Growth Marketing

Getting the first paying customer can be one of the hardest parts of building a business. There’s plenty of advice about marketing and sales, but hearing what actually worked for other founders is a different story. How did you get your first paying customer? Was it through networking, cold outreach, social media, or something else entirely?

I bumped into a founder recently who’s running an enterprise SaaS company selling £20k+ annual contracts. Instagram gets some likes, but it’s bringing in zero pipeline. At this stage, is it worth dropping Instagram and focusing on LinkedIn, outbound and industry communities instead?

A founder is considering Reddit as a way to understand their target customers better, but they have no plans to actually advertise on the platform. Would you still use Reddit for customer research, and if so, what would you look for?

One founder shared a challenge they’re facing with their community. Engagement is growing, but they’re trying to figure out how to turn some of that interest into customers without making the community feel overly commercial. How do you turn community members into customers without ruining the community?

This came up in a conversation with a founder who has around £1,000 to put towards marketing. They’re wondering whether that’s enough to properly test paid social or whether the money would be better spent elsewhere. If you had £1,000 to test paid social, would you spend it on ads or put it somewhere else?

I started building rentt in 2020. Six years later, I’m still walking into letting agencies asking questions. On 28 March 2020, I had an idea. Property management felt unnecessarily complicated. Spreadsheets for one thing. WhatsApp for another. Emails everywhere. Documents sitting in folders. Different systems for referencing, compliance, maintenance, payments and communication. And somewhere in the middle of all of that were landlords, property managers and tenants simply trying to get things done. I wondered: Why couldn't this all work together? That question became rentt. At the time, I had a full-time career in data, analytics and transformation. So rentt started as a…

A founder shared an interesting thought about launching a premium homeware brand. They feel Instagram is becoming increasingly crowded, while Pinterest seems more suited to people actively planning purchases. Has anyone shifted more of their marketing budget towards Pinterest and actually seen better results?

This came up in a conversation with a founder recently. They’re looking for a better way to turn existing customers into a consistent source of new business. What’s the best way you’ve found to turn customers into referrals?

A founder raised an interesting question about marketing a highly technical B2B product that most consumers would struggle to understand. Where would you focus your marketing, and which platforms have actually worked for reaching the right decision-makers?