# 8 B2B Marketing Strategies That Got My Startup to $10 Million (and 1 that FAILED)

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9clA64pWhA
Duration: 21 min
Language: English
Words: 4458
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/Q9clA64pWhA

---

[0:00] finding marketing strategies that actually move the needle when you're trying to grow a B2B startup can feel impossibly hard it's really easy to waste a ton of money and time chasing channels that don't work so in this video I'm chatting with Greg Deno about nine of the almost 20 strategies I list in the SAS Playbook he and his team used these strategies to drive growth at time doctor to over 10 million in annual recurring Revenue we talked nitty-gritty about how he applied the strategies and at what stage of the business as well as get his advice on what he sees working today and where you should start if

[0:34] you're early stage if you stick around till the end Greg tells us about the one strategy that didn't work and that he would avoid at all cost unless you're swimming in cash Greg thanks for joining me on the channel so just to set the table a bit can you tell us about time doctor and the role you played there yeah so I was uh the third marketing person in at the company and uh the funny thing about that was um I didn't really have a role other than get users and uh it was it was honestly kind of the most fun I've had in my entire

[1:06] career like you it was like we had no money we had no limits it was just the only limit was everything we had to do had to be free because we couldn't spend anything and um yeah so it's just go get users and that was it and it was a lot of it was a blast it's so it sounds like you tried a lot of marketing strategies and you know I have a I have a book called The SAS Playbook and I have 20 marketing strategies that uh that I include in there and I tend to bucket them or categorize them based on three factors like the speed how how fast they

[1:36] work like so like cold outbound is often faster than SEO for example and there's the the cost whether it's purely Financial or the time it takes Y and then scalability because some things like a product launch you can only do once versus SEO and content is like highly highly scalable yep so with that framework in mine I'd love to walk through your list of approaches that you tried and then talk briefly about you know the tactics and and maybe put those three factors uh the three vectors over those so talk us through the first one like where did you get started we stumbled into uh SEO uh we kind of wrote

[2:10] one of those like traditional alternative posts that you see like uh toggle was one of our key competitors so we wrote like toggle Alternatives and um within a couple of weeks it was pretty quick we were like oh wow this post got us a user and then it was like oh this post got us two users because we ranked it higher it ranked higher and so on and so forth so we just basically kept rewriting these Alternatives posts we didn't know any better like they weren't all that exciting they weren't like going to Brand us as thought leaders or anything but they just printed money so

[2:40] every time we'd write one we'd get two three users a month like if you're if you're at like let's say a thousand users like getting one user is probably you're you're not going to care but if you're at like 10 20 30 users getting that one user is probably fast for you so like it it takes weeks it does not take long at all if you if you are able to like kind of write it well structure it well well build a couple links through guest posting or whatever and then um yeah you could get start getting a couple users in weeks that's really nice so the speed is a lot shorter than

[3:09] someone might think and it sounds like the cost wasn't tremendous because it was time but it was time to write time to write the post and time to write a couple guest posts and that's it yep right right and the scalability would be high on that yeah we wrote We if you go on the time Dr blog there's 50 60 of these posts because they're just they're just money makers yep and so talk about how I believe that then LED you into link building yeah so we would hire link Builders as fast as possible because we knew that every time uh we hired a link Builder it meant our contact was going

[3:43] to rank faster so you like we had like a flywheel like we didn't call it a flywheel then because this was like 2015 and I don't know if the term flywheel was a big thing then but like our flywheel would be like higher link Builder get users higher link Builder and that was like our that was our flywheel for a while um you know and then it was like get users hire content writer hire link Builder get more users and like that was it for and we did that for for years and you at some point you had six or eight people who just building links that's crazy yeah and and

[4:15] so because and they were each I I believe you you talked about like each link Builder could get 10 or 15 links per month so it sounds very time intensive if you had full-time people only you know I say only in my head link building is is a lot more complicated than it used to to be right yes it is now for sure it was like when we started it wasn't as complicated but it got complic more and more complicated over time and the link Builders had kpis that they had to reach not only in terms of like number quantity of links but also quality of links so we had like metrics

[4:45] to determine how how good is this link so like it was very much a well-run organization just within that because we just valued it so highly when I left in 2021 it was 400,000 visitors a month yeah unbelievable so obviously massively scal if we go back to my you know speed cost and scalability massively scalable when I left we were spending 40,000 a month in SEO content got it but you had built up to that yeah yeah for sure we started at one article a month or one article a week and then with two to three links a month like and then it built up just built it built up I think

[5:19] of it like so I have this thing called the stairstep method of Entrepreneurship where you kind of build one product and then you take the revenue from that to build the next to build the next in essence you were stair stepping your way up in terms of marketing spend yeah for sure absolutely yep so that was content and Link building uh you also I know did a lot of integration Partnerships can you tell us like how that worked so we would do a couple things we would do the Integrations with that had to be there so for instance we had to do a a base camp integration because our users

[5:52] expected a base camp integration but if you do a base camp integration they actually don't really care like if I were to email Jason freed if like like hey we did a base camp integration You' be like oh that's so cute thanks whatever but then like you if you could play this more strategically and you do an integration with a company who's about your size so we did one with a a company called workflow Max a great company but at the time they were about our size we actually worked with them with their marketing team with their Dev team in order to build one a more

[6:21] comprehensive integration but two a just a a like a marketing launch with them and um so we did both um workflow Max in terms of like do people actually use the time doctor workflow Max maybe maybe not I don't know but we got a lot of users because of that integration and because of that partnership got it that's perfect so I I talk a lot about uh I coin this phrase integration marketing which is not that it's a pretty generic phrase but it's the idea your Integrations not only can serve your existing customers but they can be marketable events and I first saw Ruben Gomez doing this with bid sketch

[6:58] years ago he's now the found a Sewell and the first time I did integration marketing myself I believe was either 2011 or 2012 and it was with a sasap I had called Hit tail and I I came to the exact same conclusion you did is that if integration partner was a lot larger they didn't care and if they were approximately the same and they could be smaller they could be a little bigger right a little smaller a little bigger within like 20% like they were usually pretty in terms of user growth not not necessarily mrr but in terms of like users they they cared yeah for sure

[7:31] right and and the idea is you want to get mentioned on their integration page or an app Marketplace whatever they have get a try to get a guest post on their site C try to do a joint announcement via email maybe a webinar these yeah so we would so we would do all that we would do webinar we would do a email blast to like we would email like workflow Max would email about time doctor we'd email about workflow Max we be on the workflow Max integration page that which would drive some signups uh but you know not too many but you know it was it was enough at the time where

[8:01] it was like this is kind of moving the needle and we just kind of stacked these little winds over and over and over again and that's the way to think about it I've done a lot of integration marketing because with my last startup drip I think we did 30 something 35 Integrations in the span of about 18 months and a big part of that was that it became kind of a flywheel for us and everything you said that you asked for we did in addition we would asked for like there was you know some people have inap announcements of like here's a new feature we'd ask for that we'd ask for a

[8:28] KB article and we would reciprocate you know it's anything that the two of you can reciprocate we weren't smart enough to ask for inapp announcements and things like that at the time we just yeah it was we didn't know better and you also mentioned webinars in there as a potential with integration Partners did you use those solely within Integrations or did you do webinars with just thirdparty folks as well who might have a complimentary audience we both uh we did them a lot with third parties with complimentary audiences yeah it kind of goes into like more partnership so people go to like somebody like tral or something like that and we would do

[9:02] an email blast with tral like again they we they they had a complimentary remote work audience uh but we didn't have to build an integration which was nice because the dev team was happy with that uh less work for them but we would just go to them and be like hey do you want to do this email blast to your audience we'll do it to our audience and then hey do you want to do a webinar this month with them and they be like yeah sure the the email blast work great let's do the webinar and so yeah we would just combine all these like again stack these

[9:29] just Partnerships up yeah I actually group in in the SAS Playbook I group Integrations and Partnerships as kind of one marketing approach because a partnership doesn't need an integration but if you add the integration on but it's all it's it's about the JV aspect of it right the joint venture for sure and I think one of the biggest mistakes is that that I see SAS companies make is like they do the first part they'll like they'll do the integration partnership and then the end the relationship but like that's just the start of the relationship and like three four you could could rehash these Partnerships three every 3 to six months whatever

[10:03] your Cadence is is up to you and the partner but it's that's just like once you build the integration that's just the start of it or once you do that first email blast that's just a start you just keep Recycling and and keep making friends with these people like it's extremely scalable because you're just as they're growing and you're growing you guys grow together you don't have to constantly keep finding new partners you just find 10 15 20 of them and and you're good for years I know I mean we're kind of hinting at leveraging other people's audiences right or other companies audiences and and doing these

[10:36] joint ventures and I know that in addition to webinars that you did uh you leveraged them through email Partnerships and podcasts you want to talk through how those two worked uh so the email Partnerships are we would just say very quickly like hey train just email about time doctor we'll email about trainual and that's it and then we just write quick Copy email and and they send it to their users we'll send it to their users and you can get like a significant number of Trials um I don't want to say I forgot if I don't want to say 10% cuz that sounds way high but I

[11:06] forgot the exact but we would get like 5% of their users to become trials now whether they converted into clients or users is uh paid members is a different story um but we would get a significant number of Trials very quickly and then with with podcasts uh so we had Liam uh our our co-founder CMO he was on a podcast like once a day for nine months it was it was crazy stupid and uh he burnt out but what we saw was what we saw was brand mentions going up um I don't know how that relates to oh we increased user our user base by x i I don't think that was

[11:44] there's any real metric there that we could have attested to it but we did see like you know more people searching for time doctor as as he was doing more more podcasts yeah podcast can be hard to attribute but I've seen similar results especially here's the thing it's hard with SAS because especially if you have a high volume SAS you don't see the you know the the bump I see it more with again I sell I have written four books and some of my books like the start small stay small that's 15 years old it only it sells 100 200 copies a month right now so if there's a blip I see it

[12:17] I mean even if there's like a 20 you know if a podcast comes out I'll see oh I sold like 30 copies of a book that day SAS playbooks a little harder cuz it's still still like 1,200 a month so it's the blip has to be pretty hefty but podcast being mentioned on YouTube channels uh I'll see a viral tweet go you know recommending my book or whatever it's a little easier to see but there just cuz you can't attribute it doesn't mean it's not moving the needle and this is a hard thing as a marketer it's just it's just so hard yeah it's hard to it's hard to yeah it's just

[12:45] really hard to understand like how it works in terms of like the mechanism that says you know is somebody listening to Lam about remote work and being or you about your book and be like oh let's go find the SAS play book I don't know but but you know they've probably seen emails about it and then they've seen other people tweet about it and they've probably heard it someplace else and then it's like oh you know what I hear this book all the time let's go buy it or I hear this app about this app all the time let's see what it's about right and that's the balance as a marketer is

[13:15] like I'm much more of a direct response marketer I think you are as well where I want to see results and be able to attribute as much as I can it's just harder and harder these days and so I take a balance with like look I'm not going to do all brand marketing like Coca-Cola and bror right it's not going to work for startups like us for bootstrappers but I also can't be so hung up on attribution that everything needs to be 100% attributed or I don't do it and this is an example of of one of those so in a minute I want to talk

[13:42] about where you would start today if you were starting over from scratch but before we do that I want to cover the last two strategies which are among the most common that I see Founders leveraging and these are paid ads and cold Outreach or outbound sales talk us through how you use those all right So Paid ads just they're hard they're a lot harder than you think and it's not because you can't get users to sign up the hard part is um getting the what are the cool kids calling it a row ads today the hard part is getting return on ad spend yeah return on ad spend uh instead

[14:14] of Roi but like in a in back getting that payback in in a short amount of time so so if you're if you're getting your payback in six or eight months as a bootstrapped entrepreneur you're you're going to be out of business very quickly um you just can't keep spending ads so uh the hard part is getting that payback to be two months maybe three at the most your my Ruth th for True bootstrappers is 2 to four months and if they have if they're kind of tiny seat funded they have a bit of money in the bank let's say low six figures 100 200 Grand I say

[14:46] you can get out to about six or seven that's where I got with with drip cuz I knew our numbers so well but you're right if you're bootstrapped you're trying to get six or eight months of payback oo it wrecks that wrecks your cash flow so we didn't go hardcore in ads until we we were 78 million ARR like we we were playing around with it uh in the low seven figures but until we got to like but we didn't turn them on until 78 because we need we knew we were going to spend half a million dollars just to get that just to dial in that spend to

[15:15] get to two three like two three months um it's that's how it just takes a while with the between the creative and the the paying Google and Facebook and all that uh just an expensive uh Venture uh the other thing we did try we took thing from uh what's what's the click is it clickfunnels so we tried to do the thing where it was like oh we're going to run ads to a course and then upsell the product after that uh we did not get that to work I don't I think you should try it but it was just something that we didn't get to work we found the turn to

[15:45] be super high uh from those folks so we we abandon that but um but yeah so it's definitely something where where will offset to spend as um for you yeah we've had a tiny SE company try that and also not able to make it work similar results the people who were buying the course were like super aspirational Y like and then but we want the people with a minimum of 10 uh companies with a minimum of like five to 10 seats right and so they're less likely to buy a course exactly those those folks are not buying a course like the CEO founder of a five even a five person company just

[16:18] doesn't have time to sit through a two-hour course sure and so talk to me about cold Outreach outbound sales did that come later that was doing 10 to 20 to maybe even 40 seats per company to 2 to 400 seats which is a very different it's a very different type of company with like account managers and things like that we didn't have that infrastructure and the reason is like like if your your ACV isn't let's say 30,000 a year 20,000 a year at minimum I don't know if it's worth doing outbound sales um just as you scale like as a Founder as an early seed yeah absolutely

[16:53] do outbound sales and do the Outreach but as you get uh bigger uh I think your ACV has to be in that 20 30,000 just for it to make sense uh long sales Cycles things like that so yeah so that's so we so that came after and then we had an entire organization around that sdrs to closers and things like that so so Greg if you were going to start over today and build a sass from scratch you were early stage what marketing approach would you start with I would be doing alternative posts I would 10 to 15 of them and then the second then as soon as

[17:27] I had 10 20 users I would be doing Partnerships just email partnership over and over again I mentioned in the opening that there was one strategy Greg said he would avoid at all costs before we get to that I want to invite you to join microcom for connect Greg originally posted this list of marketing strategies in our marketing channel within microcom connect microcom connect has more than 7,000 highly motivated bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SAS Founders connect is private it's vetted it's highly engaged and highly moderated if you want Community with other amazing bootstrapped Founders apply to join at micron.com connect so Greg in your post you

[18:08] mentioned one strategy that you were never able to make profitable what was it uh conferences and you mean attending conferences or hosting no hosting a conference putting on a conference uh so we got this brilliant idea to run a conference called Running remote it was at one point and I don't know if it still is but it was at one point the world's biggest remote work conference um I mean we would get 5 600 people to come to go to like Bali for a remote work conference it was it was really cool the problem is is uh as you know conferences are they're not a marketing

[18:43] channel they're an entirely separate business and we didn't know that we were we we we had no idea what we were getting into um so so we put this on WE it's still going on it's still running and so it's while it's not profitable in itself it does it does leverage it does other things however like if you're thinking about oh let's start this conference and we're going to you know talk about our bootstrap stas and everything like that um yeah don't do that it's a lot of work at least wait until you have yeah at least wait until you have 10 million in revenue and you

[19:16] could hire literally an event planner with an event planning team and yeah that's how to do it it's yes for sure like it it's it should not be founder co-founder Le in any way shape or form right and now now in terms of conferences did you also try attending other conferences whether as a sponsor or as an attendee and did you feel like those maybe were more worth it we spoke at a lot of conferences Liam spoke at a couple conferences I spoke at a couple conferences a couple other folks spoke at conferences so um I don't know if that was worth it again maybe maybe we

[19:47] met some people it was probably worth it to uh build the Partnerships up like like if we spoke do I think we got a bum do do I think we added 10 new users I don't know but if we spoke at something and then we met people and then we were like hey let's do a let's do a webinar together that's where it was worth it for sure yeah Greg it's been amazing having you thanks for coming on and sharing all your knowledge thanks so much where can people find you on the internet where they can keep up with what you're doing yeah so um I spend

[20:16] most of my time on LinkedIn these days uh Greg Dao um and content copy.com is my site awesome thanks again for joining me thank you so much Rob thanks again to Greg for joining me if you enjoyed this please please like And subscribe Greg shared that SEO and content marketing were the foundation of time doctor's success and I've seen many startups go this route often Founders have a hard time deciding which type of content to create first so I made a whole video about where to get started with your content marketing strategy you should give it a look and we'll see you next time

---

About this transcript
Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com).
ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts.
Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools
How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt