Grow your B2B software business with Founder-Led Marketing
Project 33 helps B2B software startups create awareness for their solution, build trust & credibility in their market, generate inbound demos, and drive sustainable business growth by implementing Founder-Led Marketing and positioning their founder as an authority in their space.
What is Founder-Led Marketing?
Founder-Led Marketing is a modern approach to marketing that leverages your 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 content and marketing assets. Why the founder? Because we believe that in order to effectively drive revenue, today’s marketing needs to be built on deep customer, product and market insights – and no one understands them better than your founder.
Why does Founder-Led Marketing work?
1. Easier to build awareness:
Sophisticated B2B buyers want to hear from the founder, not from a Content Writer or PR person. The founder has the best stories as they've been with the business since day one.
2. Easier to build trust:
No one understands your company, product, customers and market better than your founder. And deep insights are what build customer trust and company credibility.
3. Easier to create demand:
It's much easier to generate new demand for your product if you have someone actively evangelizing your category, and no one is better suited to carry this flag than the founder.
Founder-Led Marketing vs Alternatives
Traditional BMarketing (Non-founder-led) | Founder Personal Branding | Founder-Led Marketing | |
|---|---|---|---|
Traditional B2B Marketing (non-founder-led) | Founder Personal Branding | Founder-Led Marketing | |
Objective | Generate leads / MQLs | Grow personal social media following of the founder | Drive revenue & business growth |
Channels | Google ads, website blog/SEO, email marketing | Linkedin, Instagram, TikTok | All channels (channel agnostic) |
Content | Product features, product pitches, CTAs | Personal anecdotes, selfies | Insights, industry commentary, educational content |
Organic/paid | Organic & paid | Organic | Organic & paid |
Demand | Pure demand capture | Demand capture & demand creation | Demand capture & demand creation |
Focus on which market segment | On the 3% who are actively looking to buy right now | On the 97% who are currently not interested in buying | On 100% of the market by creating different marketing assets for each group |
Lead quality | High volume, low quality | Highly variable | Low volume, high quality |
Lead to Deal Conversion Rate | 0.1-1% | Highly variable | 10-20% |
Assumption | In order to sell more, we need more leads and email contacts for our sales team to pound | In order to sell more, we need more followers and likes on social media | In order to sell more, we need to build customer trust and educate our buyers before they ever talk to Sales |
Effectiveness | Declining | Highly dependent on the charisma of the founder | High |
Why you should not implement Founder-Led Marketing
1
2
3
4
5
❌ You're selling a low-cost, B2C or very simple, straightforward product
❌ You're still building the product or you don't 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're selling a complex, expensive solution ($10k+ ACV) to sophisticated buyers (Director-level & up)
✅ You have initial traction (> $1M ARR) and know exactly what you're selling & to whom
✅ Your founder has deep domain expertise of the field you’re in (eg. in cybersecurity if you’re selling cybersecurity software) 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
✅ You have the willingness to make Founder-Led Marketing an organizational approach
Founder-Led Marketing is easy to integrate with Project 33
we dont operate like your usual marketing agency with lots of brainstorming sessions....
instead, we follow an engineered approach...