How Onin built out their marketing team using Passionfruit

Ryan wanted to build technology that brought people together.

So he founded Onin, a pre-seed startup that combines calendar and chat, to help you organise plans with anyone (friends, family, or a partner) in one app. In the app, you can find all the calendar features you know - events, scheduling, and notifications — with social features you love — chats, invite links and usernames.

But Ryan needed a product marketing specialist to come in and help him launch the product perfectly.

After a referral from an investor, Onin turned to Passionfruit.

Based on their vision and needs, Passionfruit matched Onin with Imi - a killer Product Marketer in under three days.

Imi had a passion for building products from scratch with experience founding her own businesses. Imi had also been in the early-stage team at Contact, a marketplace product in the creator economy and Cortex, a creative studio. She was the perfect match for Onin.

As an experienced product marketer, Imi loved getting in the weeds and working alongside founders, helping companies scale, and launching new, innovative products and features along the way.

Imi originally started working for Onin 1.5 days per week in August 2022. It was a match made in heaven. So perfect, that after just 1 month, she was hired full-time as their Head of Product Marketing and joined the small but mighty London-based team in November.

“I’m loving my time at Onin. Getting stuck in as a freelancer gave me the freedom to meet the team and understand the mission far more deeply than a traditional interviewing process. This was super unique, and made jumping onboard full-time far easier and more enjoyable”
- Imi, Head of Product Marketing at Onin
(former Passionfruit freelancer)

Since joining Onin, Imi and her team have had massive success. At the end of April, they announced £2.75 million of new funding from Octopus Ventures and the much-anticipated launch of their new app (definitely worth the download), which Imi played a critical role in rolling out.

The best part? Onin got back in touch with Passionfruit to work with more marketing powerhouses to help plug holes in their expanding marketing team.

Imi, long into her role as Head of Product Marketing, needed a Social Media Manager to help execute Onin’s marketing strategy on TikTok. She knew Passionfruit could deliver quality marketing talent (she had been a Passionfruit specialist after all) and she wanted to find an equally amazing specialist for the job.

A week later, Onin began working with Nicole, one of Passionfruit’s experienced TikTok Specialists.

Not only did Onin use Passionfruit to find their perfect match in Imi, but they also found the perfect TikTok specialist. Using Passionfruit helped Onin grow its Marketing team and in turn, its product.