Paulette Kub

Why this persona fits the audience

Co-runs a 2-person devtools startup in London; ships code and marketing from the same backlog, maintains a changelog in GitHub and Notion, currently pays for Buffer to schedule launch posts, and reviews signup sources in GA4 and Mixpanel after each release.

• Age: 38
• Location: London, UK
• Occupation: Co-founder / developer
• Income: £95k founder draw
• Education: MSc in computer science
• Company size: 2 (Founders only)
• Years in role: 4 years

“I don't need another feature; I need a system that stops me from having to remember what I just shipped.”

Paulette Kub is a 38-year-old software engineer and co-founder based in London, operating out of a converted warehouse unit in Shoreditch. With an MSc in Computer Science from Imperial College London, she spent eight years at a large fintech firm before launching her current devtools startup four years ago. The company, a two-person entity, focuses on simplifying the release lifecycle for independent developers. Paulette serves as the CTO and de facto Chief Marketing Officer, a dual role necessitated by the lean team structure. She personally codes the core engine, manages the infrastructure, and single-handedly handles the go-to-market strategy. Her workflow is a hybrid of rigid discipline and creative improvisation; she maintains a public GitHub repository for the product and a private Notion workspace for internal strategy. Currently, she relies on a patchwork of tools: Buffer for social scheduling, Google Analytics 4 for broad traffic overview, and Mixpanel for granular event tracking. Despite her technical proficiency, she faces a persistent bottleneck: the manual effort required to translate code commits into compelling marketing narratives. This disconnect forces her to split her attention, often leaving her feeling that she is spending too much time acting as a journalist and not enough as an architect. Financially, she draws a modest £95,000 annually, reinvesting the majority of profits into server costs and external contractor support. She is driven by a desire to prove that a small, efficient team can compete with larger entities if they optimize their leverage points. Her recent decision to switch from a generic CMS to a headless architecture was born out of a need to automate content distribution, though the implementation remains a work in progress. Paulette views time as her most finite resource, treating every minute spent on repetitive tasks as a failure of system design. She is currently exploring ways to reclaim her evenings for running and rest, recognizing that her long-term success depends on sustaining her energy levels rather than burning out through sheer willpower.

Background & daily life

A day in their life

Paulette wakes at 5:30 AM, runs five kilometers, and returns to brew pour-over coffee while checking global server health dashboards. By 8:00 AM, she is in deep work mode, focusing on backend logic for a new API endpoint. At 11:00 AM, she switches contexts to write the weekly newsletter draft, carefully aligning the tone with previous entries. After lunch, she merges the latest PRs, updates the Notion changelog, and schedules the launch tweet via Buffer. The afternoon is spent reviewing analytics from the previous week's release in Mixpanel, noting a dip in signups from India, and adjusting the content strategy accordingly. She finishes work at 6:30 PM, takes a walk to clear her head, and spends an hour reading industry blogs before bed.

Lifestyle

Paulette lives in a minimalist, industrial-style loft in Shoreditch, where every object has a designated place. Her mornings begin at 5:30 AM with a solo run along the Thames or through Victoria Park, followed by a strict coffee ritual before touching any code. She treats her personal finances with the same rigor as her startup's burn rate, maintaining a separate emergency fund and avoiding luxury subscriptions unless they offer measurable utility. Weekends are reserved for deep work on side projects or social runs with a tight-knit group of other founders. She avoids chaotic social scenes, preferring one-on-one coffee chats over loud networking events, and prioritizes sleep hygiene above all else.

Work life

As the sole technical lead alongside her non-technical co-founder, Paulette wears every hat except sales. Her day is a blur of context switching between writing backend APIs, debugging CI/CD pipelines, and manually drafting the week's product updates. She manages the entire release cycle: merging pull requests, updating the GitHub changelog, copying text into Notion, scheduling the post on Buffer, and finally dissecting the traffic spikes in Mixpanel. The pressure comes from the lack of buffer; there is no department to absorb the friction of manual marketing, so she must build systems that feel automated but are currently maintained by her own cognitive load.

Relationships

She maintains a close but small circle of friends, mostly fellow engineers and founders who understand the unique grind of early-stage startups. Her relationship with her co-founder is professional yet intimate, built on mutual respect for their respective domains. She has a supportive family in Manchester who visit occasionally but don't fully grasp the nuances of her work-life balance struggles. She relies heavily on asynchronous communication with her community, finding more value in written threads than verbal meetings.

How they decide

Paulette approaches decisions with a systematic, evidence-based framework. She rarely makes impulsive purchases; instead, she researches options, reads documentation, checks third-party benchmarks, and often builds a quick prototype or spreadsheet model to validate a hypothesis before committing resources. She values peer validation from trusted technical circles over flashy advertising, and she prefers tools that integrate seamlessly into her existing ecosystem rather than those requiring significant migration effort.

How they sound

Her speech is precise, efficient, and devoid of filler words. She uses technical analogies frequently to explain business concepts and speaks in a calm, measured cadence. She avoids corporate jargon like 'synergy' or 'circle back,' preferring direct phrases like 'ship it' or 'break the pipeline.' She doesn't complain about problems but immediately pivots to discussing potential solutions or system improvements. There is a slight British understatement in her tone, even when discussing major setbacks, keeping emotions grounded in facts.