancers. One of their members even markets dynamite. Because no matter how explosive your product is, you always need good marketing and community! MKTG WMN is a community that supports women across marketing functions, regardless of where they are in their journey.
Pay Your Learnings Forward & Create a Flywheel
Natalie has really enjoyed the process and journey she’s gone through to become a capable, early stage marketer. She has navigated specific learnings like executing scrappy & successful marketing campaigns, unafraid to experiment with different strategies and smaller budgets.
Next, she wants to bring more people up the ladder that look like her. She has found that Black women in early stage startups isn’t as common as it should be. Through conversations with mentors of her own, she is working to feed her passion for inclusion and community building to create better representation in tech and bring the next generation along with her.
Natalie actively mentors young BIPOC candidates interested in startups & tech, digitally and in Boston, helping them with their resumes and sometimes even salary negotiations. Natalie is always willing to offer time to Black talent, helping them evaluate and break into great companies. Natalie recognizes all the opportunities she has received have come through the community she has built and she is determined to invest in other people in the same way others have invested in her.
Paying it forward is her way of showing appreciation, reinforcing her own learnings, and also continuing to build her network. Representation in tech is Natalie’s way of paying it forward so tech seems less exclusive to underrepresented talent and so that more Black females can be seen leading product & engineering teams in the years ahead.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment – “When I was early in my role at Estateably, I realized April was financial literacy month. While doing research on credit card debt & student loans, I noticed no one was talking about how you take care of your assets so we launched some content & awareness around trusts & wills. Feeling comfortable and supported in an environment to try different things is important.”
Invest in Building Community – “Nurturing & building community has been a critical part of my success. You never know where your next opportunity is going to come from so you need to take the time to foster your network.”
Enjoy the Journey – “When I was graduating from college, I would have never pictured where I am now. I’ve taken a very unconventional path and everything I’ve learned is through those experiences. Everything eventually ties together.”
Natalie admits she’s never really been someone with a five year plan. She wants to continue to grow as a marketer, particularly an early stage marketer who can be the first marketing hire in a B2B tech startup. She also wants to continue to grow the MKTG WMN community, exploring ways to turn that project into a business and grow as an entrepreneur, furthering her own brand. She is also dabbling with the idea of being an angel investor one day. And, of course, she’s a proud mom to her cat Pancake, who has her own Instagram account.
If you want to learn more about Natalie, you can find her growing MKTG WMN, working from a local coffee shop or WeWork in the Downtown Crossing area, enjoying walks around the city of Boston – especially Piers Park in East Boston, or making an impact at Estateably. Or you can reach out to her on LinkedIn! Thanks for sharing Natalie. Excited to see all the momentum you build inside and outside of software companies in the years ahead!