We hit a $100k run rate across our SaaS portfolio a couple months back. Our focus product is DemandBird, a wildly-better B2B social media management tool built for teams and agencies.
Here are DemandBird’s numbers so far, in the six months since we launched:
289 registrants
170 free trials
59 subscribers
103.1% monthly NRR
Not bad. Could definitely be better. But we haven’t even launched our primary AI value proposition yet. And we’re bootstrapping hardcore: we’re only spending customer revenue on marketing… we’re not using any of our own personal $$ to make it go faster. (It’s a fun experiment: if we played the game on hard mode, what could we still do?)
Here’s what I’ve been doing on the sales and marketing side to make it happen:
Share the value prop on social media relentlessly but authoritatively
For almost a decade now, Mac and I have been using social media to grow our businesses. For me, that was LinkedIn, and for Mac, that was Twitter.
Now, we’re each doing LinkedIn, X, Substack, TikTok, and more. Why branch out from what we know?
Well, for one, it’s much easier to do when we use our own product to easily repurpose content for multiple platforms at once:
I often have Claude do this for me, in DemandBird, too.
Let’s say I want to get a quick post out, on the way back from a customer meeting: I’ll voice-to-text into Claude, ask it to turn it into a post with a Twitter variant + a LinkedIn variant, and add an image from my camera roll, too. Then if I’m comfortable with the output I’ll add it to the queue as-is. If I’m not, I’ll have it keep it in drafts and give it a look-over when I’m next at my desk.
Hundreds of thousands of my ideal buyers see my content every quarter:
This turns into a TON of opportunities to converse, network, sponsor, partner, and generally embed myself deeply within my customer base and broader ecosystem.
Try to post high-quality content 3-5x/week on LinkedIn. Or if you’re an indie hacker, start with X. Whatever it is. But then repurpose your ‘primary platform’ content onto other platforms to start building up your community elsewhere, too.
Message, partner, connect, chat, sponsor… serve
If all you do is post and wait for people to show up with their wallets out, you won’t get very far. Here are some things I do, that you can as well, to show up more deeply within your ecosystem:
When interesting people engage with your content, strike up a conversation that doesn’t involve leading questions or a pitch. Use your actual social skills here folks!
Engage with other people’s content, both about your industry but also in a way that shows what kind of person you are. If you’re a mom of 3, comment on someone’s post who is also a mom of 3, even if that post has nothing to do with your ‘target market’. Just be a f**king human. (You would also be surprised how much people online want to do business with… you guessed it… other f**king humans. Not bots pretending to be human to win empathy points.) Don’t make it an act. Just actually show up!
Send lots of DMs. Again, same idea as above: as my friend Sam Browne expertly put it, you must avoid both ‘extreme poles’: on the one bad end is pitching everyone who moves, uncaringly and transactionally. That sucks. The other end is less bad but more insidious and passive/aggressive. And that is… the ‘friendzone'. You know, where you’re so scared of mentioning your product for fear they’ll think you’re pitching them, that you never do, but your desperation to ‘get the sale’ leaks out of you. And they can feel it. The secret is to be in the middle. Do make your intentions clear, but also don’t be weird and robotic about it. Leave room for them to tell you the real story about what they’re using, what they like about it, etc, and don’t make people feel like you’ll push or hard-sell or ‘rebut their objection’ if they don’t want to immediately sign up for a 30-min demo of your solution.
Noticing a theme here? Social skills get you pretty far. Don’t leave them at the door just because you’re selling.
When you do that, all sorts of other opportunities pop up:
“I’m not in the market but can we do a webinar for our community on your tool?”
“Do you offer white-labeling?”
“I’m under contract now but it’s up in May. Oh wait, you do contract buyouts? Tell me more”
“Thank you for the referral, I’m going to post about how great it was to meet you”
You will not see a LICK of these kinds of "expansive” opportunities, if all you do is pitch pitch pitch. Or if all you do is ask weird personal questions and hope they bring up a need for your product before you do.
Give people the gift of your real, authentic intent. And allow them the space to communicate where they are at, too. Stay in that zone, and absolute magic happens.
Sprinkle some scalability on this brand building
I’ve been doing this social media thing for almost a decade, so it’s easy for me to get a great ROI on ‘scalable stuff’ like boosting my posts with Thought Leader Ads or getting someone at Hubspot or Apollo to provide a free, high-quality backlink to our website. But I started doing all of this stuff within just a few months of going on LinkedIn and starting to post, in 2017. It doesn’t take much credibility building online to start doing a little more ‘scalable stuff’ in a way that provides a great ROI.
Here are some recent concrete ways I’ve done that, that you can borrow:
Building the kind of extremely-high-quality backlinks which I touched on above, to pad our SEO foundations
Parlayed offers to teach on XYZ topic in someone’s community, into bonus content: they email their list about the event, we get content from it, I post that content, our aura starts to merge with theirs in a beneficial way, etc
Sponsored influencers and brand ambassadors, and signed up industry heavyweights as advisors for our company. The more your own credibility in the space is known and influential, the easier it’ll be for things that scale better, to provide you an ROI. If a lot of people are already on some level aware of your brand, and then they see their favorite industry celebrity posting about it too, that often pushes a lot of people who would otherwise not have taken action for a while, to do so earlier.
Highlighted top ICP customers and prospects in our own content, thus bringing them the type of exposure that I am talking about getting - but hey, often one of the best ways to get, is to give freely… so do it! Especially when you’re giving to the people you would most want to buy from you.
All of the above ends up constituting the kind of brand-building that the (actual) SEO gurus remind us is the main way to build authority and traffic:
I know that buying tons of cheap backlinks will never, ever get me the same ROI as I get from having solid, substantial industry relationships. So I focus on building high-quality brand from doing all of the things above. And more.
Do you need DemandBird to do all of this?
No, of course not. You can just show up, post, DM, set up events, network with your customers and industry participants, etc. All with no tooling whatsoever, just like I did for several years.
But if you want to get a substantial head start on growing on social, in a way that plugs right into your Claude MCP/API workflow, consider becoming one of our customers! Just reply if you want a special coupon or something. We’d be happy to hear from you and help out. Either way, there’s a free trial here → demandbird.com
P.S. I recorded a free social selling course with Apollo that teaches a lot of this stuff and more. It’s available here:
