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Welcome to Volume 157 👋
Happy Thursday!
In this week’s newsletter, we cover:
- 🚀 LaunchDarkly Steals the Limelight with Brand and Content Excellence
- 📈 Scaling Beyond Founder-Led Sales to Reach that Series B — SaaStr
- 👀 What’s the Latest in B2B SaaS This Week?
- 🧠 This Week’s Brain Food
- ➕ The Best Content Across the Web
Let’s get into it.
Looking for a marketing conference without the B.S.?
You’re in luck—Ross will be in Austin, TX, this October 18th to speak at the Marketingland Festival by the pros at The Marketing Millennials. With dedicated spaces for everything from branding and content creation to ecommerce and revenue tactics, it’s a day you won’t want to miss!
Check out the rest of the Marketingland lineup and book your ticket before they’re all gone!
B2B SAAS INSIGHTS
LaunchDarkly Steals the Limelight with Brand and Content Excellence
We often take for granted just how dynamic the tech space is. In the CPG, automotive, fashion, and other industries where new products are developed behind the scenes, hiccups and mistakes are addressed safely away from the consumer’s eyes. In SaaS, this all happens while consumers use the product. To succeed, tech brands need to maintain a fine balance between rapid software development and mitigating the risks that these changes pose to user experience.
LaunchDarkly, a leading feature management platform, perfectly addresses this challenge in product and brand name. It helps DevOps teams facilitate the controlled release and management of software features so changes are deployed with more flexibility, security, and efficiency. Essentially, it “de-risks” software releases.
With only a handful of competitors in this growing industry, LaunchDarkly’s tongue-in-cheek name tells potential users everything they need to know about the product right off the bat: It helps you roll out new features in a quick, controlled way. Out of the limelight, as it were.
The positioning clearly resonates, as nearly 80% of the feature management brand’s traffic comes from direct search traffic—a key indicator of brand strength.
But the marketing excellence doesn’t end at the synergy between product, positioning, and brand. That’s just the tip of the spear. In our most recent case study, I explore how LaunchDarkly educates, engages, and empowers its target users and key institutional decision-makers using the following key content assets:
- An introductory post on feature management that brings in $15K worth of organic traffic
- A landing page dedicated to proving the ROI of feature management to purchasers
- A comparison page outlining how LaunchDarkly outperforms its top competitor
You can check out the full LaunchDarkly case study on the Foundation Labs page.
B2B MARKETING
Scaling Beyond Founder-Led Sales to Reach that Series B
In the tech world, there are few in-house positions as useful to the marketing and sales team as that of the almighty founder. Not only do they possess a wealth of domain-specific knowledge, but they also often have intangibles that play particularly well with target audiences—from potential users to venture capitalists.
Whether it’s credibility, confidence, risk tolerance, or simply the allure of the entrepreneur, founders are one of the most effective sales assets for early-stage SaaS brands. Getting them directly involved in sales provides an added layer of flexibility, credibility, and experience that’s hard to match with SDRs.
But, as many of you already know, there’s just one tiny problem with this approach: Founder-led sales simply don’t scale. As companies grow and progress from pre-seed to Series A, it’s increasingly difficult for founders and C-suite leaders to get involved on the sales side.
Well, you (and I) are in luck. The team at SaaStr recently chatted with Laura Connell from Atomico to discuss how SaaS brands can scale beyond founder-led sales. The Workshop Wednesdays seminar highlights how the path to Series B runs through a top-notch sales team.
👀 What’s the Latest in B2B SaaS This Week?
📣Atlassian agrees to acquire video messaging giant Loom for $975 million📣
🔒 Gusty secures $51 million in one of the largest cybersecurity seed rounds of the year
📉 Groupon joins SumUp selloff as payment platform’s valuation drops over 50% to around $4.1 billion
🤖 Startup marketing automation platform Aampe closes a $7.5 million funding round
📈The Future of Content Marketing
This year, we’ve seen major disruptions in the content marketing space—from the Generative AI boom to crumbling social platforms. Brands that adapt quickly to such changes create content that truly stands out and, ultimately, come out on top.
Want to get a head start on next year’s trends? Ross recently met up with Taylor Wells and GTM News to discuss the Future of Content Marketing in 2024.
Check out the Future of Content Marketing in 2024 video here!
🧠 This Week’s Brain Food
I, like many of you, have spent a lot of time in 2023 becoming more fluent in a new language: Large Language Model-ese.
It’s a lot different than learning French or Mandarin—there’s no Duolingo app or night classes at the community center. It’s more like learning a new slang or code—lots of trial and error during prompt creation, not to mention adapting to the constantly changing algorithms.
In the midst of the rush to keep up and remain efficient, I’ve pushed to the side a nagging question: “Am I still a writer?” That question resurfaced, front and center, when I came across Vauhini Vara’s Confessions of a Viral AI Writer in Wired (an excellent read, btw).
As marketers, copywriters, and a number of other creatives lean more heavily on generative AI tools to keep pace with our colleagues and competitors, how will that affect our ability to create without them? I have no idea what the answer to this and many other questions will be, but for now, I’ll take it as a good reminder to dust off that notebook or journal.
Want to sponsor our next issue? Reply to this email, and we’ll share how you can reach more SaaS founders and marketers today.
🏅 X Post of the Week
B2B Doesn’t Have to Be Boring — Loom’s Acquisition Proves It by Ross Simmonds
🎖️ LinkedIn Post of the Week
AI Content Replacement Cheat Sheet by Ross Simmonds
🤳🏽 Nice Finds You Should Binge
- How Miro Turned the Whiteboard into a $17.5-Billion Valuation
- Chatbots Are Trippin’ — How Falsities from Generative AI Harm Web Search Quality
- Prompt Engineering: A Guide for Marketers and Content Creators
- Viral Disney Show Loki Faces Backlash Over Use of Generative AI
- How Content Can Support Upsells & Cross-Sells in SaaS
🎧 What We’re Wired Into This Week:
Sweet October Autumn Morning in Bookstore Cafe Ambience
This SaaS news smattering is brought to you by Ethan Crump!
If you have any feedback, suggestions, or ideas you want to see in this newsletter, feel free to email me at ethan@foundationinc.co. We’re always looking for ways to improve and make sure you’re getting the best B2B SaaS marketing resources.
Have a great weekend, and see you on the other side!
