GTM on a Shoestring for B2B SaaS
A few things to consider on the route from 0 to 100 customers with a limited budget.
I won’t pretend—I never ran a bootstrapped B2B SaaS.
Vizzly was YC-backed, giving us a tight circle of founders and alumni to lean on. But we never raised much—around $750K before our exit.
We never spent a dollar on go-to-market (GTM) and created a profitable company that was growing consistently ~15% MoM and we didn’t need to raise again.
What I share here is a sample of the learnings and tactics that helped on route to 100 customers.
This topic is broad enough to fill a book, but I’ll keep it concise, to the point and most importantly free of BS.
Before We Dive In
GTM effectiveness depends on what you're selling, to whom and at what price.
For example, selling software at $19 per seat per month to restaurant owners is a whole different game than selling enterprise security infrastructure.
Since the mid-market is the gravitational center of B2B SaaS—and where most companies, inevitably regress to the mean—I’ll focus the content there.
For those wondering why: mid-market companies offer reasonable ACVs without the lengthy sales cycles of enterprises. Unlike startups, they have the budget and if they like the product, tend stick around.
What is GTM?
Real quick: GTM is the strategy you use to launch your product, reach potential customers and drive adoption and ultimately revenue.
A super broad term that means everything and nothing at the same time.
I’ll make this more tangible so the next time your CTO asks what you do and why you do it, you can actually explain.
The Theory of Constraints
You have no money, which means you have no time.
Capital aside, without the stamp of approval or network that comes with venture funding, it’s naturally harder to build trust and awareness.
That is your constraint.
Focus efforts around your problems and be very intentional.
Just quickly: If you think running ads could maybe help, you’re already fucked.
Building Trust
People like to buy from people.
We hear a lot about product-led growth and self-serve models, but that distribution approach takes considerably more time to build the same level of trust as buying directly from the founder.
Building trust from ground zero with little traction is tough, but there’s a couple things you can do to counter the cold start problem:
Be vocal about your development progress. A startup’s biggest USP is development velocity—the best ones ship fast. The biggest frustration when working with incumbents is the pace of development and responsiveness of support.
You don’t have either of those problems.
Development Velocity
Turn your changelog into a marketing tool. Share updates across social, email, your site and Slack, build a narrative that your team ships fast AF.
Make the changelog shareable—it’s an asset. Prospects who believe in your product will naturally share it, so just make it easy for them.
Keep messaging raw and relatable. Don’t be that guy promoting hustle culture on social bragging about how you’re writing the post at 1am from the office.
Go to fucking bed.
But, if you're not already posting on social, start now.
Unscalable Support
At this stage, nothing needs to “scale.”
At one point, Vizzly had over 150 shared Slack channels with customers
Invite prospective customers into a shared Slack channel, include your team, where you can all engage with and speak to the customers and users.
This might be the first time the prospect is engaging with the rest of the team, and first impressions matter, so consider the following:
Even with an automated welcome, have the team greet them individually.
Share relevant onboarding materials, docs, and knowledge base resources.
Share a link to your calendar for support and make yourself accessible.
You won’t be able to keep this up forever, but do it until something breaks.
You’ll build personal relationships, close deals faster and learn a ton about your users—it’s a no-brainer.
Of course, trust is hard to build and easy to lose—so always follow through.
Targeted Awareness
For many founders, generating high-quality traffic and a steady flow of leads—cost-effectively—is the biggest challenge.
Mid-Funnel Content
Upper-funnel activity is expensive—you’re educating users, building brand awareness, and capturing leads who may have zero purchase intent at this stage.
Plus, a sales cycle without purchase intent is painfully long.
It’s difficult to compete with your venture-fuelled counterparts on the upper-funnel—not impossible, but I’m not convinced it’s the best use of resources.
If you’re in an existing market, let your competitors do the heavy lifting—as long as you’re in the conversation when prospects starts comparing options.
The content you create should speak to high-intent prospects only:
Create detailed competitor product comparison pages.
Build best-in-class documentation (technical or otherwise).
Only chase keywords that express high purchase intent.
If you’re set on running ads at this stage, stick to retargeting and focus only on prospects who’ve engaged with high-intent content.
The Grunt Work
Startup sales can be especially daunting for non-commercial founders—countless tools, so-called silver bullets and an endless stream of how-to blog posts.
Ironic, I know. Anyway…
Don’t over-engineer your sales process.
Whether it’s investing in the perfect CRM, building workflow automations, or setting up complex email sequences with marketing assets triggered by who clicks what and when—none of that is what will get you from 0 to 100 customers.
From a sales lens, there a few things that’ll move the needle now:
Positioning and messaging that’s highly relevant.
Contact data that reflects your ICP—shit data wastes time.
High-quality sales assets prospects can easily share.
Some automation is fine at this stage, but it should be and feel very hands-on.
You categorically do not need an AI SDR.
If anyone has found an AI SDR that actually works, DM me.
Right now, I’d bet on my gran learning C++ first.
Positioning & Messaging
You should constantly experiment with your positioning—every email and call is a chance to test new theses and see what resonates with whom.
Be systematic—know why you're testing new narratives.
The challenge is balancing sales push with product discovery—the art is knowing when to lean into each founder persona.
Once you have enough conversations, you’ll start to see patterns in how customers describe your product. Repackage and recycle this content.
Prospects will use keywords and phrases you haven’t thought of before. Assuming there’s ICP alignment, this should guide much of your narrative.
Keep your strong opinions, sure, but areas of uncertainty are where you need to take insight from prospects and let them lead.
Contact Data
You’re on a shoestring and high-quality contact data can be pricey.
There are plenty of tools to scrape contact information and identify ICPs based on various signals, which can improve your outreach timing. Some of these are great, but at the start of your journey, they’re likely overkill.
Grab a budget-friendly tool with decent data, like Apollo, and crack on.
Leverage your primary network for intros—even if you don’t know them so well. People are more generous than you may think.
I wrote about this in my last Substack on raising money—same rules apply.
Sales Rooms
Your narrative is still evolving and hasn’t fully solidified yet. Your website naturally doesn’t offer much depth at this stage and prospects likely don’t have a clear understanding of what sets you apart from the competition.
This was true for us for the first 18 months—Notion was our best friend.
We built one-pagers to share externally—sometimes generic, sometimes customized at the customer level. I guess you’d call this a ‘sales room.’
Sometimes the content of this doc would vary, but essentially:
Product overview, vision and feature set.
Demo videos, technical docs and concept summaries.
Links to case studies and customer references.
Order form, terms of service etc.
There are plenty of reasons to do this, whether you're on a shoestring or not:
Allows you to test messaging, positioning real fast.
Gives prospects a polished asset to share (that makes them look good).
Provides a centralized hub for all external content.
TL;DR
GTM is often seen as a dark art, and when we don’t fully understand something, the instinct is to throw money at it and see what sticks.
But regardless of funding, GTM is hard—money doesn’t change that.
Acknowledge your constraints and structure your strategy around them.
Your ability to build trust is fundamental to early success.
Start building your inbound content engine from day one.
Unscalable support, hands-on outreach etc., don’t shy away.
You can absolutely sign 100 accounts this way.
Absolutely loved this one! The part about constraints really hit me.
Trust is really the main constraint on the early stage when you don’t have external approval or funding yet