Acquiring new customers is damn hard.
Sadly, SaaS growth is stuck in the previous decade.
You're chatting with marketers about your SaaS growth and you're getting the same answer every time: top-down, funnel-based activities... Pour more in. Get more out. Hopefully.
Top-down marketing approach makes your teams operate in silos — everyone trying to figure their shit out and working on goals they are biased about. Yet, on every quarterly meeting, you're seeing sales and marketing teams misaligned and dysfunctional.
For decades, this worked. But when you take a step back and look at how that growth curve grew over time, it feels linear.
97% of marketers still praise the top-down approach. Me and the 3-percenters praise embedding marketing into the product and using product as the biggest growth lever.
The mantra is simple: acquire users by showing them where they are and where they can be, handhold and guide them to feel the promised value within the first hour, build trust by showing them that it actually works, utilize product usage, company, and intent signals to know when is the right time to ask them for more money, and shape your business with them so they feel a sense of ownership and rave about you in every occasion.
This approach allowed me to acquire more than 250k users and $3M in revenue for bootstrapped EdTech and B2B & B2C SaaS, DevTools, and Marketplaces backed by angels and VCs like Accel, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia's Surge, CRV, and more.