Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
I used to watch brilliant B2B software companies build incredible products only to struggle with customer acquisition. You know the story: amazing technology, passionate founders, but crickets when it came to actual users.
Three years ago, a B2B SaaS client came to me with this exact problem. They'd spent two years perfecting their product, raised decent seed funding, and had a handful of early customers who loved what they built. But growth had stalled at around 50 users, and they were burning through runway faster than they were acquiring customers.
The problem wasn't their product - it was their distribution strategy. Or rather, their complete lack of one.
Most B2B software companies fall into the same trap: they assume that building a great product is enough. But here's the uncomfortable truth I've learned working with dozens of SaaS startups: distribution beats product quality every single time.
In this playbook, you'll discover:
Why the "build it and they will come" approach kills B2B software companies
The distribution-first framework that helped my client 10x their user base in 6 months
Specific channel strategies that work for different B2B software niches
How to identify and test your highest-ROI distribution channels
The metrics that actually matter when building a sustainable growth engine
This isn't another generic growth hacking guide. This is a battle-tested approach based on real experiments with real B2B software companies. Let me show you exactly how we built a distribution machine that actually works.
Industry Reality
What every B2B software founder believes
Walk into any B2B software accelerator, and you'll hear the same advice repeated like gospel. The conventional wisdom goes something like this:
"Focus on product-market fit first, then worry about distribution."
Here's what most advisors and "growth experts" will tell you:
Perfect your product: Spend months (or years) building the "perfect" solution before thinking about customers
Find product-market fit: Keep iterating until you have a handful of customers who "can't live without" your product
Scale through word-of-mouth: Rely on organic growth and referrals from your early customers
Add marketing later: Once you have "proven" demand, layer on paid acquisition and content marketing
Hire a growth team: When revenue hits a certain threshold, bring in specialists to "optimize" what's already working
This approach exists because it sounds logical and safe. It's what worked for a handful of famous companies in the early 2000s, when competition was lower and organic discovery was easier.
But here's where this conventional wisdom falls apart in 2025: the market is too noisy, competition is too fierce, and customer attention is too fragmented for the "build first, distribute later" approach to work.
While you're perfecting your product in isolation, your competitors are building relationships with your target customers. While you're waiting for organic growth, they're owning the channels where your prospects spend their time.
The result? Even superior products lose to inferior ones that have better distribution. Every. Single. Time.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When this B2B SaaS client first approached me, they embodied everything wrong with the product-first mentality. They'd built a beautiful project management tool specifically for creative agencies - think Asana meets Figma, with workflow automation that actually understood how creative teams work.
The product was genuinely impressive. I tested it myself and immediately saw the value. Their early customers were raving about it in testimonials. The problem? They had 50 users after 18 months and were adding maybe 5-10 new users per month.
Their "distribution strategy" consisted of:
A basic website with some SEO blog posts
Hoping existing customers would refer new ones
Occasional posts on their personal LinkedIn profiles
A Product Hunt launch that got them 200 signups (90% of which churned within a week)
The founder kept saying: "If we just make the product better, growth will follow." They were spending 90% of their time on product development and 10% on everything else.
My first move was something that made them uncomfortable: I told them to stop all product development for 30 days and focus entirely on distribution. No new features, no UI improvements, no "just one more thing" that would supposedly unlock growth.
Instead, we needed to answer one critical question: Where are creative agency owners already spending their time, and how can we meet them there?
This was the beginning of our distribution-first experiment that would completely change how they thought about building a B2B software company.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Here's exactly what we did, step by step, to build a distribution engine that could scale:
Step 1: Channel Mapping and Hypothesis Building
Instead of guessing where our target customers might be, we did actual research. I had the founder spend two weeks interviewing their existing 50 users with one simple question: "Where do you go when you need to learn about new tools for your agency?"
The answers were eye-opening:
70% followed specific agency owners on LinkedIn
60% were in 2-3 Slack communities for agency owners
50% listened to podcasts during commutes
40% attended virtual events and webinars
Only 20% discovered tools through search engines
This data immediately shifted our entire approach. Instead of betting everything on SEO (which most B2B software companies default to), we focused on relationship-driven channels.
Step 2: The Personal Branding Distribution Engine
Remember how I mentioned that 70% of their target customers followed specific agency owners on LinkedIn? We turned the founder into one of those people.
But here's the key: we didn't talk about the product. Instead, the founder started sharing daily insights about creative agency operations - workflow tips, client management strategies, team productivity hacks. Real, actionable content that agency owners actually wanted to read.
The content strategy followed a simple formula:
Monday: Problem identification ("Why most agency workflows break at 10+ clients")
Wednesday: Solution deep-dive ("The 3-step process we use to onboard new clients in 24 hours")
Friday: Behind-the-scenes insights ("What we learned after analyzing 100+ agency workflows")
Step 3: Community Infiltration (The Right Way)
Instead of joining communities to pitch our product, we joined to provide value. The founder became the go-to person for workflow and project management questions in three key Slack communities.
His approach was simple: answer every question thoughtfully, share resources freely, and never pitch the product unless specifically asked. When people did ask about tools, he'd mention several options (including theirs) and explain the pros and cons of each.
Step 4: The Podcast Circuit Strategy
Since 50% of our target audience listened to podcasts, we systemized podcast outreach. But instead of pitching "our amazing tool," the founder positioned himself as an expert on creative agency operations.
We identified 20 podcasts that creative agency owners listened to and crafted personalized pitches around topics like "The Hidden Productivity Killers in Creative Agencies" or "Why Most Project Management Tools Fail Creative Teams."
The result? 8 podcast appearances in 3 months, each one reaching 500-2000 agency owners.
Step 5: The Webinar Partnership Loop
Instead of hosting our own webinars (which would have had tiny audiences), we partnered with established players in the agency ecosystem. Design tool companies, freelancer platforms, agency consultants - anyone who already had an audience of agency owners.
We offered to run free workshops on "Streamlining Creative Workflows" for their audiences. No sales pitches, just genuine value. At the end, we'd mention that we had a tool that could help implement what we'd taught, but the focus was always on the education.
Channel Research
Map where your customers actually spend time - not where you think they should be
Content Authority
Build expertise in your space first - the product comes second
Community Value
Join conversations to help not sell - credibility takes time to build
Partnership Leverage
Collaborate with established players who already own your audience
The transformation was remarkable. Within 6 months, we'd grown from 50 to 500 active users - a 10x increase. But more importantly, we'd built a sustainable growth engine that didn't rely on luck or viral moments.
Here's what the numbers looked like:
LinkedIn content: Generated 200+ qualified leads per month
Community engagement: 150+ new signups from Slack groups
Podcast appearances: Average of 25 new users per episode
Webinar partnerships: 300+ signups across 6 events
But the real success wasn't just in the numbers. We'd fundamentally changed how the company thought about growth. Instead of hoping customers would find them, they were actively building relationships in the spaces where their customers already gathered.
The customer acquisition cost dropped from an unsustainable $200+ (mostly from failed paid ads experiments) to a healthy $45. More importantly, the customers we acquired through distribution channels had much higher retention rates because they'd already been educated about the value before signing up.
Six months after implementing this distribution-first approach, they closed a Series A round - not because their product had dramatically improved, but because they'd proven they could acquire customers systematically and scale efficiently.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the seven most important lessons I learned from this distribution transformation:
1. Distribution channels are relationship channels. B2B software buyers don't make decisions in isolation. They get recommendations from people they trust, follow thought leaders in their space, and participate in communities. Your job is to become part of those trust networks.
2. Content creates context, not conversion. The goal of your content isn't to directly sell your product - it's to position your founder as the expert who understands the problem better than anyone else. The sales come naturally after that.
3. Start distribution on day one, not after product-market fit. Building distribution takes time. The relationships, the content library, the community reputation - none of this happens overnight. Start building these assets while you're building your product.
4. One channel done excellently beats five channels done poorly. We focused intensively on LinkedIn personal branding and community engagement rather than spreading ourselves thin across every possible channel.
5. Your customers' existing habits matter more than your growth preferences. We wanted to do SEO because it felt "scalable," but our customers weren't discovering tools through search. We had to meet them where they were, not where we wanted them to be.
6. Partnership distribution compounds faster than solo distribution. Collaborating with other companies that already served our target market gave us instant access to warm audiences instead of building from zero.
7. Measure leading indicators, not just revenue. We tracked relationship metrics (LinkedIn connection rate, community engagement, podcast booking rate) as leading indicators of future growth, not just lagging indicators like signups and revenue.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups, the key is to:
Identify where your target users get recommendations for tools
Build founder personal brand around problem expertise, not product features
Focus on relationship-driven channels over performance marketing
Start building distribution assets before you need them
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce businesses, adapt this by:
Finding where your customers discover new brands and products
Building brand authority through educational content about your niche
Partnering with complementary brands that share your target audience
Creating communities around your product category, not just your brand