Grow your B2B software business with Founder-Led Marketing. Project 33 helps B2B software companies create awareness for their solution, build trust and credibility in their market, shorten deal cycles by positioning their founder as authorities in their space.

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How it works

What is Founder-Led Marketing?

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What is Founder-Led Marketing? Founder-Led Marketing is a contemporary approach to driving growth that leverages the founder’s expertise, stories and gravitas to create awareness, build customer trust, and generate demand for your category by turning their insights into shareable, bite-sized marketing assets.


Why the founder? Because in order to effectively drive revenue today, marketing needs to be built on deep customer, product, and market insights – and no one understands them better than the founder.

1 hour interview with our team per week

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We turn the conversation into bite-sized LinkedIn text, image and video posts and help you repurpose them on other channels.

The 7 Hour Rule. Psychology says that it takes people, on average, 7 hours to make a big decision. In B2B, that means your prospects need to spend, on average, 7 hours with you, your company, and your offer before they’re able to make a buying decision.

These 7 hours include researching your product, understanding the features, talking with peers, getting internal buy-in from the team, comparing you to competitors, thinking about the decision, reading reviews, etc. Traditionally, B2B companies “accumulate” these 7 hours through Sales: multiple calls, meetings, back-to-back emails, another phone call, another meeting, taking them out to dinner, etc. With Founder-Led Marketing, you provide as much of the information your prospects need upfront and freely accessible, so your buyers can educate themselves about your solution and validate your domain expertise on their own time. And because marketing is scaled (you can record a video once, and thousands of prospects can all watch that same video), you spend your time as a founder efficiently while giving your sales team aircover.

Create awareness

Sophisticated B2B buyers want to hear from an expert, not a marketing person. Because the founder has been with the business since day one, they have the backstory and expertise to get your buyer's attention.

Build trust & credibility

To build trust and credibility in your market, you need to be able to communicate deep, technical insights. And no one understands your company, product, customers and market better than the founder.

Generate more demand

To create demand for a new product, you need someone who is actively evangelizing your category and carrying the flag for your company, and no one is better suited to do this than the founder.

Watch videoThe 7 Hour Rule explained

Founder-Led Marketing vs. Alternatives. Focus on revenue and business growth with low volume and high-quality content resulting in high effectiveness to scale your company.

Founder-Led Marketing

Traditional Marketing

Founder Personal Branding

Objective

Drive revenue and business growth

Generate leads / MQLs

Grow personal social media 
following of the founder

Channels

All channels (channel agnostic)

Google ads, website blog / SEO, 
email marketing

LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok

Content

Insights, industry commentary, educational content

Product features, product pitches, CTAs

Personal anecdotes, selfies

Organic or paid

Organic and paid

Organic and paid

Organic

Demand

Demand capture and demand creation

Pure demand capture

Demand capture and demand creation

Focus on which market segment

On 100% of the market by creating different marketing assets for each group

On the 3% who are actively 
looking to buy currently

On the 97% who are currently not interested in buying

Lead quality

Low volume, high quality

High volume, low quality

Highly variable

Lead Conversion Rate

10–20%

0.1–1%

Highly variable

Assumption

In order to sell, we need to build trust with customers and educate our buyers long before they talk to sales

In order to sell more, we need more leads and email contacts for our sales team to pound

In order to sell, we need more followers 
and likes on social media

Effectiveness

High

Declining

Highly dependent on the charisma of the founder

When you should not implement Founder-Led Marketing. An overview of certain requirements needed for a fruitful and impactful collaboration.

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You are selling a low-cost, B2C, or very simple, straightforward product

Check

You are still building the product or you don’t have have a clear buying persona (you sell to anyone and everyone)

Check

Your founder is new in the field and doesn’t have deep domain expertise yet

Check

Your founder is only involved in a narrow area of the business or doesn’t interact with customers and prospects

Check

You just want some “LinkedIn content” for your founder

Cross

You are selling a complex, expensive solution ($10k+ ACV) to sophisticated buyers (Director-level and up)

Cross

You have initial traction (> $1M ARR) and know exactly what you are selling and to whom

Cross

Your founder has deep domain expertise of the field you are in and is respected by peers

Cross

Your company is small enough that your founder is still involved in most functions of the business and has regular interactions with customers and prospects (usually between 10-100 employees, sometimes larger)

Cross

You have the willingness to make Founder-Led Marketing an organizational approach

Project 33 vs. Alternatives. Dedicated managers and directors to produce various content in a very short period of time.

Project 33

Hiring in-house

Stacking agencies

Dedicated Director of Demand Gen and 
Growth Marketing

Director of Demand Gen and Growth 
Marketing ($150k/year)

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Dedicated Marketing Manager

Marketing Manager ($85k/year)

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Dedicated Copywriter

Copywriter ($60k/year)

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Dedicated Video Editor

Video Editor ($50k/year)

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LinkedIn content

Check

LinkedIn agency ($3,500/month)

YouTube content

Check

YouTube agency ($2,500/month)

Email newsletter content

Check

Email Marketing agency ($2,500/month)

Website SEO content

Check

SEO agency ($4,000/month)

TikTok/Shorts/Reels content

Check

Shortform content/Tiktok agency ($2,000/month)

LinkedIn ads

Check

Linkedin ad agency ($3,000/month)

Facebook ads

Check

Facebook ad agency ($3,000/month)

Time commitment for the founder: 1-2h/week

Time commitment for the founder: 
Depends, usually 2-4h/week

Time commitment for the founder: Highly variable, easily 5h+/week

Time to implementation: 30 days

Time to implementation: 120-180 days

Time to implementation: 90 days

Total cost: $13,000/month

Total cost: $28,750/month

Total cost: $20,500/month

Founder-Led Marketing is easy to integrate with Project 33. Like chatting with a friend for an hour a week, resulting in a variety of usable content for many platforms.

Conversational recordings

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We extract your founder's insights and turn them into video, text and image content by preparing questions and then interviewing them remotely for 60min every week (with a software similar to Zoom). “Producing content” feels like having just another conversation with a prospect or team member — instead of feeling like being put on the spot and having to perform.

Dedicated Team of Marketers and Content Creators

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When you work with us, you get a dedicated Director of Growth Marketing, Marketing Manager, Copywriter and Video Editor, so that everything from building your GTM strategy, ideating topics, creating content, uploading, distributing, and managing your paid campaigns is managed by us. All you have to do is show up to the weekly recordings and approve content.

Engineered process

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We don’t operate like most marketing agencies with lots of brainstorming sessions, content briefs and “quick” input calls. We have an engineered approach with a transparent process that we arrived at through trial and error, not by guessing or following our intuition. We cut out all the fluff, so your founder needs 1–2 hours per week max to execute on our framework.

Some results of our work. Marketing, when done right, should make sales easier and drive measurable results.

Frequently asked questions. We try to make ourselves clear in all ways possible. But sometimes, things slip through the cracks, so we’ve summarized everything here.

What are the results I can expect?

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ComX generated 3-4 inbound demo requests per week for their $60k ACV product after 1.5 months.
Siteimprove grew their pipeline from 5 to 50 $100k deals in 4 months. These are results for dedicated teams with strong product-market fit and a clear buying persona.
The full customer interviews are on our case study page.

How long does it take to get results?

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Depends on your ACV and sales cycle length. After 1 month, we want to see positive signals (messages, comments, website visits, connection requests from ICPs). After 3 months, we want to see pipeline being generated (demo requests, qualified opportunities) that justify our fee.

How much does your service cost?

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Pricing starts at $13,00USD / €12.000EUR per month. More info on our pricing page.

How does it work?

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You fill out a questionnaire about your company, product, market and customers, we prepare questions for your founder, interview them for for 1h every week, turn their founder's insights into bite-sized video, text and image content, and distribute it on Linkedin, Youtube, your website, in an email newsletter, podcast, via paid ads on Linkedin & Facebook, and more — to build awareness and trust with your target accounts. More info on our process page.

What if we don't get results?

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We disqualify prospects thoroughly based on our criteria. If by the end of month 3, we have not generated qualified pipeline that our service pays for itself, you get out of the contract early.

How much time does the founder need to spend on this?

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1-2 hours/week.

What are the resources & team size we need to support this?

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Besides the founder, you need 1 person on your side to support our process. They will need to dedicate 2-4 hours/week to it. Their main task is to approve content before it goes live. Usually this is the person who owns marketing on your team, but it can also be the founder themselves.

Ready to scale your B2B software company? Speak to someone on our team to find out if Founder-Led Marketing would make sense for your company.

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