For those striving to create lovable products

This is a product marketing blog for SaaS and Marketplace startups striving to create new products and offerings people love — it's much easier to sell lovable products.

Hey there! I’m Ben Obear, and I’ve worked with 150+ startups over the past decade and a half. While I officially run marketing and business development for a global software consulting business, I help many of our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and marketplace customers define winning marketing strategies for their businesses. I excel at connecting the dots between product strategy and marketing, helping founders build products their customers love. Like everyone in marketing, I’ve had some failures and some successes while learning a lot along the way.

This blog is for founders and marketers looking to find their first customers

More specifically, this blog is for founders and marketers like you who work at SaaS and marketplace companies — and together, we’ll find customers for your new product or product offering. When you’re finding customers for something new, the rules are different. You don’t have historical sales scripts and marketing copy. You don’t have data on successful campaigns and failed ones. All you have is your intuition and usually a small budget to find and close your first few customers.

This blog is about economically finding those first customers with scientific precision. Since you don't work at Amazon (or another large tech company), you can't afford to run a seven-figure launch campaign on seven channels. Instead, you think like an astrophysicist running experiments in your head before you spend a single dollar.

Companies with SaaS and Marketplace business models generally have a clear path to profitability, generating revenue with each new customer. Salesforce, Slack, and Zoom invented new ways to find customers and grow their businesses. In future posts, we’ll dissect strategies used by these well-known companies and other startups to find and grow their early adopters.

Who shouldn’t read this blog

This blog is not for eCommerce and consumer software startups. Plenty of other blogs give step-by-step advice on optimizing your marketing funnel to boost your user growth metrics or sell physical goods. Plus, when you create a consumer product, you’re in the “hits business” — the odds of making the next Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram are never in your favor.

When you’re building TikTok for cats, Pinterest for fashion, or “the next popular consumer software product” for X, your chance of failure is in the high 90th percentile. Most consumer software products either fail to gain much traction or don’t grow beyond a few thousand, hundred thousand, or million early adopters.

Even if your WhatsApp for cooking app grows to three million active users, you must continue on a hockey-stick growth trajectory. If you have a few bad quarters and your user growth stalls, your ability to raise the next funding round to keep your engineers caffeinated and your cloud servers powered on dramatically diminishes. Path and WANELO are two examples of the thousands of funded consumer startups that failed to gain widespread adoption, so they fold or run on fumes.

Whether you’re selling a new consumer device or trying to build the next Warby Parker for pillowcases, what you’re doing is cool, and you deserve great advice to grow your startup. But you should seek advice from someone else who is an eCommerce marketing expert.

Move fast and be frugal

Your competitors bid up the keywords you want to target, making your customer acquisition cost unprofitable. You need to find new channels and run smarter campaigns than your competitors. Together, we'll work through ways you can run quick scientific experiments that help you find your customers quickly. It's going to be a fun journey, finding your customers together!