5 Things I Learned At SaaStock

✋ Happy Friday SuperMarketers!

This week I spent a few days at SaaStock in Austin.

Good people, interesting talks, helpful insights.

Thinking back on it, there was one throughline that I picked up:

Marketing is getting harder.

Everyone is vying for attention.

Amidst a sea of content and noise.

Acquisition costs are increasing.

Competition as well.

However we’re also at an inflection point, obviously lead by AI.

Here are some of the takeaways:

1. Have Singular Clarity: Create a Singular Company-Wide Goal 

Crucial to establish a clear focus. 

David Politis, Founder of BetterCloud and a long track record of success, shared his experience with dwindling days of runway, before facing the potential end of his business. 

Backs against the wall, he focused the team on one number: how many new customers they could get in 6 months?

They needed 100.  

He had the number written in the office for everyone to see. Everyday. 

That focused the company’s efforts and avoided distraction. 

By creating a single, overarching metric and goal, you can align your team’s efforts and measure success effectively. 

This approach ensures that everyone in the organization is working towards the same objective, fostering a sense of unity and purpose.

A good place to start:

• One Ideal Customer Profile (very narrowly defined)

• One channel

• One offer

And from there, focus on one goal.

2. People Want To Learn At Their Own Pace: Product-Led Growth

Wes Bush, Founder of ProductLed, shared the strategies of Product-Led Growth (PLG): a go-to-market strategy where the product itself drives customer acquisition, expansion, and retention. 

More than simply granting access to the product for a self-guided tour, it’s a full framework that helps customers extract more value from the product in a self-serve manner. 

The result is a better customer experience, greater scalability, more stable and predictable revenue, and more efficient growth (revenue per employee). 

Ultimately it’s about creating leveraged growth, instead of acquiring customers in the “hands on” approach. 

3. SEO as Product Development

SEO expert Kevin Indig shared how best-in-class SaaS companies are leveraging SEO. 

Two key takeaways: 

1. Programmatic SEO is particularly effective, especially when it is built on proprietary data. He shared an example that used salary data as the premise of the content, and created programmatic pages built around that. It still requires fine-tuned prompts (GPT for Sheets is your tool of choice here) and manual fact-checking, but the scale delivered big results for him. 

2. SEO as Product: Kevin shared the example of G2, and how SEO efforts were full team efforts, including developers, product, UX design and SEOs. It became a  is not just a marketing function but an integral part of product development. This is somewhat related to Product Led Growth, where users want to experience and interact with the product (like a free tool or freemium access) and not simply consume static content.  

4. Zero Click Content: Add Value Where Your Customers Are

Amanda Natividad, VP of Marketing at SparkToro shared her strategies for Zero Click Content – content that is valuable in and of itself. 

It’s not enough to share links to your blog post and expect someone to follow the bread crumbs. 

This relates to social content – creating detailed, actionable social posts that are standalone value. 

But this approach also extends to email – that the emails themselves are crammed with value so no additional clicks are required. 

You are thus not optimizing for clicks or website visitors, because the content itself is valuable on its own.

This worked for Amanda and SparkToro, where the Zero Click Content strategy boosted their open rates from 26% to 40%….a big impact considering a list of 60k!

5. Marketing Is Getting Harder

Multiple Founders and CEOs of 8 and 9 figure ARR businesses shared the challenges and moments of uncertainty in their climb to stable growth.

Two examples here:

1. Adam Robinson pivoting Retention.com to a B2B play. Their original product was a high growth product, but held back by high churn. Leveraging his large audience on Linked In, he’s pivoted to RB2B to help guide the product development and initial beta customers. 

2. Flodesk Co-Founder Rebecca Shostak’s secret to scaling to $20M+ ARR as a bootstrapped company: stay very close to customers while building the product. She pre-sold her email product, and launched as a “barely Minimum Viable Product”. Yet good feedback loops to gauge exactly what to build, and how to solve customer problems, helped stand out from incumbents like Mailchimp. 

Those are just a few of the learnings from my trip to SaaStock this year. Until next week, stay Super, Marketers. 

Gen

PS: I came away with a bunch of photos of the speakers on stage. 

And now with ChatGPT, these can finally be valuable! 

Next time you’re at a conference, you can make use of those photos too – just upload them to ChatGPT, and ask for ChatGPT to transcribe the slides and make them directly applicable to your needs. 

Here’s a quick walkthrough of how I did it:

Bonus takeaway from SaaStock: don’t believe what you see on social media.

I “won” a pickleball tournament!

(reality: I just hit a ball over the net a few times in a fun post-talk activity, and someone handed me a trophy 😆 )