The Inbound Engineering System That Took Our SaaS From $0 to $60K MRR in 53 Days

0:00Two weeks ago, I published a post on X that got $130,000 views and generated over $70,000 of revenue in like eight days. The post was about inbound engineering. If you don't know what that is, it's because I made it up. It went viral because it describes a marketing strategy that every founder and CMO needs, but few people know how to do it well. And while I made up the name Inbound Engineering, it is a real system. It is a system that we use to grow our own companies and our clients companies over the past 12 months and we've had incredible success. We have experienced astronomical growth and I am

0:33going to teach you the system in this video. So for example, we launched one SAS called mentions and we grew that from 0 to 20k of MR in 30 days. And then we launched a second SAS called Cleo and we grew that from 0 to 60K of MR in 53 days. And that actually hit an a million-dollar run rate in less than five months. And so in this video, I'm going to show you our exact inbound engineering system that we use to grow those companies and our clients companies. And if you're wondering who I am, I'm Rob Hoffman. I am the CEO and founder of Contact and Inbound

1:07Engineering. All right, let's get into it. Okay, so before we jump in and start going through the system, reminder, the system does work. Here are some results that we got for our clients. So you can see these testimonials from Tyler the CEO and co-founder of Beehive, Mike at Brands Meet Creators, Mark at LaunchBoom. You can just pause the screen, you can read these beautiful testimonials on your own about what we did to help grow their companies. We have a ton of other testimonials that you can see on our website. And then these are the companies that I mentioned. These are our own companies that we grew. So this is a system that

1:41we have used over and over again and it just works. So at a high level there are kind of three pillars of inbound engineering and this is obviously a simplification but that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to make it very simple. There's a lot of nuance but we don't have time to get into everything. So let's just talk about the 8020 and try to make it as clear and simple as possible. So the three pillars we have inbound content you have lead progression content and then you have AI search content. And these are some examples of these three pillars. So inbound content the goal is to get

2:15attention and these are types of content such as LinkedIn post, expost, YouTube video. So organic content on LinkedIn X YouTube. Then you have lead progression content. [music] This is more middle of funnel. So if you think about this type of content is meant to convert that attention into calls/demos and this would be webinars, newsletters,

2:40community lead magnets and warm calling. Warm calling is very interesting. We will talk about that later. I think this is probably one of the top way to get leads and customers today and not a lot of people are doing it or talking about it. I'm going to talk about that later. And there's AI search. And AI search, funny enough, can [music] actually be like while here I kind of have it classified as bottom of funnel, AI search can actually be top of funnel so people can discover you through search and it can also be middle of funnel. But for the sake of simplicity, I want to

3:13talk about AI search as a way of pushing prospects over the final decision-making hump. And so this would be things like landing pages, blogs, and also funny enough, LinkedIn articles, and YouTube videos, which are working really well right now for AI search. And I'll show you why this type of content helps to push people over the edge. I have an example here where basically if people discover you with this content, they're going to go and search you up. And you basically want AI, whether it's Google's AI overviews or whether it is somebody searching in chat GBT, you want the AI

3:45to sell your product or service for you. And there's so much trust in these platforms and the conversion rates are insane. So we will come back to that. But these are the three pillars super high level. And now let's just talk high level about this actual system. And so I'm going to go through this and then I'm going to come down and I'm going to show you examples of each one of these stages so that you can see actual realworld examples of how I created this content with my team to grow my

4:14companies and my clients companies. Okay. So everything starts with hub content and the interesting thing is that hub content it's typically long form so YouTube web pages so like you know SEO pages like landing pages blogs etc or it can be articles and so it's called a hub and spoke model where you have a long form YouTube video that you can use to create smaller clips or maybe you have a long form blog post that you use to create shorter LinkedIn posts or exposts and so you always want to know what is your hub content the hub content is typically the most valued dense long- form just most useful content where if

4:51you have that you can break it down and distribute it in smaller bite-sized chunks across these platforms which as we all know it like distribution and and just showing up on these platforms as much as possible is also important and so the purpose of this type of content is to get attention this is where it all starts but then you need to capture this attention and typically this is done with lead magnets so now that you've captured this attention with lead magnets. Somebody signs up for your lead magnet and they are going to land on a thank you page and then get put into an email flow. From there, they are

5:25immediately pushed on your thank you page to your newsletter, a community, you know, webinar, or an application, or to book a call. And if they don't do any of these things from the thank you page, which I'll show you an example of in a moment, then you're going to try to convince them to sign up for any one of these things from your email flows. And then from there, basically, they're going to be getting on a call or applying to work with you. And if they are qualified, that is when you do a discovery call. This is more if you're like a services business. And you have

5:59your email flows and SMS flows between the discovery call and the proposal call. And then you close the client. And let's say that you are a SAS product. Well, it's going to look a little bit different. You're going to probably have somebody coming from lead magnet to one of these three things down here. And they're just going to from here become a customer. And I'll give you examples of that in a moment. So that is very high level what this system is. And it is, you know, it starts with attracting attention, capturing attention, nurturing and converting that attention into demos and or calls. Then you

6:35qualify somebody and you close them. That is in short what the system is. And notice that this is an inbound system. So what I'm not going to be talking about today is paid partnerships, affiliate, paid ads, cold outreach. That's not what I'm talking about today. Those have their place, but this is our inbound engineering system, which I believe is the most powerful marketing system on the planet right now. So, now let's go through this one more time, but a little bit slower. And let's just talk

7:00about examples of each of these things. So, this was a piece of content that I posted onto X and it got a lot of views. And the purpose of this particular post was to get people to sign up for our webinar and to basically sell our AI search services. And so what happens? You create content. I knew this content would do well. And I can explain probably in a later video what storytelling ingredients I use to make this post perform so well. So the purpose of this post was to get attention. So remember what we talked about right here and what we are talking about right here. So what do we do with

7:37that attention? Well, we want to then capture that attention. And so how do we capture that attention? So this is the actual post. I got a ton of views. And you'll notice that it was a thread. And in the thread, I'm trying to give value. I'm trying to show exactly how you achieve the results that I'm talking about here, which is that we were able to outrank six VC back competitors in AI search and SEO in under 48 hours with our bootstrap SAS [music] and chat GBT and AIO's actively shit-talking them and recommending us. How do we do it? And I give a specific step-by-step examples of

8:11how you do that in this post. And then notice right here in the middle near the end of the post, I say, "Speaking of, do you want these results?" Well, we're going to show you in our live insider session. And notice I don't say webinar because webinar sounds boring. We say live insider session. Sign up below while there are still seats using urgency. And I plugged our webinar. So now people go and they sign up for the webinar. And I finish the rest of the tweet here. And we had like 50 signups from that post. the post, it attracted the attention right here. The webinar that I plugged [music] in the middle of

8:47the post in a kind of organic sort of way that captured attention and then we actually do our webinar. So, number one, whoever signs up, they also get put into an email flow and that email flow warms them up before the webinar and there's also an email flow after the webinar, which is actually where a lot of the sales from a webinar comes from. Funny enough, it's in the emails, not in the actual webinar itself. But that's a whole other topic. And then we had I think there was like 500 people come to this webinar and on the webinar then we push people to book a call and they just

9:19go down this funnel until they are a closed client. So that is a real example of this system in action. It's actually kind of simple. I'm going to show you a few other examples. So there is also this post here. This one is for a software company that I recently exited. And this is a good example because if you are a software founder watching this, you're probably wondering how this applies to you. Well, here's how. So,

9:42this was a post that I did on LinkedIn. And this was just a very top offunnel inbound piece of content where the purpose of the content is just to get attention and we achieved that goal. We got like 100,000 impressions. Again, I can speak about how we were able to do that in a later video, but for now, just stick with me. Then if you read the post down here at the bottom, we're channeling the attention into our lead magnet and that gets people to sign up to our webinar. And so RSVP here for free. This is lead progression content, middle of funnel. We're capturing emails

10:16and we're incentivizing people to come to a webinar. And then here's the interesting part is that then we create AI search content. And the purpose of this is because you have a lot of people who are seeing this post and they are learning about Cleo for the first time. So what are they going to do? They're going to go up and they're going to search Cleo. They're going to be like, well, I've heard about Stanley because Stanley has raised a bunch of money and does a ton of marketing. Cleo is kind of the same thing. Like what separates them from Stanley? And that's where we are

10:42able to rank here using AI search. And we are, if you notice, just absolutely crushing this first page of Google. We're all over the AI overviews. We're here, here, here, like everywhere. And AI is actually selling us. It's saying we're comprehensive. We cost less than the competitor. And it even says like they lack native scheduling or publishing tools. So, it's kind of like talking about our competitors for us. So, that's an example of how you you create attention, you capture attention, and then when people go to do their research, you have AI do the selling for you. And this is the beauty of AI search is that everybody's going to go do their

11:21research before buying from you. And so you want whether it's AI overviews or chat GBT or cloud of perplexity, you want the AI to sell your product for you. And people have so much trust in these LLMs that if the AI tells them to buy, they're probably going to do it. Third example right here. This is really interesting because I used inbound engineering to launch our inbound engineering offer. And here's an example. So I did this post. I knew this post would go viral partially because if you coin a term that half of the world's going to love and half is going to hate and some people are going to be like

11:56that's amazing and some people are going to be like oh that's stupid. It's going to go viral. So I knew this was going to get attention and this post itself I actually funny enough just sent people to book a call. So that was probably less of a sophisticated funnel motion. So if you actually look here, I started ranking for inbound engineer almost immediately because you can rank really easily for AI search with LinkedIn

12:20content, LinkedIn content and articles. And so you can see if you search inbound engineer, I'm coming up here. I think I'm coming up right here. And I'm coming up right here. So that is legitimizing my offer. And that is helping to show people that yes, this is a legitimate thing. Inbound engineering is real. It's powerful. and Rob's the guy. So, you're

12:41going to want want to work with him. Okay, so those are some good realworld examples of this inbound engineering system in action. So, we talked about attract, we talked about capture, but I also want to show you this little part down here cuz this is also very interesting. This is actually a lead magnet that we use for my company

13:01contact, which is an AI search agency. And one lead magnet that we have is this AI search checklist. So, doesn't this look nice? But the interesting thing is that if you were to sign up for this, let's say that we put in our information here and you go get the checklist. Well, then your lead is going to be pushed to this thank you page. This is where they actually get the checklist. But then they're also pushed to an application or I may even just change this for somebody to be able to book a call with us if

13:28they press this button right here. depending on how much friction you want to add into the sales process, which again is a whole other topic. But on that thank you page, that's where now you can put people into this email flow and you also can push people to a call or an application, which is what we're doing right now. Or you could actually have instead of pushing them to that call or the application, you could have down here, by the way, we're doing a webinar on AI search. So why don't you go ahead and sign up for that or whatever it is like join our AI search

13:59community and you're just pushing people further down the funnel and you're nurturing that warm traffic. So now that we have captured these folks emails and their phone numbers that's where we want to nurture and convert them and some of the best ways of nurturing and converting would be these three things right here. newsletter, community, webinar and we for our SAS companies would often do the webinar funnel and we did this also we still do this for our AI search agency and so I really like webinar and I also think that by the way newsletter and community can kind of like go to a webinar probably easier to

14:36go like this so the funnel can kind of look like that and then once you get someone on on a webinar you can also push them back to your application and book a call and then they either become a customer if you're a SAS or you run a one or two call close sales process with them if you are a service. But one more thing that I want to talk about that I mentioned at the beginning of the video I think is a really interesting opportunity that not a lot of people are doing that I think will crush it and we are doing this for ourselves and we're

15:01doing this for our inbound engineering clients and it is warm calling. So, when you have people who have signed up for your lead magnet and now you have their phone number and their emails, really interesting thing you can do, and it's funny because it's not anything new per se, but it's kind of not a lot of people

15:18are doing it. I don't really know why. You can do warm calling, which is just a variation of cold calling, which basically means if you publish a lead magnet and you have 100, 500, a,000 people sign up for that lead magnet and now you have their phone numbers. Imagine just having a setter who is getting these folks on the phone within like 5 minutes or less. And these are people who contrary to cold outreach and cold calling, these are people who they know you, they trust you, they like your content, and you can have them on the phone in like 5 minutes. And what we're doing is that when we get them on the

15:54phone, it's all valueled. So, when you get them on the phone, you might actually say, "Hey, we have a webinar that we're doing, or I have this other lead magnet or resource, and do you want to set up a time where I can walk you through it and through how to use it?" And so, I'm a big believer in value first always, but every touch point you can get with a customer is going to make it more likely that they buy your product or service. Granted, this is more for services. However, this could work if you are a high ticket software company. And so this is something that

16:25we're running. We are setting this up for our clients. And so if you want to work with us, by the way, I'll leave a call link in the description. And also, if you are interested in getting access to this teal draw board, then I'm also going to put this in the description. So that is basically it. That is the inbound engineering system. Of course, this is a very simplified version cuz I wanted to fit this all in into like a 20 30 minute video. And what I'm going to do is in future videos I'm going to dive into each of these areas a little bit more in depth. For example, okay, like

16:58yeah, obviously it would be great to put out content that gets 100,000 views. How do you do that? Well, I can tell you how to do that, but I will need a full video to explain all the copyrightiting strategies and storytelling techniques and ingredients that we use to do that. So, go ahead and subscribe to my channel because I'm going to be putting out a video on that soon. But in the meantime, if you have any questions about this system, feel free to drop a comment

17:21because I'm going to read all of them. I'm going to personally respond to all of them and I hope that that was valuable for you. So, thank you for watching. and I will see you in the next