Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Last year, I watched a client obsess over creating "viral content" for months. They spent weeks crafting what they thought would be the perfect LinkedIn post, convinced it would explode and transform their SaaS overnight. The result? 47 likes and crickets.
Meanwhile, another client was quietly building what I call "sustainable buzz" - and their revenue grew 300% in 6 months without a single viral moment. The difference? They understood that real brand buzz isn't about viral moments - it's about consistent, valuable interactions with your market.
Most founders chase the viral dream because it feels like a shortcut. One big moment, massive exposure, instant success. But here's what I've learned after working with dozens of startups: viral growth is like winning the lottery, while sustainable buzz is like building a profitable business.
In this playbook, I'll share the exact framework I developed after studying both viral failures and sustainable successes. You'll learn:
Why the "viral first" approach kills most startups before they get started
The 4-layer buzz system that actually builds lasting brand awareness
How to turn your expertise into a content engine that compounds over time
Real examples from SaaS acquisition strategies that worked without going viral
The metrics that actually matter for sustainable growth
This isn't about getting lucky once. It's about building a system that generates consistent attention for your brand, month after month.
Industry reality
What every startup founder believes about brand building
The startup world is obsessed with virality. Scroll through any entrepreneurship forum and you'll see the same advice repeated endlessly:
"Create viral content" - Because one big hit will solve all your problems
"Post daily on all platforms" - More content equals more buzz, right?
"Follow viral trends" - Jump on whatever's hot today
"Focus on engagement metrics" - Likes and shares are the ultimate success indicator
"Be everywhere at once" - Omnichannel presence from day one
This conventional wisdom exists because viral success stories get all the attention. We hear about the founder whose LinkedIn post got 100K views, but we never hear about the 10,000 founders whose posts died in obscurity that same day.
The problem with viral-first thinking is that it optimizes for the wrong outcome. Viral content optimizes for attention, not for business results. You end up creating content that gets shared but doesn't build your business, attract your ideal customers, or establish your expertise.
Even worse, chasing virality leads to what I call "content desperation" - you start copying whatever worked for someone else, losing your unique voice in the process. Your brand becomes a poor imitation of trending topics instead of a distinct expert voice in your field.
Most startups burn out after 3-6 months of this approach, convinced that "content marketing doesn't work" when the reality is they were playing the wrong game entirely.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I started working with B2B SaaS clients, I fell into the same viral trap. I was convinced that if we could just create the perfect piece of content, it would explode across LinkedIn and solve all our awareness problems overnight.
The wake-up call came from a client whose founder spent months crafting what he thought would be viral LinkedIn content. We're talking about detailed market research, competitor analysis, trend identification - the works. He was absolutely convinced his posts about "AI disruption in fintech" would break the internet.
The results were brutal. Post after post averaged 20-30 engagements. His content was getting lost in a sea of identical "thought leadership" posts from every other fintech founder saying essentially the same thing. After three months, we had generated zero qualified leads from content, and his team was questioning whether content marketing worked at all.
That's when I discovered something interesting while analyzing our most successful client projects. The companies generating the most sustainable buzz weren't the ones trying to go viral - they were the ones documenting their actual work.
I noticed this pattern across multiple clients: the founder of a project management SaaS was getting incredible engagement not from generic productivity tips, but from sharing specific case studies of how he'd helped clients reduce their meeting time by 40%. An ecommerce automation client was building a massive following by documenting her actual experiments with AI content automation.
The lightbulb moment: instead of trying to create viral content about their industry, they were creating valuable content from their industry expertise. They weren't trying to entertain everyone - they were trying to help their specific ideal customers solve specific problems.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
After that realization, I completely rebuilt my approach to brand buzz generation. Instead of chasing viral moments, I developed what I call the "Expertise Documentation System" - a framework that turns your actual work into a content engine that compounds over time.
Layer 1: Document Real Work
The foundation is simple: instead of creating content about your industry, create content from your work. Every client project, every experiment, every success and failure becomes content material. This isn't about sharing client secrets - it's about extracting the lessons and frameworks from your actual experience.
For my SaaS clients, this meant turning their product development decisions into case studies. When one client decided to change their onboarding flow, instead of just implementing it quietly, we documented the entire process: the problem they identified, the solutions they considered, the metrics they tracked, and the results they achieved.
Layer 2: The "I Did This, Here's What Happened" Framework
Every piece of content follows the same structure: Context → Action → Result → Lesson. This creates what I call "uncopiable content" because it's based on your specific experience, not generic industry knowledge that anyone could research and regurgitate.
One client used this framework to document their free trial optimization experiments. Instead of writing generic posts about "how to improve trial conversion," they shared: "We tested removing the credit card requirement from our trial signup. Here's what happened to our conversion rates, and why we ultimately rolled it back." That single post generated more qualified leads than six months of generic content.
Layer 3: Cross-Pollinate Industries
The most engaging content comes from applying lessons from one industry to another. I started encouraging clients to look outside their immediate sector for inspiration and then share how they adapted those insights.
A B2B SaaS client started applying customer retention tactics from subscription boxes to their software onboarding. The content documenting this experiment - "What Birchbox Taught Me About SaaS Onboarding" - became their most shared piece of content ever and established them as an innovative thinker in their space.
Layer 4: Build the Feedback Loop
The final layer is systematically capturing and responding to the conversations your content generates. Every comment, every question, every debate becomes fuel for future content. This creates a flywheel effect where your content improves based on real audience feedback.
We implemented this by creating "response content" - turning common questions and objections into full articles or posts. When someone challenged a client's approach in the comments, instead of just responding there, we'd create a detailed follow-up post exploring both sides of the argument.
Documentation System
Turn every project into content material by extracting frameworks and lessons from actual client work rather than theoretical industry knowledge.
Cross-Industry Insights
Apply successful tactics from other industries to your field, creating unique perspectives that can't be found elsewhere in your sector.
Uncopiable Content
Use the "I Did This, Here's What Happened" framework to create content based on specific experiences that competitors can't replicate.
Feedback Flywheel
Transform audience questions and objections into new content topics, creating a self-improving content system that gets better over time.
The results of this approach were dramatically different from viral-chasing strategies. Instead of hoping for one big moment, we built consistent, compound growth.
Across multiple clients implementing this system, we saw consistent patterns: engagement rates 3-5x higher than industry benchmarks, but more importantly, qualified lead generation that actually converted to customers. One client went from 50 monthly qualified leads to 300+ within six months, with content being their primary acquisition channel.
The compound effect was the real game-changer. Unlike viral content that spikes and dies, expertise-based content continued generating value months after publication. Content pieces from month 1 were still driving leads in month 6, creating a library of evergreen assets.
Perhaps most importantly, this approach positioned clients as genuine experts rather than content creators. They started getting invited to speak at conferences, being quoted in industry publications, and attracting partnership opportunities - none of which happens from viral content that's forgotten in a week.
The time investment was also more sustainable. Instead of spending 20+ hours per week trying to create viral content, clients spent 3-5 hours documenting work they were already doing.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons I learned from building sustainable brand buzz versus chasing viral moments:
Virality is a byproduct, not a strategy - When you focus on creating genuinely valuable content, viral moments happen naturally. But they're never the goal.
Your actual work is more interesting than your opinions - People can get industry opinions anywhere. What they can't get anywhere else is the specific experience of working on problems similar to theirs.
Smaller, engaged audiences convert better - 1,000 people who regularly engage with your content are worth more than 100,000 who scroll past.
Consistency beats perfection - Publishing valuable content regularly builds more buzz than sporadic "perfect" pieces.
Cross-industry insights create differentiation - The most memorable content comes from unexpected connections between different fields.
Distribution follows content quality - Great content finds its audience through organic sharing and search, reducing reliance on algorithmic luck.
Brand buzz compounds when it's expertise-based - Unlike viral content that burns bright and dies, expertise builds on itself over time.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups, focus on documenting your product decisions and customer development process:
Share user research insights and how they shaped features
Document A/B tests and onboarding experiments
Explain technical decisions in non-technical terms
Show behind-the-scenes product development process
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce businesses, leverage your customer data and operational insights:
Share seasonal trends and buying pattern discoveries
Document supply chain and logistics innovations
Reveal customer research and persona development
Show conversion optimization experiments and results