Zapier grew to 10 million users in 12 years. It leveraged programmatic SEO to create thousands of landing pages, enhancing organic traffic and search result visibility. The brand's freemium pricing model lowered the barrier to entry, attracting a broad user base that gradually converted to paid plans. Strategic partnerships expanded its reach by tapping into the user bases of other SaaS companies.

James de Feu, the Head of Paid Ads at Zapier, shares his insights on the evolving landscape of advertising, emphasizing the importance of influencer marketing, storytelling, and the integration of AI in ad strategies. He believes that the traditional golden age of paid advertising has passed, and he is embracing this shift by incorporating influencer marketing into his team's strategy. De Feu has allocated a significant portion of his hypothetical advertising budget to influencers, indicating a strong belief in their effectiveness in reaching target audiences, particularly in the B2B space. De Feu acknowledges that while paid ads will continue to play a crucial role, their effectiveness has diminished over time. He suggests that marketers should not abandon paid advertising entirely but rather diversify their strategies to include influencers who resonate with their customer base. This approach reflects a broader trend where influencer marketing is no longer limited to consumer products but is becoming increasingly relevant for B2B brands as well. Storytelling is another key element that de Feu highlights as essential for successful marketing. He points out that marketers often become too focused on optimizing individual ad experiences, losing sight of the power of narrative. By engaging customers through storytelling—sharing their pain points and solutions—marketers can create more meaningful connections. De Feu emphasizes that storytelling has always been a vital aspect of marketing and will continue to be a significant advantage. As the advertising landscape evolves, de Feu stresses the necessity of adapting to changes, particularly with the rise of AI. He advocates for continuous testing and learning to leverage AI for personalizing ads and targeting audiences effectively. This shift towards high-intent, targeted content marks a departure from generic advertising approaches, allowing brands to connect more authentically with their consumers. In summary, de Feu's perspective underscores a transformative moment in advertising, where influencer marketing, storytelling, and AI-driven strategies are becoming increasingly important for brands looking to engage their audiences effectively.

AppSumo's revenue grew from $100K in 2010 to over $100M by 2021 through a mix of community-building, strategic leadership, and revenue diversification. Its key tactics included personalized email marketing, viral giveaways, and launching the AppSumo Marketplace, which allowed third-party vendors to list products. AppSumo Plus and Originals further expanded its revenue streams, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem.

Grammarly's marketing focused on SEO, content marketing, social media, and email in its early days. After receiving funding, it began to heavily invest in paid advertising, including branding and awareness campaigns, while also expanding its social media presence. The brand's freemium model, which creates a low-friction entry point, is a perfect example of product-led growth.

Joseph Lee, the founder of Supademo, an AI-powered product demo tool, shares growth tactics starting with a 4-step SaaS validation framework. The framework involves problem identification, focus definition, hypothesis development, and solution delivery. Supademo's initial growth relied on unscalable tactics, such as manual outreach and leveraging networks. Viral loops, accounting for 70% of Supademo's acquisition, and SEO, contributing 20-25% of signups, were crucial strategies. Sidecar products (complimentary free tools), co-marketing, and reverse trials also drove growth.

Calendly grew from an MVP product in 2013 to a company now valued at $3 billion. Early on, the company struggled to maintain a unique value proposition in a crowded market, monetize its users without harming customer satisfaction, and find the right level of customization to offer to users in different segments. Ultimately Calendly succeeded due to its freemium model, which helped spread organic word-of-mouth, as well as its personalized marketing to keep users engaged. Some of its successful marketing initiatives include webinars and educational content, discount code campaigns via Google Ads, and enabling its customers to embed Calendly in their own ads.

LowCode Agency's best performing growth channels have been referrals, its online calculator tool, and content marketing.

An analysis of 1,600 bootstrapped SaaS companies' SEO traffic and strategies driving their growth.

Kieran Flanagan, CMO of Zapier, shares the 10 current rules of marketing. He emphasizes the importance of picking the right channels for your products, as channels will never bend to fit with products. Today’s marketing channels favor individuals vs. brands. Creators likely will take 15-20% of what Series D and public companies spend on paid advertising today.

Amplitude managed to test, launch, and scale its self-service plan in just 2 years. The implementation was a journey fraught with challenges and valuable insights. However, despite the initial resistance, the company saw substantial and gradual improvements in the conversion rates. This article leans over key lessons, which include developing a pricing strategy, promoting teamwork across departments, and prioritizing customer retention in the evolving business model.

Klaviyo leveraged its brand and partnership network to reach nearly $700 million in revenue in a crowded marketing automation industry. Direct traffic is Klaviyo's leading traffic channel, in part because word of mouth has been part of the company's DNA since its early startup days. The brand has also driven the association between its name and marketing revenue attribution, with tactics like branded-metrics within the tool. Klaviyo has created a flywheel effect by partnering with companies like Shopify, WooCommerce, and marketing agencies.

Preply, an online language tutoring company, grew its monthly search traffic from 0.5M to 3.8M in 3 years using a multi-pronged SEO strategy. Its blog brings in 1.9M visits per month, the majority of which comes from top-of-funnel content that answers common questions of language learners. The site has a forum where language learners can ask questions, which brings in another 0.85M traffic per month. The brand brings in a significant amount of traffic to bottom-of-funnel content using programmatic SEO.

This article discusses how ActiveCampaign, a marketing automation SaaS company, reached $250M in ARR. Key growth strategies included experimenting with LinkedIn ad formats to drive engagement, activating customer advocates for social media campaigns, and verticalizing content hubs to better cater to specific industries. The company's initiatives, focused on conversion rate optimization, drove improvements to its bottom line.

Reddit's new Lead Generation Ads allow Redditors to provide advertisers with key information (such as name and email) without leaving the platform. During beta testing, advertisers across various industries saw improvements in lead quality and campaign performance. Zapier's integration allows advertisers to seamlessly send leads directly into their CRM of choice, automate lead segmentation and outreach processes, and more.

AppsFlyer, a leader in mobile attribution and marketing analytics, achieved a $2 billion valuation by building a great tool and backing it with a thoughtful marketing strategy. The brand knows how to create content worth sharing and has embraced a wide-net distribution strategy. AppsFlyer invests heavily in social media, including Facebook and Instagram, as well as developer content on Medium. Its website includes a glossary, which brings in significant unbranded content and backlinks. The brand has created in-depth resource content, which brings in less volume but higher value traffic.

Mobbin, a mobile and web design reference library, found that adding elements like feature tables and FAQs on the pricing page dramatically increased engagement and conversion rates for free plans, but in some scenarios reduced paid plan sales. Its team believed that this extra content was a distraction for the segment of users who had already decided to buy. Mobbin ran a test that routed higher-intent users (those who clicked on a ‘Get Pro' link) to a slimmed down version of the plan pricing, without the free option. This resulted in an 18% increase in transactions.

The 'Don't Make Me Think' growth lever focuses on reducing cognitive load. Grammarly increased upgrade rates by 10-20% through personalized pricing based on onboarding data, while Blinkist boosted free trial sign-ups by 20% with clearer trial terms. These examples show how minimizing friction and guiding users intuitively can enhance feature adoption, speed up product value realization, and improve retention, creating a self-reinforcing growth loop.

Folk CRM's co-founder Simo Lemhandez reveals the company's path to 5X year-on-year growth and 100,000 users. Folk's team created substantial early interest with a waitlist before building the product then spent 18 months developing a robust solution before beta testing. By manually onboarding early users, they gained valuable insights that informed their iterative pricing strategy, which involved doubling prices every 6 months.

Thought leadership content on LinkedIn can be a cost-efficient way to grow your business. Warmly, an outreach tool, used the “build in public” tactic, leading to 8X growth in inbound demo requests. Air, a creative operations platform, created a physical book on creative ops and also leaned into influencer marketing. June.so, a product analytics platform, used product research and insights to generate organic engagement and signups.

Loom was acquired for $975M by Atlassian and had been growing >500% YoY. It achieved this by designing an effective growth loop — a mechanism where inputs generate some output, and outputs can be reinvested as inputs. As new users join, they create videos and share them with others, which prompts new signups and restarts the loop. This enables UGC, leverages social sharing to build trust, and turns existing users into acquisition channels. This post briefly covers growth loops from companies like Netflix, Dropbox, and Airtable.

Wiz, a cybersecurity company, used a broad marketing mix to grow site traffic from 226K in November 2023 to just under 390K as of April 2024 — a 72% increase over just 6 months. The company invests in brand building with a strong visual identity and uses field marketing and paid search to get its identity in front of people. Organic search accounts for 26% of site traffic, bolstered by content marketing on its Wiz Academy subfolder and a strong backlink profile. The brand also uses social selling on X, LinkedIn, and Reddit to drive roughly 25,000 monthly visits.

This article breaks down how the co-founders of StageTimer.io, a remote-controlled countdown timer app, monetized a simple timer app. It stresses the importance of challenging assumptions about customer needs and pricing strategies, such as using personalized approaches like event-based pricing. Reddit was an invaluable testing ground for capturing new users and supplementing SEO efforts.

Two targeted, high-conversion GTM tactics allowed a SaaS brand to grow to $700k ARR in just 4 months. The brand created a custom, personalized landing page for each account and individual when conducting cold outreach on LinkedIn. The team also attended in-person conferences that they knew their ICP would attend and prepared personalized ABM decks in advance based on the exhibitor list.

Sherpany, a meeting management platform, found in user research that its target audience saw the product as “just another meeting solution.” To better communicate its unique value proposition, the company repurposed some of its expert content into a Digital Transformation strategy guide and offered it as a lead magnet. Sherpany used this to test a completely new lead funnel, which resulted in a 58% increase in platform demo requests.

GuitarTricks uses popular YouTube videos and blog posts to draw in potential customers, offering a free membership level to capture and engage visitors. This strategy allows it to upsell within its member area and through email campaigns, providing a taste of paid content to encourage upgrades. Retargeting ads and discounts further drive conversions, making its marketing funnel highly efficient.

Zeneduc increased sales by 45 times in nine months through targeted email marketing, It improved open rates from 12% to 34% and click-through rates from 0.5% to 4%. The success was driven by segmentation, personalized content, and automated email sequences. As a byproduct, website traffic grew from 10 to 300 daily visitors, further solidifying Zeneduc's online presence.

NerdWallet, a prominent player in the financial services sector, relies heavily on search engine optimization (SEO) to drive traffic, with over 70% of its traffic being unpaid. This reliance on organic search traffic makes the company particularly vulnerable to fluctuations in SEO performance, which can directly impact its revenue and stock value. The company's recent challenges highlight the precarious nature of its SEO strategy, especially in light of algorithm changes from Google that can significantly affect visibility and traffic. In a recent analysis, it was noted that NerdWallet experienced a substantial loss of approximately 6 million in organic traffic within a three-month period, translating to a 23.6% decline. This drop was attributed to "unexpected headwinds," as described by the CEO in the financial report. The timing of this decline coincided with a major Google core update, which aimed to penalize sites that manipulated search results. Speculation arose that changes in how Google displays credit card information in search results could further exacerbate traffic losses for NerdWallet. The analysis identified three categories of competitors that benefited from NerdWallet's traffic decline. First, direct competitors with similar business models, such as Bankrate and Forbes, gained traffic due to slight ranking improvements. Second, more specialized sites that focus on niche topics outperformed NerdWallet in areas outside its core offerings. Lastly, large financial brands, including NerdWallet's partners, also captured traffic, raising questions about the implications for consumers and the competitive landscape. To address the traffic loss, NerdWallet implemented several strategies. They updated and overhauled content on pages that had lost significant traffic, focusing on enhancing their expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) signals. Additionally, when content updates did not yield results, they relocated pages to new directories, effectively giving them a fresh start while retaining existing link equity. The analysis also revealed that NerdWallet competes for over 144,000 keywords with its partners, which presents both opportunities and challenges. While this partnership strategy can diversify traffic sources, it also places pressure on NerdWallet to maintain high SEO performance without losing ground to its partners. Interestingly, the data showed that a small percentage of pages—1.2%—accounted for over half of NerdWallet's traffic, illustrating the Pareto principle in action. A standout piece of content, a blog post about making money, consistently outperformed other pages, demonstrating the potential for SEO to generate passive traffic over time. Despite the challenges, NerdWallet's approach to content management, including pruning underperforming pages and focusing on high-traffic content, has proven effective. The company has also localized its content for the UK market through strategic acquisitions, which has led to significant traffic growth. In conclusion, while NerdWallet faces ongoing challenges in the competitive SEO landscape, its ability to adapt and implement effective strategies has allowed it to maintain a strong revenue stream. The insights gained from analyzing NerdWallet's SEO practices provide valuable lessons for other businesses navigating the complexities of search engine optimization.

Fullfunnel.io created a new account-based marketing strategy to reach new clients via LinkedIn. This involved deep customer research, identifying specific prospects, and then developing the content and marketing material to reach those individuals. The team began with a small test to validate the channel. It resulted in 5 valuable connections, re-engagement with one sales opportunity, and $375K for the client.

Adobe's SEO strategy, driven by content featuring high-quality images, useful tools, custom experiences, and expert opinions, generates nearly 80 million in monthly traffic. Its site ranks for commercially-aligned keywords, such as "infographic examples", and maximizes the traffic value with a custom page template featuring built-in CTAs. Adobe uses page design to improve the user experience and truly meet search intent, unlike some other SEO heavyweights. The white space on each side and the text spacing also make the blog content much easier to skim and digest than other competing sites.

This guide explores the role of pricing as a direct lever for revenue in SaaS. It highlights strategies like targeting high gross margins and establishing clear price positioning. The guide examines pricing models from ChatGPT's $20/month flat-rate plan to Stripe's transaction-based pricing and covers tactics such as tiered pricing and the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter to determine optimal price points. It also recommends continuous experimentation and iteration, sharing examples of how companies like Hubspot adjust pricing based on customer value and willingness to pay.