Ivan Ivanka
Founder & CEO, Markster · San Francisco. I spent 15 years running growth at every scale, and kept seeing the same thing: the business runs on the owner, so growth stops the moment the owner does. I build and run the system that fixes that.
Fifteen years running growth, one conclusion.
Serving CERN, OECD, and Airbus. Named Growth Hacker of the Year. Now backed by 500 Global.
Most companies don’t have a growth problem.
They have a key-person problem.
I’ve run growth from the shop floor to the C-suite of a 1,500-person enterprise. The failure mode is the same everywhere: most businesses stall because sales, marketing, and follow-up still run through the owner. When the owner stops pushing, pipeline stops moving.
The work was never the hard part.
Across four agencies, the outreach, the content, and the follow-up were never the bottleneck. The bottleneck was that no business had a system to keep that work running once the owner got busy. So growth quietly became a second job nobody wanted, and it broke under the first busy season.
Growth that runs itself.
I built Markster to remove the owner as the bottleneck. Sales, marketing, CRM, follow-up, and pipeline run as one operated system. The owner approves what goes out. We run the rest. I also created ScaleOS, the methodology behind it. I build the fix, and I measure the outcome.
The next generation of great businesses won’t be built by bigger teams. They’ll be built by better systems.
Operated by Markster.
Most growth advice is written by people who’ve never had to run the thing. I write for the owner who’s still doing it all themselves.
Field notes on operated growth.
What actually moves pipeline for a service business, what doesn’t, and how to build a system that keeps running when you get busy. No hype, no theory. Just the version I’d give a fellow founder over coffee.
- Written from the operator’s seat, not the consultant’s. I run this for a living.
- Founder-to-founder. Calm, specific, no growth-hacking nonsense.
- Plus the podcast - the same conversation, out loud.
Want the system, not just the read?
A short call tells you whether Markster can get you results, what it would run for you, and what it costs. No pitch.