Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
OK, so here's something that's going to sound crazy: after years of helping SaaS startups grow, I've completely stopped recommending the "paid ads first" approach that every growth guru pushes.
You know that feeling when you're burning through ad budget faster than you can say "CAC"? When your Facebook ads are getting clicks but nobody's converting to paid plans? I've been there with dozens of clients, and honestly, it was a wake-up call.
The problem isn't that paid ads don't work - it's that most SaaS founders are treating their product like an e-commerce store when it's actually a trust-based service. That changes everything.
After working with a B2B SaaS client who was struggling with this exact issue, I discovered something counterintuitive: their best-converting users weren't coming from their expensive Facebook campaigns. They were coming from the founder's LinkedIn content. Not the company page - the founder's personal posts.
In this playbook, you'll learn:
Why the "paid first" mentality fails for most SaaS products
The hidden growth engine that attribution tools miss completely
How to build an organic foundation that makes paid ads actually work
My framework for deciding when to go paid vs organic based on your product
The distribution strategy that's working in 2025 (hint: it's not what you think)
Ready to stop throwing money at ads that don't convert? Let's dive into what actually works for SaaS growth in today's market.
Industry Reality
What every SaaS founder gets told about growth
Walk into any SaaS accelerator or growth mastermind, and you'll hear the same playbook repeated like gospel:
"Start with paid ads to validate your market, then scale with more paid ads."
The conventional wisdom goes something like this:
Build your MVP
Set up Facebook and Google Ads
Test different audiences until you find one that converts
Scale the winning campaigns
Maybe add some content marketing on the side
This approach makes sense on paper. Paid ads give you immediate feedback, precise targeting, and the ability to scale quickly once you find what works. Plus, organic growth takes time, and most startups are racing against their runway.
The problem? This playbook treats SaaS like e-commerce. It assumes people are ready to buy after seeing one ad, like they're shopping for sneakers on Amazon. But here's the thing: your SaaS product isn't a pair of sneakers.
When someone clicks on your Facebook ad, you're not just asking them to buy something - you're asking them to integrate your solution into their daily workflow. You're asking them to trust you with their business processes. You're asking them to stick around long enough to experience that "aha moment" that makes your product valuable.
That's a completely different ask, and it requires a completely different approach to growth. The paid-first strategy falls apart because it's optimized for transactions, not relationships.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
Let me tell you about a B2B SaaS client that completely changed how I think about growth strategies. When I started working with them, their setup looked solid on paper: multiple ad campaigns running, decent traffic coming in, trial signups happening regularly.
But something was broken in their conversion funnel. They were spending serious money on Facebook and Google ads, getting people to sign up for trials, but hardly anyone was converting to paid plans. The numbers were brutal - they were burning through budget faster than they could acquire paying customers.
My first instinct was typical consultant mode: optimize the ads, improve the landing pages, fix the onboarding flow. You know, all the standard stuff. But when I dug deeper into their analytics, I found something that didn't make sense.
A huge chunk of their "direct" traffic was converting at much higher rates than their paid traffic. Like, significantly higher. These weren't people typing in the URL randomly - they were showing up with clear intent and converting to paid plans.
Here's where it gets interesting: after some investigation, we discovered that most of these high-converting "direct" users were actually coming from the founder's personal branding on LinkedIn. Not the company's LinkedIn page, not sponsored posts - just the founder sharing insights about the industry and occasionally mentioning their solution.
People were following his content for weeks or months, building trust over time, then typing the URL directly when they were ready to buy. The attribution tools were calling it "direct traffic," but it was actually the result of a months-long nurture process.
Meanwhile, the paid ads were bringing in cold traffic that had never heard of the founder, didn't trust the brand, and abandoned the trial after day one. We were optimizing for the wrong metrics and missing the real growth engine entirely.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Once I understood what was actually driving conversions, we completely restructured their growth approach. Instead of fighting against the nature of SaaS sales, we leaned into it.
The Trust-First Framework:
First, we shifted the founder's content strategy. Instead of generic "thought leadership" posts, we focused on documenting actual work. Every week, he'd share a specific challenge he'd solved for a client, a mistake he'd made, or a contrarian take on the industry. No fluff, just real insights from real experience.
The key was making it about education, not promotion. 90% of his content had nothing to do with their product. But it established him as someone who genuinely understood the problems their prospects were facing.
Second, we created what I call "educational content that demonstrates expertise." Instead of pushing features, we started creating content that showed how to solve the problems their product solved - even if people used other tools. Counterintuitive? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.
Third, we mapped out the actual customer journey. People weren't going from "see ad" to "buy product." They were going from "discover founder" to "follow content" to "build trust" to "evaluate solution" to "become customer." This process took months, not days.
Fourth, we repositioned paid ads as amplification, not acquisition. Instead of trying to convert cold traffic directly, we used ads to promote the most valuable educational content. The goal wasn't immediate conversions - it was getting people into the trust-building funnel.
The organic foundation became the trust engine, and paid became the distribution engine. This is completely backwards from what most SaaS companies do, but it actually aligns with how B2B buyers make decisions.
We also implemented a content distribution strategy across multiple channels. The same insights that worked on LinkedIn were repurposed for blog posts, Twitter threads, and industry newsletters. But everything flowed back to building that relationship with the founder's personal brand.
Trust Building
Content that demonstrates expertise without pitching products creates stronger prospects than any ad copy
Attribution Blindness
Your analytics are lying about where your best customers actually come from - dig deeper into "direct" traffic
Channel Alignment
Match your growth strategy to your product type: transactional products can go paid-first, relationship products need organic foundation
Amplification Strategy
Use paid ads to amplify your best organic content, not to convert cold traffic directly
The results were dramatic, but they took time to show up - which is exactly what you'd expect from a relationship-based approach.
Within six months, the quality of trial signups improved significantly. People who came through the new funnel were using the product actively during their trial period, asking better questions during sales calls, and converting to paid plans at much higher rates.
The founder's personal brand became a legitimate asset. His content was getting shared by prospects, mentioned in industry discussions, and used by the sales team during demos. The company went from being "another SaaS tool" to being "the company founded by that expert who shares valuable insights."
Most importantly, they built a sustainable growth engine that didn't depend entirely on ad spend. When market conditions changed or ad costs increased, they weren't scrambling to find new channels - they had an organic foundation that kept generating qualified prospects.
The paid ads started working better too, because we were amplifying content that resonated with people who already trusted the brand. Instead of interrupting strangers, we were reaching people who wanted to hear from us.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key insights from this experience:
SaaS ≠ E-commerce: Stop treating your software like a transactional product. You're selling ongoing relationships, not one-time purchases.
Attribution is broken: Your analytics are probably wrong about where your best customers come from. "Direct" traffic often represents the end of a long nurture process.
Trust comes before trials: Cold traffic needs weeks or months of exposure before they're ready to evaluate your product seriously.
Personal brands beat company brands: People buy from people, especially in B2B. Your founder's personal brand is often your strongest asset.
Content that teaches converts: Educational content that solves problems (without pitching) builds stronger prospects than any sales copy.
Organic enables paid: A strong organic foundation makes paid ads more effective, not the other way around.
Quality over quantity: Better to have 100 engaged prospects than 1000 tire-kickers.
The biggest mistake I see is founders trying to shortcut the trust-building process with better ad targeting or more aggressive sales tactics. But trust can't be hacked - it has to be earned through consistent value delivery 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 building organic foundations first:
Establish founder's personal brand through valuable content
Create educational resources that demonstrate expertise
Use paid ads to amplify organic content, not replace it
Track engagement metrics alongside conversion metrics
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores, paid-first can work better:
Transactional products suit immediate conversion tactics
Combine paid ads with trust signals like reviews and testimonials
Use retargeting to nurture prospects over multiple touchpoints
Build email lists for relationship marketing at scale