I’ve noticed something across most early-stage teams.

My LinkedIn feed is full of:

“30+ tools to run GTM/outbound”

“How I orchestrate 50+ tools to book 20+ meetings per week.”

But here’s the problem: Most outbound doesn’t fail because of tools.

It fails because it’s random.

No trigger.
No timing.
No reason to reach out now.

So I don’t think (early-stage) founders need to orchestrate so many different tools.

So today, we break down 8 outbound campaigns that book you meetings, without using hundreds of different tools.

1. ICP Auto-connect campaign

2. LinkedIn content engagement campaign

3. New signups/demos booked campaign

4. Website visitor campaign

5. Customer lookalike campaign

6. Customers’ network (nearbound) campaign

7. Specific tech tool campaign

8. Value first campaign

You can run all these campaigns with Lemlist.

A quick word from our sponsor

I only include sponsors that I would recommend personally. If you’re interested in reaching 28,000+ SaaS operators, sponsor the next newsletter.

📢 lemlist — The outbound platform that books meetings, not bounces

lemlist is the multichannel outbound platform built for sales teams who need real pipeline, not just activity metrics.

• Connect intent signals, personalize at scale, and send sequences that actually get replies

• Build email + LinkedIn sequences in minutes, with AI that sounds like you

• Trigger outreach based on timing signals, not guesswork

• Track every reply, click, and booked call in one dashboard

Want to make your direct motion work before you try to scale it?

Try lemlist for free

4-Step System: Turn Insights into effective Outbound Campaigns

The two ingredients that make your outbound effective: Timing + Relevance

This means we use a signal (that is relevant for the contact) to reach out. The most powerful buying signals are often very specific to your market.

So step 1 is:

Think about relevant triggers that are a proxy for your product that might be relevant to them.

When you track the right signal:

1. Your message becomes relevant to your contact.

2. And it comes at the right time.

So let’s have a look at the 4 steps: Identify critical events, track signals, map pain, write messaging that converts.

Step 1: Identify Critical Events (From Sales Calls)

Listen for patterns that you hear in your sales calls. If you apply SPICED, watch out for the critical events mentioned:

• “We’re hiring fast”

• “We just implemented [Tool X]”

• “We’re expanding into a new market”

Step 2: Translate into Signals (Observable Triggers)

Think about trackable signals for these events. Something that you can observe from the outside. A proxy that timing is right:

• Hiring → Job postings / team growth

• New tool → Tech stack changes

• Expansion → New locations / languages

Here’s an overview of the signals that you can monitor with Lemlist, without using another tracking tool.

Step 3: Map the Pain (Why it matters)

This step is critical. Connect signals with related pain points:

• Hiring → Long ramp-up time for new hires

• New tool → Training and adoption are slow

• Expansion → Payment complexity increases

👉 This makes your outreach relevant

Step 4: Turn It into Messaging

Now you connect the dots: Signal + Pain. Build your outreach around it:

• “Saw you’re hiring fast — teams often struggle with [pain] at this stage…”

• “Noticed you implemented [Tool X] — many teams run into [gap]…”

• “Expanding into [market]? That’s usually where [problem] shows up…”

Signal-based messaging

Here are a few more examples of signal-based messaging.

So let’s have a look at the campaigns. 👇

Campaign 1: ICP Auto-connect

This one isn’t signal-based at all.

But it helps you build a relevant network on LinkedIn. Especially if you create content (Founder LinkedIn brand) and do (signal) based outreach via LinkedIn, it helps if you expand your network with ICP contacts.

You can connect with 100-200 contacts per week (depending on whether you are a free user or a premium/sales navigator user). Expect a 30% acceptance rate.

This means you add roughly 50 ICP contacts per week to your network - on autopilot.

Do this for 12 months, and you’ve added 2500+ ICP contacts to your network.

People who see your content will start to build trust and are more likely to engage with you when you reach out.

All you need to do is add the right ICP contacts to your Lemlist Auto Connect campaign.

You will have a few ways to add the contacts to the campaign:

1. Import from Sales Navigator

2. Adding contacts manually with the Lemlist Google Chrome extension

3. Use Lemlist native database

4. Push leads from third-party databases (Clay, Prospeo, Apollo)

5. Upload a CSV or Import from your CRM

This first campaign fits perfectly with Campaign 2.

Campaign 2: Engaged with your LinkedIn content

Lemlist makes it easy to track people who engaged with your LinkedIn content.

To make sure you only get relevant signals, you can define:

1. What type of engagement counts as a signal (like, comment, both)

2. Add filter criteria (so you only get signals from your ICP)

I started using it for myself a few weeks ago. You see, I get 2-3 ICP leads per day.

With one click, you can push them to the right campaign.

And the campaign itself doesn’t need to be super complex.

2 steps are all you need:

Step 1: LinkedIn connection

The message can be as simple as:

“Hi {{firstName}}, noticed you liked one of my recent posts.

Great to connect.”

Step 2: DM after they accepted the connection request

Don’t send straight after they accepted. Wait 1-2 days.

Initial response: Thank them specifically for engaging with your particular post

“Hey [Name], I noticed you liked my post about [specific topic]. Thanks for the engagement! What part resonated most with you?”

“Hey [Name], I liked your comment on my post about [topic]. Are you currently working on [relevant challenge or solution]?”

Value-add follow-up: Share additional relevant information

“Since you found that interesting, you might also enjoy this [resource/article] that dives deeper into [related topic].”

Relationship building: Ask about their experience with the challenge your content addresses

“I’m curious - have you been facing similar challenges with [problem your solution addresses] at [their company]?”

Direct Approach:

“Hey [Name], I noticed you’ve been engaging with content about [topic]. We’ve helped similar [company specifics] companies in [country/industry] to [usecase] - resulting in [positive results]. If this sounds interesting, I’d be happy to [soft value-first offer] - no strings attached.”

For advanced LinkedIn signals, consider a tool like Trigify.

Campaign 3: Connect with new Signups/Demos booked

Sounds obvious. Reality is that more than 50% of the founders I worked with did not do this.

So what is it about?

If you get a new sign-up for your product or a new inbound demo booked, make sure to send them a connection request on LinkedIn.

“Hi {{firstName}}, saw you booked a call with me — looking forward to it!”

Lemlist allows you to use webhooks and connect tools like zapier, n8n, claude, make to automatically push new leads to your Lemlist account.

Once you have added the contacts to Lemlist, you can use their enrichment feature to find the LinkedIn profile based on their email address.

Campaign 4: Website visitors

Knowing that a company visited your website is a strong signal.

Lemlist currently enables company-level identification. Meaning you know that someone from the company visited your website.

But with one click on the company, you see its contacts.

In case you want person-level identification, consider using a tool like Snitcher.

What’s great is that you can narrow down to specific pages and filter only for relevant target locations.

For me, I focus on Europe-based founders, and I care about people who’ve been on my GTM audit & GTM advisory page for longer than 30 seconds.

Here are some DM templates you can use:

“Hey {{first_name}}, thanks for connecting!
We saw some interest from {{company_name}} on our site recently, so I thought I’d reach out. Is there anything I can help you with?”

“Thanks for connecting, {{first_name}}! I noticed you or one of your team members from {{company_name}} recently visited our website.
Usually this means explore new ways for {{usecase}}.
Curious if that’s something that’s been top of mind for your team lately?”

Campaign 5: Customer Lookalike

Look for companies that are similar to your best-fit customers.

Thanks for connecting, {{first_name}}!

We recently started working with {{company_lookalike}}, which is quite similar to {{company_name}}, and it made me curious about how you’re handling {{usecase}} today.

Is that something you’re involved with on your side?

{{first_name}}, I saw your setup is pretty similar to the one of {{company_lookalike}}.

It made me curious: how do you currently manage/handle {{usecase}} without {{painpoint}} ?

To find the right lookalikes, you could test a tool like ocean.io or LGM lookalike feature - or manually find the right companies based on firmographic and technographic filters (based on your ICP criteria).

Depending on your exact set-up, this is also where Lemlist’s new AI agentic enrichment might be smart to use.

Here’s an example of how you can enrich your leads based on if they are a ‘SaaS company’.

Campaign 6: Customers’ network (Nearbound)

The approach is very similar to the customer lookalike campaign above.

The difference here is that we scan the network of your customer to find relevant ICP fits.

And you use their names as an ‘opener’.

Here are some ideas for you:

Search for companies that are located in the same area as your new customer

This can work great if you know that there is a high likelihood that they know each other.

Think about:

• restaurants on the same street

• Architecture firms in the same city

• Logistic teams with hubs in the same industrial park

• Municipal administrations with close Zip Codes

Now, when you reach out to those companies, you can leverage your existing customers’ names. They will recognize their name, which makes your message relevant to them.

Search your customers’ suppliers, customers, and partners who fit your ICP

Same strategy as above. Instead of the local relevancy, you use their existing relationship as a conversation opener.

Hey {{firstName}}, great to be connected.
Looks like we both work with {{Customer}}. Do you run more projects together with them?

Hey {{firstName}}, saw you also worked with {{Customer}} on a previous project.

We work with them on {{customers_core_usecases}}.
Out of curiosity: how do you currently manage/handle {{usecase}} without {{painpoint}} ?

Campaign 7: Value First Campaign

In case you can provide easy upfront value to your clients, that can be a great strategy.

There are 2 ways to perform this tactic:

1. You actually did create something relevant to them and share it upfront, or

2. You create on demand: you ask them if they are interested, and if they are, you create the content and share it with them

A few examples so you can better understand what I mean:

“Reviewed your product onboarding flow and found a few things that you could improve”

👉 If you offer a service/product that helps with onboarding

“Reviewed your LinkedIn profile and can share with you 4 things that would help you to stand out more”

👉 I received this actually 3x times in the last weeks, every time I responded. Why: Easy to say yes, low commitment.

“Saw your Google ads on keyword X - a few things that I observed…”

👉 If you offer a service/product that helps companies run better ads

“I found a few public tenders that might be relevant for you. Want me to share it with you?”

👉 If you offer a service/product that helps companies find relevant tenders.

“I’ve created a short 2-min video that shows you how you can improve your website visibility in LLMs - want me to send it over?”

👉 If you offer a service/product that helps companies to increase their AI visibility

“I really enjoy your content. I’ve turned your last newsletter episode into 5 LinkedIn posts that will increase your engagement on LK. Want me to share them with you?”

👉 If you offer a service/product that helps creators with content production

I’ve actually tested this approach for myself, and it works!

I think you get the pattern.

You offer free value with low commitment. Something easy to say Yes to.

Campaign 8: Companies using a specific tech tool

Knowing that a company is using a specific tool is a strong and actionable signal. It gives you immediate context and a natural way to start the conversation.

In practice, this signal is most useful in three scenarios:

1. You integrate with the tool (product partner)

Your product works on top of or alongside their existing tool.
→ Example: an analytics tool built on top of a CRM like HubSpot or Shopify.

2. You extend the tool

Your product fills a clear gap or missing capability.
→ You’re not replacing it — you’re making it more valuable.

3. You replace the tool (competitor)

Your product is a direct alternative.
→ You’re positioning against the limitations of their current solution.

Across all three cases, the key advantage is simple:
👉 You can use the tool they’re already using as a relevant, personalized icebreaker.

Campaign 8a: Company adopts a new tool

A particularly strong version of this signal is when a company has recently adopted a new tool.

This often indicates:

• They are actively improving their stack

• They are open to new solutions

• They are still shaping their workflows

This is especially powerful if:

• Your product integrates with that tool, or

• You know your best customers typically use both tools together

Example:
If companies that adopt a product analytics tool often also need your solution, this becomes a high-intent trigger.

This works extremely well in ABM (Account-Based Marketing):

• Define a target list of accounts

• Track when they adopt relevant tools

• Reach out at the right moment

Example message

“Saw you’re using [Tool X]. Teams often complement it with a solution for [specific gap]. Worth exploring if that’s relevant for you?”

Campaign 8b: Companies using a competitor

You can apply the same logic to competitor-based outreach.

Here, the goal is to:

• Acknowledge what they’re using

• Highlight common limitations

• Open a conversation around gaps

Example message

“Saw you’re using [Tool X] for [use case]. Many teams find that while it works well for [core strength], they still run into challenges around [adjacent gap]. Curious how you’re currently handling that?”

So by now, you have at least 8 relevant campaigns to test yourself.

But there are 2 more things that I want to share with you:

1. Be intentional and specific about your CTAs

2. Track your outbound campaigns (and learn)

Specific CTAs

Even with perfect targeting and strong messaging, your outbound will fall flat if the CTA creates friction.

The goal of a great CTA isn’t to close a deal, it’s to earn the next small step.

Common CTA Mistakes

❌ Too much commitment
Asking for a 30-minute call upfront is a big ask — especially from someone who doesn’t know you yet. You haven’t earned that level of time.

❌ Low perceived value
“Let me show you our product” isn’t compelling. Buyers care about their problems, not your demo.

❌ Vague or unclear
“Let me know your thoughts” or “open to chat?” creates ambiguity. If it’s not clear what happens next, people won’t act.

❌ Too many options
Multiple CTAs in one message (“call, demo, webinar invite, share case study?”) create decision fatigue and lead to no decision at all.

Strong outbound CTAs are:

• Low friction → easy to say yes to

• Clear → one simple next step

• Value-led → tied to something relevant for them

Here are 25+ effective CTAs:

Outbound Success Metrics

Once you run your outbound campaigns, analyze your performance.

Key Metrics

1. Connection Acceptance Rate → Accepted ÷ Sent

2. Reply Rate → Contacts replied ÷ contacts messaged

3. Positive Reply Rate → Qualified/positive replies ÷ contacts messaged

4. Meeting booked rate → Meetings booked ÷ contacts messaged

Analyze your results:

1. Low LK acceptance rate → Optimize your profile; wrong leads

2. Low reply rate → Optimize your messaging; improve signal relevance

3. Good (positive) reply rate but low meeting booked rate → Optimize your CTAs

Takeaway

By now, you have 8 outbound campaigns you can start testing.

But if there’s one thing to take away, it’s this:

Outbound isn’t about sending more messages.

It’s about sending them at the right moment. That’s what signals give you.

Start asking:

👉 “What happened that makes this the right time to reach out?”

Answer that and your outbound will feel completely different.

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

If you’re somewhere between €0 → €1M ARR, I can help you with your GTM.

1️⃣ Free GTM Foundation Library
→ 50+ resources (guides, templates, frameworks)

2️⃣ GTM Audit
→ 360° assessment + 6-month action plan: Your GTM Blindspots revealed

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory
→ Work directly with me to build your GTM

I’ve noticed something across most early-stage teams:

They don’t fail because of GTM tactics.

They fail because their GTM doesn’t match their stage.

So they:

• hire sales too early

• test 5 channels at once

• constantly change their messaging

…and nothing compounds.

Not because GTM doesn’t work.

But because they’re solving the wrong problem.

What I’ve learned:

Before you think about how to grow,

you need to understand where you are in GTM

Because what works in one stage will break you in another.

You can not apply the same GTM playbook to completely different stages.

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ The Ultimate Partnership Guide for Founders

✅ 17 must-have questions about your GTM

✅ The Ultimate SaaS Positioning Guide

A quick word from our sponsor

I only include sponsors that I would recommend personally. If you’re interested in reaching 28,000+ SaaS operators, sponsor the next newsletter.

📢 lemlist — The outbound platform that books meetings, not bounces

lemlist is the multichannel outbound platform built for sales teams who need real pipeline, not just activity metrics.

• Connect intent signals, personalize at scale, and send sequences that actually get replies.

• Build email + LinkedIn sequences in minutes, with AI that sounds like you.

• Trigger outreach based on timing signals, not guesswork

• Track every reply, click, and booked call in one dashboard

Want to make your direct motion work before you try to scale it?

Try lemlist for free

📢 Attio — the AI-native CRM for GTM

Attio is the AI-native CRM with built-in enrichment, flexible workflows, and fast setup. Connect your email and calendar, and Attio instantly builds your CRM.

Their new “Ask Attio” agent changes how you run your CRM: Prep for calls in seconds, update fields automatically, get deal summaries with one click

Start now

Let’s get into it. 👇👇

The Foundation (Why Most GTM Breaks Early)

Before we talk about stages, there’s one thing most teams get wrong.

They treat GTM like separate pieces:

• ICP

• Positioning

• Messaging

But in reality:

These are a chain of decisions

• Your ICP defines what problem matters

• That problem defines your positioning

• That positioning defines your messaging

Make this actionable:

ICP (who actually buys):

• Pick one narrow segment (not multiple)

• Define the trigger (why do they buy now?)

• Use real customers, not assumptions (unless you’re pre-revenue)

When you build your ICP, include 4 key elements:

—> The ideal company (3-5 firmographics, technographic criteria)

—> The ideal personas (economic buyer + users/champion)

—> The intent signal/ buying triggers

—> The Anti ICP (3-5 disqualifiers)

Positioning (why you for them):

• What you are: Anchor around one use case, product category, or competitor

• How are you different

• Make it obvious in <5 seconds (1-sentence positioning statement)

Messaging (how you communicate it):

• Focus on clarity —> don’t try to sound super clever

• Use the language of your customers

• Focus on one core outcome/usecase; don’t communicate everything at once

• Repeat the same message everywhere (website, calls, emails, content…)

So let’s do a quick reality check:

You don’t have a GTM foundation yet, if:

1. You don’t know your ICP, or you're still testing multiple ones

2. You’re unclear about your positioning, meaning you can’t explain in an easy, short sentence what you are + who you are for + why you are better/different

3. Your messaging is inconsistent, meaning you see yourself using different words (in your copy, sales calls, content…)

The Stage-Based GTM Playbook

Now the part most founders skip:

GTM only works if it matches your stage

1️⃣ Stage 1: Hustle (0 → ~€100k ARR)

Goal: Find something that works

How to recognize you’re here

• ICP is still unclear

• Messaging feels inconsistent

• Deals are unpredictable

• Growth feels random

👉 You don’t have GTM foundation yet; you’re searching for it.

What actually matters

Talk to customers every week
Nothing beats real customer feedback.
This can include cold calls, sales demos, or interviews with lost deals and churns.

Test ICP + messaging in real conversations
You’re still testing, so use the touchpoints you have to see how your messaging resonates with your (future) ICP. Don’t just think internally about it, test it in the trenches: calls, demos, outbound, content are your friend.

Sell manually (founder-led)
You’re the founder. You own GTM.
Don’t outsource selling to an agency, intern, or consultant.
You need direct feedback loops.

Look for pull signals
Once the first customers come in, look for pull signals. Where do you see that things move faster/easier, and what segments are harder to close?
—> fast conversions, repeated patterns, low friction

What “good” looks like

✅ You hear the same problem repeatedly

✅ Prospects understand your value quickly

✅ Some deals feel surprisingly easy to close

Biggest mistakes

❌ Scaling too early (paid channels, hiring sales)
❌ Jumping between ICPs too fast (before getting enough validation)
❌ Overthinking positioning instead of testing it
❌ Avoiding real customer conversations (and just building the product)

👉 If things feel inconsistent: You’re still in Stage 1.

2️⃣ Stage 2: Focus (→ €1M ARR)

Goal: Make GTM predictable

How to recognize you’re here

• You found an ICP that converts

• Messaging resonates across multiple prospects

• Deals close, but not consistently yet

• You see traction in 1–2 channels

👉 Something works: now make it repeatable

What actually matters

Lock 1 ICP + 1 use case
This is the hardest part. You likely have customers across different segments and use cases.

That’s fine for the hustle phase, but very hard to scale.

So your job is now to niche down and say no to everything else.

Double down on 1–2 channels max
You’re early; this usually means limited resources. To grow to the first million, you have a higher chance of mastering 1-2 channels (where you already see traction), instead of running multiple channels at the same time.

Build a repeatable sales process
Until now, the founder has handled all sales. So there was no ‘need’ to systemize.
But the next step is to become predictable and build your repeatable playbook.

This means you need to build your first playbook.
—> Same steps in the sales process (e.g., disco —> demo —> pilot —> won)
—> Deal stages in your CRM
—> Tracking conversion rates
—> Analyze lost reasons
—> Draft email templates per stage
—> Collaterals across the full funnel (pricing, case studies, ROI calculations…)

The goal: Find something that is repeatable and that you can teach your first sales hires.

Systemize your messaging
Sounds simple. But too often, when I’m doing my GTM audits, I see that the internal messaging framework (living in Notion or Miro) and the actual customer-facing messaging on their website, outbound, sales demos, blog, and LinkedIn content are completely different. Also, each asset tells a different story.

→ Your job: Create messaging alignment

What “good” looks like

✅ Pipeline becomes predictable

✅ Deals follow similar paths

✅ Customer understand your Positioning

✅ Messaging consistently converts

Biggest mistakes

❌ Adding new channels too early

❌ Expanding ICP (“we can also sell to…”) too early

❌ Constantly changing messaging

❌ Flying blind: Not tracking key metrics

👉 This is where I see most early-stage startups struggle.

Because success here comes from: Focus, not more ideas

Get your GTM Blind Spots revealed: Get a 360° assessment of your current GTM strategy plus a custom 6-month action plan all within 7 days - so you can act with confidence, not guesswork.

Get GTM clarity

3️⃣ Stage 3: Expansion (Post €1M ARR)

Goal: Scale what works

How to recognize you’re here

• You can predict pipeline from activity

• Messaging consistently converts

• Sales is repeatable

• You know your numbers and can plan properly

• You can ‘teach’ someone else how your ‘playbook’ works

👉 You now have a system. Something you can ‘scale’.

What actually matters

Scale proven channels aggressively
This means more budget, more people, more volume.

Add new channels (if needed)
In case your existing channels are not enough, you can now test new channels on top.

GTM motions
It might also be the right time to add a secondary motion (for instance: partnerships, product-led growth, or outbound/inbound)

Build specialized teams
You now outgrow founder-led sales. So you bring in the first specialized roles in your GTM team.

Protect your core positioning
Don’t make the mistake of changing your core positioning. Just because you hit the 1€ million ARR, doesn’t mean you can now play the same game as the big guys. Keep your positioning advantage.

Option to expand horizontally (new ICP) or vertically (new use cases)
It’s also the time when you could think of expanding into adjacent segments or use cases. Important: You can, but definitely don’t need to.

What “good” looks like

✅ Growth becomes predictable

✅ Your GTM still works/is healthy (even though you added more resources)

✅ Expansion feels like an extension, not something completely new

Biggest mistakes

❌ Scaling too early (with a broken GTM foundation)

❌ Adding too much complexity at once

❌ Losing clarity in positioning

❌ Forgetting your initial wedge

Final Takeaway

GTM foundation work is not about doing more.

It’s about doing the right things at the right stage:

• Stage 1 → Find what works

• Stage 2 → Make it repeatable

• Stage 3 → Scale it

And all of it sits on:

• ICP

• Positioning

• Messaging

Get that wrong → nothing works
Get that right → everything compounds

Okay, that’s it for today.

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

The Ultimate Positioning Guide + Worksheet

Get Positioning Guide

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

If you’re somewhere between €0 → €1M ARR, I can help you with your GTM.

1️⃣ Free GTM Foundation Library
→ 50+ resources (guides, templates, frameworks)

2️⃣ GTM Audit
→ 360° assessment + 6-month action plan: Your GTM Blindspots revealed

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory
→ Work directly with me to build your GTM

Most early-stage founders think partnerships will unlock growth.

So they:

• Sign a few partner logos

• build integrations

• launch a “partner program”

And 6 months later?

Nothing.

No pipeline. No distribution. No leverage.

Just a Notion page and a few “let’s stay in touch” calls.

Here’s the problem:

❌ They don’t create demand out of thin air.
❌ They don’t magically fix weak positioning.
❌ They don’t solve unclear ICPs.
❌ And they definitely don’t replace founder-led sales.

We’ve both seen founders waste 3–6 months on partnerships that never produced a single deal.

This guide is meant to help you avoid exactly that and help you make one decision:

Should you invest in partnerships right now - and if yes, where do you start?

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ 17 must-have questions about your GTM

✅ The Ultimate SaaS Positioning Guide

✅ 10 Quick GTM Fixes you can ship this week

A quick word from our sponsor

I only include sponsors that I would recommend personally. If you’re interested in reaching 27,000+ SaaS operators, sponsor the next newsletter.

📢 Introw — Unlock partnership revenue in minutes

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📢 Attio — the AI-native CRM for GTM

Attio is the AI-native CRM with built-in enrichment, flexible workflows, and fast setup. Connect your email and calendar, and Attio instantly builds your CRM.

Their new “Ask Attio” agent changes how you run your CRM: Prep for calls in seconds, update fields automatically, get deal summaries with one click

Start now

Let’s get into it. 👇👇

Before you do partnerships, ask yourself

Do not focus on partnerships yet if:

❌ You still can’t explain clearly who your ICP is
❌ You haven’t proven you can close customers directly
❌ Your GTM motion is still inconsistent
❌ Your ACV is too low to support human-heavy partner motions
❌ You secretly hope “partners” will solve your growth problem for you

If your direct motion is not working yet, partnerships will not save you.

They will only add complexity.

If your core GTM is weak, partnerships scale confusion.

That said, not all partnership types are equal. Some are absolutely worth testing early. Others are a complete waste of time at your stage.

👉 Want the full guide?

Access the Partnership Guide for Early-Stage SaaS and AI Founders

It goes deeper into all partnership types, detailed frameworks, and how to avoid the traps.

Get full guide

Real Partnership: What most founders get wrong

Most of what gets called a partnership in SaaS is not a real partnership.

The term gets used for everything:

• an API integration

• a listing on a marketplace

• an affiliate relationship

• a co-marketing webinar

• a reseller agreement

A real partnership is not just a transaction.
It’s a collaborative relationship.

Long-term.
Shared upside.
Ongoing investment.

The 1+1 = 3+ principle

A partnership should create more value together than either side could create alone.

If that extra value does not exist, you don’t need a partnership.

You need: a vendor, a tool, or a simple commercial agreement.

For early-stage SaaS, that value typically shows up in:

1. Lifting Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Through integrations that make your product stickier, or service partners who help customers extract more value.

2. Reducing Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Through co-marketing, warm introductions, or referrals from trusted advisors your prospects already work with.

3. Speeding Time-to-Market: Through product integrations that fill gaps without building everything yourself, or channel partners who give you immediate distribution.

4. Reducing Risk: Through diversifying your go-to-market beyond a single motion, and through partners who validate your product in their market.

If it does none of these, it’s probably not worth your time

Partner Value Proposition: What’s in it for them?

This is where most founders get it wrong.

They focus on:
❌ “What can this partner do for us?”

The better question is:
✅“Why would this partner invest time, trust, and reputation into us?”

Strong partner value propositions usually include:

1. Revenue potential

Not just commissions—services, retention, expansion.

“Your clients need this. You can wrap services around it. And it helps you become more valuable to them.”

2. Portfolio improvement

Your product helps them:

• serve a new customer segment, industry or region

• Expand their relevance with existing clients (Upselling path)

3. Competitive advantage

Your product helps them differentiate against their competitors.

Or provides access to innovation that they couldn’t build themselves.

What keeps a partner engaged is this:

The 4 types of Partnerships

Not all partnerships are the same. Every partnership falls into one of four categories:

Product partners

Partners that make your product better. They connect it to the tools your customers already use and fill functional gaps. This is where most early-stage companies should start.

Examples:

• integrations

• technology partners

• infrastructure partners

They carry the lowest risk, require no partner enablement infrastructure, and directly improve your product for existing customers.

Marketing partners

After product partnerships, marketing partnerships are usually the most accessible category.

They help your buyers discover and trust you.

They serve three functions:

• Awareness (podcasts, newsletters, events),

• Credibility (trusted voices validating your solution),

• and Conversion (affiliate programs, co-marketing with lead sharing).

Examples:

• joint webinars

• shared newsletters

• co-authored guides

• podcast swaps

• events

• ecosystem content with adjacent SaaS products
  

The best early-stage version is usually:

Co-marketing with adjacent companies that serve the same ICP but solve a different problem.

That is the sweet spot. You borrow trust, reach, and context without direct competitive tension.

Channel partners

Partners that help distribute or sell your solution.

Examples:

• referral partners

• co-sellers

• resellers

• distributors (who bring your product to customers you can’t reach on your own)

High potential, but high risk if you’re not ready.

Service partners

Help customers realize value.

If your product is low-touch and self-serve, you don’t need service partners right now.

They become relevant when your product requires significant human involvement to deliver value.

Examples:

• consultants

• agencies and implementation partners

• system integrators

• managed service providers

Most early-stage companies should start with:

Product partnerships first.
Marketing partnerships second.

Why most channel partnerships fail

Channel partnerships sound attractive because it feels close to revenue.

But:

1. They can’t fix broken GTM

Partners amplify a working motion. They don’t build one.

2. The activation problem is real

Signing partners is easy. Getting them to act is hard.

A common pattern:

• You sign 5 or 10 “partners”

• Everyone is excited on the intro calls

• Nobody sends leads

• 4 months later, everything is dead
  

80 out of every 100 partners turn inactive.

3. Deal size determines viability

At low ACV (< €5k/year), human-driven channel often doesn’t work.

As a rough rule:

• below ~€3k–€5k ARR: referral/channel gets hard unless it is very scalable or affiliate-like

• €5k–€50k ARR: referrals and co-selling can make sense

• above that: deeper channel models become more viable

Partnerships by ACV and Product Complexity

Two key filters that decide what partnerships are right for you.

ACV

Your Average Contract Value directly influences which partnership models make sense:

The higher your ACV, the more partner-heavy models can make sense.

Low ACV (< €5k/year), low-touch (self-serve or light-touch sales)

Partnerships that scale without human intervention work best.

Think:

• product integrations (marketplace listings, native integrations)

• affiliate programs

• lightweight referrals

• technology partnerships

Mid ACV €5k–€50k/year), medium-touch

Now referral and co-selling can start to make economic sense. The deal size justifies a warm introduction, and the sales cycle benefits from a trusted recommendation.

Marketing partnerships also deliver strong ROI here, because co-marketing reduces CAC on deals that are large enough to matter.

Higher ACV (€50k+/year), high-touch

Now, resellers, system integrators, and service partners become viable because the deal economics support the partner’s investment in learning and selling your product.

But this is typically beyond the early-stage.

Product complexity

The more implementation and change-management your product requires, the more human help matters.

• Simple product → product + marketing partnerships

• Complex product → service partners + co-selling

How to Actually Start (Without Wasting 6 Months)

Enough theory.

If you want to test partnerships in a smart way, do this.

Step 1: Write a Partner Hypothesis

• Who exactly is the partner?

• Why would they care?

• Why are you relevant to them?

• Is there ICP overlap?

• What would success look like in 90 days?

Step 2: Talk to 2–3 partners

Do not build:

• a portal

• a tier structure

• a fancy commission model

• a partner deck with 40 slides

Just talk to real candidates.

Questions to ask:

• Do they see the value you’re describing?

• Would they actually introduce you to their clients? Why or why not?

• What would they need from you to make this work?

• What’s their honest assessment of the partnership’s potential?

Listen carefully. If two out of three tell you the value proposition doesn’t resonate, go back and refine your hypothesis. If they’re enthusiastic but need different support than you expected, adapt.

Step 3: Run a pilot

Work with your first 1–2 validated partners on a simple, time-boxed pilot:

• 8–12 weeks

• Clear mutual goals (e.g., “3 introductions from you, dedicated onboarding support from us”)

• Weekly or biweekly check-ins

• Honest evaluation at the end

Document everything. What worked? What didn’t? What surprised you? This pilot becomes the blueprint for your partnership approach going forward.

The Most Common Partnership Mistakes & FAQs

Partnerships are full of traps for early-stage founders.

Here are three we see all the time:

❌ Seeing Marketplace Listings as Partnerships

Listing your product on a marketplace (Salesforce AppExchange, HubSpot Marketplace, Shopify App Store) is not a partnership strategy.

It’s a distribution tactic.

And on its own, it rarely drives results.

Marketplaces are crowded.
You’re competing with dozens (or hundreds) of alternatives.

Without:

• active promotion

• co-marketing

• or a truly differentiated integration

Most listings generate near-zero organic traffic at the early stage.

👉 Treat marketplace presence as a checkbox—not a growth engine.

❌ Your Sales Manager Is Not Your Partnership Manager

This happens all the time.

Founders think:

“It’s kind of like sales, so let’s give it to the head of sales.”

Usually wrong.

Sales is transactional.
Partnerships are collaborative.

A sales leader is measured on quarterly revenue.
Partnerships take 6–12 months to produce results.

That creates the wrong behavior:

• pushing deals instead of building relationships

• treating partners like customers

• focusing on short-term wins

Partners feel this immediately and disengage.

👉 If you’re early, the founder should own partnerships.

❌ “We have 5 partners who said they’ll introduce us… but nothing happened.”

This is the most common failure mode.

And it’s almost always an enablement problem.

Not a partner problem.

Signing a partner is 10% of the work.
The other 90% is making them successful.

Most founders don’t give partners what they need:

• clear ICP and positioning

• simple materials (one-pager, intro blurb)

• easy way to introduce you

• fast response on intros

• regular check-ins

If partners have to figure it out themselves, they won’t.

The takeaway

These are just 3 of the most common pitfalls & FAQs.

In the full guide, we’ll break down:

• all major mistakes

• detailed FAQs

• and how to avoid wasting months on partnerships that go nowhere

👉 Get the full guide here

Key Takeaway

Don’t ask:

“How do we get more partners?”

Ask:

“Which one partnership type would create the most leverage for our business right now?”

Then start there.

• One hypothesis

• One category

• One strong partner

• One real pilot

That’s how early-stage partnerships actually work.

Okay, that’s it for today.

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

P.S. Check out Bernhard’s website for Partnership Consulting, Assessments, and free content.

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

1️⃣ Use my free GTM library with 50+ free resources (guides, templates, workbooks, and tools) to build a strong GTM foundation (helped 5000+ SaaS leaders)

2️⃣ Get a 360° GTM audit of your status quo + a custom 6-month action plan

3️⃣ Work 1-on-1 with me - GTM Advisory for SaaS founders from €0 to €1 million ARR

A lot of founders tell me they have a go-to-market strategy.

But when we start working together, and I ask a few simple questions… things often get blurry.

So here’s a quick test.

If you’re building a SaaS/AI company from €0 → €1M ARR (and beyond), you should be able to answer these 17 questions clearly.

So today you have to do the work, not me :)

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ The Ultimate SaaS Positioning Guide

✅ 10 Quick GTM Fixes you can ship this week

✅ Homepage Teardown: What 6 Top SaaS Companies get Right (and Wrong)

A quick word from our sponsor

📢 Attio — Your CRM wasn’t built for how fast you need to move

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Then Ask Attio anything:

• Ask “What’s the latest on this deal?” and get comprehensive answers with suggested next steps

• Prep for calls in seconds, with context from across your entire business

• Keep your pipeline up to date automatically

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Let’s get into it. 👇👇

Customers & ICP

1. Who specifically is your product built for today?

Not your TAM.
Your actual Ideal Customer Profile.

Can you clearly define your ICP with 4-6 attributes?

• Firmographics,

• Technographics,

• Persona-specific attributes

In the early stages, you usually need to focus on one segment and one use case to reach product-market fit.

👉 If you struggle here, check out my ICP Framework

2. Who are your best-fit customers?

Look at your current customers and ask:

• Who has the highest usage?

• Who churns the least?

• Who has the fastest sales cycle?

These are signals of your best-fit customers.

What do they all have in common?

👉 If you're unsure, analyze your customers to find your best-fit customers.

3. What type of customers should you not target right now?

Many early-stage founders try to serve too many segments.

But GTM only becomes repeatable when you narrow your focus.

So define your ANTI-ICP.

Your Anti-ICP represents companies or personas you should not target because they:

• Don’t value your product

• Don’t have the pain you solve

• Don’t fit strategically

4. What triggers someone to start looking for a solution like yours?

Buying triggers (or intent signals) are events or behaviors that show a company or persona is more likely to buy now.

It’s a sign/proxy that they are currently experiencing the pain you solve, and might actively be looking for a solution.

Every purchase has a trigger:

• A new hire

• A new regulation

• A painful current tech stack

Understanding this moment is critical for messaging and demand generation.

Positioning

5. What is your primary positioning anchor?

Your primary positioning anchor defines what you are.

It helps buyers quickly mentally classify your product.

👉 If you struggle with your positioning, use my new Positioning Guide.

6. What alternatives are customers using/considering?

Every product replaces something. That’s the dominant status quo.

Usually it’s one of these:

• spreadsheets

• internal tools / patching together multiple tools

• doing it manually

• another SaaS product

If you can’t clearly name the alternative, positioning becomes very difficult.

7. What makes you meaningfully different?

Once you know your alternatives, you need to explain why your product is better for a specific use case / how you’re different.

Your differentiation needs to be:

• clear

• believable

• relevant to the customer

Messaging

8. What’s the core message on your homepage hero?

Within a few seconds, a visitor should understand:

• Who the product is for (ICP)

• What is it (Product Category or use case)

• What the product does (Capabilities)

👉 If you struggle with your homepage messaging, check out: SaaS Homepage Template and Homepage Teardowns

9. What are the top 3 objections you hear all the time?

Most early-stage SaaS hear the same few objections:

• “We already use something else”

• “Not a priority right now”

• “Too expensive”

Great messaging addresses these objections upfront.

Do you have them written down somewhere?

10. Is your narrative consistent across your GTM assets?

Too often I see teams using different messages across their GTM assets.

Review your:

• homepage

• sales deck

• LinkedIn profiles

• case studies

Ask yourself:

• Do we communicate the same story?

• Do we use consistent terminology?

Repetition builds clarity.
Don’t try to reinvent the message for every channel.

11. What proof do you have and communicate?

Buyers need to trust you before they buy.

So what proof do you have that your product really helps them?

Early proof can include:

• case studies

• testimonials

• pilot results

• quantified outcomes

Templates that you can use:

• Trusted by [number of clients] including [testimonial 1], [testimonial 2], [testimonial 3]

• [number of product usage] managed on the platform

• Trusted by [clients] to manage [volume/impact]

Make this proof visible in your messaging.

GTM Execution

12. What stage of GTM are you currently in?

Most SaaS companies move through three phases:

1. Hustle Mode – finding the first customers

2. Focus Mode – defining ICP and repeatable GTM

3. Expansion Mode – scaling beyond €1M ARR

13. What is your primary acquisition channel?

Early-stage founders often try too many channels at once.

Instead, focus on one primary channel that consistently generates pipeline.

Some channels work great together, for example:

• Founder LinkedIn content + (warm/signal) based outbound

• (BOFU) Content for SEO and LLMs + Google Ads (for BOFU content)

But you still need to master one channel first.

So make yourself a favor and don’t do too many channels at the same time.

Just yesterday I had an intro call with a founder who told me they were doing:

• LinkedIn outbound

• 3 long-form articles per week

• a referral program

• an affiliate program

• influencer marketing

• Google Ads

• LinkedIn Ads

They had 23 customers and less than €100k ARR.

That’s not a GTM strategy. That’s GTM chaos.

14. What sales motion fits your product best?

Don’t try to run product-led (your website CTA is ‘Free Trial’) and sales-led (your website CTA is ‘Book a demo’) both in parallel (if you’re < 1€ million ARR).

Each motion requires a lot of resources - you can’t afford to master both.

The right motion depends on:

• ACV

• Complexity of the product

• Market maturity

• (how your target customers prefer to buy products)

Hot take:
Unless you’re selling a low-ACV self-serve tool in a crowded market, running demos early is incredibly valuable because every conversation teaches you something.

15. Do you have a defined, repeatable sales process?

Whenever I ask founders to walk me through their sales process, this is where it breaks.

They say:

“First we do this… then maybe another call… sometimes something else.”

Your job is to design a journey. To guide prospects through a set of clearly defined steps.

Look at your last 10 demos:

• Did they lead to 10 different next steps?

• Or do you see a clear pattern emerging?

👉 If you struggle, check out my advice.

16. Do you know what it takes to reach your revenue goals?

If you don’t track your funnel, you can’t plan growth.

At a minimum, you should know your high-level funnel metrics.

What conversion do you see from:

1. Product-Led: Website Sessions —> Sign-Ups —> Active —> Won

2. Sales-led: Discovery Calls —> Qualified/Demos —> Won

Also track:

• ACV

• sales cycle

With these numbers, you can start reverse-engineering your growth plan.

17. What is the one GTM problem currently holding you back the most?

Not five problems.

Just one.

But dig deeper.

❌Not: “We need more leads.”

✅ “We send 100 ICP-fit DMs per week, but nobody responds.”

If you struggled to answer several of these questions clearly, you probably don’t have a GTM strategy yet; you have GTM activities.

And that’s normal.

Most founders start by experimenting.

But real traction usually appears once the GTM foundation becomes clear.

If you want help building your GTM foundation from €0 → €1M ARR, feel free to reach out.

Book GTM Clarity Call

That’s it for today.

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

1️⃣ Use my free GTM library with 50+ free resources (guides, templates, workbooks, and tools) to build a strong GTM foundation (helped 5000+ SaaS leaders)

2️⃣ Get a 360° GTM audit of your status quo + a custom 6-month action plan

3️⃣ Work 1-on-1 with me - GTM Advisory for SaaS founders from €0 to €1 million ARR

Today, we’ll dive deep into positioning. After working with 30+ early-stage founders over the last 3 years, I’ve noticed that strong vs. weak positioning sets the foundation for your GTM success.

What You’ll Get Inside This Episode

✅ A 3-step framework for choosing the right positioning anchor
✅ A clear decision tree (Activity vs Use Case vs Category vs Alternative)
✅ Differentiation angles that actually work

+ a Bonus: A practical worksheet to define your positioning

👉 Shortcut: Access the Ultimate Positioning Guide

Get free Positioning Guide

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ 10 Quick GTM Fixes you can ship this week

✅ Homepage Teardown: What 6 Top SaaS Companies get Right (and Wrong)

✅ Insights from 15+ GTM audits

A quick word from our sponsor

📢 Attio — Your CRM wasn’t built for how fast you need to move

Attio is the AI CRM that flexes with your GTM strategy, not the other way around. Connect your email and calendar, and Attio instantly builds your CRM.

Then Ask Attio anything:

• Ask “What’s the latest on this deal?” and get comprehensive answers with suggested next steps

• Prep for calls in seconds, with context from across your entire business

• Keep your pipeline up to date automatically

Ready to move faster?

Start now

👉 Reach 27.000+ SaaS operators with sponsored content. Sponsor the next newsletter.

Let’s get into it. 👇👇

Last month, I had 8 intro calls with founders.

Most of them had a solid product.
Some even had decent traction.

But when I asked: “What are you building?”

More than half gave me a 3-minute explanation.

And after 3 minutes… I still couldn’t clearly explain it back to them 😇.

If I don’t get it in 30 seconds, your buyers won’t either.

That’s a positioning problem.

1️⃣ You need to take a positioning bet

One of the biggest GTM mistakes I see early-stage founders make:

❌ They wait for perfect data before positioning.

But positioning creates the data.

The moment you decide:

• what your product is
  👉 “We are X”

• who it’s for
  👉“We help X”

• who you compete against
  👉 “Instead of solution Z”

Everything sharpens:

→ Clear ICP targeting
→ Better messaging
→ More focused sales calls
→ Smarter roadmap decisions
→ Content ideas that actually convert
→ Competitors you can clearly position against

Yes, it’s a bet.
Yes, it might be wrong.

But: Positioning isn’t about being right.

It’s about having something to test.

Bad positioning beats no positioning. Every time.

Quick check: If I asked you right now: “What are you?”

Could you answer in one sentence without rambling?

2️⃣ The 3-Step Positioning Framework

Positioning is two decisions layered together:

1. Choose your Primary Anchor (What are you?)

2. Add a Secondary Angle (Why you? Your Differentiation)

3. Combine both into a clear statement

This is the core of the framework in the full guide.

This framework is my attempt to structure and operationalize these ideas for early-stage SaaS founders

Let’s break it down.

Step 1: Choose Your Primary Anchor

Your primary anchor answers:

“What is your product?”

If buyers can’t mentally classify you, they can’t buy you.

Confused buyers don’t ask for demos. They ignore you.

There are 4 options.

1) Activity Positioning

You frame your product around a manual activity people do today.

Best when:
• Market is early/ not existing
• No clear category exists
• People still use spreadsheets, Slack, Notion, etc.

Main GTM goal: Create awareness.

2) Use Case Positioning

You position around a clear job-to-be-done.

Buyers can describe the problem, but not the category.

Best when:

• Market is emerging

• Product categories are emerging / fragmented

• You replace broken workflows

Main GTM goal: Own the use case.

3) Product Category Positioning

You position your product as a type of software that buyers already recognize and actively compare.

Buyer awareness is high. They already:
• Google the category
• Compare vendors
• Check G2

Main GTM goal: Win comparisons (with differentiation inside the category).

4) Competitive Alternative Positioning

You position yourself directly against a dominant leader.

Only use this when:
• market maturity is very high + a market leader clearly dominates
• You have a strong wedge

Main GTM goal: Steal demand from the leader.

The 4 types of Positioning (Examples)

Let’s have a look at how you can position the same product with the 4 types of positioning anchors.

How to Choose the Right Primary Positioning Anchor (Decision Tree)

Choose your Primary Anchor based on how buyers think today, not how you want them to think.

Use the decision tree below to choose the right anchor (simplified from the full decision tree in the guide).

If you answered the questions top to bottom, you should be able to choose the best fit for you.

But here’s the thing.

How to Choose the Right Level of Specificity

Choosing the right anchor is not just about which type (Activity, Use Case, Product Category).

It’s also about choosing it at the right level of specificity.

• Too vague → Confusing

• Too specific → Too niche/ Small target audience

• Right level → Clear & defensible

Step 2: Add a Secondary Positioning Anchor (Differentiation)

Your primary anchor classifies you.

Your secondary anchor differentiates you inside the chosen anchor.

You can choose max 2 real differentiators:

☐ Niche Down (If Niche → Who exactly?)

☐ Low-Cost Player (If Low-Cost → Compared to what?)

☐ Premium Player (If Premium → What makes you superior?)

☐ Unique Attribute (If Unique Attribute → What is ONLY true for you?)

☐ Lite Version (If Lite → What complexity are you removing?)

Step 3: Combine Primary + Secondary Anchors

Combine a primary anchor + secondary anchor for a clear positioning.

Examples:

If you made it this far, you already understand more about positioning than most founders.

To make it easier for you to craft your positioning, I’ve created a Free Notion Positioning Worksheet for you.

My positioning thinking is heavily influenced by April Dunford, Fletch PMM (with Anthony Pierri & Rob Kaminski), Rob Walling, combined with hands-on work with 30+ SaaS founders.

This guide is my attempt to turn those ideas into something practical.

3️⃣ The Positioning Worksheet

The positioning worksheet comes with 2 sections:

1. Understand the market

2. About you (How you position yourself in the market)

This is where the real work happens.

Access Positioning Worksheet

You’ll define:

• Your ICP
• The Usecase (jobs-to-be-done)
• The core problem
• The alternative solutions + dominant status quo
• The key limitations of that status quo
• Your primary anchor
• Your secondary anchor
• Your competitive differentiator

Instead of guessing your positioning from this newsletter, use the full framework properly. I’ve compiled everything into one structured asset: The Ultimate Positioning Guide.

The Ultimate Positioning Guide + Worksheet

Inside the guide, you’ll get:

✓ Full decision tree
✓ Anchor comparison table
✓ Worksheet (Notion version)
✓ Internal positioning templates
✓ Market-facing statement templates
✓ 6 common positioning mistakes
✓ Positioning health check (self-assessment)

Get Positioning Guide

The goal is that you have clarity around your positioning.

This means internal and external positioning statements.

I hope today’s content helps you better position your product in the market.

If you’re serious about fixing your GTM foundation:

Don’t just tweak your homepage headline.

Do the strategic work.

Okay, that’s it for today.

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

Reply to this email and send me your positioning statement. I’ll give you feedback.

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

1️⃣ Use my free GTM library with 50+ free resources (guides, templates, workbooks, and tools) to build a strong GTM foundation (helped 5000+ SaaS leaders)

2️⃣ Get a 360° GTM audit of your status quo + a custom 6-month action plan

3️⃣ Work 1-on-1 with me - GTM Advisory for SaaS founders from €0 to €1 million ARR

Today, we’ll cover 10 quick GTM fixes that you can ship this week - no new playbooks, no new channels, just foundational execution that reduces noise.

Subscribe now

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ Homepage Teardown: What 6 Top SaaS Companies get Right (and Wrong)

✅ Insights from 15+ GTM audits

✅ The Best of MRR Unlocked 2025

A quick word from our sponsors

📢 Attio — Your CRM wasn't built for how fast you need to move

Attio is the AI CRM that flexes with your GTM strategy, not the other way round. Connect your email and calendar, and Attio instantly builds your CRM.

Then Ask Attio anything:

• Ask “What’s the latest on this deal?” and get comprehensive answers with suggested next steps

• Prep for calls in seconds, with context from across your entire business

• Keep your pipeline up-to-date automatically

Ready to move faster?

Start now

👉 Reach 27.000+ SaaS operators with sponsored content. Sponsor the next newsletter.

Let’s get into it. 👇

1) ICP & ANTI ICP Bullet list

Ask yourself:

• Can you describe your ICP in 5 short bullet points?

• What are the disqualifiers that define your ANTI ICP?

If you can’t describe your ICP and Anti ICP in 5 bullets, your GTM execution gets fluffy (noisy pipeline, long sales cycles, low demo win rate) - that’s the opposite of what you want to achieve on your 0—> 1€ million ARR journey.

Remember, ICP is a combination of:

1. Ideal Company (Firmographics, Technographics, other relevant criteria)

2. Ideal Persona (Job Title, Department, Pain/Challenges)

3. Intent Signals (How do you know they face the problem your product solves)

The same is true for your ANTI ICP. This is a list of Disqualifiers.

If you don’t know who you should not sell to, your pipeline will always be noisy.

P.S. Don’t stop with documenting your ICP, enforce it in your GTM.

Need support? Check out my ICP Framework or get early access to my brand new ICP Framework 2026.

2) Decide on your primary positioning anchor (product category or use case)

Ask yourself:

• Do buyers immediately understand what your product is?

• Or do you need 5 sentences to explain what you do?

Before you differentiate, you must anchor.

Decide explicitly. Are you leading with:

• A product category?

• A specific use case?

One primary anchor. Not multiple.

If buyers don’t know what to compare you against, they are confused.

Pick one primary anchor and reflect it consistently:
Homepage. LinkedIn. Demo intro. Sales deck.

P.S. Here is a preview of my upcoming Positioning Guide, including how to choose the right primary anchor.

3) Kill one channel (if you’re in Focus mode)

Ask yourself:

• Are you running multiple channels “a bit”?

• Or are you executing one deeply?

If you’re early-stage and spreading across 4 channels, you’re likely generating weak signal everywhere.

Focus mode means:

• Pause the weakest channel

• Reallocate time and energy to the strongest signal

4) Add a “How did you hear about us” in your Demo / Sign Up Flow

Ask yourself:

• Do you actually know where qualified pipeline comes from?

Add a required “How did you hear about us?” field. Also make it part of your demo calls to ask them (again).

Review it weekly.

This gives you more confidence in your GTM channels.

P.S. This is a great use case for the new Attio Ask feature.

5) Share your best case studies

Ask yourself:

• Do you actively use your best case studies?

A lot of times, when I work with founders, I see they have great case studies but don’t use them. The case studies are ‘hidden’ on sub-pages on the website, and that’s it.

Use your case studies effectively:

• Make them part of your sales emails

• Add ‘case studies/customers’ in your website navigation bar

• Have a ‘case study’ section on your homepage

• Add their stories to your sales deck

• Add them to your LinkedIn profile (featured section)

6) Revamp your LinkedIn profile

Ask yourself:

• Does your LinkedIn clearly communicate what we do and who we serve?

If not, it’s time to revamp your profile: Headline, Banner, Featured Section

7) Ask your (best) customers for referrals / warm intros

Ask yourself:

• When was the last time you proactively asked for a referral?

I do believe you can use every touchpoint with a prospect/customer to get warm intros. It depends on how you ask for it.

Step 1: Prepare for the call

Scan their network for ICP-fits and create a shortlist. The goal is to have a list of 3-5 contacts + companies that they might know (with a high probability).

Step 2: Ask open question

“Who are 2-3 other companies/people you can think of who can benefit from X as well?”

“Who do you think could benefit from our product?”

Step 3: If no response/ they don’t know anyone, be prepared and say:

“No worries, I saw that you are connected with X and Y. I believe they might be a good fit for us. How is your connection with them?”

“I had a quick look at your LinkedIn network before our call, and I saw that you’re connected to X, Y, Z, who I believe would benefit a lot from our product. How is your connection with them?”

Step 4: Make it easy for them to make the intro (asap):

Have an email template they can use or suggest a LinkedIn group chat.

8) Track lost reasons systematically

Ask yourself:

• Do you have a required lost reason field?

• Do you systematically analyze why deals are lost?

If not, add a required “Lost Reason” field in CRM.

I recommend tracking 7 lost reasons👇

1️⃣ Decided for competition

2️⃣ Status quo sufficient

3️⃣ Decision delayed

4️⃣ Too expensive / no budget

5️⃣ missing key features

6️⃣ no response

7️⃣ other

9) Do you have a hard criterion for “when to open” and “when to close” a deal?

Ask yourself:

• Do you follow a clear rule when you open and close a deal?

• When exactly does a lead qualify as an opportunity?

• When do you close-lost?

A common way (for a sales-led motion) is to open a deal for SQLs, meaning they have:

✅ ICP Fit

✅ Product-Usecase Fit

✅ Urgency to buy

You need to find your ‘best sales process’ and follow it consistently.

Also, have a rule when you close lost stalled deals. You don’t want old, stalled deals manipulating your sales pipeline forecast.

10) Review your last 3 demo calls and challenge yourself

Ask yourself:

• How deep was your discovery?

• Do you really know their status quo and pain points?

• Do you know their decision process and all stakeholders?

• Can you clearly articulate the committed next steps (who, when, what)?

• Was your demo more of a product tour than a sales conversation?

So sit down and watch your last recordings.

Feel free to use the structure of my Coaching Feedback Template 👇

None of these are growth hacks. They are GTM foundations.

So now, sit down and add them to your next week to do list.

If you implement even half of these, you’ll improve your GTM execution.

Okay, that’s it for today.

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

P.S. Respond to this email and let me know how you executed them.

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

1️⃣ Use my free GTM library with 50+ free resources (guides, templates, workbooks, and tools) to build a strong GTM foundation (helped 5000+ SaaS leaders)

2️⃣ Get a 360° GTM audit of your status quo + a custom 6-month action plan

3️⃣ Work 1-on-1 with me - GTM Advisory for SaaS founders from €0 to €1 million ARR

Today, we’ll cover 3 things:

1️⃣ Teardown of 6 Top SaaS Homepages (+ learning you can apply for your website)

2️⃣ Why sales-led motion can work for <10k€ ACV

3️⃣ How many customers do you need to know your ICP?

It’s about something most founders quietly avoid: Taking a clear GTM bet.

Let’s get into it. 👇

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ Insights from 15+ GTM audits

✅ The Best of MRR Unlocked 2025

✅ The Ultimate Founder & Team LinkedIn Playbook

Homepage Teardown of 6 Top SaaS Companies: What’s Good, What’s Bad

For this issue, I partnered with Maximilian Fleitmann, founder of Magier - a leading design-as-a-service agency for Startups and reviewed 6 SaaS/AI homepages.

The teardown includes: Attio, Clay, Jimo, Fin, Sastrify, and Introw

We flagged:

✅ What works

❌ What doesn’t

🔥 What we’d change immediately

We turned it into a Figma file with concrete comments you can use for your own homepage.

🟢 Green sticky notes = really good things

🔴 Red sticky notes = things that need optimization

Instead of walking through all 6 here, I’ll highlight a few recurring patterns that showed up across multiple pages.

Access Teardown

🟢 Good one #1: Clear “Who it’s for” above the fold

On the strongest homepages, it was immediately clear:

• Who the product is for

• What the product is/does

No abstract slogans.
No technical feature dump.

Just a concrete statement that lets the right buyer think:

“This might be for me.”

That one decision already does a lot of qualification work for you.

🟢 Good one #2: Innovative ways to add social proof elements

We saw several strong approaches to social proof, far beyond simple logo carousels.

👉 Adding ‘read case study’ links to the logos

👉 Backing product capabilities with relevant case studies

👉 Adding badges, reviews, and trust elements as supporting signals

The key difference: Social proof wasn’t decorative, it was contextual.

🟢 Good one # 3: Product visuals buyers can actually relate to

Instead of abstract mockups or generic UI shots, the best homepages showed:

• Realistic examples

• Familiar use cases

• Screens buyers could imagine themselves using

This immediately creates a better first impression of:

• How the product works

• Where it fits into the buyer’s workflow

🔴 Example 1: Missing entry points for deeper pages (product pages)

Your homepage is your core positioning asset, but it can’t answer every detailed question.

That’s why strong homepages guide visitors to relevant sub-pages, most often product pages.

What was missing on some pages:

❌ Links to dedicated ‘company type/persona pages’

❌ Clear path to different partner type pages

❌ Central page listing all integration partners

These entry points would guide buyers further in their evaluation.

🔴 Example 2: Missing ‘end-of-the-page’ FAQ & CTA section

The homepage ends with the ‘case study’ section, but misses 2 critical sections:

❌ Call to action section

❌ FAQ section

🔴 Example 3: Too much detail on the homepage

Your homepage doesn’t need to answer all questions.

Its job is to:

• Qualify the right visitors

• Create clarity

• Guide people to the next step

In the case of Fin AI, for example, the homepage goes very deep into explaining how it differs from other AI agents.

That’s a valid topic — but in our opinion, the execution is overkill:

• Too much text

• Too much detail

👉 Solution: Cut ~50% and move the depth to a dedicated page (e.g. “How the Fin AI engine works”).

P.S. Want to see a great way to add a ‘competitor comparison’ on your homepage? Check out Cloudtalk’s homepage section.

Full homepage teardown

Get the full teardown of 6 homepages with detailed comments in a shared Figma file.

If you’re currently iterating on your homepage, this will save you weeks of trial and error.

Get Homepage Teardown

Sales-led motion for <10k€ ACV

Everyone says you can’t run a sales-led motion with sub-10k€ ACVs.

That’s not true.

It can be fine, especially if you’re a founder between 0€ and your first 1–3M€ ARR.

The real problem is that most founders look at the wrong indicator.

ACV is not the deciding factor for whether a sales-led motion is healthy.

What actually matters are 4 things.

1️⃣ CAC payback period (fully loaded)

The real question is:

How long does it take you to recover your customer acquisition costs and start making money?

At an early stage:

🟠 Anything below 12 months can be acceptable

🟢 Below 6 months is great

Even Douwe Wester has said that 10–15 months can still be acceptable, depending on context.

If you’re bootstrapped, your thresholds might be tighter, but the principle stays the same.

If your CAC payback works, the ACV is not “too low for sales” by default.

2️⃣ ARR signed per AE

The second key metric is how much ARR each sales rep signs.

If your reps can sign enough ARR per year, sales can scale at least initially.

With healthy quotas (for example 4–6× OTE):

• Scaling with “more humans” can be fine

• Especially for the first 2–3 sales reps

This is not about building a perfectly efficient sales org. It’s about making sales work at your current stage.

But this only works with an efficient sales motion.

Sales-led below 10k€ ACV only works if the motion itself is tight.

That usually means:

🟠 Win rates above 20%

🟠 Sales cycles below 90 days

🟠 Mostly inbound-driven demos

What you can’t afford at <10k€ ACV

❌ heavy outbound

❌ field sales,

❌ long sales cycles.

But if you get 1️⃣ CAC payback and 2️⃣ ARR per AE right, these problems usually disappear automatically.

3️⃣ Market maturity, product complexity & phase of the company

Whether a sales-led motion works also depends on a few structural factors:

👉 Maturity of the market

👉 Complexity of the product

👉 Phase of the company

In very mature markets (e.g. CRM, webinars, accounting, email automation), buyers are usually well educated. Human assistance adds less value.

In more complex categories (e.g. ERP software, payment infrastructure, data warehouses, HR operating systems), buyers benefit significantly from human interaction.

And if you’re early, there’s one important thing many founders miss:

This phase is not primarily about sales efficiency.

It’s about learning.

Sales, early on, is a powerful way to:

👉 Learn how customers buy

👉 Understand objections

👉 Improve positioning

👉 Build the right sales foundation

Going full PLG or sales-assisted PLG too early often kills that learning.

4️⃣ Design the right sales process for you

There is no single “correct” sales process you can copy.

Every SaaS company already has a sales process, whether intentional or accidental.

The problem is that many founders never define theirs.

When I work with the founders inside my 6-month GTM advisory we focus on clearly defining:

✅ Your primary CTA
→ Book a call? Start a trial?

✅ What happens in the first call
→ Short discovery or full demo?

✅ What defines a qualified lead
→ Clear MQL / SQL criteria

✅ When a deal is opened in the CRM
→ Explicit entry rules

✅ Next steps after the call
→ Technical deep dive? Trial phase?

✅ What happens after closed-won
→ Onboarding, activation, handover

✅ How you work with existing customers
→ Churn signals, expansion, retention

Write it down.

Ideally, as a simple visual flow.

3 tools and links for founders and GTM operators

👉 Run your (signal-based LinkedIn + Email) outreach campaigns with Lemlist

👉 Get early access to my new Positioning & Messaging Framework

👉 How many customers do you need before your ICP becomes real?

That’s it for today.

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

1️⃣ Use my free GTM library with 50+ free resources (guides, templates, workbooks, and tools) to build a strong GTM foundation (helped 5000+ SaaS leaders)

2️⃣ Get a 360° GTM audit of your status quo + a custom 6-month action plan

3️⃣ Work 1-on-1 with me - GTM Advisory for SaaS founders from €0 to €1 million ARR

This is the first MRR Unlocked episode of 2026.

Over the last few months, I’ve done over 15 GTM audits across various B2B SaaS companies.

Different markets.
Different ACVs.
Different stages (all between 0€ and 1€ million ARR).

Yet the same GTM problems keep showing up.

Not because founders are sloppy.
Not because the product is bad.
Not because they don’t execute fast enough.

But because GTM is treated as a collection of independent activities, not a system.

Which is why many founders feel busy, ship constantly, and still struggle to create momentum.

Here are the 6 GTM mistakes I see over and over again.

Let’s dive in. 👇

📌 Early Access: The B2B SaaS Sales Demo Toolbox

Get early access

1. ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is defined, but not enforced

Pattern

Almost every founder I work with can describe their ICP in a document.

Very few actually use it as a hard constraint in day-to-day GTM decisions.

The ICP exists, but it doesn’t actively shape who you attract, how you sell, or what you prioritize.

What this looks like in practice:

❌ Website messaging speaks to multiple segments (or to none)

❌ Sales demos look the same for every prospect

❌ CRM has no mandatory ICP qualification fields

❌ Content topics are broad and generic, not tailored to one sharp ICP

❌ Outbound lead lists are huge, but response rates are weak

❌ Nobody can clearly articulate an Anti-ICP

❌ ICP assumptions remain unchanged even after 20–30+ customers

👉 This shows up in almost every audit I do, even in teams with “good” ICP docs.

How to fix:

✅ Make the ICP explicit on the homepage (who it’s for/ not for)

✅ Tailor demo structure and examples by ICP segment

✅ Add mandatory ICP fields in your CRM (industry, size, use case, etc.)

✅ Define clear disqualification criteria and actually enforce them

✅ Review pipeline monthly by ICP segment (win rate, ACV, sales cycle)

✅ Analyze your customer regularly to fine-tune your ICP (based on data)

Examples of my GTM audit:

In multiple audits, the ICP work was excellent: clear segments, triggers, pains.

But none of it showed up on the website, demos, or LinkedIn.

Another company had revenue (200k€ ARR) and 20+ customers (from different segments and for different usecases; which is completely fine for the hustle phase), but couldn’t clearly say which segment actually converts best, because ICP data wasn’t tracked and never properly analyzed.

So if you feel like you have a ‘good ICP’ on paper, head over to your Website, CRM, Demos and double check if you also enforce it.

Resources for you:
1. ICP Framework
2. Review existing customer regulary to find your best-fit customers.

2. Buyers don’t know what to compare you against

Pattern:

Founders jump straight into “differentiation” before clearly defining the product category or primary use case. So the positioning lacks a clear anchor.

So when buyers can’t place you in a category, they don’t know what to compare you against. This makes evaluation slow and confusing.

What this looks like in practice:

❌ Prospects ask: “So is this like X?”

❌ Confusion about what you replace (Excel, incumbents, point tools)

❌ Vague homepage language (“AI-powered”, “all-in-one”, “modern platform”)

❌ Category invention happens too early

❌ Internal debates about competitors

❌ Differentiation sounds generic because it isn’t anchored

How to fix:

✅ Decide first: category positioning or use-case positioning

Choose: category positioning first, use-case positioning if category doesn’t exist

✅ Use differentiation within the category, not instead of it

✅ Write one clear category sentence: “We’re a X for Y”

✅ Explicitly name the primary alternative you replace (status quo)

✅ Define 2–3 competitive alternative buckets:

• Status quo (Excel, manual workflows, agencies)

• Incumbent tools

• Direct Competitors

✅ Articulate 2–3 sharp talking points:

✅ Build comparison and alternatives pages to reinforce the category

Examples of my GTM audit:

In one audit, the company served multiple customer segments and use cases.

As a result, buyers didn’t know whether the product was a point solution, a platform, or an alternative to existing tools, which led to longer demos, stalled decision and long sales cycles.

They faced confusion around what product category they really fit into.

As a result, there was confusion on the category, the copy was fluffy and generic and they failed to guide buyers to the right solution.

Unlike this example, where they could clearly define what the product is, who they compete with, and how they are different.

Ressources:
1. Positioning 101 (Product Category vs. Usecase Positioning)
2. My new Positioning & Messaging Framework (Get early access)

3. Sales demos are product tours and lack structure

Pattern:
Most Demos are feature shows and neglect discovery, buy-in and next steps.

This means the demo is mainly designed to show the product, but rarely optimized to help the buyer make a decision.

What this looks like in practice:

❌ Shallow discovery (no urgency, no impact, no decision process)

❌ Feature-heavy monologue with little buyer engagement

❌ Same demo flow regardless of persona or use case

❌ No explicit “success criteria” for the next step

❌ High post-demo ghosting

How to fix:

✅ Treat the demo as a decision-making moment, not a walkthrough

✅ Follow a clear 10-step demo structure

Intro → Time Check → Agenda → Discovery → Buy‑In Summary → High-level Product Framing → Tailored Demo → Pricing → Recap → Next Steps

✅ Run structured discovery before showing the product

Situation → Pain → Impact → Critical event → Decision

✅ Use “mini check-ins” after each key feature (to validate relevance and buy-in)

✅ Recap pains and quantify impact before showing pricing/next steps

✅ End with a clear mutual plan (who, what, by when) + next meeting scheduled

Examples of my GTM audit:

Here you see some real feedback on sales demo recordings.

If I were to summarize the most recurring issues, it’s these 4 👇

Ressources:
1. My new ‘B2B Sales Demo Toolbox”

Free Access to 50+ GTM resources

4. No clearly defined sales process

Pattern:
Sales is a set of calls, but not a designed journey.

Founders/sellers don’t guide prospects through a set of clearly defined steps, so they can’t describe what should happen after each step.

What this looks like in practice:

❌ “What happens after the first call?” depends on the person

❌ No consistent goal for the first call vs demo vs follow-up

❌ Deals are created without a clear definition

❌ Trials are offered without commitment or success criteria

❌ Deals stall because next steps were never designed

👉 Whenever I ask founders to walk me through their sales process, this is where it breaks.

How to fix:

✅ Define a simple, explicit sales process

e.g., Disco → Demo → Trial/Pilot → Close

✅ Assign a clear goal and exit criteria to each stage

✅ Define when a trial is “earned” (qualification threshold)

✅ Create standard follow-ups for each stage (post-demo, trial kickoff, recap)

✅ Enforce pipeline hygiene: every deal needs a next step and close date

Examples of my GTM audit:

In several audits, sales activity existed, but nobody could clearly explain when a deal should be opened, advanced, or closed.

As a result, pipelines were full, but unreliable. Deals stalled not because of objections, but because the next step was never clearly defined.

👉 So write down your ideal sales process on paper!

Another thing that I see quite often is that exit/entry criteria are not well defined.

This lead for example, to pushing prospects too early to a ‘trial’ or ‘pilot’ without real commitment.

Ressources:
1. Buyer Journey Visualisation
2. Sales Email Templates for Follow Ups

5. GTM assets are too generic

Pattern:
The strategy work is done in internal docs, but buyer-facing assets don’t reflect it.

I often review a team’s internal docs and think: “This is actually very good.”
Then I look at their website, CRM, sales deck, and content, and the clarity disappears.

What this looks like in practice:

❌ ICP and messaging frameworks live in Notion/Miro only

❌ Homepage copy is fuzzy or overly technical (ICP doesn’t understand)

❌ No clear callout of ICP, product category, or status quo problem

❌ Sales decks are 80% product features presentations

❌ LinkedIn profiles don’t explain what the product does and for whom

❌ Strong insights exist, but prospects never see them

👉 This one is painful because the thinking is usually very good.

How to fix:

✅ Translate ICP and positioning into the homepage hero

✅ Update sales deck to follow: Status quo → pain → solution → proof → next steps

✅ Align website, deck, demo narrative, outbound messages, content around the same story

✅ Make LinkedIn profiles ICP-specific (headline, banner, featured assets)

[Your role] @ [Company name] / We help [ICP] to do [usecase] without [problem]

[Your role] @ [Company name] / I help [ICP] achieve [result] by [what you do]

[Your role] @ [Company name] / The [product category) for [ICP]

✅ Build ICP specific content (Case studies, BOFU content, How to guides, Actionable Lead Magnets)

Examples of my GTM audit:

In one audit, the internal messaging and ICP work were excellent.

But the website copy was generic, the sales deck hadn’t been updated, and LinkedIn profiles still used vague descriptions.

Ressources:
1. Sales Deck Template
2. Homepage Wireframe & Copywriting
3. Case Studies Guide
4. Lead Magnets Guide
5. LinkedIn Founder & Employee Guide

6. Content is done, but without a strategy

Pattern:
Teams are “doing content”, but it’s disconnected from high-intent topics.

Content exists, but it isn’t designed to support real sales conversations or capture existing demand. This usually means teams are creating a lot of TOFU blog posts and random LinkedIn posts.

Results are usually 0 Inbounds.

What this looks like in practice:

❌ Random LinkedIn posts (or disconnected from ICP pain points)

❌ No repeatable content format (every post is a different topic)

❌ No Inbound generating lead magnet

❌ TOFU blog posts that don’t attract buyers

❌ Content optimized for likes, not ICP engagements

❌ No measurement of pipeline influence

👉 This almost always shows up together with weak inbound quality.

How to fix:

✅ Prioritize BOFU content: alternatives, comparisons, “best X for Y”, use-case pages

✅ Focus early on the 5% of buyers who are already in the market 

✅ Build a content map based on ICP questions by awareness stage (from problem-unaware → problem aware —> solution aware —> product (category) aware —> purchase-decision)

✅ Build a high-performing lead magnet (that is ICP relevant)

✅ Turn real sales objections into posts and articles

✅ Record customer calls and use insights for your content roadmap (objections, pains, desired outcomes…)

✅ Measure content by meetings influenced, not impressions (e.g. via self-reported attribution)

Examples of my GTM audit:

Most companies today operate in a crowded market with established players. This allows you to capture existing demand.

Ressources:
1. BOFU Content Page Examples
2. 35+ LinkedIn post templates (for Founders)

If there’s one takeaway from all these audits, it’s this:

Founders don’t lack ideas, effort, or tools.
Most GTM problems lie in the GTM foundation and struggle to bring these to life end-to-end.

If you recognize parts of your own GTM in this newsletter, take a moment and go through the provided fixes.

Most of the time, it’s not about doing more, but instead doing fewer things with consistency.

GTM Audit

If you feel stuck or want an external perspective, I offer a 360° GTM Audit:

• Deep review of your current GTM

• Clear gaps and priorities

• A custom 6-month action plan

• Delivered in 7 days

Book your GTM Audit

That’s it for today.

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

1️⃣ Use my free GTM library with 50+ free resources (guides, templates, workbooks, and tools) to build a strong GTM foundation (helped 5000+ SaaS leaders)

2️⃣ Get a 360° GTM audit of your status quo + a custom 6-month action plan

3️⃣ Work 1-on-1 with me - GTM Advisory for SaaS founders from €0 to €1 million ARR

This is the final MRR Unlocked episode of 2025.

Instead of new frameworks or tactics, I wanted to pause and do three things:

1️⃣ Recap what resonated most this year

2️⃣ Share a simple checklist to help you start 2026 strong

3️⃣ Say thank you and share what’s coming next

Let’s dive in.

Subscribe now

1. Best of MRR Unlocked 2025

The 3 Top Episodes This Year

These were the episodes you shared and liked the most this year.

🥇 The GTM Foundation for SaaS/AI founders

Core idea:

Without a strong foundation, your GTM org will eventually collapse.

This resonated because many founders tried to “scale GTM” in 2025 before the basics were in place.

Key takeaway:

Before thinking about channels, tooling, or headcount, you need clarity on:

• Your ICP

• Your Positioning

• Your primary GTM motion

Without that foundation, growth becomes random, not repeatable.

👉 Link to episode

🥈 How to find your Ideal Customers

Core idea:

Most teams think they know their ICP until they’re forced to actually analyze it.

This one hit home because founders often define their ICP once, then never revisit it as the product and market evolve.

Key takeaway:

Your ICP evolves as your product, market, and deal sizes evolve. So, frequently analyze your customers to get a better understanding of your best-fit customers.

👉 Link to episode

🥉The Ultimate Founder-Led LinkedIn Guide

Core idea:

Founder-led LinkedIn works, but only if it’s intentional.

This episode stood out because a lot of founders felt pressure to “post on LinkedIn” without knowing why or how it should support GTM.

Key takeaway:

LinkedIn success isn’t luck. It’s a combination of:

• Profile clarity (banner, headline, featured section)

• Clear content pillars tied to your ICP

• Consistent execution (comments, copywriting, design, lead magnets)

Used correctly, it compounds over time.

Used correctly, it compounds over time.

👉 Link to episode + Bonus: Ultimate Founder & Team LinkedIn Playbook

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ The Ultimate Founder & Team LinkedIn Playbook

✅ From 0 to 1€M ARR: 17 Expert Tips you should know

✅ The Ultimate SaaS Pricing Page Guide

2. The 2026 GTM Readiness Checklist

A quick self-assessment for B2B SaaS founders

If you want 2026 to be a growth year, not a “busy but still stuck” year, this checklist is a good place to start.

✅ Market & ICP

• Do we have one clear primary ICP?

• Can we explain who it’s not for (Anti ICP)?

• Do we know the status quo our ICP is stuck in?

✅ Positioning & Messaging

• Can we explain our value without showing the product (in 1-2 sentences)?

• Do we clearly articulate: Point A (current pain) —> Point B (desired outcome)

• Is our messaging consistent across website, content, outbound, and demos?

• Can we explain how we are different from our competitive alternatives (without a feature comparison table)?

✅ Go-to-Market & Sales

• Do we have one dominant GTM motion (PLG, sales-led, or hybrid)?

• Is our sales process is documented, repeatable, and measurable?

• Our product demos follow a clear structure and are NOT feature tours?

✅ Growth & Revenue Quality

• Do we know our top 1–2 growth channels (not 5)?

• Are we actively working on expansion revenue and retention?

• Do we understand why we win and why we lose deals?

✅ Team & Internal Readiness

• Do Sales, Marketing, and CS share the same definitions?

• Are roles, responsibilities, and expectations clear?

• Do we have a GTM dashboard as a single source of truth?

❌ If you answered “no” to more than a few of these, that’s not a failure.

👉 It’s clarity on what actually deserves your attention in 2026.

GTM Audit

If you feel stuck or want an external perspective, I offer a 360° GTM Audit:

• Deep review of your current GTM

• Clear gaps and priorities

• A custom 6-month action plan

Delivered in 7 days.

Get clarity on your GTM

And one reminder as you plan for 2026 👇

DON’T COPY THE BIG GUYS

3. Thank You + What’s Coming in 2026

Before signing off for the year, I want to say thank you 🙏

Thank you for reading.
Thank you for replying.
Thank you for sharing.

Writing MRR Unlocked in 2025 reinforced something I keep seeing:

👉 Most founders don’t need more tactics; they need more clarity.

So that’s what I will double down on in 2026. Helping you build the best GTM Foundations for your SaaS/AI products.

What to expect in 2026

In 2026, I’ll double down on helping you build strong GTM foundations for your SaaS/AI product.

That means more content on:

• ICP & positioning clarity

• Messaging that actually sells (website, sales decks, demos, LinkedIn)

• Sales execution that’s simple and repeatable

For Q1, I already have some great topics in the making:

👉 A new Ideal Customer Profile Framework

👉 Positioning & Messaging Framework (you can use in ChatGPT)

👉 The B2B SaaS Sales Demo Toolbox

Get early access

If you want early access, sign up here.

That’s it for 2025.

See you in the new year.

Alex

P.S. If you want to reply to this email, I’d love to know:

What’s your biggest focus for 2026?

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2️⃣ Get a 360° GTM audit of your status quo + a custom 6-month action plan

3️⃣ Work 1-on-1 with me - GTM Advisory for SaaS founders from €0 to €1 million ARR

You might have come across Maria on LinkedIn from her time at Magier, where she was the founding marketer and responsible for activating LinkedIn as a GTM channel for the team.

Nikolas is the Founder of Socialkit, the LinkedIn employee advocacy software.

Today, we will do a deep dive into all the steps that founders/teams need to take to activate founder and employee brands on LinkedIn.

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Before we start, a few episodes that might be relevant for you:

✅ How to create strong Lead Magnets

✅ The Ultimate Founder-Led LinkedIn Guide

✅ 17 experts sharing their best 0-1€ million ARR tip

Let’s dive in.

What is a good founder LinkedIn profile?

Treat your LinkedIn profile like a website landing page.

Your profile is what will compel visitors to either engage or bounce off.

To avoid the latter, the most important thing in your profile should be clarity.

Clarity on:

1️⃣ Who do you want to reach (aka. your ICP)

2️⃣ What’s in for them? Why should they follow/engage with you?

3️⃣ What do you want them to do (aka. CTA)

This infographic will help you design a great LinkedIn profile (for you and your employees).

But let’s deep dive into the 3 key sections of your LinkedIn profile:

1. Banner

2. Headline

3. Featured Section

Banner

It’s the perfect place to place your 1-sentence value proposition.

Great banner includes:

✅ What you do (product category / use case)

✅ For whom (your ICP)

✅ Social proof (reviews, number of clients…)

and optionally also a CTA.

Let’s have a look at some great banners 👇

Headline

Don’t re-invent the wheel. We recommend using one of the following templates

1. [Your role] @ [Company name] / We help [ICP] to do [usecase] without [problem]

2. [Your role] @ [Company name] / I help [ICP] achieve [result] by [what you do]

3. [Your role] @ [Company name] / The [product category) for [ICP]

4. [Your role] @ [Company name] / [Outcome] for [ICP] made simple

5. We fix [pain point] so you can focus on [desired state] / [Role) @ [Company]

6. [Problem + Solution] / [Your role] at [Company name]

Featured Section

The featured section is the perfect place to add your CTAs. We recommend using this section to highlight:

✅ Your case studies

✅ Your CTA (book a demo / free trial)

✅ Your lead magnets

✅ Best performing posts

Let’s have a look at some great featured sections 👇

Now that we know how to make your profile better, let’s also talk about a few No-Gos - things you should not have in your profile.

6 LinkedIn No-Go’s for SaaS Founders (and why they hurt you)

❌ Talking about yourself in the third person in your About section
→ It feels unnatural and creates distance, making you less authentic and harder to trust.

❌ Using a buzzword-heavy tagline like “Disruptive AI-powered platform transforming the industry”
→ means nothing and no one understands (use our headline template above).

❌ Using AI-generated or generic stock images for your banner
→ It signals low effort and erodes credibility because it looks templated and impersonal.

❌ Leaving AI-generated comments on other people’s posts
→ They’re easy to spot, feel robotic, and hurt your personal brand more than silence would.

❌ Sending connection requests with bad personalization or direct pitches
→ Instant pitching screams automation and desperation, which kills trust (better to send a blank request).

❌ Posting once or inconsistently, then disappearing
→ Without consistency, you will see 0 results.

Next, let’s look at ways to enhance the impact of your founder brand.

How to turn employees into Thought Leaders

When the founder posts, you get reach, trust, and pipeline.

When your team posts too, you multiply distribution, diversify proof, and create a growth engine that doesn’t depend on just one person to drive results.

Your buyers don’t just want to hear from “the founder.” They want to hear from the person who designs, runs customer support, or fixes the onboarding flow.

Instead of having one loud voice, you have multiple faces representing the brand.

This does three things for you:

1. It builds trust.

2. It multiplies reach. 10 employees with 2k followers each can outperform 1 founder with 20k.

3. It de-risks growth. If only one person builds their personal brand and then leaves, you basically need to start from scratch. If five are building their personal brands and you are supporting every new joiner in starting on LinkedIn, it becomes a growth channel.

In this section, we’ll show how to make that happen without begging people to post.

Step 1: Lead from the Top

If leadership isn’t posting, why should the team?

It’s hard to convince a team to share ideas publicly if the founders and team leads aren’t doing it themselves. It sets the tone and makes participation feel safe.

Once the leadership team has posted consistently for a month or two, you can start engaging the others.

Step 2: Find Internal Thought Leaders

Observe who in the company is opinionated and active in the Slack/Teams channels, or who is already active on Social Media. It will be easier to get these people on board next.

Look for people who are:

• Employees with deep expertise that aligns with your ICP’s pain points (Subject Matter Experts)

• People who are already active on social media and comfortable sharing ideas.

• Already sharing opinions internally (Slack, meetings, Looms…)

• Good communicators: They can explain things clearly and with passion

Start with the departments that are closest to the customer.

These teams are naturally closest to communication and content:

• Marketing → already creating and sharing content.

• Sales → connected to prospects in active deal cycles.

• Customer Success (CS) → in direct contact with customers.

• Product → shaping product roadmap through customer feedback

Step 3: Make participation a no-brainer for the team

“Post for the company” is a big ask if there’s nothing else in it for them.

“Build your personal brand for your future, and we’ll support and incentivise you” is a much stronger offer.

You can’t force thought leadership, but you can inspire people to post.

What’s in it for them?

Industry visibility, inbound opportunities, and more leverage.

Don’t be afraid of your employees becoming more valuable in the market. That’s a good thing.

Step 4: Support Your Team (9 tactics to remove friction)

Most employees don’t post because they don’t know what to say. Starting from a blank page when you’re new to LinkedIn is intimidating.

Give employees something worth sharing. People post when they’re proud of what’s happening internally. Be it announcements, valuable lead magnets, challenges, events, new features, and more.

To make starting as easy as possible for the team, here are 9 tactics you can do:

#1 Create and share a content calendar template

Anything from Excel to Google Docs works, but we recommend Notion because it’s very customisable and flexible.

#2 Ready-to-go posts, aka Master Content Database

A library of “ready” posts, including copy and visuals, designed in the company branding. Case Studies, carousels, lead magnets, upcoming company announcements, etc. Posts anyone could post, regardless of role.

#3 Post Templates

10 role-specific (sales, marketing, design, customer success, product) post templates anyone can personalise in 10-15 minutes with examples.

#4 Share Winning Hooks and Resources

Analyze the performance of the posts and share internally the best performers, especially winning hooks.

#5 Visual kit

Create branded Canva or Figma templates and share them with the entire team. Your team may decide to have their own visual style on LinkedIn, but you also want to support them if they want to use the company branding, which is even better for awareness and trust building for the company. It’s up to the employees what to choose.

#6 Living FAQ Document

Have an FAQ page somewhere with guidelines, what’s not ok to share, address common challenges, and explain how to deal with potential leads.

#7 Cash bonuses or commissions if posts help close new deals

You might even want to add monetary incentives.

ColdIQ incentivizes its team with a cash bonus.

#8 Run a LinkedIn challenge

Consider creating an internal leaderboard to track impressions, engagement, and follower growth.

Magier, Storyarb, ColdIQ and Chameleon all hosted LinkedIn challenges.

Giulia from Chameleon even built a dashboard in Lovable to track employee post amounts and motivate people to post more (or you can use SocialKit)

#9 Use All Hands for shout-outs

Mention the leads and clients LinkedIn is bringing. When a post gets you a client or lead, talk about it. Highlight that LinkedIn drives pipeline.

For example, at every all-hands, Storylane thanks employees who post on LinkedIn and ends with a call to action encouraging others to share.

Done-for-you” service

Of course, you can also get external help and decide to get a “done-for-you” service.

Here are a few people/companies who can help you:

1. Ivan Peric

2. Pierre Herubel

3. Finn Thormeier

4. Tommy Clark

5. Giulia de Oliveira Camargo

6. Marvin Sangines

7. Morgan Ratcliffe

8. Marija Hammon

9. Maria Ledentsova

We asked Finn Thormeier to share his best tip after working with 50 founders and execs on their brand and interviewing over 100 of the top LinkedIn creators

What are the fundamentals?

1. Try to add value

2. Engage with others on the platform

3. Be yourself

4. Keep showing up

People overfocus on hacks. What time to post. Whether they should attach a carousel or a video or an image file. Over-engineered hooks. Whether the link should be in the comments or in the post copy. Automation.

Sure, those can have an impact. But when I talk to people who *actually* built an audience of 10,000 or 100,000 followers, they focus on the above 4 things.

1. Try to add value

Ask yourself

• Would you want to read this yourself?

• Can someone actually do something with this information?

• If someone paid you $1,000/hour for your advice, is this what you would tell them

• Why would a busy person who doesn’t know you invest 5 minutes reading what you have to say?

Value also comes in the form of entertainment, but you actually gotta be funny.

2. Engage with others

Actually, reply to your comments. Reach out to people. And especially, write at least 2-3 comments on *other* people's content every day. Something thoughtful. A question. Your own 2 cents. Disagreeing but explaining why.

3. Be yourself

Some people are really funny. Some people are amazing on video. Some are super analytical and break down a complex topic in great detail. Some have incredible stories to share. Some have access to proprietary data they can visualize. Some people write with typos and swear. Or have a weird sense of humor. Lean into your uniqueness/quirkiness.

4. Keep showing up

This is like the gym. You’re gonna do this forever. Once a month is not enough. Show up multiple times a week, maybe daily. Post multiple times a week. Write comments almost every day. You can take a break every now and then, but it’s a marathon. Gotta show up week after week, month after month

—

Now that you have your infrastructure set up, let’s look at how to set up your content engine.

How to set up your content engine

The most effective way to make LinkedIn a relevant growth channel for you is by writing content that serves all 3 stages of the marketing funnel - from first discovering your brand to becoming a customer.

It’s divided into three stages:

Stage 1: TOFU (Top of Funnel)

This is where people first encounter your brand. They’re not ready to buy yet; they’re just getting to know you. Content here should be a bit broader to attract attention and build awareness.

Stage 2: MOFU (Middle of Funnel)

At this stage, people are evaluating whether you can solve their problem. They want to see your expertise, understand your approach, and build trust. Content here should demonstrate your knowledge and show how you work and who you are.

Stage 3: BOFU (Bottom of Funnel)

People are ready to make a decision. They need proof that you deliver results and clear calls to action. Content here should showcase outcomes, social proof, and clear next steps to work with you.

Balancing all three stages ensures you’re constantly attracting new people, building credibility with those who are considering you, and converting those ready to take action.

Practical advice: Aim to post at least 1x TOFU, 1x MOFU, and 1x BOFU post per week.

Instead of BOFU, MOFU, TOFU, you can also work with the different awareness stages, from unaware to most aware (aka product aware).

Now that you know how to turn your employees into LinkedIn Thought Leaders, we wanted to share with you some good examples for inspiration.

Collection of 10 teams (founder & employees) using LinkedIn to drive pipeline

Buffer

ColdIQ

Lemlist

Chilipiper

Chameleon

Storylane

Contrast

tl;dv

Slate

Chatbase

Tactics to optimize your LinkedIn game

While posting is the most crucial thing you can do to build your personal brand, there are a few other tactics you can use to enhance your LinkedIn presence.

1. Commenting

You can leave ‘valuable’ comments on other people’s posts and get your profile in front of 100s of potential ICPs.

• You must share something valuable in the comments (please no AI repetition).

• We generally recommend commenting on at least 2–3 posts per day

• Comment on ICP posts or influencers in your niche

• If people engage with your post, make sure that you respond to their comments.

This way, people will frequently see your insightful comments, and LinkedIn influencers will be more inclined to engage with your posts.

2. DM warm outreach

Send DM sequences to ICP people on LinkedIn. But instead of pitching your product, add value first.

3. Comment Below Lead Magnets

Some people hate it. But it works 😀 You share highly relevant content on LinkedIn. And ask people to comment to get the asset. And you will send a DM to everyone who commented.

💡You can find an entire guide on lead magnets and check out this ‘Freebie Playbook’ from Maria.

Tools to help in content creation

Here’s a list of helpful tools.

• Content Creation: Scripe, Taplio, Authoredup, or Publer

• Analytics: Shield

• Comment below Lead Magnet Posts & DM automation: Leadshark

• Content Calendar: Notion

• Scheduling Content & Analytics: Scripe, Metricool, Socialkit

• LinkedIn Inbox Management: Kondo

LinkedIn templates

• 35+ LinkedIn post templates (for founders)

• 25 founder-led content ideas

• 25 LinkedIn post templates

• 50 LinkedIn Banner Swipe file

That’s it for today. Now you know how to turn your team into LinkedIn brands.

Happy growth 🚀

Alex, Maria, and Nikolas

3 ways I can help you grow your SaaS to €1 million ARR 👇

1️⃣ Use my free GTM library with 50+ free resources (guides, templates, workbooks, and tools) to build a strong GTM foundation (helped 5000+ SaaS leaders)

2️⃣ Get a 360° GTM audit of your status quo + a custom 6-month action plan

3️⃣ Work 1-on-1 with me - GTM Advisory for SaaS founders from €0 to €1 million ARR

This is part 2 of my very special newsletter series, where we bring together insights from multiple founders and experts who have been there, done that, and are now excited to share their learnings with you!

👉 In case you missed part 1: 6 founders sharing their mistakes & tips

Subscribe now

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ Why pitches fail (+ fix yours in 11 slides)

✅ 6 GTM tactics that work surprisingly well for bootstrapped founders

✅ 9 GTM infographics to hit your 1€ million ARR

GTM Foundation Library

If you want to grow your SaaS to 1€ million in ARR, I’ve created a free GTM library with 50+ Infographics for you.

Get 50+ GTM infographics for free

👉 Reach 25.000+ SaaS operators with sponsored content. Sponsor the next newsletter.

17 experts across Positioning, Messaging, ICP, Content Marketing, Pricing, CRM & Tracking

To make it easier for you to digest, I’ve asked 17 experts from different disciplines to share their best tips.

So you learn about:

✅ Positioning & Messaging

✅ Ideal Customer Profile

✅ Content Marketing

✅ Pricing

✅ CRM & KPI Tracking

Here’s the exact question I asked them:

Okay, so let’s get started 👇

#1 Positioning & Messaging

Jon Itkin - Principal, In the Kitchen

Pay close attention to the maturity of your market.

Most advice targeting early-stage companies assumes you’re in an early/forming market. That might not be true. As markets mature, the rules change.

If you’re in an early market:

• People will be more receptive to big, bold ideas

• Leading with vision and possibility can be great

• Buyers are still learning what’s possible

• You have room to define the rules

If you’re in a mature market:

• Disruption is 10x harder than you think

• Built-in norms and expectations already exist

• Feature wars won’t save you

• You need to pick fights you can win

The trap: AI categories are maturing in weeks, not years. You could launch into whitespace and hit a mature market by your Series A.

What to do: Before you pick a positioning strategy, honestly assess how baked your market is. Then match your approach to that reality, not to what worked for someone else in a completely different context.

Your market defines the battlefield. Not your ambitions.

Relevant further information:
👉 The 95-5 rule: Only 5% are in the market
👉 The 5 stages of awareness: from problem unaware to product aware

Andrej Persolja - Founder, We Fix Boring

I’d say stay (or sometimes) get in touch with your power users (those who use the product the most and are spending the most money.

To do that, you can open a channel to them.

With one of the clients, we opened a Slack group just for power users to get direct access to the founders. That helped us get a pulse on what they want, how they think.

Much easier to keep your positioning/messaging on point when you have access to that data.

We are observing 3 different things:

1. Product

What are they complaining about? What’s their wish list? Helps keep your product roadmap clean.

2. Persona

What are their jobs to be done? Helps improve marketing/sales.

3. Positive feedback

What are we doing better than others, helping us double down on that / not lose that in the growth process.

Relevant further information:
👉 Create your Positioning & Messaging Framework
👉 Get to know your ideal customers

Anthony Pierri - Co-Founder of FletchPMM

Nobody will care about the outcomes you can drive if they don’t know what product category you fit into or what workflow your product supports.

Choose a product category or use case as a primary positioning anchor...and you are 80% better than the rest.

Relevant further information:
👉 SaaS Positioning 101

Talya Heller - Founder, Down To a T

Write your sales story first. Then, test it with the right 3–5 customers.

Founders obsess over product-market fit, but story-market fit comes first. If you can’t sell the problem and the payoff in plain language, you’re not ready to scale anything.

Most founders build a product before they can tell a story that anyone wants to buy. Your first customers aren’t just paying you, they’re shaping your positioning. Treat them like your company’s survival depends on it, because it does.

Here’s how to do it right:

1. Your first customers will shape your story and perhaps even your product. Aim for at least 3–5 early customers who look like your future, not just whoever will pay.

2. Simplify your wedge. Focus on one use case that proves your value fast.

3. Practice your sales story:

   1. Pick a villain. What are customers fighting against? The clearer the enemy, the clearer your story. When we own the problem, we own the solution - that should be the throughline in your marketing, too.

   2. Frame the struggle. Show the cost of doing nothing in business terms (time, money, risk).

   3. Paint the payoff. Describe the moment after your product works, visually, emotionally, and financially.

4. Treat everything like an experiment: Watch what lands and what falls flat - that’s your positioning data.

   If you can’t close with your story, don’t write more code—rewrite the story.

5. Use their feedback to tighten your GTM, not just your roadmap. The best messaging comes from customer conversations.

6. Pricing is a part of your positioning, hence it’s a part of the story. Tiers, levers – all should work with your narrative. When it doesn’t, you’re confusing potential buyers and creating doubt, which leads to slower sales cycle and lower win rate.

7. Collect proof from day one: Turn their wins into case studies; that’s your proof engine.

8. Document their objections; that’s your competitive intel.

9. Align your team around the learnings; that’s your story-market fit. Product, sales, and marketing should all tell the same story arc.

10. Evolve the narrative until customers can retell it better than you can, and your best customers refer others like them back to you.

You don’t find product-market fit. You build it. One story, and a few smart customers, at a time.

Relevant further information:
👉 Create your sales story /POV based on the messaging framework
👉 Product Market Fit: Problem Solution Fit + GTM Fit. The 3 stages to PMF

Toni Hopponen - Founder, Landing Rabbit

Something I learned when building Flockler, a pure self-serve SaaS, from 0-1mil ARR and beyond, is that the homepage’s role is to be the traffic controller at the event parking lot.

✅ The hero should hold a bright green light for your best-fit prospects, the champion users. But also, you need to keep it clear for stakeholders, from colleagues and managers to the CEO.

✅ Vice versa, the hero needs to be a clear stop sign for everyone else. You really want to keep low-quality leads out of your sign ups and demo calls.

The variable audience means your homepage message is always a bit lukewarm. And that’s okay.

The best traffic controllers are clear but calm. Their main job is not to convert. It’s to find the best parking slot for everyone arriving at the destination.

So what does the best homepage look like?

Here are four critical components for my SaaS homepages:

1️⃣ Hero: What, who for, and why should they care

2️⃣ How it works: 3-5 steps on how the app works

3️⃣ Testimonials: Show that others like your best-fit prospects already buy

4️⃣ Use cases: These take the visitor to the right track

When creating your 0-1mil ARR SaaS homepage, don’t try to say everything.

Don’t overplay your hand and just talk to the champion. Focus on a clear message and guide users to landing pages that convert.

Relevant further information:
👉 How to create your SaaS Homepage (incl. Figma Templates)
👉 SaaS Homepage Copywriting Templates
👉 Product Pages for SaaS websites

Matteo Tittarelli - Founder, Genesys

Build a Messaging & Positioning library

I recommend this to be the very first step in every content endeavour because this library forms the context engine for every campaign, landing page, blog post, and asset I create. It has:

• Product messaging: capabilities, benefits, differentiators.

• ICP, segments, and use cases model.

• Competitors, customer references, proof points.

The best part is that you can build it for free in under an hour (with the right inputs).

How I build it: I use a combination of custom GPTs (see below) to speed up the process. Once I have the outputs, I organize them into a central messaging doc, which I upload on my LLMs (eg. Claude, GPT, Clay, Manus) as context to power prompts and asset generation

Why this matters:

• Keeping things consistent across outbound and content channels.

• Adding messaging when introducing new products, segments, or personas.

• Re-positioning or re-messaging against new competitors or categories.

Relevant further information:
👉 Genesys Product Marketing Messanger, ICP Modeler and B2B Positioner

#2 Ideal Customer Profile

Douwe Wester - Co-founder, WhyThey

Most founders try to scale before they actually know who they’re scaling for.

Here’s how to fix that.

1. Start with early customers, not assumptions. They help you learn, not scale.

2. Watch what they do, not what they say. Behavior reveals fit faster than feedback.

3. Depending on your motion, use your first set of customers to find patterns in usage, retention, and expansion.

4. Cluster those patterns into small, high signal customer groups.

5. Define your Ideal Customer Profile based on results, not relevance.

6. Map who actually drives the deal. Buyer, user, blocker, and champion.

7. Understand what each persona needs to move forward. Information gaps kill momentum.

8. Build your Ideal Customer Profile as a living system, not a document. Update it every quarter.

9. Narrow your focus until your message lands without friction.

10. Growth starts when every motion across marketing, sales, and product serves the same customer.

You don’t find your Ideal Customer Profile. You earn it through motion, iteration, and focus.

Relevant further information:
👉 The power of niching down
👉 How to analyze your early customers to find your ideal customer

Björn W. Schafer - Funky Flywheels

ICP Clarity is Not a Workshop - It’s a Discipline.

Most founders think they know their ICP once they’ve hit early traction. They don’t. What they have is a handful of happy customers, often not a repeatable pattern. Yet.

Here’s what I tell every founder between around 1M ARR:

• Stop chasing volume. You don’t need more leads; you need a tighter focus.

• Segment by outcome. Ask: Who gets the fastest and most measurable ROI from your product?

• Validate with data, not gut. Check your top 10 customers: Where did deals close fastest, with the lowest discount, and fastest Time to Value? That’s your real ICP.

• Build your anti-ICP list. Knowing who not to sell to saves you 50 % of wasted pipeline effort.

• Operationalize ICP. Everyone, from SDR to CS, should get transparent insights of your ICP segments in your CRM.

• Review quarterly. Your ICP will evolve as your product and market mature. Treat it as a living system. As a rhythm 🕺

Relevant further information:
👉 The Ultimate Template to build your ICP
👉 Know your ANTI ICP

Ashley Herbert Popa - Director of Product Marketing, Bynder

Don’t be afraid to niche down with their ICP.

I see a lot of founders who want to sell to everyone trying to get as many companies in the pipeline as possible, but you’re usually selling to no one because your message is too vague and bland.

You don’t have to say no to opportunities that aren’t in your ICP, but niching down can help you and your team to have more focus on who you’re building for and who to target.

Find those customers that are excited to buy and are not just staying with you but bringing revenue by staying with you - i.e., you might have a lot of freemium customers, but if they aren’t willing to upgrade and pay, they’re not seeing the value. Once you have that traction with your ICP, you can use the bowling pin approach, slowly opening up to segments, verticals, or geographies that are similar or have the same problems as your original ICP, and you’ll likely already have product-market fit or close to it.

Milestones are easier to tackle than marathons.

Relevant further information:
👉 How to expand after PMF
👉 The Hidden Cost of serving multiple segments

Alexander Estner - GTM Advisor & Author of MRR Unlocked

Build your foundations first & make your GTM motion repeatable before ‘scaling’.

Too many founders want to find the ‘scalable’ growth hacks too early.

Focus on building a strong foundation first. For me, this includes:

✅ Knowing who benefits the most from your product (aka. Your ideal customer)

✅ Clearly articulating what your product does and why it’s different than competitive alternatives (aka. Positioning & Messaging)

✅ Building a repeatable motion: Know how to create pipeline and turn it into revenue (Growth channels & sales process)

Relevant further information:
👉 A 3-part series on how to build a strong GTM foundation
👉 Scale readiness indicators: The right time to scale

#3 Content Marketing

Sara Stella Lattanzio, B2B Marketing Consultant

The biggest mistake I see is founders investing in content too early or too late.

If there’s no product-market fit, it will only amplify noise. But once you have a working MVP that solves real pain points for a specific audience, and clarity on your target market and unique narrative, content becomes your best compounding engine.

Here’s what I’d advise early-stage founders:

1️⃣ Shape one sharp narrative

You don’t need a content calendar; you need one idea that ties your product and your audience’s pain together and an original perspective. In a crowded market where everyone can ship content and software, your message needs to be as differentiated as your product.

2️⃣ Build in public

This is especially powerful at the early stage, when your motion is still mainly founder-led. It works because it’s authentic; people are invested in the story even if the product isn’t fully baked yet. It’s also a great way to warm up your audience, but the timing matters: do it once you have a working MVP and something real to show. The power lies in the narrative and how good a storyteller the founder is.

3️⃣ Understand demand and choose channels intentionally

Early-stage teams rarely have capacity to cover multiple channels, so pick the ones that fit your audience’s behavior. If there’s existing demand for the topic, search content (yes, YouTube also qualifies as search content) should be a priority. But if you’re introducing a new category, focus on channels where you can educate and shape demand, like social and community. The goal is to align your content type and distribution with how people already discover and learn.

4️⃣ Keep production and distribution in balance

Both matter, but given how flooded the content landscape has become, distribution matters more today. I recommend starting with a long-form piece that captures real insights and depth. It can even be a long video you never publish, but it gives you raw material to create shorter pieces, quotes, or clips. It’s better to do more work up front and distribute across multiple channels or over time instead of constantly starting from scratch.

5️⃣ Play the long game

Content isn’t sales. Most teams give up after a month and wonder why nothing sticks. If you’re starting from zero, commit to at least six months of consistent work before changing course, assuming you nailed the basics first. That’s how content compounds and starts paying off.

Relevant further information:
👉 The Ultimate Content marketing guide
👉 How to create powerful lead magnets
👉 7 tactics to distribute your lead magnet content

Romana Kuts - Founder, SaaStorm

If you’re a B2B SaaS on the journey to $1M ARR, and want to leverage content marketing and SEO to grow, here’s your to-do list:

1. Interview your customers. 5 calls > 50 brainstorms.

2. 1 pain point → 5 angles → 10 pieces (how-to, case study, teardown, comparison, myth-buster).

3. Go deep before you go wide. Own one problem space end-to-end.

4. Ruthlessly reuse. Every blog post → 5 assets: LinkedIn post, email, short, carousel, quote thread.

5. Make content someone’s job, not a side project. Small team is fine; clear ownership is non-negotiable.

6. Track revenue, not just rankings. Set up attribution early or you’ll kill content just before it compounds.

7. Ship weekly; optimise monthly. Consistency beats bursts.

8. Repeat winners. Turn top posts into a series, webinar, or updated 2026 edition.

9. Mine CRM notes and call transcripts for headlines. The phrases customers use should be your H1s.

Relevant further information:
👉 The Ultimate guide to create powerful case studies
👉 High intent SEO keywords
👉 35+ LinkedIn post templates

#4 Pricing

Krzysztof Szyszkiewicz - Co-Founder, Valueships

If there’s one thing: Treat Pricing as a Process

Marketing is a process, sales is a process, so why can’t pricing be a process?

Treating it as a process is exactly what the most successful companies are doing.

So what does it mean?

1. Set a purpose for your pricing

Growth? Margin? Competition? Make sure it aligns with your company’s overall purpose.

2. Differentiate

In most cases, all-in-one is not ideal at the beginning. Why? Because you need to learn more about your users: their willingness-to-pay, feature preferences, upsell potential, etc. —> Differentiate by core value metrics and features.

3. Look at the results and iterate (PROCESS)

For example:

• If most of your users are on the most expensive plan, you might be too cheap. Think about a price increase.

• If most of your users are on the cheapest plan, you might be giving too much value. Think about downsizing.

• If nobody expands, check usage. Maybe there’s an opportunity to improve here.

4. Governance

Set a quarterly pricing meeting in your calendar.

Discuss:

• New feature introductions – align with your purpose:

  • Expansion: add-on or most expensive plan?

  • Competitive advantage = maybe a sample is available everywhere?

• Discounting patterns – is 10% of MRR leaking due to discounts? It might be time to seal it already.

• Model refresh/change – remember, no action is also an action if there was a discussion beforehand.

Do yourself a favor: Treat Pricing as a Process – then pricing will give back to you.

Relevant further information:
👉 Ultimate SaaS Pricing Guide
👉 Krzystof and Alex’s discussion on ‘all in-one’ pricing and feature gating

Rob Litterst - Co-Founder, PricingSaaS

The biggest key to pricing early on is recognizing your stage, and not overcomplicating it.

Think in 3 phases:

1️⃣ Value-Hacking (0–€1M ARR)

You’re finding product–market fit. Focus on discovering your value and what people are willing to pay. Keep it simple: your goal is validation, not optimization.

2️⃣ Growth-Hacking

Once people clearly want your product, you can start experimenting with pricing models to scale.

3️⃣ Profit-Hacking

After scaling, focus on driving incremental revenue and improving margins.

These stages (from Mike Maples) are a useful framework for aligning pricing with company maturity. In the early “value-hacking” phase, resist the urge to overthink or overbuild pricing models. Unless you have significant costs (like an AI product), simplicity wins. Validate demand first, refine pricing later.

Relevant further information:
👉 The SaaS Pricing Page Guide

#5 CRM & KPI Tracking

Arnaud Belinga - Co-Founder, Breakcold

Here are the biggest mistakes that founders do when it comes to CRM in their 0-1mil ARR journey

❌ Mistake 1: You pick a CRM too early

For the first 50K ARR, even 100K, you don’t really a CRM. You need to just build and sell your product.
Once you start to have a micro-PMF, start thinking about having a sales CRM to improve your conversions.

❌ Mistake 2: Your 1st CRM is Notion or Spreadsheets

Notion, Airtable and Spreadsheets are not CRMs. They’ll make you lose more time than they should have saved you.

Pick a sales CRM adapted to your needs that connect to the B2B channels where you’re selling (eg. email + LinkedIn or email + phone etc)

❌ Mistake 3: You try to overthink your sales processes

People try to build complex processes with 10+ CRM lists, 20+ tags and 46 Zapier automations.
The truth is that you only need 1 CRM list, 1 pipeline with 6 stages where you turn your inbound SaaS signups into paying customers.

❌ Mistake 4: You don’t follow up enough

If you’re a SaaS, you probably receive inbound SaaS signups.
Not trying to chat with them via LinkedIn or other is making you lose conversions.

There are so many times where I closed annual subscriptions because I followed up a third time someone trying my product on LinkedIn.

This is where your CRM will help you stay organized and win more deals.

Relevant further information:
👉 14 actionable CRM tactics for SaaS founders
👉 3 highly relevant CRM set-ups

Dirk Sahlmer - Partner, FE International

Build your KPI muscle early!

From my experience, too many founders track metrics, but don’t really use them.

1. Start with decisions, not dashboards.

What do you need to learn to make better decisions? Then track only the 3-5 metrics that answer that.

2. Look beyond MRR, it’s a lagging metric.

Focus on what drives it - conversion, activation rate, CAC payback, and other leading indicators.

3. Define metrics precisely.

KPIs must have an owner, a clear formula, and a frequency.

4. Benchmark, don’t copy.

Industry benchmarks provide useful context, but shouldn’t be seen as commandments.

5. Make metrics part of your story.

Ideally, you can narrate your business through data, instead of just showing charts (VCs love that).

You don’t need a complex dashboard. You need a simple (living) KPI habit that scales with you.

Relevant further information:
👉 Weekly & Monthly GTM Dashboard
👉 Financial Planing Template

And now, one more bonus tip on the business model.

Rob Kaminski - Co-Founder, FletchPMM

Work from a proven business model, rather than trying to create a new one from scratch.

The underlying thesis of Fletch was rooted in a productized service model demonstrated in the book, Built to Sell. We also took a lot of inspiration from what Greg Hickman from Alt Agencies describes as the “Five Ones”. One product, One Avatar, One Channel, One Tactic, for One Year.

While we innovated the model slightly as we learned, we had confidence that this model would work because it had already worked for other businesses.

I think too many founders start from a blank canvas, and it gets them in a lot of trouble. When they should be focused on building a great product to solve a problem, they end up dealing with business model problems along the way.

These early companies should be maximizing for # of interactions with customers (ie. reps in trying to solve the problem).

Even going to the extreme of offering your products for free is a good way to do this. Because in the beginning, it’s not about revenue at all, it’s about learning.

Learning what the real problem is.
Learning what the best way to solve it is.
Learning what people will pay for a solution.
Learning how to reach your target audience consistently.

Now that’s it for today.

17 experts shared their best tips for your journey to 1€ million ARR.

Now I want to hear your story

👇 Respond to this email and share your mistakes & tips with me. I will feature the best ones in the upcoming episode.

Happy growth 🚀

Alex

3 ways I can help you grow your SaaS to €1 million ARR 👇

1️⃣ Use my free GTM library with 50+ free resources (guides, templates, workbooks, and tools) to build a strong GTM foundation (helped 5000+ SaaS leaders)

2️⃣ Get a 360° GTM audit of your status quo + a custom 6-month action plan

3️⃣ Work 1-on-1 with me - GTM Advisory for SaaS founders from €0 to €1 million ARR

This is a very special edition of the newsletter because this time, we are bringing together insights from multiple founders and experts who have been there, done that, and are now excited to share their learnings with you!

It’s a 2-part newsletter series:

👉 Part 1 (today): 6 founders sharing their mistakes & tips

👉 Part 2 (next episode): 15 experts sharing what works today and 2026

Subscribe now

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ Why pitches fail (+ fix yours in 11 slides)

✅ 6 GTM tactics that work surprisingly well for bootstrapped founders

✅ 9 GTM infographics to hit your 1€ million ARR

GTM Foundation Library

If you want to grow your SaaS to the 1€ million ARR, I’ve created my free GTM library with 50+ Infographics for you.

Get 50+ GTM infographics for free

👉 Reach 25.000+ SaaS operators with sponsored content. Sponsor the next newsletter..

Founder Insights: What went wrong and what worked

Let’s hear it from the founders who have successfully scaled their company from €0 to the 1€ million ARR and beyond.

Learnings from 6 founders

👉 Stefan Bader: Co-Founder of Cello (Referral Software for SaaS)

👉 Andreas Michel: Co-Founder of Ayunis (Software for municipalities)

👉 Hanno Lippitsch: Co-Founder of Eversports (Software for sports venues)

👉 Simo Lemhandez: Co-Founder of Folk CRM (The next gen of CRM)

👉 Adam Cleland: Founder of Asora (Software for modern family offices)

👉 Brice Maurin: Founder of LGM (Software for Multi-Channel Outbound)

I asked each founder to share:

1️⃣ The painful mistake(s) they made in the 0-1 stage (that others should not make)

2️⃣ The best tips/things that worked for them.

Okay, let’s go 👇.

#1 Stefan Bader - CEO, Cello

1) Mistakes

❌ Building things that don’t scale without a tech-debt repayment habit

In the early days, it’s fine to build scrappily and prioritise speed over clean architecture. However, paying down tech debt must become a continuous habit; otherwise, you will eventually trap yourself in a system that slows you down instead of enabling you. We had to learn this and work our way back out.

❌ Title game: Giving out VP titles too early.

At this stage, everyone should be an IC. You have C-level + Senior/Lead/Head is fine, but avoid VP because it creates the wrong expectations and limits flexibility later. Yes, we learned from our mistake.

❌ Being ruthless at hiring: If it’s not a clear “hell yeah,” don’t hire.

Early hires shape culture disproportionately - compromising here slows you down and creates clean-up work later. Retrospectively, the most expensive mistakes we made were related to this.

2) Hacks / Tips

✅ Don’t entirely build your GTM on rented land

When platforms move the goalposts, visibility collapses overnight. Make sure you own some of your channels -> referrals, communities, integrations

✅ Signal > noise - Low-signal volume kills conversion

Build intent-based outbound that gives AEs real buying context - not vanity metrics.

✅ Measure Product–Channel Fit like Product–Market Fit

Even great products fail if their channels collapse. Track CAC payback and conversion drift - they can be early warning signs.

✅ Practice subversive marketing - Break out of the mainstream.

Surprise your market with creative, high-signal plays that challenge expectations and earn organic attention. Make sure you always create value first for your target audience.

✅ Stay launch-ready

Channels degrade faster than most teams react. Build a launch muscle: ship, test, rebuild - fast.

✅ Collapse silos early

Product, sales, and marketing should run as one GTM system. Fragmented teams can’t adapt when channels shift.

Subscribe now

#2 Brice Maurin - CEO, La Growth Machine

1) Mistakes

❌ Desktop app slowed adoption

Building a desktop app that users had to install, which created IT friction and slowed adoption, that’s why LGM is now fully web-based.

❌ Bad onboarding UX

Accepting an ugly but “working” V1 onboarding, it technically worked, but we lost months we could’ve saved by improving UX earlier.

❌ Focus on the wrong ICP

Targeting the wrong ICP early on, chasing “growth hackers” focused on volume instead of people who care about getting real replies.

❌ Waited too long to gather our users into a community

Not rallying a core group of early users from day one with a real community-building strategy, whether for referral (marketing) or co-creating the product roadmap.

❌ Underestimated localization efforts

Underestimating time zone needs when expanding to the US can lead to rapid growth stalls without a local presence or support.

❌ Kept low-autonomy people too long for a remote-first team.

Protecting team cohesion matters more than short-term output.

2) Hacks / Tips

✅ Manual onboarding of first customers

Ruthless filtering and manual onboarding of the first ~500 users, which led to high signal, low churn, and real co-building with customers.

✅ Scaling only what works manually

Do manual stuff first. If it works, scale it. For our outbound, mixing channels (email, LinkedIn, X, calls, voice) worked great.

✅ An “integrations-first” GTM approach

25+ integrations opened new markets, especially in the US, thanks to partners’ distribution.

✅ Building a community flywheel

Create a community flywheel: Social listening, inviting advocates, and running a creator program that generated inbound momentum.

✅ Intent-based outreach

Engaging visitors and post-interactors matching our ICP, then triggering personalized LGM campaigns.

✅ Word of mouth

English-first product and YC startups’ word-of-mouth created a small loop with a massive compounding effect.

#3 Andreas Michel - Co-Founder & CEO, Ayunis

1) Mistakes

❌ Trying to move too slowly because of “public sector logic.”

We thought we had to play by their rules - long procurement cycles, formal sales, endless pilots. But in reality, the public sector moves faster when you give it something concrete and usable. Bureaucracy slows down thinking, not buying in general.

❌ Underestimating how early structure accelerates growth

We believed we could stay fully “startup-scrappy” longer - but scaling even a small public-sector SaaS requires clear roles, predictable ops, and professional processes much earlier than expected.

2) Hacks / Tips

✅ Brand trust > features

In the public sector, credibility and design beat long feature lists.

✅ Laser-focus on one real problem

We didn’t try to “digitize municipalities.” We just helped them manage facilities - one very painful process. From there, expansion became natural.

✅ Turn complexity into narrative

We didn’t just sell SaaS - we sold the story of modern administration. That’s how we have been transforming from one niche (sport facilities) to a platform (Ayunis).

✅ Hire seniors early

We hired people who could build structure and lead teams - even before we really “needed” them. It allowed us to grow faster later without breaking internally.

✅ Stay lean and bootstrapped

Scarcity forced focus. Every euro had to move ARR.

💡 P.S. How I helped Ayunis to become the leading public sector SaaS in D/A/CH.

#4 Hanno Lippitsch - CEO, Eversports

1) Mistake

❌ Building without enough customer research

To believe that you already know what customers want and basically build what you think they want without having had proper discovery meetings

2) Hack / Tip

✅ There is no hack to get around PMF

We started to accelerate when we reached PMF with the Studio Manager focusing mainly on Yoga Studios. Properly working with customers and truly understanding what they want, while having good commercial teams (Marketing, Sales, CC) in place, puts fuel in the fire.

#5 Simo Lemhandez - Co-Founder, folk CRM

Hacks / Tips

✅ Keep launching frequently

The biggest risk is not to launch too much, but rather to go unnoticed. It helps you build a launch muscle, find what resonates with your customers, and more broadly create momentum in your team!

✅ Don’t diversify go-to-market channels too much

What works is doing high conviction bets. Investing long enough in a channel until the channel can take off. Splitting your channels across multiple channels reduces your chances of finding go-to-market alpha.

Try for a few months at least. All channels tend to compound.

SEO results will take a few months to appear. You need to try to work with tens of influencers before that one goes viral. etc. So it’s a matter of choosing properly the channel you want to invest in in advance, and committing.

The goal here is to stay top of mind, to own a space in customers’ minds. A healthy launch routine is launching something every week, with a major launch every month.

#6 Adam Cleland - CEO, Asora

1) Mistakes

❌ We didn’t sufficiently prioritise the feedback of the early customers

When you start building, lots of stakeholders have an opinion on what you should do. Friends, family, investors, board advisors, internal team members, industry specialists, pilot customers, design partners, and others. You, as the founder!

We didn’t sufficiently prioritise the feedback of the early independent (not through connections) paying customers. Someone with a problem who didn’t know you and paid for it to be solved. Their feedback should be put on a pedestal, and finding those people is your number one priority.

❌ We overwhelmed our prospects by showing all features in our demos

We sell a quite complex SaaS solution, so we thought for too long that we had to demo all the features we have, leading to overwhelmed prospects. The key reason is that we haven’t done enough discovery.

2) Hacks / Tips

✅ Don’t go too broad on product strategy too early

Your initial TAM isn’t your ultimate TAM. Even if you’re building a broad platform or have a big vision, make sure you have one feature that’s truly compelling and differentiated for your beachhead ICP.

✅ Keep pricing clean and simple

Clean and simple can be as important as the overall pricing level. More mature companies’ pricing typically becomes complex.

💡 P.S. How I helped Asora 2,7x their MQLs and grow beyond 1€ million ARR

Now I want to hear your story

I hope you can learn a lot from their mistakes & tips.

👇 Respond to this email and share your mistakes & tips with me. I will feature the best ones in the upcoming episode.

Stay tuned for the next episode, where 15 experts are sharing their best tips with you.

Happy growth 🚀

Alex

3 ways I can help you grow your SaaS to €1 million ARR 👇

1️⃣ Use my free GTM library with 50+ free resources (guides, templates, workbooks, and tools) to build a strong GTM foundation (helped 5000+ SaaS leaders)

2️⃣ Get a 360° GTM audit of your status quo + a custom 6-month action plan

3️⃣ Work 1-on-1 with me - GTM Advisory for SaaS founders from €0 to €1 million ARR

Most GTM playbooks are written for venture-backed startups.

👉 Today, we break down 6 scrappy GTM tactics that work great for bootstrapped founders.

Subscribe now

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ Why pitches fail (+11 slides to fix yours)

✅ The Ultimate Guide for your SaaS pricing page

✅ 9 GTM Inographics to hit first 1€ million ARR

👉 Reach 25.000+ SaaS operators with sponsored content. Sponsor the next newsletter.

Book sponsorship

In the past year, I’ve spoken with more than 300 SaaS founders, from tiny indie hackers to teams doing a few million ARR.

One theme has been coming up over and over: most GTM playbooks are written for venture-backed startups.

They assume big budgets and wide runways. Paid ads, sponsorships, big outbound teams.

If you’ve raised $5m, that advice can make sense.
If you haven’t, it can kill you.

That’s why I love Alex’s work here on MRR Unlocked. He’s broken down the fundamentals of GTM ICP messaging, outbound, content - perhaps better than anyone.

In this piece, I’d like to add the other half of the story: the small, scrappy tactics that don’t usually make it into playbooks, but keep showing up in conversations.

Here are six I think deserve more airtime.

1. Mine negative reviews for leads

Every 1-star review is a free lead. It tells you exactly who’s unhappy, why, and what they’d pay to fix.

This tactic is especially powerful in “crowded markets.” VCs usually avoid them - too much competition, too little room to stand out. But if you’re bootstrapped, crowded markets can be goldmines. They prove one thing: there’s demand.

And the fastest way to find your edge is to study where incumbents fail. Negative reviews give you that roadmap.

How you can apply this:

1. Search G2/Capterra/Reddit for competitors.

2. Filter for 1–2 star reviews.

3. Copy recurring pain points into a sheet.

4. Build a lead list from reviewer names/companies.

5. Reach out directly with something like:

“Saw you struggled with X. We built Y to solve it - want me to send few slots for a quick demo?”

This founder on Reddit even analyzed 150k negative reviews across 8,000 SaaS companies to find opportunities. (Source)

ℹ️ P.S. Check out the Social Listening Guide to learn more about it.

2. Go where the micro-communities live

Big campaigns don’t drive early traction. Small, trusted groups do.

I’ve lost count of the number of founders who told me, “Our first 100 customers came from Reddit or Slack groups.”

How you can do this right now:

1. List 3–5 small Slack, Discord, or subreddit groups your ICP hangs out in.

2. Join and spend a week answering questions/helping.

3. Share a free resource or guide that solves a pain point.

4. Mention your product naturally when it fits.

5. DM engaged members with a trial link or invite.

🔗 Example AMA: “I got my first 100 users through Reddit, Discord, and word of mouth.”

3. Collaborate with niche influencers

The best collaborations aren’t with big-name influencers. They’re with the people who have the right type of followers.

Case in point: Tweet Hunter. They launched on Twitter, then gifted free accounts to micro-creators like JK Molina. It drove credibility and signups faster than any ad spend could have. Source

Here’s how you can go about this today:

1. Identify 5–10 micro-influencers (500–5k engaged followers) in your niche - look on Twitter, LinkedIn, Substack, or small podcasts.

2. Offer free access to your product (or a perk/credit) in exchange for them trying it out. Make it easy to promote - give them a unique link, landing page, or discount code.

3. Suggest a simple collab format (guest post, AMA, short webinar, or co-tweet/post).

4. Track results with UTM links and coupon codes so you know which partnerships work.

5. Double down on the 1–2 influencers that actually convert, instead of spreading thin.

👉 Reach 25.000+ SaaS operators with sponsored content. Sponsor the next newsletter.

4. Extend founder-led sales

One of the biggest mistakes I see founders make is to hire their first sales rep too early. Especially those coming from VC-backed companies, just because they can afford it.

This Reddit thread summarises 40 SaaS growth stories, where the common pattern was founder-led demos well past $1m ARR.

It’s not just about saving money. Every call is both revenue and feedback. Cut that loop too early, and you fly blind.

Here’s how I’d do sales if I were to start my own business today:

1. Block 5-10 hours/week for direct demos or discovery calls.

2. Use Notion/Google Sheet to track every conversation.

3. Note recurring objections or questions.

4. Update your pitch/product to address them.

5. Keep selling yourself until you’re repeating the same script consistently and can confidently close most of your demos

5. Build education-first funnels

Teaching is cheaper than advertising. Bootstrapped teams turn playbooks, quizzes, or email courses into acquisition engines.

One founder described a simple funnel: “We ran a 5-day email course, then followed up with tailored outreach based on what people answered.” Conversion rates beat cold outbound by a wide margin.

Big SaaS companies do this at scale (HubSpot’s Website Grader is the classic), but bootstrapped founders use it too - just in leaner form.

How you can do this:

1. Pick a painful question that your ICP Googles.

2. Create a short email course, checklist, or quiz that answers it.

3. Gate it with a simple signup form.

4. Follow up with tailored advice + product demo.

5. Repurpose it into blog posts or social snippets for ongoing traffic.

ℹ️ P.S. Check out the Lead Magnet Guide to learn more about it.

6. Directories - get listed (or build your own)

Directories are probably the most underrated GTM tactic. Most founders think about them only as “nice-to-have” visibility. In reality, they’re one of the most capital-efficient GTM channels you can tap into early:

Get listed:

• Being on Capterra, G2, Product Hunt, AppSumo, Zapier Marketplace, Shopify App Store, HubSpot Marketplace (and niche equivalents in your vertical) puts you directly in front of buyers with intent.

• A well-optimized listing with a handful of strong reviews can rank above better-funded competitors who are ignoring these channels.

• Founders I’ve spoken with often credit their first 50–100 paying customers to a Product Hunt launch or an early directory push.

Build your own:

• John Rush’s insight: don’t just get listed - build directories yourself. He launched 20+ directories, with 5 of them becoming the go-to resources in their niches.

• Directories become distribution assets: they rank on Google, attract your ICP, and you can monetize them via sponsorships, affiliate links, or by funneling traffic into your own product.