Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Last month, a SaaS founder asked me this exact question: "Who can help me publicize my startup?" He'd just raised a small seed round and was drowning in pitches from PR agencies, growth marketers, and "SaaS publicity experts" all promising overnight success.
The harsh reality? Most of these "experts" will burn through your budget faster than you can say "thought leadership." After working with dozens of B2B SaaS clients and watching the same patterns repeat, I've learned that the best publicity for SaaS startups rarely comes from traditional publicists.
Here's what actually works in 2025: distribution beats everything. Your founder's personal brand on LinkedIn will outperform any PR agency. Building in the right communities generates more qualified leads than press releases. And creating genuinely useful content trumps expensive publicity campaigns every single time.
In this playbook, you'll discover:
Why traditional PR agencies fail SaaS startups (and waste your money)
The 4 types of people who can actually help your SaaS gain visibility
My proven framework for founder-led content that drives real business results
How to build distribution channels that compound over time
Real examples from B2B SaaS companies that cracked organic growth
Ready to stop throwing money at publicity and start building real distribution? Let's dive into what actually works for SaaS growth in today's market.
Industry Reality
The traditional publicity playbook that burns startup budgets
Walk into any startup accelerator and you'll hear the same advice repeated like gospel: "You need to get your name out there." "Hire a PR agency." "Get featured in TechCrunch." "Build thought leadership."
The traditional SaaS publicity playbook looks something like this:
Hire a PR agency - Pay $5K-15K monthly for press releases and media outreach
Chase press coverage - Spend months trying to get featured in tech publications
Speaking engagements - Apply to conferences and hope for acceptance
Content marketing agency - Outsource blog writing and social media management
Paid advertising - Throw money at LinkedIn ads and Google campaigns
This approach exists because it's the path of least resistance for founders who don't want to do the work themselves. It's also the most profitable for agencies selling these services.
The problem? Most SaaS publicity efforts fail because they optimize for vanity metrics instead of business results. Getting mentioned in TechCrunch might stroke your ego, but it rarely translates to qualified leads or paying customers.
Here's why the traditional approach falls short: PR agencies don't understand your product deeply enough to create compelling narratives. Content agencies write generic posts that could apply to any SaaS. And paid ads become more expensive every year while organic reach continues to decline.
The companies that actually succeed at SaaS publicity think differently. They focus on distribution over everything else - building systems that bring customers to them rather than chasing one-off publicity wins.
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 made the same mistake everyone makes. I assumed that building a great website and running some ads would be enough to generate leads. The websites I built were conversion-focused, the messaging was clear, and the user experience was smooth.
But here's what I discovered: I was essentially training world-class sales reps to do door-to-door sales in an empty neighborhood.
One particular client really drove this home. They had a solid project management SaaS for remote teams - genuinely useful product, fair pricing, happy existing customers. We spent months perfecting their website, running A/B tests on landing pages, optimizing their trial signup flow. Everything looked great on paper.
The results? Crickets. Despite having a "conversion-ready" website, they were getting maybe 50 visitors per month. Even with a 5% conversion rate (which is excellent), that's only 2-3 trial signups monthly. Not exactly the growth they needed.
That's when I realized the fundamental flaw in how most people think about SaaS publicity: they're solving the wrong problem. Everyone focuses on conversion optimization when the real issue is distribution. You can have the world's best-converting landing page, but if nobody sees it, you're still stuck.
This client had fallen into the classic trap - they'd hired a designer (me) to make their website look professional, then expected customers to magically find them. When that didn't work, they started asking "who can help us get publicity?" thinking the solution was more visibility.
But here's what I learned from digging deeper into their analytics: the few customers they did have weren't coming from press coverage or traditional marketing. They were coming from the founder's occasional LinkedIn posts about remote work challenges. Those posts weren't even promotional - just genuine insights about managing distributed teams.
That discovery completely changed how I approach SaaS publicity.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
After that wake-up call, I completely restructured my approach to helping SaaS startups gain visibility. Instead of focusing on traditional publicity channels, I developed what I call the "Distribution-First Framework" - a system that prioritizes building audiences over chasing media coverage.
Here's exactly what I implemented:
Step 1: Founder-Led Content Strategy
I helped the founder commit to publishing 3 pieces of content weekly on LinkedIn - not promotional posts, but genuine insights from building and scaling a remote team SaaS. The key was documenting real experiences, failed experiments, and lessons learned. We treated LinkedIn like a personal blog where he shared his journey building the company.
The content framework was simple:
Monday: Share a problem they'd solved for a customer (without being promotional)
Wednesday: Document a failed experiment or lesson learned
Friday: Share industry insights or contrarian takes on remote work
Step 2: Community-First Distribution
Instead of chasing press coverage, we identified 5-7 communities where their ideal customers already gathered: remote work Slack groups, product management forums, and startup founder communities. The founder became genuinely helpful in these spaces - answering questions, sharing resources, building relationships.
The rule was simple: be helpful first, promote never. When people asked for solutions to problems their SaaS solved, others in the community would recommend it organically.
Step 3: Content Amplification System
Every piece of content got repurposed across multiple channels:
LinkedIn post → expanded into a newsletter → turned into a blog post
Customer success story → case study → social proof for website
Failed experiment → learning post → added to knowledge base
Step 4: SEO Through Experience Sharing
We built a simple blog focused on documenting their journey building the SaaS. Instead of generic "how to manage remote teams" content, they shared specific challenges they'd faced and how their product helped solve them. This created natural SEO opportunities while building trust with potential customers.
The magic happened when these efforts started compounding. LinkedIn posts led to newsletter subscribers. Newsletter content drove blog traffic. Blog posts ranked for long-tail keywords their customers were searching for. Community participation turned into speaking opportunities and partnership discussions.
Within 6 months, they went from 50 monthly website visitors to over 2,000, with a much higher percentage of qualified leads because people were finding them through content that pre-qualified their interest and budget.
Founder Leverage
Your founder's personal brand is your most powerful publicity asset - more valuable than any PR agency.
Content Compound
Consistent, experience-based content creates exponential returns over time unlike one-off publicity.
Community Distribution
Building relationships in existing communities outperforms trying to create your own audience from scratch.
Organic Amplification
When you solve real problems publicly, customers become your best promotional channel automatically.
The results spoke for themselves, but not in the way most people measure "publicity success." We weren't tracking press mentions or media coverage - we were measuring business impact.
After 6 months of this distribution-first approach:
Monthly website traffic: From 50 to 2,000+ qualified visitors
Trial signups: From 2-3 per month to 40+ per month
LinkedIn followers: Founder went from 200 to 3,500+ engaged followers
Newsletter subscribers: Built from 0 to 800+ qualified prospects
Organic mentions: Started getting recommended in communities without prompting
But the most important metric? Customer acquisition cost dropped by 60% because most new customers were finding them through organic channels rather than paid advertising.
The founder started getting invited to speak at virtual conferences not because we pitched event organizers, but because community members recommended him based on his helpful content. Potential partners reached out after seeing his thoughtful posts about remote work challenges.
Most importantly, the leads they generated were pre-qualified. When someone discovered them through a LinkedIn post about solving a specific remote team challenge, they already understood the problem and were ready to evaluate solutions.
This approach created a sustainable growth engine that didn't depend on constantly increasing ad spend or chasing the next publicity opportunity.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experience taught me several counterintuitive lessons about SaaS publicity that go against conventional wisdom:
Consistency beats creativity. Publishing mediocre content consistently outperformed waiting for the "perfect" post. The founder's most successful LinkedIn post was a simple bullet-point list of remote work mistakes he'd made.
Problems sell better than solutions. Content that documented struggles and failures got more engagement than posts promoting features. People connect with authenticity, not polish.
Community participation trumps content creation. Spending 30 minutes being helpful in a relevant Slack group generated more qualified leads than hours creating blog posts.
Personal brands scale faster than company brands. The founder's LinkedIn posts reached 10x more people than the company's posts, even with identical content.
Distribution compounds, publicity doesn't. A TechCrunch mention gives you one spike of traffic. A strong LinkedIn presence generates leads every single week.
Helpful beats promotional. The posts that drove the most business results never mentioned their product directly. They solved problems and let readers make the connection.
SEO through experience works. Writing about real challenges and solutions naturally targets long-tail keywords that potential customers search for.
The biggest mindset shift? Stop thinking of publicity as a campaign and start thinking of it as building a distribution system. Campaigns end. Systems compound.
If I were starting a SaaS today, I'd spend zero budget on PR agencies and 100% of my time building distribution through founder-led content and community participation. The ROI is higher, the cost is lower, and you own the channel completely.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups specifically:
Focus founder's time on LinkedIn content over press outreach
Join 5-7 communities where your ICP already discusses their problems
Document your product development journey publicly
Repurpose customer success stories across multiple channels
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce businesses:
Build founder personal brand around industry expertise, not just products
Share behind-the-scenes content about building/sourcing products
Participate in relevant Reddit communities and Facebook groups
Create educational content that helps customers make better buying decisions