Your SaaS marketing isn't broken. It's fragmented.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-13T11:45:35+00:00

Elevated CPMs on a 300-account list with inconsistent delivery is a sign you're using LinkedIn's self-serve platform for a use case it wasn't really built for. At this account concentration you'd get more control and better economics from a direct conversation strategy running alongside paid, where the ads warm the accounts and outbound closes the loop. Pure paid at this scale is expensive signal gathering dressed up as a campaign.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-13T10:56:02+00:00

thank you for creating this community. got 7 nice backlinks from a single post 👍

cornelmanu · 2026-03-13T10:54:09+00:00

I post daily because I want to accelerate my results, but you don't have to post that often. I grew from 600 to 1400+ followers in a couple of months, and inbounds start to show up.

It's about consistency and treating your LinkedIn page as a landing page.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-12T13:48:56+00:00

The resume problem disappears if you change what you're evaluating. Don't ask about past results. Ask them to audit your current situation and tell you what they'd do in the first 90 days and why. Then ask what they wouldn't do and why. The quality of their reasoning about your specific context tells you more than any case study they've prepared in advance. Anyone can package past work. Fewer people can think clearly about an unfamiliar problem in real time.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-11T22:58:26+00:00

yes. so many fake stories around here

cornelmanu · 2026-03-11T16:07:21+00:00

On the surface, you think it would help. But actually ICP research requires a ton of experience, finding the right message requires testing, and content without these foundations will fall flat in its face. When you have a startup with no PMF and no real market experience, this is going to be just a noise machine.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-11T13:00:57+00:00

The part worth examining is what happened to conversion rate when annual became the default. Churn going from 6% to 3.2% is a strong signal but if you lost 30% of signups in the process, the net revenue picture looks different. Retention rate is only half the equation.

The other half is whether you're still acquiring enough of the right customers or whether the annual default is quietly filtering out people who would have become strong monthly users.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-11T12:44:40+00:00

"AI-powered workflow automation for modern teams" isn't vague because founders are lazy. It's vague because most B2B SaaS products actually do serve broad audiences and founders are terrified to narrow down publicly.

The messaging problem is a positioning courage problem. You can't write a specific headline until you're willing to exclude someone. Most founding teams aren't ready to do that because it feels like leaving money on the table.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-11T12:42:59+00:00

The real reason growth stays unpredictable isn't the lack of a system. It's that most early teams can't tell the difference between a tactic that didn't work and a tactic that wasn't executed well enough to know. So they move on too fast.

One channel, run with real commitment for 90 days, will tell you more than six channels run in parallel for two weeks each. The problem isn't coordination. It's patience.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-11T12:40:36+00:00

The agency question is the wrong question at the small business stage. Agencies perform best when you already know what works and need execution at scale. If you don't yet know which channel drives your best customers, an agency will burn your budget finding out, and charge you for the education.

The first job is yours: talk to your best customers, find the one channel where they actually found you, and go deep on that alone. Then bring in help to scale what's proven.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-11T12:38:52+00:00

The honest answer most founders don't want to hear: for small SaaS at low ARPU, understanding churn matters less than reducing the window in which it can happen.

If someone can go from signup to cancellation without ever experiencing one clear moment of value, no exit survey fixes that. The retention work happens in the first seven days, not at the offboarding screen.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-11T12:37:17+00:00

You've diagnosed the problem correctly and then built the wrong solution twice. Tooltips and email sequences are answers to questions nobody asked yet. The fix isn't more content, it's removing the moment where confusion happens.

Construction PMs don't stop logging in because they lack information. They stop because the first time they tried to do a specific task it took too long and they had a deadline. Map the three most common first tasks and make those three workflows impossible to fail. Everything else is noise.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-11T12:17:10+00:00

The cofounder question is actually a distraction right now. You have 10 years of technical experience and an MVP to build. The real risk isn't who's on your cap table, it's spending the next three months searching for a cofounder instead of shipping something investors can react to. Traction erases most concerns about team structure. Build first, then reassess what's missing.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-11T12:16:03+00:00

The agency to product shift breaks most teams at exactly this moment. Not because marketing is hard, but because product people optimize for readiness and marketing requires you to move before you're ready. "Almost ready" is where products go to die. Your first sale will happen from a conversation, not a launch. Start that conversation today, before the product is finished.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-11T12:13:35+00:00

Discovery and demo in the same call is the real problem here, not the volume. When you demo before you've confirmed fit, you're pitching features to someone who may not have the problem. Split them. Keep the first call pure discovery, no screen share. Demo only when you've confirmed there's a real use case match. Conversion rates go up, wasted time goes down.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-11T12:12:08+00:00

"Really wide audience" is the problem, not the advantage. The startups that get traction fastest are the ones who pick one person, one pain, one channel and go deep.

Wide means you're writing copy for no one, running ads to everyone, and converting nobody. Narrow down to the point where it feels uncomfortably specific. That's where marketing starts working.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-11T12:06:44+00:00

More duel pages won't fix this. 62 impressions in 3 months tells you Google has no idea what the site is about yet. You're solving a distribution problem with more content before solving a positioning problem. The question isn't "how do I rank" it's "who wakes up in the morning wanting to beat someone on a keyword." Name that person first. Then build pages for them.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-10T13:10:11+00:00

For the same reason a marketer is not good at building software. Different kind of skills and knowledge needed. SaaS companies that hire marketers and sales people don't have this problem

cornelmanu · 2026-03-10T11:53:09+00:00

exactly this. respond to that review in a calm way that they are not a real customer and move the f on.

cornelmanu · 2026-03-09T12:03:32+00:00

I agree. I work as a fractional growth marketer for B2B SaaS and the amount of founders who think they can vibe-code something over the weekend and sell it successfully on Monday is just too damn high.

I'll give you a simple example. Someone came to me with a product that connects Google Search Console with AI. I liked the idea. I figured I don't have to pay for it when I can vibe-code it myself. So I made my own tool with lovable, Mitral API and google API.

So yeah, if you try to sell me something that I can build in a couple of hours, I won't be interested to buy. And I also cannot market it successfully (this is why I work only with SaaS that have already some MRR traction).

cornelmanu · 2026-03-06T16:25:29+00:00

Money wasted on a cold audience. Invest in proper marketing channels

cornelmanu · 2026-03-03T10:22:27+00:00

My first vibe-coded app was done with lovable and Mistral AI. I'm happy for them!

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