Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Last year, I worked with a B2B SaaS client that had built what seemed like the perfect product. Clean interface, solid features, happy beta users. But they were burning through their marketing budget with terrible conversion rates across every channel they tried.
The problem wasn't their product—it was that they were treating their SaaS like an e-commerce product, pushing it through channels that demanded instant decisions when their solution required trust and relationship building.
This experience taught me something most growth guides won't tell you: your product isn't broken if it doesn't work on paid ads. Sometimes, you just need to find the channel where your product's strengths become advantages, not obstacles.
In this playbook, you'll learn:
Why most businesses optimize for the wrong channel metrics
The real reason Facebook Ads fail for complex products (it's not your targeting)
My framework for finding channels where your product naturally thrives
How to test channel fit without burning your budget
Why distribution strategy beats product perfection every time
This isn't another "growth hacking" guide. It's a practical framework based on watching businesses fail by forcing square pegs into round holes—and the systematic approach I developed to fix it.
Industry Reality
What every growth team gets wrong about channel selection
Most businesses approach channel selection like they're ordering from a menu. Google Ads, Facebook Ads, SEO, LinkedIn—pick your favorites and start optimizing. The growth industry has trained us to believe that any product can succeed on any channel with the right "growth hacks."
Here's what the conventional wisdom looks like:
Test everything: Run experiments across multiple channels simultaneously
Optimize relentlessly: If a channel isn't working, it's a targeting or creative problem
Scale what works: Double down on channels showing positive ROAS
Blame the product: If paid ads don't work, your product-market fit is broken
Follow the playbooks: Copy what worked for other "successful" companies
This approach exists because it's easier to sell. Agencies can package it into neat proposals, consultants can create step-by-step frameworks, and everyone can feel productive running A/B tests on ad creative.
But here's where this falls apart: it treats all products and all channels as if they operate under the same physics. Facebook Ads demands instant decisions. SEO rewards patient discovery. LinkedIn favors thought leadership. Each channel has its own rules, timeline, and user behavior patterns.
The real breakthrough isn't optimizing your way into channel success—it's understanding which channels naturally align with how your customers actually want to discover and evaluate your solution. That's product-channel fit, and it's what most growth teams miss entirely.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I started working with this B2B SaaS client, they were stuck in the exact trap I just described. They'd been running Facebook Ads for six months with a 2.5 ROAS, which looked decent on paper but was bleeding money once you factored in their actual margins and customer acquisition costs.
The client had built a sophisticated project management platform for creative agencies. Not a simple tool—something that required teams to change their entire workflow. But they were treating it like a one-click purchase decision.
Their first instinct was to hire me to "fix their landing pages." Classic symptom thinking. They assumed the problem was conversion optimization when the real issue was much deeper.
After analyzing their customer journey, I discovered something telling: their best customers weren't coming through paid ads at all. They were coming through the founder's personal LinkedIn content, industry conferences, and word-of-mouth referrals. These customers had much higher lifetime values and significantly lower churn rates.
The paid ad customers? They'd sign up for trials, maybe use the product once, then disappear. The attribution looked good in their dashboard, but the unit economics were terrible. We were optimizing for the wrong success metric.
Here's what clicked: We were forcing a relationship-based product through a transaction-based channel. Facebook Ads work great for products where people can understand the value proposition in 30 seconds and make buying decisions quickly. But this SaaS required trust, onboarding, team buy-in, and workflow changes. That takes time and relationship building—something paid ads simply can't provide.
The breakthrough came when I suggested we completely flip our approach: instead of trying to make their product work better on Facebook, what if we found channels where their product's complexity became an advantage rather than a barrier?
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Once I understood the real problem, I developed a systematic approach to test product-channel fit rather than just optimizing conversion rates. Here's the exact framework I used:
Step 1: Customer Journey Reality Check
First, I mapped out how their best customers actually discovered and adopted the product. I interviewed 20 of their highest-value customers and found a clear pattern: none of them had made quick decisions. They'd all followed the founder's content for weeks or months before even trying the product.
This told me we needed channels that supported longer consideration cycles, not ones that pushed for immediate action.
Step 2: Channel Physics Analysis
I analyzed each marketing channel like it had its own physics laws:
Facebook Ads: Optimized for quick decisions, visual appeal, impulse purchases
LinkedIn Content: Supports thought leadership, relationship building, industry credibility
SEO: Captures problem-aware users actively seeking solutions
Industry Events: Allows for deep conversations and relationship building
Step 3: The Channel Fit Test
Instead of running traditional A/B tests, I designed experiments to test natural fit:
Created educational LinkedIn content from the founder's experience
Built detailed use-case pages targeting specific workflow problems
Developed a content strategy that demonstrated expertise rather than pushed features
Shifted from "sign up now" to "learn how other agencies solve this"
Step 4: Metrics That Actually Matter
We stopped optimizing for vanity metrics and started tracking:
Trial-to-paid conversion rates by traffic source
Customer lifetime value by acquisition channel
Time-to-value for different user segments
Engagement depth during trial periods
The results were immediate and dramatic. LinkedIn content generated fewer total signups than Facebook Ads, but the trial-to-paid conversion rate was 4x higher. More importantly, these customers stuck around and actually used the product.
Key Discovery
Channel physics matter more than optimization tactics. Each channel rewards different behaviors.
Natural Fit Wins
Stop trying to force your product through popular channels. Find where it naturally belongs.
Attribution Lies
Your dashboard metrics might show success while your business bleeds money from wrong channels.
Relationship vs Transaction
Complex products need relationship-building channels, not transaction-focused ones.
The transformation was dramatic once we aligned with natural channel fit instead of fighting against it:
LinkedIn Content Strategy Results:
Trial-to-paid conversion improved from 12% to 48%
Customer acquisition cost dropped by 60%
Average customer lifetime value increased 3.2x
Churn rate decreased from 15% to 4% monthly
But here's what surprised me most: the total volume of leads actually decreased, but revenue grew 180%. We were getting fewer people into the funnel, but the right people.
The founder's LinkedIn posts about project management challenges started getting 10K+ views regularly. Industry professionals began reaching out directly, often saying they'd been following his insights for months before deciding to try the product.
Six months later, they discontinued their Facebook Ads entirely and reallocated that budget to content creation and industry events. Their cost per acquisition dropped to under $200 while their average customer value increased to over $12,000 annually.
The business transformed from a struggling startup burning cash on paid ads to a profitable company with a waitlist of prospects who already understood and wanted their solution.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experience taught me five critical lessons about product-channel fit that completely changed how I approach growth strategies:
1. Channel fit beats optimization every time. You can't A/B test your way out of fundamental channel misalignment. If your product doesn't match the channel's natural behavior patterns, no amount of creative optimization will fix it.
2. Question your attribution model. Just because your analytics show conversions from a channel doesn't mean that channel is actually driving profitable growth. Look at the full customer journey and lifetime value, not just first-touch attribution.
3. Complexity can be an advantage. Instead of trying to simplify your product for quick-decision channels, find channels where complexity and depth are valued. Sometimes being "hard to understand" filters for better customers.
4. Follow your best customers backward. Your highest-value customers are already telling you which channels work. Map their discovery journey and double down on those patterns instead of chasing new channels.
5. Different products need different physics. E-commerce thrives on impulse and convenience. B2B SaaS needs trust and relationship building. Don't copy someone else's channel strategy without understanding why it worked for their specific product type.
If I were starting over with this client, I would have begun with customer interviews instead of conversion optimization. Understanding the natural purchase behavior should always come before channel selection.
The biggest mistake is assuming that popular channels (Facebook, Google Ads) are automatically the right channels for your business. Sometimes the best distribution strategy is the one your competitors are ignoring because it doesn't scale quickly or look impressive in growth reports.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups, product-channel fit is crucial because most SaaS products require relationship building:
Start with founder-led content on LinkedIn before paid channels
Focus on trial-to-paid conversion rates, not just signup volume
Build use-case pages that demonstrate expertise rather than features
Test organic channels first to understand natural customer behavior
For your Ecommerce store
E-commerce stores have different channel physics but the same principles apply:
Match your product complexity to channel decision speed
Simple products work on Facebook Ads; complex catalogs need SEO
Track customer lifetime value by channel, not just conversion rates
Consider your catalog size when choosing between paid and organic strategies