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.
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.
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1 hour interview with our team per week
We turn the conversation into bite-sized LinkedIn text, image and video posts and help you repurpose them on other channels.
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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.
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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.
You are selling a low-cost, B2C, or very simple, straightforward product
You are still building the product or you don’t have have a clear buying persona (you sell to anyone and everyone)
Your founder is new in the field and doesn’t have deep domain expertise yet
Your founder is only involved in a narrow area of the business or doesn’t interact with customers and prospects
You just want some “LinkedIn content” for your founder
You are selling a complex, expensive solution ($10k+ ACV) to sophisticated buyers (Director-level and up)
You have initial traction (> $1M ARR) and know exactly what you are selling and to whom
Your founder has deep domain expertise of the field you are in and is respected by peers
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)
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)
Dedicated Marketing Manager
Marketing Manager ($85k/year)
Dedicated Copywriter
Copywriter ($60k/year)
Dedicated Video Editor
Video Editor ($50k/year)
LinkedIn content
LinkedIn agency ($3,500/month)
YouTube content
YouTube agency ($2,500/month)
Email newsletter content
Email Marketing agency ($2,500/month)
Website SEO content
SEO agency ($4,000/month)
TikTok/Shorts/Reels content
Shortform content/Tiktok agency ($2,000/month)
LinkedIn ads
Linkedin ad agency ($3,000/month)
Facebook ads
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
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
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
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.
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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?
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?
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?
Pricing starts at $13,00USD / €12.000EUR per month. More info on our pricing page.
How does it work?
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?
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?
1-2 hours/week.
What are the resources & team size we need to support this?
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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