S5E2 – Building a Sustainable SaaS Business: Key Strategies for Long-Term Growth With Ferdinand Goetzen

Are you a founder struggling to Build a sustainable SaaS business? In the B2B SaaS world, achieving sustainable growth is no small feat. It involves more than just capturing quick wins; it requires a well-thought-out strategy that ensures long-term success. In this episode of the Grow Your B2B SaaS Podcast, host Joran Hofman sat down live with Ferdinand Goetzen, a founding partner at the Growth Syndicate, at the B2B Rocks SaaS event in Paris, where Ferdinand shared his key tips for building a strong SaaS business and offered valuable insights into this complex process.

Understanding the Customer Journey

Ferdinand says that the path customers take is often messy and complicated. Unlike simple marketing steps that say people go from knowing about a product to buying it, real life is more mixed up. Customers might interact with a company in many different ways. This means businesses need to provide value at every step, even if it’s hard to measure right away. Companies should focus on building a brand that connects deeply with their customers instead of just looking at short-term numbers.

Finding the Right Customers

Another important tip is to know who your perfect customer is. Many companies try to reach too many people, which can confuse their message. By focusing on a specific group of customers, businesses can make their marketing and products better. Ferdinand suggests that companies should carefully define who their ideal customers are, understand what they need, and talk to them in a way that makes sense. This helps create messages that stand out and grab attention.

Sharing Knowledge and Building Trust

Being a leader in your field is really important. Companies should share helpful ideas and insights through blogs, podcasts, webinars, and social media. This isn’t just about creating content; it’s about giving real value and building trust. When businesses show up consistently and connect with their audience, they can create a loyal following that sees them as an important resource.

Working Together for Better Results

Ferdinand also talks about a special way to combine sharing knowledge with reaching out to potential customers. He calls this “marketing-assisted outbound.” This means using marketing to help warm up leads before trying to sell to them directly. For example, inviting potential customers to join a small podcast can create a connection and make future sales talks easier. This way, the company can reach more people and build trust.

Letting the Product Shine

Another key idea is product-led growth (PLG). In PLG, the product itself helps bring in and keep customers. This means making the product easy and fun to use. Simple sign-up processes and features that encourage users to invite friends can make a big difference. Ferdinand believes the best products solve problems clearly without being too complicated.

Learning and Improving

Finally, Ferdinand reminds us that good marketing is not just about plans; it’s about doing things well. Companies should be ready to try new ideas, learn from them, and improve their strategies. This means understanding customers deeply and always looking for ways to get better. By following these principles, B2B SaaS companies can build a strong base for lasting growth and avoid the traps of short-term thinking.

Key Timecodes

• (0:56) – Building a Sustainable SaaS Business
• (1:26) – Defining Sustainable Growth
• (2:51) – The Changing Landscape of Growth
• (4:55) – The Power of Brand Influence
• (6:13) – High Intent Lead Generation Strategies
• (9:37) – Four Key Growth Strategies for B2B
• (11:34) – Harnessing Thought Leadership and Outbound
• (16:53) – Best Practices for Sustainable Success
• (19:04) – Real-World Examples of Effective Branding
• (23:39) – The Role of User Experience in Growth
• (24:01) – Strategies for Achieving Sustainable Growth
• (30:43) – Tips for SaaS Founders’ Success

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Ferdinand Goetzen

When you look at how people buy, and this is true in B2C and B2B, but it’s even more complex than B2B. People don’t just suddenly decide they have a problem, Google a solution, click it and convert. There’s a huge mess of touch points before that actually influence a conversion. Brand is not easy. Being different is not easy. Standing out is not easy. It’s when you do the things that aren’t easy, ironically, you’re not competing with everybody in the world. The higher you set the bar, the less competition you have, always. If you niche Everything’s more convincing because you can be very clear on the messaging. You can talk about their problem. You can put logos they recognize. Everything can be tailored to them. The number one thing you can do in PLG is build a great user experience. User experience is the first starting point of product-like growth. Make it easy to use, make it fun to use, make it easy to get started, and keep it simple.

[00:00:56.020] – Joran

In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about building a sustainable SaaS business and the key strategies for long-term growth. My guest today is Ferdinand Goetzen. Ferdinand Goetzen is the founding partner at the Growth Syndicate, where he helps B2B tech companies scale from 1 million to 100 million through their fractional Growth Team. Before you started Growth Syndicate, he ran and founded a SaaS company called Reveal, which has been acquired in 2023 by Next. In addition to running Growth Syndicate, Ferdinand Goetzen is an advisor, investor, and public speaker. Live from B2B Rocks.Welcome, Ferdinand Goetzen.

[00:01:26.020] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Thanks for having me

[00:01:27.440] – Joran

.Nice. Cool. We’re going to just dive right in. So let’s start with the basics. What do you actually define as sustainable growth in SaaS?

[00:01:35.940] – Ferdinand Goetzen

When I talk about sustainable growth, I’m not talking about ecological sustainability. Of course, it’s important, but it’s not what I’m referring to. Honestly, when I look at different companies at different stages of their growth, different levels of success, one of the number one things that comes back is we do a lot of things. There’s a certain randomness. What I mean by that is you maybe pull in two big whale deals in a month, and then you don’t the next month, and suddenly your targets are maybe not met. I think when we talk about sustainable, we also call it predictable growth. We’re talking about creating a foundation and an engine for growth that actually scales with your business so that you don’t at some point hit that plateau. Because we see most companies at the moment who don’t adopt some of the new methods that we try to push out there, they tend to hit a plateau. Depending on the size of the market, the business model, the ICP, you might hit that plateau at 50K ARR or at 500K ARR or at 5 million, or we even now talk to some companies that are plateauing at 30, 40 million and try to get them to That’s what I mean by sustainable growth, like growth that scales with the business.

[00:02:32.990] – Joran

I think that’s a really good explanation on sustainable growth. I guess when we look at the market right now, VC funding is down, competition is becoming more fierce, marketing channels are becoming a bit saturated or a bit more difficult. When you look at sustainable growth, how can B2B companies actually achieve it nowadays?

[00:02:51.210] – Ferdinand Goetzen

I think the key here is to understand that the landscape for growing a business has just changed massively in the last, I would say, five years. Old-school marketing Marketing. A lot of B2B companies didn’t do any marketing. It was very sales-driven. If you did do marketing, it was really like one to many big marketing campaigns, big ad campaigns. You spend a lot of money and you pay and pray. In order to make that successful, you had to basically really know your target audience and you really needed to stand out. Then the idea was that a certain number of those people would probably engage with your brand. With the emergence of digital marketing, that changed a lot because suddenly you could target for intent. You couldn’t do that with radio ads or television ads. You could maybe tailor for audience, but you couldn’t tailor for intent. Now you could suddenly tailor for intent. Google Ads and SEO, you could literally people who were looking for solutions, you could intercept that journey. And that worked really well. But of course, if you can intercept for intent, you don’t need to know the ICP that well. You don’t need to build such a strong differentiated brand if you don’t have big competition.

[00:03:44.900] – Ferdinand Goetzen

You can get away with quite a low hanging fruit approach to marketing. But what we’ve seen the last 5 to 10 years is that all of these playbooks are starting to dry up. Email open rates are down the drain. Ad clicks are down the drain. Google Ad clicks are more expensive than ever. Customer clicks are through roof. The competition is just bigger than ever because it’s easier than ever to build a tool and to build a product with AI and low code that’s just accelerating even more. Your brand is just so crucial because brand is something that really affects every stage of the customer journey throughout the entire funnel. We don’t like to talk about funnels, but what people consider the funnel, it affects everything. I think the key to do that in today’s world is look at what people are consuming. People are consuming creator videos on TikTok. They’re consuming YouTube Shorts. Everybody is creating content and everyone’s becoming a thought thought leader, whether it’s on the entertainment side or the philosophical side or on the news side or the political side. Thought leadership is what drives. It’s a massive currency today. I think companies need to become thought leaders.

[00:04:40.340] – Ferdinand Goetzen

B2b companies need to become thought leaders. I think if you build that brand, you build that demand generation engine. I think in simple terms, we’ve been marketing to 5% of the audience that has been in market for the last 20 years. Now it’s time to market to the 95% that aren’t in market because that 5% is just super saturated.

[00:04:55.900] – Joran

Yeah. In the end, they don’t have the 10% yet, but you’re building up your band. What we’re doing today, we’re doing a podcast which is built by me, but I’m part of Reditus, which I founded. Then Reditus, at one point, becomes bigger and bigger as a brand without even us trying to sell anybody.

[00:05:11.680] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Yeah, I think when you look at how people buy, and this is true in B2C and B2B, but it’s even more complex than B2B. People don’t just suddenly decide they have a problem, Google a solution, click it and convert. There’s a huge mess of touch points before that actually influence a conversion. And maybe today we have this podcast conversation. I’m not saying you always have to wait two years, but maybe in six months or two years time, I bring on a client who has a problem that your company solves. And then I start googling solutions, and suddenly one of the solutions that comes up is Reditus, and then I start comparing. I still go through all those traditional customer journey points, but then maybe I choose Reditus because I know you and I trust you, or because I had this touch point. No marketing team in the world right now, or very few, would consider this touch point in their tracking, in attribution, and they wouldn’t optimize for it. We tried to find marketing channels that give us returns in one, two, three months. That’s okay, you should do that. But if you only do that, those channels will dry up and you’ll find yourself hitting a wall.

[00:06:13.110] – Ferdinand Goetzen

So you should be working on two tracks. You should be working on high intent, high impact, high value, quick lead gen. But in parallel, build up your brand, build up your demand gen engine, build up the touchpoints, the network, the people that might have your problem, might have the problem you solve, and educate the market. Because once this starts to dry up, this can start taking off.

[00:06:32.460] – Joran

It’s almost like looking at the old slides where you always compared SEO against paid ads. Seo is a long term game where paid ads, when you turn on the money tab, things come in. Ideally, you want to grow the SEO, and it’s not what you’re seeing with brand. You need to start building your brand. You need to do things for quick wins, but then in the long term, focus on brand.

[00:06:50.000] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Seo is also very saturated, but one of the reasons that SEO hasn’t completely died, like everybody predicts, is very simple. Seo has gotten harder. You used to be able When I first started SEO, I was 15 years old, you could just create 50 blog spot accounts and link them together and you would rank. And keyword stuffing, you do white text on white background. It was so easy to rank. What’s happened over the years is Google’s algorithm has gotten better and better at putting the best content on top. It’s still not ideal. But what happens now is it’s quite hard. So there’s a lot of people doing it, but nowhere near as many as if it were easy. Brand is not easy. Being different is not easy. Standing out is not easy. And it’s when you do the things that aren’t easy, ironically, you’re not competing with everybody in the world. The higher you set the bar, the less competition you have, always.

[00:07:34.980] – Joran

Nice. I think you covered a couple of things already, but these are some of the mistakes, I guess, companies are making right now, focusing on it. But what other types of mistakes you see them make while trying to scale sustainable? And maybe even how can they avoid them?

[00:07:50.350] – Ferdinand Goetzen

The mistakes that they make currently, I think, is going all in on the most tangible-feeling channels. They feel like Google Ads is really tangible. But if you don’t plan for what you do when that saturates. I think that’s number one. Number two, I think it’s this idea that people still think in funnels and they think in growth loops and they think in fly wheels. The customer does not operate in a funnel. The funnel is a nice way for you to organize your metrics and see if you are covering all your bases. But the funnel is not a real thing. The customer journey is this crazy, messy, convoluted confluence of touchpoints. If the first step that companies need to make is understand that customer journey is messy. Because the problem, number one, is that even marketers who They want to do that event because they just fundamentally believe that creating value for their target audience is going to work, or they want to create maybe more creator-style content, they’re not doing it because they’re not getting buy-in. They’re not getting buy-in for the resources, the talent, the budget they need, because a lot of CEOs, a lot of stakeholders are still thinking about the old marketing playbook.

[00:08:49.100] – Ferdinand Goetzen

I think that’s the problem. Once you understand the customer journey is messy, and then once you figure out, how can I, in an organized way, create those touch points and lose my obsession with tracking? It’s very good that we can track data and you should always look for signals, but you don’t need to look for perfect attribution because perfect attribution in B2B is a lost cause anyways. I’m sure there’s some people who specialize in attribution who are going to argue with me on that. Just because you can’t measure it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. I think once you realize that, you start changing the way you do marketing.

[00:09:17.050] – Joran

Yeah, and I guess then let’s turn it around. These are the mistakes, right? If you say all these things like the customer journey is messy, you can’t track everything, what processes or strategies you would say companies now have to to still be able to grow, sustainable long term, while, I guess, being able to track or at least follow something.

[00:09:37.620] – Ferdinand Goetzen

There’s four ways a B2B company can grow. Maybe five, but primarily there’s four ways a B2B company can grow. The first is search. That’s Google Ads, it’s Bing Ads, and it’s SEO. Companies are doing it. Most companies are doing it. Do it and do it well. Then if you build a brand alongside of that, those are going to perform better. The second thing you can do is outbound. Outbound. When I say outbound, we think of outbound as a sales activity. It’s something that the sales team does. Yes, reaching out to potential clients, talking to them, and then going deep into their use case, that is a sales activity. But we’ve created this model called Marketing Assisted Outbound. It It really makes some of the ABM ideas, but it really puts marketing at the service of the outbound process. I’m not going to go into too much detail here, but essentially, you’re combining ads, thought leadership, content, webinars, events, community initiatives into the outbound process so that you’re basically warming up your lists with valuable touchpoints before you ever reach out. So outbound is the second, and what we call marketing-assisted outbound is the second pillar.

[00:10:37.610] – Ferdinand Goetzen

The third thing you can do is thought leadership. And when I say thought leadership, it’s everything that’s content, podcast, events, community, anything that helps position you as a leader in your space. Some people might call that brand. Then the fourth pillar is product-led growth, driving growth through your product. This can be something like Miro’s template marketplace. It can be imposing a reverse trial for better conversions. It can be all kinds of different things. Then the fifth in parentheses is partnerships. In some more enterprisey environments, partnerships can be a really fundamental channel, but I find it’s the one that really depends on the industry. The other four applies to almost all. Maybe product like growth also only applies to software, of course, but essentially, those are the four ways you can grow. Search, thought leadership, PLG, and outbound. Those are the four things you can do.

[00:11:22.530] – Joran

Yeah. Let’s put it into perspective because I think like a thought leadership, you probably won’t be able to do it right at the beginning, or at least it’s not going to drive any result. Saas partners now listening and are going to change everything around. What should they focus on first?

[00:11:34.600] – Ferdinand Goetzen

You can start with thought leadership because the problem is if you don’t start with the reasoning, and this is what a lot of companies are doing, it’s not going to give me results tomorrow. Now, there is the off chance that if you do really good thought leadership and you have a post that goes viral, it can definitely produce results tomorrow. Again, it depends on your ACVs. Sometimes five new customers is a huge difference. If you have low ACVs, you need 100 new customers. That’s our relative. But thought leadership absolutely can give you quicker results, but you cannot bank on it. I agree. I I think what you need to do is you need to combine it. I can give you an example of a very concrete campaign. Essentially, they sell to local entrepreneurs in the Netherlands. Companies that have… They have gyms and they have local businesses, and they don’t use digital products to scale their impact. A gym might use something like Virtua Gym to organize their classes. But actually, they could also build their own software and actually scale their business further. This company is an agency that builds for these companies. The campaign that we’ve proposed to them is to combine thought leadership and outbound in a way that has impact and mutual impact.

[00:12:29.890] – Ferdinand Goetzen

What we’ve proposed is make a list of 200 companies that are your ideal company in your area. Reach out to those CEOs or the founders or the owners of those companies, and instead of selling them something, reach out to them and say, Hey, look, I’m doing a micro podcast with entrepreneurs of small businesses. No other small business entrepreneurs. They have a relevant network. So you say, Do you want to do this micro podcast? You don’t need to prepare anything. It takes 20 minutes. You pull up Riverside, get your iPhone, it doesn’t matter, and you do that podcast. You publish that podcast online. Now, two things have happened. Number one, you’ve created a connection with an ideal ICP lead without sending them anything, but instantly creating value for them because you’ve given them an audience and you’ve let them talk about themselves. And people like to talk about themselves. That’s why we do podcasts. So that’s number one. Number two, if this person shares it in their network, you’re instantly accessing all the other small local business entrepreneurs in his network or her network. And then what you can incorporate into it is you add Ask that person after micro podcast, Can you recommend three other people I should do next?

[00:13:34.880] – Ferdinand Goetzen

And that’s the way you bring thought leadership and outbound together. And I think when you are just starting, the most valuable thing is other people’s network. You don’t need to build your network from scratch. Your network already exists somewhere. If you’re selling to SaaS founders, you do it. You do it with your podcast, you work with SaaS. Local. You know how to tap into other people’s network. That is the fundamental. And this is where thought leadership can come together. And that’s a very small, concentrated campaign. Over time, you add to it. You do events. You do community of stuff. You start doing content and thought leadership posts on LinkedIn. You start scaling your outbound, having different people in your company reach out. You create case studies and dedicated YouTube videos about your customers. You can start scaling this to what we call the predictable growth engine. What we see now when we talk to companies is that they do a lot of things, but they’re all random and not interconnected. But this is a really good example of where you’re bringing thought leadership and outbound, you’re connecting them together.

[00:14:24.780] – Joran

Maybe to even go into our example, that’s exactly what I do or how we do is I leverage somebody else’s network. It all starts with that one person or that one client you get on the podcast, and then from there, you can scale it even further. You need to have one person which is well known. If you have that, you can just scale it to a lot more people who are well known, and then suddenly things pick up. Like nowadays, when I do a demo, people already know me because they listen to two podcasts before they even jump on a demo with me. That’s perfect.

[00:14:53.360] – Ferdinand Goetzen

The problem is that the way people buy, the fundamentals of human psychology don’t change. But the tools and mediums and the way that they get to information does change. People still think of the website as the start-middle endpoint of everything. Your website is not that important. The website is the final place they go to check, Oh, do they have all the features? Are they GDPR compliant? Can I do this? Most of that decision is happening in the events, talking to their colleagues, following you on LinkedIn, checking out your podcast. I think, what’s the last tool you bought? Or last tool you started to use?

[00:15:24.250] – Joran

That’s a really good question.

[00:15:26.310] – Ferdinand Goetzen

One of the last.

[00:15:27.720] – Joran

Riverside, probably.

[00:15:28.830] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Okay. How did you decide to use Riverside?

[00:15:32.590] – Joran

It was based on a recommendation.

[00:15:34.040] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Okay, there you go. Who’s the recommendation?

[00:15:37.210] – Joran

I think when I was doing a podcast, when I was a guest, and then it looked great. And then I asked him, How is it for you guys? Because I was still doing it in Zoom. And then One recommendation, he says, I love it. And he told me my biggest frustration, which I had with Zoom, Riverside fixed it.

[00:15:53.930] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Recommendations. Is it… This is like humans used to make decisions like this. You’d go to the local marketplace and your friends would be like, Hey, When I was a kid, they’d be like, Oh, have you seen the new Batman movie? That’s how I would get my ideas of what to watch and what to do. Then Google became your best friend in recommending things. Now, because Google is being gamed by everybody, we don’t trust it as much anymore. Now we’re relying on other areas. I used to Google for recipes. Now I look on YouTube Shorts, or some kids will be looking on TikTok. The way people buy, fundamentally, the process hasn’t changed, but the places where they go has changed. If you understand that these dynamics have changed, you can adapt to them. Truth is, I think maybe 1% of marketing teams is doing this, maybe two.

[00:16:31.570] – Joran

So I think they can definitely take some lessons out of this. You mentioned thought leadership plus outbound, right? Connect them together, and from there you can start scaling things. Maybe even to take it one step back, you touched about really quickly getting your ICP in order release that we’re supposed to be doing. If people want to do this, what do they need to have in place to really start going out there with the four ways of growing?

[00:16:53.390] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Yes, I think the bottom line is there is no get fit, quick scheme in marketing anymore. There will be some exceptions, but very rarely. So it requires effort. Being a thought leader requires effort. Posting on LinkedIn requires effort. Doing a podcast requires effort. You cannot spread yourself too thin. So you cannot target 10 different ICPs and then do all the things you’re doing. So what you need, I think what you need as a company is number one, you need a crystal clear idea of who your ICP is. Ideally, pick one type of ICP you go after, especially if you’re early stage. If you’re later stage, you have the resources to maybe split your attention a bit more. But go after one ICP. Very specific. Spec people with specific problems, and you have a specific solution for them. You know how they speak, you speak their language, and all the logos are logos they recognize, all the testimonials are people they might even know personally. That’s what you do. Icp focus. The second thing is you stand out. I think the best way to stand out, and that’s why we call it thought leadership and not demand generation or content, because it’s about having a perspective.

[00:17:50.260] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Having a clear perspective is super crucial because when you’re going after the 95% of people who aren’t currently in market, you’re asking them to change how how they think about something and how they do something. If you’re trying to change how people do something, you need to change their perspective. That requires you to have a clear perspective. My perspective, for example, is that the what in marketing, especially in B2B marketing, is not rocket science. Every company does the same things. It’s about how you do it that matters. Everyone has ICPs, but do you have the right ICP? Do you have them clearly defined? Do you get them? And is it focused? Everybody tries to do some positioning exercise, but is it very clearly differentiated Do you know how companies win using your product versus losing by not using your product? You can all do thought leadership, but are you actually sharing clear insights? Does it connect into one clear vision, one clear perspective? I think that’s the foundation you need. Icp, positioning and messaging, is the traditional way to say it, but who am I selling to? Do I have a clear perspective? And do I have a way to convey that perspective to them, both in terms of distribution and in terms of conviction?

[00:18:53.910] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Love it.

[00:18:54.470] – Joran

We talked about how to get it set up, the mistakes, right? Let’s talk about also some best practices. Do Do you have some examples of companies who do it really well, which you can share?

[00:19:04.190] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Most of the companies we work with do it really well. When we think of companies that do this really well, I think Hockey Stack does it really well. I think you’re doing it really well. I think you’re on the earlier stage side of things, but you’re doing it really well. You’re out there, everybody knows you. You have always the blue hoodie on, you’re recognizable. I think we were just at the talk of Stefan Smilders at Expandee. They’re doing it really well. They’ve been doing this without thinking about this. Sharing templates and sharing playbooks and these things. I think a lot of companies do it well in different ways. Those are some examples. But if you go online and check it out, I think Enzo and Vigo, for example, with June. F, they do it super well.

[00:19:36.510] – Joran

When you look at all the different companies like ourselves, Expandee, June, what do they have in common? Is it consistently showing up, Sharing their knowledge, sharing their templates, as you mentioned, sharing their story. I guess if you try to combine it into some practical advice for people listening now, what are the companies doing well or the people doing well so they can copy things from them?

[00:19:57.230] – Ferdinand Goetzen

I’m going to flip it around and tell you, me as a customer, what engages. For example, when I was running Reveal, I wanted to do some SEO. I have some background in SEO. That’s always the hardest if you’re a marketer turned founder, deciding what you don’t do. I was thinking, We want to succeed in SEO. I did some research and it happened upon the company scale. We partner with them, we talk with them a lot these days, but back then I didn’t know who they were. Scale was started by a guy called Jake Steiner. Jake Steiner was the head of SEO and growth at Typeform. So already, I came across him because somebody recommended them. Somebody said, Oh, we did this thing with Scale. It was some collaboration. I checked them out. Number one thing, their headline was Sustainable SEO for B2B SaaS companies. Already, that’s great because number one problem I had is all these SEO agencies, they’re so used to e-commerce and B2C and really niche propositions that I didn’t feel like they understood how to also convert the SEO traffic. And These guys have done it before. Then number two, amongst their eight top logos, three of them were product management or product space tools.

[00:20:52.650] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Tools that I aspired to that were ranking for the kinds of things we wanted to rank for. Then once I went deeper, then I started following Jake and he started sharing content, and I was like, This guy thinks like I do about this. What companies can do is first just be very clear on who you serve and what your perspective is. With Scale, it was very clear that they do SEO for B2B SaaS companies. That’s it. Not marketplaces, not services. They do it for mid-size B2B SaaS companies. If you niche, everything’s more convincing because you can be very clear on the messaging, you can talk about their problem, you can put logos they recognize. Everything can be tailored to them. So that’s number one. Number two is having a clear thought leadership strategy. Whether you do that through having a sub stack or posting on LinkedIn or doing YouTube videos, you should probably do all of it. One piece of content is 50 pieces of content. You can’t do marketing without content. That’s the second thing. Clear ICP, clear positioning, good niching, really good content. Then I think fundamentally, you need to be good at what you do.

[00:21:53.570] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Half the companies that talk to us as leads that want us to help them, we turn them away because their product sucks. We don’t help companies with bad products because it’s just a black hole. It’s a waste of time. It’s people with good products that can do really good marketing because they understand the value of creating value for others.

[00:22:09.360] – Reditus Ad

Are you struggling to find people and companies which have access to your ideal customer profile? At Reditus, we just launched the second side of the marketplace, which allows you to search, filter, and contact B2B SaaS affiliates which have access to the audience you’re looking for. We do this by leveraging first-party data sources. Want to learn more? Go to getreditus.com.

[00:22:30.160] – Joran

Let me then ask a question for people. What do you define as a good product? Are you check out the reviews, check out the product? Are you going actually in and using it?

[00:22:39.510] – Ferdinand Goetzen

This is where the fundamentals of product-led growth or product growth come into play. There’s two levels of product growth. On the high level, you have the PLG tactics, activating them early by giving them a free trial or letting them try the tool before they ever sign up, like a Canva, for example, or doing a reverse trial where they make some payment commitment that helps with conversions, templates, sharing links, built-in referrals. There’s all kinds of tactics, onboarding. There’s all kinds of things you can do in a tool to help. But one of the biggest levers of product-led growth, this is Kate Suma. She used to be the head of Growth Designer at N Miro. She says, The number one thing you can do in PLG is build a great user experience. User experience is the first starting point of product-like growth. Make it easy to use, make it fun to use, make it easy to get started, and keep it simple. Companies build really broad products. I made that mistake with Reveal. The first version of Reveal was a monstrosity. It’s the reality. Our story of Reveal spending two years, three years basically stripping away features and focusing and focussing and focussing and pivoting to something very simple and straightforward.

[00:23:37.670] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Good products create value, good products solve problems, and good products tend to be simple, at least in the early stages.

[00:23:44.370] – Joran

You’re only helping good products, right? This might be a bit of a promotional question, but I’m curious. If a company has a good product and you say, Okay, we’re going to work with them, what would be your strategy? How would you look at what they’re currently doing and how would you take them from their current marketing strategy to sustainable growth? Yeah.

[00:24:01.900] – Ferdinand Goetzen

We have an advantage, which is our whole concept is that we’re not an agency. Our long-term plan is to build. We do our own podcast, we do community, we do events, we do content. We have this big play where We want to be a product company that builds products for B2B professionals and founders that want to scale, whether they’re courses, trainings, templates, tools, micro-sas, whatever. But a big part of our business currently is a service element. And unlike agencies, where very often you get sold something by a really senior person and then somebody quite junior does the work, we present ourselves as a fractional team that builds everything in-house. And everyone on our team is super senior. Everyone on a team has exits under the belt, has 10-15 years doing this, and is just an A-player, A-plus player. And as a result, we charge a fair amount. That helps us because it’s a filter, because you need to take marketing and growth seriously to even be willing to work with us, which definitely filters out a lot of companies that just want a quick buck and think about, We want the six-week, six-pack or three-week It takes back.

[00:25:00.610] – Ferdinand Goetzen

There’s a lot of marketing agencies offering that, and there’s a lot of founders looking for that. It doesn’t exist. So we have that natural filter. The other thing is we really put our money where our mouth is because our goal is to get fired. We don’t work with 20 companies at once. We work with a handful of companies at any point in time. And that allows us to, after nine months, when we’ve actually delivered what we wanted to deliver and built an in-house team and put somebody in charge, we can step out and find a new client. We’re not worried about clients. We turn down clients, we fire clients all the time. What we look for is a very strong marketing-free motion. What I mean by that is two kinds of companies come to us. We don’t work with companies pre-1 million. So it’s really 1 million to 100 million. That’s where we get you in that direction. Might be 1 to 5, might be 5 to 10. We won’t get you from 1 to 100 in nine months. But I think what we look for is very strong pull signals. So marketing is either pull or push.

[00:25:49.680] – Ferdinand Goetzen

You’re either pushing on people, you’re reaching out to them, you’re targeting them, you’re trying to push things on them, or they’re coming to you and they’re raising hands. This is like Miro style of growth. They in a company, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50, 200, 500, a thousand people to use Miro, and then they see the handraisers, the champions, and then they say, Refer me to your boss, because at some point it doesn’t make sense to use it across the whole company. So we look at companies that have those strong signals. Which means that the product is selling well, there’s a very clear competitive advantage. And very often what we see is it’s companies where when we talk to them, they’re super clear on why they’re awesome. And then you look at their marketing and it’s not super clear why they’re awesome. And that’s our job, is to bring that and bring that to the outside world. So we look for strong product-market fit signals. Product-market fit signals can be anything from high conversion rates, high retention rates, high engagement rates, but also just word of mouth, positive referrals. They’re just companies that are sexy right now.

[00:26:44.910] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Companies like Clay and Hockey Stack, those are sexy companies. People are excited about those companies. I think those are good examples of companies that are doing really well and have really great marketing. We’re looking for the companies that are equally cool but aren’t really nailing their marketing yet. That’s where we come in and build that function.

[00:26:59.000] – Joran

Yeah, let’s say, what would you do when you come in and you will start working with them? What are the first things you would do?

[00:27:05.600] – Ferdinand Goetzen

The first thing we do is we do a full audit of everything they do. We asked them to fill out a ridiculously, embarrassingly long form, just get as much information as we can. We then have a strategy kickoff. We talk to them and we basically say, What are your challenges? How did you get here? What’s working? What’s not working? And usually within the first couple of weeks, it becomes super clear. You see the first inklings of what’s working. Oh, one of our founders posts on Twitter a lot and we get picked up by niche publications. Okay, there’s a PR angle there. Or we had one CEO, she has 15,000 followers on LinkedIn, and she posts once every three months. She’s just a really known entrepreneur in the Netherlands. It has tons of PR contacts. So you need to see what works there. In some companies, there’s this PLG motion. There’s tons of in-app referrals. The in-app referral option is hidden somewhere behind 12 steps. We usually start by doing that kickoff. We dive in, we start looking at, and very quickly, low-hanging fruits emerge. Now, this is hard to apply When it’s yourself, we can do this because we’ve all done this for 15 years.

[00:28:03.660] – Ferdinand Goetzen

We see those signs very quickly of, That looks promising, that looks promising. This reminds me of one of these 50 cases I’ve done, and you start to have that bit of an instinct. Then we start doing the standard process, which is number one, very clear ICP definition. Nine out of 10 companies will tell you they know their ICP, and I think only about three out of 10 really do. Anecdotally, three out of 10 really have it nailed down. We don’t reinvent the wheels. If a company knows it, we just go great, but we usually try to challenge them. The The other thing we do next is really build that perspective, build out that positioning, and build out that brand messaging foundation. We do all of this in the first 4-6 weeks, and we already start executing on low-hanging fruit if that arrives. Then the next step is really, based on all that information, making a clear plan. We look at those five buckets. The what is never rocket science. It’s the how. We’re like, How do we make this into a thought leader? We work with one company in the biotech space that’s changing the world.

[00:28:53.600] – Ferdinand Goetzen

That’s pretty easy. It’s difficult because the use case is complicated, but it’s easy because they’re literally changing the world. It’s like Elon Musk style stuff, right? Whether you like him or not, that level of ambition. But we have other companies that are simple HR tooling, and that’s a different approach. That’s then about talking to the users, talking to the founders, and trying things. We sometimes start with thought leadership. We sometimes start with a company where we said, Okay, we’re going to do this micro podcast, outbound and thought leadership combination. It depends.

[00:29:22.910] – Joran

Yeah, it depends where the low energy fruit is and what’s already somewhat in place, but people are not seeing it.

[00:29:27.630] – Ferdinand Goetzen

And what they’re good at. I think one of the things that we can do is we can go into a company and say to them, You don’t need marketing. It’s rare that you don’t need any marketing, but we’ll go. The search doesn’t work. One of the companies we work with is a company called Cutter. They’re wood manufacturing. That industry is old school. These are small wood workshops in the middle of the Netherlands. You’re not going to get them with a Google ad strategy because those people, they don’t even know they have a problem. You’re coming to them and say, Hey, we can 10X your business or 5X your business. But they’re not thinking like that because Dutch culture is a little bit different. These people are satisfied. They have working businesses. They have a few grievances. So what did we start doing? We started doing some problem-triggering ads where we just say, Doesn’t it suck when this goes wrong or that goes wrong or this goes wrong? And then we actually created physical parts and sent them to them in the mail. I think that ICP starting point is the most important because you need to operate in line with how those people think and how those people act.

[00:30:16.890] – Ferdinand Goetzen

I can give tons of more niche examples, but it always depends on what is the company good at, what does the ICP need, and finding that overlap.

[00:30:23.890] – Joran

Nice. I think this is already going to give people some ideas on where they get started. Let’s dive in the final two questions, more revenue-related questions. So it doesn’t have to be regarding sustainable growth, but it probably is going to be. But what advice would you give a SaaS founder who’s just starting out and growing to 10K monthly recurring revenue?

[00:30:43.590] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Product and outbound. Try to combine with a bit of thought leadership. Helps. Product and outbound. Zero to 10, you don’t need marketing and growth. It’s very difficult to actively invest in marketing and growth before you’ve got product-market fit. Get your product-market fit first. Icp niche, because this is another thing people say, Oh, I’m bootstrap early-stage company. I can’t afford to pick and choose my ICP. There’s a difference between ideal customer profile and interesting customer profile. Having a clear ICP doesn’t mean that you say no to other business, but it means that you’re very clear in your messaging, you’re very clear in what you choose to build. There’s a great story, the story of Insighted. I met the founder of Insighted because we had the same VC back in the day. He told me the story and I could never share it. Now he shared it on a public podcast. So I can share it, you can check it out. I think it was the big exit show. Essentially, they built customer success communities for companies. They sold to 50 different industries in 10 different countries, companies from small startups to big corporates. They got to a few million ARR within a few years, and then they raised a Series A, and then they had to completely scrap 75% of the team.

[00:31:45.030] – Ferdinand Goetzen

And then they said, Okay, let’s look at who really gets it. They didn’t look at who brought in the most revenue. They just said, Who really gets what we’re doing? Because they were getting tons of customer support requests, no idea which one to prioritize. Sales was pushing for the big deals, of course, but the big deals were churning. So there was this whole mess of information, and they just went, Okay, we’re going to go after customer success managers at European B2B SaaS companies with 50 to 500 employees, mid-size B2B SaaS company CSMs. And he went in and he spoke to a thousand of them, I think. Just hundreds of them to just understand how they think and how they operate. Back then, I think from the almost 5 million ARR or 4 million ARR, only 200K was this ICP. They just basically pushed aside a huge chunk of their revenue. Within two years, they more than doubled their growth, exited with only having it raised one round, close to 100 million. They got to 10 million ARR in two years just by making that focus. Why? Because suddenly, they knew that out of the 90% support requests and feature requests, only 10% mattered.

[00:32:46.100] – Ferdinand Goetzen

He told me sales was hounding about a certain integration that took months and months to plan and build and argue about. And this small group didn’t care about that. This small group had very specific needs and very specific problems. Suddenly, the product became better. It became It was a lot clearer what the value is. The messaging became better. The positioning became better. The differentiation became better because nobody was focusing on the small group. And then they got acquired by Gainsight, and now Gainsight is one of the most successful companies in the CSM space.

[00:33:12.850] – Joran

Interesting. This is already going into the next question because what advice would you give somebody growing to 10 million AORs?

[00:33:18.910] – Ferdinand Goetzen

It’s the same, but add thought leadership. It’s basically that. It’s add thought leadership and think about PLG in a more purposeful way. To get to the 1 million or to get to the 100K, 200K, 300K ARR, don’t worry about scalability. Don’t worry about sustainable growth. Just do shit that gets relevant people onto the platform, learn from them, iterate, and just try to niche down clearly in all your messaging and all your operations. Once you’ve got that figured out, once you go like, This person buys my product in this context when I do these activities. Once you know that, that’s what a predictable engine is. Person X buys my shit when this happens. That’s predictability. Once you have that, you just build on that. The Does thought leadership show promise? Think about how you can do thought leadership at scale. Does partnerships work? Think about how you can do partnerships at scale. That’s when you start building a team and hiring and doing things more aggressively. That’s where you start thinking about product-led growth as well. So think about, how can I get people who use the product to pull in other people? How can I expand within accounts more quickly?

[00:34:17.610] – Ferdinand Goetzen

How can I create an onboarding experience that actually delivers tons of value? Is the UX there? Talk to people, figure out what your biggest blockers are, and that’s it. Just iterate on that.

[00:34:27.450] – Joran

It sounds easy. Talk to people. I see a lot of founders actually not doing it. So keep talking to your-1 to 10 is not that hard.

[00:34:33.520] – Ferdinand Goetzen

0 to 1 is way harder. Just find somebody who really knows marketing and growth.

[00:34:37.760] – Joran

That’s it. Let me see if I can try to summarize. So sustainable growth is an engine for growth, avoiding to hit a plateau. We’re going from marketing for intent to building a brand, which is becoming more crucial. Building a brand is not easy. You can’t track everything, so lose your obsession for attribution. Don’t only go for the tangible channels. The customer journey is messy, so I guess, embrace that. You have four ways to grow, Search, outbound thought leadership and product-led growth. Leveraging somebody else’s network is definitely helpful. So become a thought leader and try to see if you can leverage somebody else’s network. It will require effort. So start with a really clear ICP, very specific, super important. Make a focus and talk to them as much as you can. Have a really clear perspective and try to help to change other people’s perspective. So you need to have one yourself, which is really clear. And then do you have a way to actually convey it to them? User experience of your product is the best growth lever for PLG. And then there are often low hanging fruits for growth, but often you need an outside perspective to find them.

[00:35:40.240] – Ferdinand Goetzen

There you go. Well done.

[00:35:41.510] – Joran

Cool. If you want to get in contact with you, Ferdinand, how would they do?

[00:35:44.480] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Thegrossindicate. Com. Check me out LinkedIn. Feel free to drop me a message. Check out the Growth Syndicate on LinkedIn.We’re.

[00:35:51.160] – Joran

Easy to find.Exactly. I’m going to make it even easier. I’m going to add all the links in the show notes so people can find you. Thanks again for coming on. If people are listening right now, we’ll add a poll to this. It’s Spotify, so make sure to answer that. And if you haven’t done so, leave us a review. Cheers. Thanks.

[00:36:05.340] – Ferdinand Goetzen

Thank you very much.

[00:36:06.700] – Joran

Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. You made it till the end, so I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show. If you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to more about Reditus, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.