Marketing Insights
"Here comes survivorship bias with the chair - oh lord he's been knocked out!"
Ah, growth hacking. The siren song of every starry-eyed B2B SaaS founder with a dream, a spreadsheet, and exactly $62.47 in the marketing budget. Somewhere along the line, “growth hacking” became a buzzword, an obsession, a magic bullet. The idea that if you just tweak a headline here, A/B test a button color there, and maybe sprinkle in a viral loop—voilà! Hockey-stick growth, a flood of users, and funding rounds practically throwing themselves at your feet. We’re now deep into this obsession, and it seems like everyone’s trying to reverse-engineer some mythical formula that only the “growth hackers” know.
Let me be the one to gently whisper: shut up about growth hacking already.
Yes, I get it. I really do. When you’re starting from scratch in B2B SaaS, you’re not exactly flush with runway. And in the wild, competitive jungle of startups, everyone wants to believe there’s a secret shortcut, a hidden trail that only the savvy founders can find. But here’s the thing about shortcuts: they rarely take you where you think they will. You might be able to jump ahead for a moment, but eventually, you’ll find yourself back where you started, staring at the long road ahead. Except this time, you’ve lost time, and you're still nowhere near creating an efficient and scalable growth engine.
Let’s get something straight—lucky punches do happen. There are stories of B2B SaaS founders who hit on a viral growth hack, or leveraged some obscure channel to gain early traction. Survivorship bias is real, folks. It’s like hearing about a lottery winner, and thinking you’ve got the same odds if you just buy enough tickets. But building a startup is not a lottery. And luck, well, it’s a tricky thing. It tends to show up more often for those who put themselves in the right position to be lucky.
There’s an art to making yourself lucky more often. And, spoiler alert, it doesn’t involve clever Instagram posts or a quirky launch video. It involves doing the boring, tedious work that doesn’t have the glamor of the overnight success stories. You have to build a solid foundation. And I know—"solid foundation" is about as sexy as saying you should exercise and eat well. But I promise, it's just as important.
Let’s talk about the seasoned pros for a moment. Repeat founders tend to have much better success rates, and that’s not just because they have some secret sauce in their backpack. It’s because they’ve learned what not to do. They’ve seen firsthand that betting it all on a "viral moment" is a recipe for heartburn and investor disappointment. These repeat founders know how to do marketing right, and by “right,” I mean methodically, systematically, and with a long-term vision.
Their version of growth hacking looks a lot like executing on the fundamentals: positioning their product correctly, building strong relationships, getting customer feedback early and often, and yes, creating meaningful, relevant content that actually connects with their target audience. This approach is light years ahead of the "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" mentality that many new founders think growth hacking is all about.
I can already hear the rebuttal: "But we’re broke! What else can we do but growth hack?" I get it. When you’re on a shoestring budget, the temptation to swing for the fences with guerrilla tactics is strong. But there are plenty of things you can focus on that don’t involve begging for a viral miracle.
First, work on your positioning. This is the foundation of all great marketing efforts. If you can clearly articulate who your product is for and why it matters, you’re already ahead of most startups out there. Next, get feedback—real feedback—from your customers and prospects. Not just “this is cool,” but specific insights into what they value, what’s missing, and what would make them rave about your product to others.
Then there’s building relationships and networks. If you’ve got no budget, guess what? You still have time, and that’s one thing money can’t always buy. Form relationships with industry influencers, potential partners, and even your competitors. Those connections will pay dividends in ways you can’t always foresee.
And lastly, don’t sleep on content. Not the churn-and-burn blog posts that are optimized for every SEO keyword under the sun. I mean content that’s genuinely valuable to your audience. The kind of content that makes them stop and think, “Huh, these guys really know what they’re talking about.” Because when you build trust through content, you’re doing marketing that’s built to last—not just to go viral.
Use your network, run targeted, low-budget campaigns and leverage your “personality as a profile for growth” until you have a dedicated marketing budget.
Here’s the kicker: even if your growth hack dreams do manage to get you through a seed round, that fairy tale ends quickly when you start talking Series A or B. At that point, your investors aren’t interested in how you pulled off a cool stunt to get tens of users (this is B2B SaaS, you’re not onboarding hundreds or thousands overnight). They want to know how you’re going to spend the runway to scale. And the uncomfortable truth is, it’s really hard to go from “I tried a bunch of random tactics and got lucky” to “I have a scalable, sustainable growth engine.”
This is where the fundamentals come back into play. When you’ve been focusing on the long-term from day one—building relationships, creating high-quality content, refining your positioning, working on SEO, and yes, getting real product-market fit—you’re in a much better place to answer those tough investor questions with plans that include formal digital marketing, an event strategy, ways to leverage partners as a channel to market, community marketing and perhaps a formal ABM program.
Because guess what? Relationships take time. Content strategies take time. Product-market fit? Yeah, that takes time, too. But when you get to Series A or Series B and can say, “We’ve been laying the groundwork for months—here’s the plan to scale,” you’ll stand out from the noise. You won’t just be the founder who got lucky—you’ll be the one who earned it.
Looking to bootstrap? Similar rules apply, though that requires a dedicated piece in the future.
I know what you’re thinking: this all sounds incredibly dull. And you’re right. It is. But here’s the secret: success in B2B SaaS isn’t about excitement—it’s about execution. It’s about doing the things that everyone else glosses over because they’re not shiny or new. It’s about grinding it out, day after day, while everyone else is chasing the next big hack.
So, next time someone tells you about their latest growth hack, do yourself a favor: smile, nod, and then go back to doing the work that actually matters. Because in the long run, slow and steady doesn’t just win the race—it’s the only race that’s worth running.
