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Growing a Startup to 2,100 Customers: This SaaS Founder Did it without Marketing
Is growing a startup without marketing even possible? Yes! This is the story of a B2B SaaS founder who grew to 2,100+ customers without a marketing team.
Victor Eduoh
Founder @VEC Studio
Some of the most difficult people to sell B2B software to are those who know all the tricks about selling B2B software. Think seasoned Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) and Account Executives (AEs).
Yet, Neil Gandhi, the Founder of Paage, has over 2,100 SDRs and AEs paying for his B2B software. Think seasoned, enterprise AEs at big brands like Okta, Heap, Deel, and many others. Interestingly, Neil achieved this feat in less than two years of solo-founding Paage.
All without a marketing team.
- How is he doing it to generate demand?
- What can other B2B SaaS startup founders learn from Neil?
- How can you also grow your startup without marketing?
- And most importantly, what other startup growth strategies could Neil —and you— leverage to unlock even more growth?
This guide is my attempt to address these questions through extensive research. My goal? To share practical tips bootstrapped and early-stage B2B SaaS founders can also leverage to drive initial growth and build a successful startup without formal marketing.
Before we get to Neil’s story…
Stop Misconstruing Startup Marketing
In the early stages of building a startup, most founders misconstrue marketing. First, it’s not about doing “marketing” stuff like building a brand or splashing $$$ on expensive consultants for a brand identity. It’s about doing the basics, says famous a16z investor, Andrew Chen.
In his words:
“For [startups], it’s better to focus on the basics. Understand your users, deliver a great product to the market that grows by itself, build moats, and monetize in a user-aligned way. Grow your team, work with the best advisors/investors/etc. The basics. Do all that, and your product’s brand will take care of itself —and then you can layer on more brand marketing efforts to 10x the effect. Just don’t do the steps out of order!”
Second, startup growth isn’t also about having a marketing team. If a member of your founding team has marketing experience, great. But if not, hiring a marketing team in the early stages shouldn’t be misconstrued as the key to early startup success. It’s not!
For instance, the market intelligence platform, CB Insights, has collected startup failure postmortems since 2018. Not having a great brand or marketing team aren’t among the top reasons most startups fail.
The top three reasons?
Which brings me back to Neil Gandhi.
He’s bootstrapped and growing steadily, which means he’ll likely not run out of cash or rely on VCs to keep growing. He’s found market need for Paage, evident in acquiring over 2,100 paying customers in less than two years of founding.
He doesn’t have a marketing team. Yet, more popular competitors like Flowla, Aligned, Trumpet, Relayto, and others with marketing teams, haven’t outcompeted Paage.
Growing a Startup without Marketing: Neil’s Tricks
People can like you.
And if you’ve raised a pre-seed or seed round, it’s probably because VCs liked your startup idea. But in building your startup into a revenue-spinning company, you won’t take likeness to the bank.
The true measure of likeness for your B2B SaaS startup should be hard-earned dollars exchanged for access to your product.
A lot goes into achieving that.
Being a likable person is, of course, one of them. But in today’s increasingly crowded tech market, something else has become more crucial. And that’s articulating your product’s value well enough it convinces people —your ICPs— to pay for continued access to it.
How you do that is the first of Neil’s tricks.
1. Continuously Involving ICPs
Paage wasn’t the first startup to offer post-call sales enablement for SDRs and AEs. There were more mature, VC-backed tech companies before Neil started. Still, it didn’t stop him from nailing customer acquisition to the tune of over 2,100 buyers in under 2 years. If there's one thing I can attribute Neil's continued growth to, it has to be that...
He started with the basics.
And that was to seek help and guidance from the people he was building the product for from the very beginning:
This LinkedIn post was made about the time Neil started building Paage. As shown, he involved his ideal customer profile (ICP) early on. It appears that once he felt the problem and realized it was a problem worth solving, he sought the input of who he was solving for: Experienced AEs. Lance Hunter and Sam Arnold, whom Neil thanked for helping on his journey in the post above, are both experienced AEs with many years of SDR experience.
The importance of involving your ICPs early on, as Neil did, can’t be overstated. But you must do it continuously, too. One year after that first post, the one below shows Neil continues to involve his ICPs in developing and refining Paage:
And the reason is simple.
Founders often have an idea of their target market. But most fail to seek the input of their specific, ideal buyers within that market. As a result, they include the wrong people and miss out on the specific problems ideal buyers want to solve from the get go. You also miss out on why ICPs will be compelled to buy your product over competitors if you don’t prioritize in the beginning and continuously involve them. So knowing the who, what, and why of your startups ICPs is a hundred times more important than pulling marketing stunts. Because that’s the most important marketing stunt a startup can pull.
Says a 2x founder with successful exits:
Nikita Bier couldn’t say it better. Magic happens when you continuously know the who, what, and why of your target ICPs. Do this better than competitors, and you can tailor your messaging, content, and product story in ways that resonate more with them.
But doing this, as we’ve learned from our experience working with SaaS startups, goes beyond updating buyer persona docs. Personas may provide demographic intel that tells you who your ICPs are. But they are not so helpful for knowing what problems ICPs want to solve, which is where (JTBD) jobs-to-be-done comes in. JTBD, on their part, helps with what problems ICPs want to solve, but leaves out why they’ll be compelled to buy. To solve these, VEC Studio designed a framework merging both.
We call it ICP StoryScripts:
As illustrated, leveraging it, startup founders can continuously know the who, what, and why of their ICPs. Because after every encounter or chat with an ICP, you can group new findings into four buckets:
- Their beliefs
- Their internal pains
- Their external struggles
- And their desired outcomes.
All these changes.
How you talk about your product’s story and discuss the value of buying your software to ICPs should change, too. As you continuously involve ICPs, ICP StoryScripts can help you do just that.
On to Neil’s 2nd trick…
2. Sharing His Story, Where ICPs Hangout
Building a great product is no longer enough.
This is because existing and emerging products in every conceivable B2B SaaS niche all claim to be great. To win in today’s competitive market, one of the most important things founders must do is earn buyers’ mindshare. You do this by getting in front of your ICPs where they hang out. Before they even consider or are ready to buy your product. And by sharing stories that resonate.
I believe this is Neil’s superpower.
Every week, Neil is sharing his story —struggles, wins, point of view (PoV), and Paage’s unique value— where his ICPs hang out: LinkedIn.
These memes shared the value of using Paage:
Others are just him having fun.
And most, like the ones below, shares his wins and struggles building and growing Paage:
Notice what got the most engagement?
Across his 100s of LinkedIn posts I analyzed, the same pattern played out. People, including his ICPs, tend to engage more with posts where Neil talks about his wins and struggles building and selling Paage. Some of such posts, like the one above, directly help him acquire new customers:
Most startup founders don’t do this enough. Some ignore it completely. They bury their heads in building what they think is a greater product —more features, more workflows, etc., which is good. But building software is now the easy part. Competitors can clone your product, steal your ideas, and replicate your most coveted features in weeks or even days.
What they can’t steal?
Your story —wins, struggles, and PoV. It’s why, as you’re building your product, give equal footing to sharing your story and emphasizing your product’s unique value.
But Neil doesn’t stop there.
He also shares stories showing off how existing customers are using Paage. The importance of this cannot be overstretched. Your story —wins, struggles, and PoV— may endear potential customers to like and follow you. But liking and following you doesn’t automatically mean they’ll buy your product. What is most likely to compel them to buy your product is seeing how others like them are using your product.
From time to time, Neil shares these, too:
In essence, you can categorize the stories Neil is sharing to grow Paage into two main buckets. In one bucket, he’s sharing his story —PoV, wins, and struggles with building his product. In the other, he’s sharing the stories of how reps are using his product, Paage.
Neil’s success proves that, even without formal marketing, sharing stories can help startup founders stand out from the noise. This atypical of VEC Studio’s approach we call Product-Led Storytelling:
As illustrated, sharing stories that subtly showcase your product’s unique value (AKA, Product-Led Storytelling) has profound benefits. Because people are naturally drawn to relatable stories, this builds you an audience of fans, prospects, and advocates.
Some of the stories you share can also get picked up and amplified by reputable media organizations. By sharing his story, Neil is enjoying that, too:
Startup Growth Strategies Neil Can Further Leverage
Neil is a smart guy.
He has already latched onto two low-hanging fruits for scaling his solo growth efforts. The first was partnering with customers with a larger social media presence. This move was smart. Neil had close to 9k followers at this time of writing, which isn’t much. So brand ambassadors with tens of thousands of followers would increase Neil’s LinkedIn reach whenever they post about Paage.
One example is Gabi Sayah:
As of the time of this announcement, Gabi had well above 35k followers on LinkedIn, so you can imagine the increased reach.
Neil’s second smart move was hiring a Director of Sales, Peter Gunn, in December 2023 to lead and scale outbound sales. Based on my analysis of Paage’s growth strategy, cold outbound is the main channel Neil is using to grow the startup outside LinkedIn.
But Peter stayed at Paage for just 5 months:
In April 2024, he left Paage to join Consilio LLC. As with most attrition stories, many reasons may have caused this, including not hitting the growth outcomes Neil anticipated.
If my guess is correct, hiring a Director of Sales to scale outbound sales didn’t yield the expected growth outcomes for Paage. So what other growth strategies for startups could Neil and other founders use to drive even more growth without hiring an expensive GTM team?
We’ll discuss three of them.
1. Produce Elaborate Success Stories
On Paage’s site navbar is a link to examples:
It redirects to a collection of examples created with Paage. They give site visitors a peek into what they can create with Paage. These are the same examples Neil is sharing on LinkedIn shown earlier.
The problem?
They don’t show what the creators were able to achieve. For instance, what struggles were they having before using Paage? How exactly did they integrate Paage into their sales workflows to overcome those pains and achieve these results?
Producing elaborate success stories will address these questions. More importantly, it can help Neil drive more growth for Paage in two ways.
First, he can share and link to them in social posts for prospects interested in learning the fine details. This will, in turn, drive quality traffic to Paage’s website. This traffic can be deanonymized with a tool like RB2B, for instance, and leveraged to launch warm outbound.
Second, Neil can use these success stories to boost interest in his product and increase sales call show rates. Say an AE at a 50+ size company books an intro call. Before the call, sharing a success story of how an AE at a similar company used Paage to achieve a desired outcome can boost interest prospects’ show rates.
Jake Ferman at Attention proves this:
2. Invest in Original, Research-Driven Content
In the words of John Borini:
John isn’t alone. Other B2B content marketing veterans have hinted that content driven by original thinking and original research are the only ways left for startups to stand out from the content noise today.
And I couldn’t agree less.
Our work with several startups reveals the huge void in content backed by original thinking and research across major SaaS niches. Take the sales tech niche, which Paage operates in. Per the LinkedIn post below, the author shared loose data on SDR to AE success rate. In the comments, several people who engaged requested the data source, which the author couldn’t (or refused to) provide.
This led people who cared about this data to go as far as sharing outdated data on the topic:
This one, out of countless others, shows the void a sales startup like Paage could fill to earn PR, backlinks, and traffic by investing in original research. And I’ll argue that, with over 2,100 paying customers, Paage is in an advantageous position to fill such voids in two ways.
First, Neil can brainstorm relevant research topic ideas missing in the sales enablement niche. Second, he can dig into product usage data and survey his customers for insights worthy of compiling into published research. Gong, for instance, did this to power their content engine and drive enterprise growth in their early days. Hockeystack recently started doing the same to stand out with Hockeystack Labs.
The success of this, however, depends on the quality of ideas driving your research. You must prioritize ideas that will ultimately lead people who care about the research findings to appreciate the value of using your product, as you don’t want to generate junk traffic.
We help founders do this.
In our work with startups, we conduct secondary research and facilitate brainstorming sessions to identify original product storytelling and research topic ideas. We then sort, prioritize, and help them execute researched ideas with value scores between 2 and 3:
3. Build an Owned Audience Community
Neil has grown to about 9k LinkedIn followers.
Given he was nowhere close to that only a few years ago, his follower growth has been impressive. It contributed a lot, if not the most, in helping him grow Paage. However, LinkedIn, like other social media algorithms, is a blackbox. Organic reach can be up today and down tomorrow. You’re not sure your target audience will see your content on their feeds. Worse, you can lose your account and followers if deplatformed.
All these points to one fact. Social media isn’t a predictable way for startups to distribute content and predictably nurture relationships with prospects and customers. For instance, you can’t segment your LinkedIn followers into prospects and customers. This means you can’t organically deliver messages likely to resonate with everyone who follows your content.
Building an owned audience solves this:
As Dave Gerhardt rightly opined, building an owned audience is an excellent way to get prospects to trust you. Adam Schoenfeld, the CEO of Keyplay, is an excellent example. Building an owned newsletter audience enabled him to win over undecided tech buyers who probably wouldn’t have cared about his tool. The result of doing this?
Over $100k in ARR, even before launching publicly.
It’s why we encourage and help startups to build this from day one of working us. The reason is because an owned audience, like a newsletter, is a community of people who subscribed to join with their emails, giving you express permission to send more resources to their inbox.
You can segment this audience into existing customers, fans, and prospects. You can deliver the right content to the right audience segment more predictably and be more assured of them getting it. For instance, you can send existing customers content that nudges them to expand accounts and send fans and prospects content that continuously nurture them. Either way, these efforts help to unlock more growth and reach more people, as community members can easily share this newsletter.
But the question is, how do you build and grow an owned audience community your ICPs will value so much they’ll subscribe to?
You can start today by doing two things:
- Get a platform that makes it easy for them to subscribe. This could be newsletter platforms like Substack or others.
- Craft and distribute story-driven content that resonates with your ICPs. It should capture their who, what, and why.
The latter could be stories sharing your PoV, wins, or struggles with building your product. Neil is already using this to grow his LinkedIn followers and grow Paage. Give these same stories more polish, and they’ll be good for growing an owned newsletter audience. It could also be original research that ultimately provides data to justify using your product. Or elaborate success stories showing (not just telling) the unique value customers are unlocking with your product.
In a nutshell, Product-Led Storytelling:
Storytelling Powers Startup Growth
People, including your prospects, are inundated with marketing content. From overflowing email inboxes to noisy social media feeds, everyone is endlessly scanning for what’s worth their attention.
They’ll ignore sales pitches.
And scroll past bland marketing content.
But by sharing his story —PoV, wins, and struggles building his product, Neil earned buyers’ attention. And grew Paage to over 2,100 customers without a marketing team. His example proves storytelling remains the most potent tool for startups to earn prospects’ attention. Research by NeuroLeadership Institute found why:
“When we see or hear a story, the neurons in our brain fire in the same patterns as the [author’s], a process known as “neural coupling.”
You may be asking: How can I also use storytelling to power my startup growth? In an expert article for Forbes, Heather V. MacArthur shared how:
B2B SaaS startups trust VEC Studio for this.
We handle everything from content strategy to strategic planning for effective story-driven, product-led content execution. If you have a few more minutes, you can review how we do it through our unique, Product-Led Storytelling process.
Victor Eduoh
Founder @VEC Studio
Founder, Lead Strategist @VEC. Thinker, reader, words-crafter, and husband to Omosede. Besides crafting product-led stories, I love scouting and grooming rare marketing talents.
Crafted with ❤️ in Port Harcourt