About Mélissa,
Mélissa Sanchot is Marketing Director at HelloAsso, a French association management platform founded 17 years ago. The platform hosts 480,000 registered associations, serves 20 million users, and facilitates over a billion euros in annual collections. It is entirely free for associations: the business is funded by voluntary contributions from citizens at the point of payment. Before HelloAsso, Mélissa was among the first marketers hired by Uber in France, during the launch of the platform's first European cities.
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HelloAsso is a genuinely unusual business. The product is free, the activation funnel is constrained by regulatory KYC requirements, and revenue only materializes at the end of a long chain, after associations have collected funds, and only if citizens choose to contribute voluntarily. Growing in that environment requires a reading of the economics that most marketing teams have never had to build.
In this episode, Mélissa Sanchot breaks down how she operates within those constraints, and what it means concretely for her team structure, the profiles she hires, and the bets she is placing for 2026.
Here’s what I took away:
1) HelloAsso’s revenue depends on four variables, and marketing doesn’t control all of them.
The equation: number of associations acquired, multiplied by activation rate, multiplied by the amount those associations collect, multiplied by the voluntary contribution rate from citizens. That last variable shifts based on the association’s sector, its size, and even how frequently a given citizen has already interacted with the platform in a short window. Someone who pays for an activity, buys an event ticket, and donates to an animal shelter in the same week develops a kind of contribution fatigue. Modeling this accurately took years. And there are macro variables nobody controls: when public subsidies to associations contract, HelloAsso feels it directly in its numbers.
2) Regulatory KYC landed in the middle of the activation funnel.
HelloAsso is a licensed payment institution regulated by the CPR. For a long time, associations could start collecting immediately after signing up, with identity verification only required at the point of their first payout. That hook allowed the platform to build usage before asking for documentation. Since switching to its own payment infrastructure 18 months ago, verification now happens at the point of entry. The result: associations arriving without all their documents ready, a funnel that drops off earlier, and a direct acquisition lever that became significantly harder to pull. Mélissa’s response has been to work directly with the compliance team to profile associations by risk level and calibrate the friction accordingly, rather than applying the same requirements across every sign-up.
3) She removed the product marketer role. And she explains exactly why.
Her observation: the product marketer deresponsibilizes PMs on market understanding, and deresponsibilizes marketers on product knowledge. Each side waits for the PMM to do the bridging work. The bet she took instead: generalist marketers, each sectorized by vertical (sport, culture, générosité), owning their subject end to end, from content to product launches. A marketer who knows their sector deeply and can use AI to cover the technical content gaps is more useful to her than a functional specialist without sectoral grounding.
4) Moving upmarket required building a sales function from scratch.
HelloAsso historically ran on self-serve and volume. There were no account executives, no real sales process, no pipeline machinery. To address large associations, which operate more like structured companies than volunteer collectives, that entire function had to be built. HubSpot was connected, a lead gen engine assembled, account managers hired and trained. And just like the marketing team, the sales team is sectorized: pitching a professional sports federation with the same language as a charity fundraiser does not work.
5) 37% spontaneous brand recognition, and nobody knows what HelloAsso actually does for them.
HelloAsso’s brand tracker shows 37% spontaneous awareness. That is a strong brand by any measure. But the same tracker reveals something uncomfortable: everyone has a positive feeling toward HelloAsso, and nobody has any tension with it. Mélissa’s read on that: if you haven’t managed to create some tension, you don’t really exist in your user’s environment. The answer in 2026 is to build a direct relationship with the 20 million citizens already using the platform, starting with the acquisition of an existing app with 2 million active users built around sports association management, with plans to extend it across all sectors.
6) At Uber, the brief was: do marketing, but you have no budget.
Mélissa was one of the first marketers hired by Uber in France. To launch Nice, she mapped the city through human conversations, identified the local figures who mattered, and organized private concerts in people’s living rooms with a locally known singer, delivered by a branded Uber. People competed to get a slot. Local press covered it. What she took from that experience: when there is no budget, creativity and the willingness to knock on doors directly become the only real levers. She says that pirate mindset never left her.
Find Mélissa on LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-sanchot/
Enjoy,
— Jordan
