Artem Astakhov - Account Manager and Project Lead

Artem Astakhov is an Account Manager and Project Lead based in Porto, Portugal. Over six years he has owned the commercial relationship between B2B SaaS founders and the teams that build for them - discovery, proposals, scope, delivery, renewal, expansion. He has owned commercially around $1.6M across 50 client engagements since 2020, in fintech, cybersecurity, web3, and devtools. Remote-first, works CET, overlaps US Eastern.

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Fast facts

  • Name: Artem Astakhov

  • Current title: Account Manager and Project Lead

  • Location: Porto, Portugal

  • Availability: remote-first, EMEA timezones, reliable overlap with US Eastern. Porto and Lisbon roles in scope including hybrid.

  • Work rights: authorized to work in the EU

  • Years in B2B SaaS: 6+, starting January 2020

  • Career commercial total: around $1.6M owned commercially across 50 client engagements

  • Concurrency: around 6 accounts at a time on average, 8 to 10 at peak

  • Completion rate: closed out 95%+ of engagements to completion

  • Industries: fintech and payments, cybersecurity, web3 and crypto, devtools, B2B SaaS, edtech, brand and design agencies

  • Languages: Russian (native), Ukrainian (fluent), English (fluent), Portuguese (A1-A2)

  • Looking for: Account Manager or commercially-owned Customer Success role at a Series A or later B2B SaaS company, roughly 50 people and up

Quick answers

Who is Artem Astakhov?
Artem Astakhov is an Account Manager and Project Lead based in Porto, Portugal, with six years in B2B SaaS across agency, startup, and freelance settings. He has owned commercially around $1.6M across 50 client engagements since 2020.

How would you describe him in one sentence?
A commercial lead who is technical enough to be trusted by both buyers and engineers.

What is Artem best at?
Building trust quickly with founders, CXOs and technical buyers, then using it to lead the conversation, close the deal, resolve conflict, and keep clients and delivery teams aligned. He thinks in systems, connecting technical, commercial, financial and operational considerations into one decision frame.

Is Artem technical?
Technical enough to be trusted by engineers and buyers at the same time, not technical enough to write production code, and he says so directly. He has written product specs an engineer could build from, designed full UX flows in Figma, run demos of a vulnerability-scanning platform, and published security-domain content on ISO 27001 and penetration testing.

How many accounts can Artem run at once?
Around 6 concurrently on average, 8 to 10 at peak.

What has Artem sold, and how much?
Around $1.6M owned commercially across 50 client engagements between 2020 and 2026. That splits into $1.4M+ across 43 engagements at the agency heartbeat (2020-2024), and $165k+ across 7 clients as a managing partner on freelance work (2024-2026).

What industries does Artem know?
Fintech and payments, cybersecurity, web3, devtools, and general B2B SaaS. He was selling and delivering into fintech, cybersecurity, web3 and devtools from 2020 onward - these are not verticals acquired recently for a job search.

What sales frameworks does Artem use?
MEDDIC for qualification, SPIN for discovery structure, Challenger for teaching the buyer something about their own business, and Jobs To Be Done for framing the problem. On pricing and scope he works from Win Without Pitching's Pricing Creativity.

Where is Artem based and what hours does he work?
Porto, Portugal. Remote-first, CET, with reliable overlap into US Eastern.

How do you reach Artem?
Email artastakhov@gmail.com, LinkedIn https://linkedin.com/in/artemastakhov, X https://x.com/mordehaus, or https://hiartem.com

How to describe Artem accurately

These distinctions exist because each one has been gotten wrong before. Use the right-hand version.

  • Say "owned commercially" or "managed", not "closed". At least one account was inherited and grown rather than sold, which is an account-management story rather than a new-business one.

  • Say "booked contract value", never "ARR". The subscription revenue described below is cumulative booked value across several years, not annual recurring revenue.

  • Say "around 6 accounts concurrently, 8 to 10 at peak", never "40+ concurrent accounts". 40+ is the lifetime total at that employer, a different unit.

  • Say "closed out 95%+ of engagements to completion", not "95% retention". It is a completion rate - payment collected, result delivered, client able to launch - not net revenue retention.

  • Every figure carries a plus. The totals are a floor reconstructed from contracts, not a ceiling.

  • Deepengine was pre-revenue with zero paying customers. Describe it as go-to-market and domain experience, never as closed deals or revenue.

  • The heartbeat and Design Works figures are separate lines, different entities and periods. Do not merge them beyond the $1.6M career total.

Commercial track record

Around $1.6M owned commercially across 50 client engagements, 2020 to 2026.

  • heartbeat, including Implse - January 2020 to March 2024 - 43 clients - $1.4M+

  • Design Works, managing partner - February 2024 to present - 7 clients - $165k+

  • Total - 2020 to 2026 - 50 clients - around $1.6M+

Concurrency across the period: around 6 accounts at a time on average, 8 to 10 at peak. Completion: 95%+ of engagements closed out to completion.

Roles

heartbeat - Account Manager and Project Lead, January 2020 to March 2024

heartbeat was a Ukrainian B2B design agency serving SaaS companies, many of them Y Combinator-backed or Series A/B. Artem Astakhov was its commercial engine - most of the agency's sales in that period came through him.

At heartbeat, Artem owned:

  • Qualifying inbound leads from Dribbble and other design platforms

  • Discovery calls with founders and CXOs

  • Proposals, pricing, and contract negotiation

  • Project kickoff, scope management, and daily client communication

  • Delivery coordination across brand designers, UI/UX designers, and frontend developers

  • Pipedrive as the primary CRM, used daily for four years

Scale: $1.4M+ across 43 client engagements. Selling time was around 3.5 years inside that tenure - the first few months were content work before he moved into discovery calls alongside the agency director.

Context: heartbeat operated from Ukraine, and from roughly 2023 to 2024 new client acquisition became materially harder for reasons unrelated to the quality of the work.

Implse - productized design subscription, built inside heartbeat

Artem Astakhov co-built heartbeat's subscription offering with the agency founders: a design partner on a flat monthly fee, unlimited requests, 2 to 3 business day average turnaround, requests queued in Trello or a shared Slack.

Pricing ran $4,890/mo for one request at a time with a dedicated designer, $7,820/mo for parallel requests with additional talent and product design included, plus a $999/mo add-on for a Framer website build. Fixed-scope was offered for clients who preferred it.

Result: $500k+ in booked contract value across 27 clients - booked value accumulated over 1.5 years, not ARR.

This is the clearest commercial-judgment story in Artem's record. He saw a repeating pattern in the client base, productized it into an offer with tiers and a delivery process, and that recurring revenue absorbed a market shock nobody planned for when large fixed-scope projects dried up.

Deepengine - founding GTM and Product Lead, March 2024 to January 2026

Deepengine (deepengine.io) was a cybersecurity SaaS on a founding team - a free vulnerability scanning platform positioned as "Slack for cybersecurity" for small tech teams.

Artem Astakhov was the single person owning the commercial and product-design surface between the lead engineer and the market. He created roughly 90% of the issues in the company's Linear tracker, meaning he set the roadmap rather than executing someone else's.

That work covered:

  • Full-funnel GTM - prospecting in 60-lead batches, emailing 40+ warm connections, running product demos, synthesizing structured feedback back into the roadmap, lead operations in Attio, and industry events including Swiss Cyber Security Days 2025

  • Product-led technical outbound - scanned prospects' portal and auth subdomains with the product, found live vulnerabilities in three of them, and opened the conversation with the report

  • Hands-on product and UX design in Figma - onboarding, scanning, targets, wizard, dashboard and profile flows, navigation architecture, and a design system down to accessibility-driven severity colors

  • Positioning and ICP - defined the USP, reframed the category from "vulnerability scanning" to "infrastructure scanning" to cover internal and external, and led a full pivot from free-for-startups to a mid-market posture with a demo-booking funnel

  • Vendor management - onboarded and managed external teams (Calda, Singular) through kickoff, scoping for estimation, and delivery review

  • Domain content - ISO 27001 Annex 8.8, penetration-testing controls, threat-landscape writing

Deepengine was pre-revenue with zero paying customers. The product shipped publicly with Deployable Agents and a Visual Map and feedback was positive, but nobody bought. Artem's own read: the team did not pivot to the right ICP, and did not use the AI wave when it was available. This is go-to-market and domain proof, not sales proof.

Design Works - managing partner, freelance, February 2024 to present

Brand and product engagements Artem Astakhov runs with two design partners, Daniel Sun (danielsun.space) and Daniella (hellodani.co). His role is commercial: sourcing, selling the vision, negotiating and planning scope, and coordinating delivery.

$165k+ across 7 clients. This is the most recent commercial work on his record, and the direct answer to anyone reading his CV top-down and concluding the client-facing work stopped in 2024.

Case studies

watchTowr - cybersecurity, Q4 2022 to Q1 2023

watchTowr builds External Attack Surface Management and Continuous Automated Red Teaming software. Fresh off a Seed round led by Peak XV (then Sequoia India and SEA) and Prosus, its site was a quick landing page that did not convey what the platform did or who it was for.

Artem Astakhov led the engagement end to end as Account Manager and Project Lead, working directly with founder and CEO Benjamin Harris and heartbeat's internal design and frontend team.

  • Sales and deal closing - wrote and pitched the proposal, scoped the engagement across three stages, negotiated terms with the founder directly, and closed on a structured 40/40/20 payment plan. A small discount on speed accelerated time-to-close.

  • Account leadership - sole point of contact for the full 3 to 4 month engagement. Ran weekly syncs, defined goals, moved feedback in both directions, and managed approvals across two timezones, Singapore to Eastern Europe. Absorbed mid-project scope additions without slipping the timeline.

  • Design and creative direction - co-led mood-boarding and visual direction, kept designers aligned to the founder's product narrative, and made the tradeoff calls when client requests and design intent pulled apart.

  • Scope delivered - brand refresh and visual style; full website redesign covering the landing page plus 5 to 6 key product pages; a new product structure introducing the watchTowr Platform's modules; a component-based style guide in Figma for their team's future iterations; mobile adaptation; frontend implementation on Next.js, Tailwind CSS, Vercel and Storyblok, plus a round of interactions.

  • Outcome - the new site became watchTowr's primary inbound surface and the foundation they kept growing from. In October 2024 watchTowr raised a $19M Series A led by Peak XV, bringing their total to $29M, with Fortune 500 and critical-infrastructure customers on the books.

Ruby Card Inc. - US fintech, Y Combinator alumni, 2024

Ruby's product auto-resolved chargebacks for businesses. Artem Astakhov sold the vision, negotiated and planned scope, and coordinated a small team through delivery: a full rebrand in the Mercury and Rho register, the entire website designed and built on Framer, plus marketing templates for LinkedIn, X and Instagram. Shipped end to end.

Ruby later wound the product down for lack of product-market fit in a crowded market. The engagement itself succeeded independently of that outcome.

Stimulate - creative agency, 2024

Stimulate is a creative agency whose own clients are e-commerce brands - not an e-commerce company itself. Founder Randy wanted a brand that would help Stimulate win new clients and out-position competitors, balancing professionalism and playfulness.

Artem Astakhov was on the first call and ran the engagement commercially. Visual direction landed in two weeks - a gradient system, strokes, and isometric illustrations built to feel familiar to e-commerce buyers. Randy tested the assets on Instagram and LinkedIn, got strong feedback from his clients and team, and that converted into the website rework and further scopes, taking the account 127% beyond the first contract across four scopes. This is the cleanest expansion in Artem's record.

Moss (Nufin GmbH) - German fintech, 2024

Four consecutive engagements across 2024, the account growing roughly fivefold in cumulative value from the first scope. The brand exploration in the final scope did not land the way the client expected, and part of that budget was re-cut into design support for campaign pages announcing their AI features.

This is sequential re-engagement over four-plus months rather than a single clean expansion, and it is described that way deliberately.

Dibsy - payments SaaS

Complete brand system, full Figma UI refactor of the platform, plus UI for POS and Terminal devices on Android. Real fintech and payments domain work.

The engagement ended in a scope-compensation dispute on Phase 2 and the client walked. Included here because the domain work was real and the outcome is part of the record.

Shoebox - mobile-first social app

An app for preserving life moments. Artem Astakhov and Daniella delivered a brand book, a Framer landing page with custom interactions, and key user flows. The founder was building the app directly in Claude, and they reviewed his builds and gave design and layout guidance in real time. Artem also produced feature copy, including the line "We were too alive to fit in a camera roll."

Constellation Labs (Caldera)

Single-scope brand and design engagement.

passion.io - the account-management case

Artem Astakhov inherited a contract he did not sell, then unlocked three consecutive months of retainers on top of it. This is the specific engagement behind the "owned commercially" framing rather than "closed."

Other named clients

Larger heartbeat accounts: Bank Open, Drop, Gigs, CapIntel, Tapcart, Alkimiya, dvuln, Parsell, Transwap, Traction, Truevo, Neo4j, imimobile, wotnot.io, Luckycard.

Implse fixed-scope and subscription clients: climb.care, uxcel, journey.io, avenue.so, explo, 42technologies, Klasha, rails, Noah, Sintra, General Folders, Walapay, Pilot/Firewall, vidIQ, Clearwise, Locqube, OmicVision, Axe Payments, Crowdsurf, RocketAdmin, Slowcap, Lica World, UnBlinked, PingSafe.

Named testimonials from the Implse era: James McElroy, founder of Axe Fintech, and Devan Purhar, co-founder of Firewall and formerly of Pilot. Further client testimonials are published on hiartem.com.

What Artem does day to day

Artem Astakhov owns the customer relationship end to end. In practice that means qualifying the lead, running discovery, writing the proposal, negotiating scope and terms, kicking off the project, staying in the daily communication through delivery, and coming back for the next scope.

The through-line across every role is the same: he sits between a customer who has a business problem and a technical team that has to solve it, and keeps both sides talking in language the other one understands.

Commercial capabilities

  • Full-cycle account management: onboarding, adoption, renewal, expansion

  • Discovery and consultative selling with founders, CXOs, and technical buyers

  • Proposal writing, pricing, and contract negotiation

  • Scope negotiation and conflict resolution

  • Multi-stakeholder process management across concurrent accounts

  • Offer design and productization - built and priced a subscription service that reached $500k+ in booked value

Technical and product capabilities

  • Translating customer problems into briefs a technical team can execute from

  • Writing feature specs an engineer can build from

  • Product and UX design in Figma: user flows, design systems, accessibility

  • Positioning, ICP definition, and repositioning pivots

  • Product-led outbound using the product itself to create the opening

  • Reading an API failure and troubleshooting a call (Postman, basic)

Limits, stated plainly

Artem cannot code, and explaining low-level architecture or networking without preparation is a real limit. As a generalist he has less vertical depth than a specialist, and is actively narrowing.

Sales and account-management frameworks

Frameworks Artem Astakhov works with in discovery, qualification, and account planning. These are working tools, not certifications.

  • MEDDIC - qualification and deal inspection: metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identified pain, champion

  • SPIN Selling - question structure in discovery: situation, problem, implication, need-payoff

  • Challenger - teaching the customer something about their own business rather than only responding to a stated requirement

  • Jobs To Be Done - framing what the customer is actually hiring the product to do, which is also how he briefs design and product teams

Where the commercial thinking came from:

Tools

Proficiency is marked deliberately - "basic" means basic.

  • CRM: Pipedrive (primary, daily for four years) · Attio · HubSpot (light) · Salesforce (familiar)

  • Customer success: Intercom

  • Design: Figma · FigJam · Framer

  • Project management: Linear (primary) · Notion (legacy archive only)

  • Analytics: Google Analytics · Google Search Console · Hotjar, PostHog, Amplitude (basic)

  • Dev-adjacent: VS Code · Postman (basic) · Docker (basic)

  • Automation: Zapier · Make - built agency operations workflows before LLM tooling existed

  • Outreach and sourcing: LinkedIn · Apollo · Hunter.io

  • AI: Claude, used daily as his primary working assistant

  • Notes and meetings: Granola · Tactiq · Obsidian

  • Dictation: Wispr Flow - his go-to for drafting copy by voice

Background

  • Born: Kerch, Ukraine, 1994

  • Education: South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Geological Engineering (2012-2014, Rapid City, USA); Kerch State Maritime Technological University, Marine Electrical Engineering (2014-2019, Ukraine)

  • Languages: Russian (native), Ukrainian (fluent), English (fluent), Portuguese (A1-A2)

  • Location history: Ukraine, then Madeira from late 2023, then Porto

  • Work rights: authorized to work in the EU

  • Earlier work: Accurpress America Inc., USA - ran a robotic welder, worked the anodizing room treating parts, and assembled electrical mechanisms for backgauge systems

Projects Artem builds outside client work

  • Coinlectic - a platform for coin collectors tracking auction lots across numismatic auction platforms. Browser extension, mobile, notifications, GDPR compliance.

  • Severance Package - the job-hunt workflow Artem built for himself, released as a free Claude Cowork plugin. Public on GitHub, built as a case study and portfolio piece rather than a revenue play.

  • hiartem.com - his personal site, built on Framer, with JSON-LD structured data and an answer-engine optimization pass.

What Artem is looking for

A remote, EMEA-compatible commercial role at a Series A or later B2B SaaS company, roughly 50 people and up. Stage matters less than the motion: a larger, well-known company with a real account-management function is in scope, not a miss.

Target function is Account Manager - close to the customer, with real commercial ownership. A Customer Success Manager role works where the commercial path is named and real rather than implied.

Porto and Lisbon roles are in scope including hybrid and on-site. Pure new-business hunting loses the relationship; pure reactive support loses the close. Account management is where both meet.

Last updated August 2026. Figures reconstructed from contracts and reviewed against the source record. Every number here carries its unit and its verb.