Ready to build your own Founder-Led Growth engine? Book a Strategy Call
Frontlines.io | Where B2B Founders Talk GTM.
Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
13 HR Tech Founders
Marketing Best Practices
Anchor Your Marketing Around the Truths Your Competitors Are Afraid to Say
Michael built Arist’s marketing strategy around a deliberate choice to say what everyone in the industry already knew but nobody would admit. “A lot of our approach to marketing has just been being very honest, very blunt, very different from everybody else, and just willing to have hard conversations that for some reason other companies aren’t willing to have because they’re afraid that it will backfire.” The specific truths he was willing to surface were the ones that made competitors most uncomfortable. “The reality is that most L&D teams are not using AI at all, for example, and for some reason, nobody in the industry is willing to talk about it.” That honesty became the foundation of how Arist built credibility with buyers: “What we’ve realized is that the only way that we can build trust is to be very clear that, hey, we know what’s actually going on within these companies, and we’re here to actually solve it.”
Commit Fully to a Channel Before Writing It Off
Siadhal was direct about one of Metaview’s core marketing mistakes: running underpowered experiments and drawing the wrong conclusions from them. As he put it, “the mistakes we’ve made have been more in low quality, low commitment experiments on certain channels that were therefore never going to succeed. And it wasn’t because the channel was wrong for us, it’s just because our execution was not up to scratch.” He applied this lesson specifically to paid acquisition: “we have not invested a ton of money, but we’ve definitely dabbled and spent time on paid acquisition, but we haven’t ruled it out as something that doesn’t work for us. We just think we didn’t execute the way we needed to.” The failure wasn’t the channel. It was the commitment level.
Replace "Brand" With "Personality" to Make Every Marketing Decision Easier
Most brand discussions stay abstract for too long, and Tomer’s solution to that problem is a single word swap. His approach was direct: “My read on what’s important in brand is I just try to replace the word brand with personality. So what is the personality of your company?” That question forces a level of specificity that “brand” never does. And once you have the answer, every downstream decision has a filter: “When you know that, everything else becomes so much easier. When you go to the homepage, how do that homepage talk to you? What do you show? Do you show the product more? Do you show the customers more? Do you talk about pricing? What do you show and when. When you use the product, what’s the tone of language? And in the copy, what do you emphasize?” A defined personality turns brand from a values exercise into a practical decision-making tool every person on the team can actually use.
Abandon Outdated Demand Generation Playbooks Before They Slow You Down
Mike Fitzsimmons didn’t just say certain tactics stopped working. He called out the entire framework. “The sort of 2016, 17, 18 B2B SaaS demand gen playbook that everybody kind of runs, you know, scrap it. I just like completely throw it out.” His concern wasn’t just effectiveness, it was what running an outdated playbook does to a marketing team over time: “I think it has stifled innovation and has stifled creativity.” The marketers trained on that playbook keep reaching for the same tools, and those tools keep underdelivering. As Mike put it, “the world has passed by so much of that stuff and that’s not where the magic is.”
Segment Your Audience Below the Industry Level to Earn Real Relevance
Sid found that treating a broad market as a single audience produced generic marketing that failed to earn trust. His approach was to go deeper: “the way that we grow is really by thinking about our customers at the industry level, at the sub industry level. It’s very different if you think about litigation lawyers versus patent attorneys. There are actually pockets on the Internet today where you can find specific niches.” The reasoning behind this goes beyond tactics. As Sid explained, “when you think about SMBs, yes, you’re operating in a business to business setting, but SMBs are entrepreneurs. They’re people at the end of the day. And I think about it much more like the B2C community building effort. It’s far more just a faster way to grow, faster way to really earn trust.” The more specific the audience, the faster you build the trust that drives growth.
Increase Outbound Volume to Engineer Favorable Timing at Scale
John Kim’s outbound philosophy starts with a simple observation about his own behavior as a buyer: “the only ones I would ever respond to is if it’s really relevant and a pressing problem right now. Like, it doesn’t have to be that good of a cold email.” From that observation, he built a system designed to increase the chances of reaching the right person at the right moment. As he put it, “we actually try to engineer luck a little bit by using a volume-based approach but still targeted messaging and that way we can increase that surface area of hitting the right person who has that relevant problem at scale.” The goal is to be in front of enough of the right people that you catch some of them at the exact moment the problem is acute.
Delay Demand Gen Until You Have Pipeline to Sustain the Wait
Charlotte was direct about when demand generation actually works. “Demand gen is amazing, but it really needs to come once you’re kind of, you know, a bit more off the ground, where you can have that wait for pieces of content dripping out and waiting for those leads to come through.” The channel requires existing pipeline as a buffer, not as a starting point. As she put it, it only works once “you’ve built up enough pipeline that it services you.” Deploying it before that foundation exists burns time and resources on a channel that structurally cannot convert fast enough to matter.
Evolve Your Marketing Message as Your Buyer Becomes More Sophisticated
Jeremy described a deliberate shift in how Andela approached marketing as the company scaled. Early efforts focused on building a brand around excellence with talent. Over time, that changed. “Over time, it’s become more important to help the world see really how hiring is changing.” The buyer had evolved, and the marketing had to match. Andela moved toward educating the market on the mechanics of modern hiring, spending “much more time sort of educating the market and helping people understand how we think about things like assessment, how we think about sourcing, how we think about matching, how our talent decision engine works.” The shift reflects a principle most scaling companies eventually face: the message that earns early awareness is rarely the message that closes sophisticated enterprise buyers.
Build Thought Leadership Before Your Marketing Budget Catches Up
At the Series A stage, Karoli Hindriks made thought leadership through media and events a core part of how Jobbatical built market presence. The team focused on earning a seat in high-level conversations about international hiring and immigration. “One of the things that we have done and managed to do quite uniquely is… the thought leadership built through media, through events, in all the markets where we are operating.” The work translated into credibility at the highest levels. “We really have managed to build ourselves as thought leaders and be part of the conversations on a very high level with top tier media.” That presence compounded over time into opportunities that reflected the stage of the company. “Just before we did our Series A, I was asked to speak at the main TED stage in America, which doesn’t happen very often at the early stage.”
Grow Your Brand by Activating Customer Stories and Referrals
When Sapia couldn’t match competitors on marketing budget, Barb focused on a different lever entirely: the customers who were already in love with the product. “With our customers who are sort of in love with the product and the technology, the relentlessness of asking for referrals, giving them opportunities to share their stories, has also created a lot of inbounds for us.” She didn’t build a separate brand marketing function. Instead, she let customer intimacy do the work. As she put it, “piggybacking off our customers’ brand strength has been a real key to us building our own brand, rather than having to spend a whole lot of money on brand marketing.” For founders operating with constrained resources, this is a direct alternative to paid brand building: go deeper with the customers you already have and make it easy for them to talk.
Test Channels Quickly and Treat Underperformance as Data
Jennifer Dulski ran her marketing function like a lab. Her team operated with a clear process: “we run a pretty rigorous growth experimentation process, so we have hypotheses and we test things. We try to test as quickly as possible to see what’s working.” The discipline cuts both ways. When a channel didn’t perform, she didn’t rationalize it. The homepage chatbot was a clear example: “I thought, everybody’s got to have a chatbot. And so we put up one and we started with manual answers to it, and it hasn’t been yet that meaningful for us.” The lesson for operators is that following conventional wisdom on channels is its own form of confirmation bias. What works broadly doesn’t always work for your specific buyer in your specific context.
Keep Your PR Firm Long Enough to Build Institutional Knowledge
Jared Pope made PR his first major marketing investment, committing to a monthly retainer that he described as exceeding his mortgage payment. He kept that same firm for years, and the reason he cited was institutional knowledge. “It’s been successful because it’s easy to call upon them and they know the history to where when you bring on a new, whether it’s a marketing firm or somebody else, you almost have to reeducate.” That continuity paid off in a specific way: “they got who we are, they got our message, they got our branding.” For Jared, the value of a long-tenured agency was not just familiarity. It was not having to start the education process over.
Run Industry Recognition Campaigns to Generate Goodwill and Community
When Nitzan needed to build awareness and trust across his target buyer base without a large marketing budget, he launched an industry-voted Top 100 professionals campaign. “It’s all by votes of the industry. We don’t influence the results but we are the ones who are facilitating that and we are giving, announcing that and people surprise, they like to be recognized. So it creates a lot of love and a lot of feeling of community.” The campaign cost little to run but delivered outsized returns in goodwill because it gave people something genuinely valuable: peer recognition. “Those kinds of initiatives, they required thinking and growth hacking and the right people to set this up but it’s not requiring large budgets.”