Solid Water Marketing Agency
Frequently Asked Questions

CORE SERVICES

  • What exactly does Solid Water do, and why is it different?
    Solid Water is a senior-led growth marketing agency from London built on a simple premise: marketing should drive growth, not just activity. Most agencies hand you a campaign. We build you a system, one that compounds over time and covers the full customer journey from first touchpoint to repeat purchase to long-term loyalty.

    We work with companies at every stage, from pre-seed founders searching for their first customers to Series B businesses scaling predictable revenue. We also work with established companies launching new products who need startup speed without the guesswork.

    Behind the agency are two founders who’ve both been on the client side. Maria Tsarkova is a growth marketer who helped take a UK fintech from prototype to exit and  led a major fintech rollout across six MENA markets. Daria Partas brings 20 years of international experience in strategic communications. Formerly Head of Corporate Relations and PR at BT (Business and Public Sector), Daria is the go-to expert in building C-level personal brands and reputations in complex and sensitive environments offering a proven track record of designing communications solutions that help companies and (U)HNW individuals achieve business and reputational goals. Daria’s client portfolio includes companies in aerospace and defence, financial services and fintech, telecom, professional services.

    They built Solid Water because they’d lived the pain points themselves.
  • The name captures the duality: flexible by nature, uncompromising about the data foundation beneath every decision.
WHAT SERVICES DOES Solid Water OFFER, AND WHICH ONES ARE RIGHT FOR MY STAGE?
Our services span the full growth journey, and which ones make sense depends on where you are right now. Here’s how they map to each stage.
Pre-seed
Finding your footing

At this stage, everything is still shifting — your ICP, your messaging, your product. What you don’t need is a full marketing machine. What you do need is a clear view of which experiments to run first. Our Growth Lab Workshop helps you define your KPIs, set hypotheses, and design a focused plan. We pair this with Minimum Viable Brand work — tight messaging, a USP-focused website, and a digital presence that makes you look credible to customers and investors — and Founder Brand setup, so the founder is showing up in the right places in the right way from the start.
Seed
Getting structured

You have some traction, but it’s not yet clear why things are working or whether they’ll hold. Investors aren’t fully getting the story. Marketing still feels like guesswork. At this stage, Channel Validation is the priority — finding what actually drives growth and stopping the spend on everything else. We combine this with Founder Brand to build visibility and trust, and Investor Communications to make your narrative clear, compelling, and easy for investors to act on.
Series A
Building to scale

Expectations are higher and the margin for error is smaller. What worked at Seed isn’t enough anymore, and you need processes that can survive growth. This is where we build the Foundation for the Growth Marketing Programme — a proper growth infrastructure that makes marketing predictably ROI positive. We add AI Search Marketing at this stage to start building visibility in AI-driven discovery, and continue Investor Communications as you refine your narrative ahead of the next round.
Series B
Scaling predictably

Budget is growing and inefficiency is becoming expensive. You need predictable growth, not random experiments — and your channels, teams, and messaging need to work together. This is where the full Growth Marketing Programme comes into its own, turning marketing into a genuine growth engine. We run AI Search Marketing as a core acquisition channel, and the Data & Measurement Framework ensures every decision is backed by reliable data.
Established businesses
New products, new markets, or stalled growth


If you’re a larger company launching something new, or your growth has plateaued, we bring the experimentation culture and speed of a growth agency alongside the commercial rigour your leadership expects. The Growth Marketing Programme is the core engagement, and we can work alongside your existing team through Growth Sprints Management, take execution fully off your hands, or provide senior strategic oversight through Fractional CMO support.

Not sure which stage you’re at, or whether you’re in between?

That’s exactly what our initial Growth Strategy Call is for.

FOR STARTUPS & SCALE-UPS

  • How is this different from just hiring an agency to run our ads?
    A channel agency optimises one thing. We optimise your entire growth model, and the difference compounds significantly over time.

    Traditional agencies report impressions and reach. We report on revenue impact, acquisition cost efficiency, and retention improvement. They run isolated campaigns. We manage acquisition, conversion, and retention as one connected system. They lock into rigid campaign cycles. We move at the speed of growth, testing and doubling down in rapid sprints.

    The objective is marketing that pays for itself and builds equity in your growth infrastructure over time.

  • Can you help train our internal team to do this themselves?
    Yes, and we actively encourage it. A team that treats growth as a discipline rather than a guessing game is one of the most valuable things a company can build.

    Growth Team Training is a hands-on programme that equips your marketers, product managers, and commercial leads with experimentation frameworks they can implement straight away. We also run a North Star Metric Workshop, a working session that gets your whole organisation aligned around the one metric that matters most. The clarity it creates tends to change how decisions get made across the business, not just in marketing.

    Both are available as standalone engagements or as part of the broader Growth Marketing Programme.

FOR CORPORATE NEW VENTURES

  • We’re a large company launching a new product. Can you help?
    Yes, and new ventures inside large organisations face a specific challenge that’s often overlooked. Your existing marketing team is built for the core business, not for a venture that needs to prove itself fast. You need startup speed and experimentation culture alongside the commercial rigour your leadership expects.

    That’s what we bring. We’ve built go-to-market models for new products and new market entries across fintech, telecom, and consumer technology, including companies expanding into India, APAC, and the Middle East. We validate strategies through structured experimentation before significant budget is committed, and report back in the language of boards: CAC, LTV, pipeline velocity, and revenue growth rate.
  • We already have an internal marketing team. Where do you fit?
    We work alongside internal teams regularly, and it’s often where we have the most impact. Internal teams bring institutional knowledge and brand access. We bring an external growth lens, experimentation rigour, and senior strategic leadership at the speed a new venture needs.

    Post-strategy, you choose how we work together. Growth Sprints Management (from £7,500) means we co-own the experiment roadmap, run monthly strategic checkpoints, and keep the programme focused and accountable while your team executes. Growth Execution (£15,000 to £20,000) means we take the programme end-to-end, handling creative assets, funnel structuring, in-channel rollouts, and cross-team coordination. We also offer Fractional CMO support for quarterly growth reviews and senior marketing leadership without a full-time hire.

FOR INVESTORS & VCS

  • Does Solid Water work with investors or VCs?
    Yes. We work with venture capital firms, private equity investors, and their portfolio companies. We offer three core services for investors.

    01. Growth Lab Workshop (Coaching for portfolio companies)
    A hands-on session with the startup team to review what’s been tried, what’s worked, and how learnings are being applied — whether that means pivoting or pressing ahead. It’s designed for portfolio companies that need a fresh perspective and a structured way forward.

    02. Startup Marketing Health Assessment (Due diligence)
    An independent evaluation of a startup’s marketing strategy, carried out through conversations with the founder. It’s useful both for pre-investment due diligence and for ongoing portfolio reviews where you want an honest external view of how a company is set up to grow.

    03. Growth Marketing Programme (Senior expertise and delivery)
    For portfolio companies that need more than advice. We provide senior-level marketing strategy development and hands-on delivery, acting as an embedded growth partner to help companies hit ambitious targets faster.
  • Our co-founder Daria Partas has presented at Barclays Eagle Labs on what makes a marketing strategy stand out during due diligence. We’ve surveyed nearly 200 VCs on how they evaluate startup marketing, so we understand what good looks like from both sides of the table.

GENERAL

  • What industries do you work in?
    Our team has deep experience across fintech, healthtech, telecom, hospitality, consumer technology, spacetech, and lifestyle brands — both B2B and B2C, across the UK, Europe, APAC, and MENA. Our portfolio spans British Telecom, VEON, a UK green bank, a Swiss boutique hotel, international music and fintech startups, a global CFD brokerage, and others.

    Our methodology is industry-agnostic. What we need is a client serious about measurable growth.
  • How do we get started?
    Start with a Growth Strategy Call — a focused conversation where we get into your current growth challenges, commercial targets, and where you’re seeing friction. It’s not a pitch. It’s a working conversation. By the end, you’ll have a clear sense of your biggest growth levers and whether our approach is the right fit.

    Book through solidwateragency.com or email marketing@solidwateragency.com. We aim to respond within one business day.