The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 16

Garrett Moon, CoSchedule

500 Posts to 7,000 Customers: SaaS Content Marketing

Garrett Moon is the CEO and co-founder of CoSchedule, a content marketing and social media publishing calendar for small businesses and marketing teams. CoSchedule helps over 7,000 customers organize their content marketing and social media publishing in more than 100 countries around the world. CoSchedule was founded in 2013 and to date has raised around $500,000 in funding. This episode is the story of two guys who ran a web design and marketing consulting business. One day they hatched a plan for a new SaaS product on a plane ride between North Dakota and Atlanta. By the time they landed, they were fully committed to the idea and had decided what they were going to do next. This wasn't the first time these two had launched a product. They had already tried four times without much success. But this time felt different because their idea would solve a problem their consulting clients were often complaining about - organizing content creation and social media promotion in one place. They started by writing a blog post about the problem and how their new product would solve it. They mocked up some screenshots in Photoshop of a product that didn't exist yet. Within 24 hours, they had 300-400 email signups from people interested in the idea. Then Garrett did something remarkably disciplined. He went through that email list, threw out all the Gmail and Yahoo addresses, and identified 10 potential customers. He created a slide deck and scheduled calls with each of them to get feedback before writing any code. The SaaS content marketing didn't stop there. Garrett blogged once a week about the entire process of building CoSchedule - sharing wireframes, early ideas, and getting community feedback along the way. After launch, they scaled to three posts per week, published over 500 actionable blog posts, and grew their email list to over 100,000 subscribers. What makes this story different from every other "we used content marketing" narrative is Garrett's Blue Ocean strategy. Instead of competing on volume, CoSchedule published fewer but dramatically better posts - several thousand words each, deeply researched, always actionable, and always including downloadable worksheets or resources. Most competitors wouldn't put in that level of effort. That became their moat. Garrett also shares the painful lessons about building features customers didn't want, why he deliberately avoided selling to his consulting clients, and why focus is the single most important attribute for any entrepreneur.

Kreg Peeler, SpinGo

How a Website Metric Sparked a SaaS Go-to-Market Shift

Kreg Peeler's first entrepreneurial venture was at age 12 - selling avocados at a busy California intersection with a cardboard sign. His SaaS go-to-market journey started in a similarly scrappy way, with a DVD containing 6,000 menus that he distributed through university bookstores. That DVD led to a website called Spin Local, which had a local events section. Kreg's wife Amanda manually curated event listings - digging up content from venue websites, correcting typos, and publishing comprehensive calendars. When they checked their analytics, 80% of all website traffic was going to that events section. That one metric changed everything. When newspaper companies tried to acquire Spin Local, Kreg countered with a licensing deal instead. He broke off the events section as a separate product called SpinGo and signed up media companies as clients who paid monthly fees for event content they could embed in their entertainment sections. SpinGo's SaaS go-to-market strategy evolved through three phases. Phase one was licensing event content to media companies and app developers. Phase two was promotions - letting event makers pay for premium placement, featured listings, and self-serve Facebook and Google ad campaigns. Phase three was Event Master, a full SaaS platform that unifies ticketing, marketing, volunteer management, and event apps into one solution. By 2016, SpinGo had grown to 200,000 registered event makers, powered 5,500 entertainment apps reaching 200 million monthly viewers, and raised over $7 million in funding. The Event Master SaaS product, launched in February, signed 254 events in its first few months and was projected to generate 80% of the company's revenue. Kreg's trade show strategy was particularly effective. He brought professional stage lighting, 80-inch TVs, and event production expertise to newspaper industry conferences where competitors showed up with pop-up banners. The visual contrast won attention, and his message - "own local, don't try to be national" - positioned SpinGo as an ally rather than a competitor.

The SaaS Podcast

Signs You Chose the Wrong SaaS Co-Founder

A 12x SaaS Pricing Increase That Fixed Unit Economics

3 Tactics That Got Gleam to 5000 SaaS Customer Acquisitions

A Step-by-Step Framework for Getting SaaS Pricing Right

From Blogging to a SaaS Exit by Building Audience First

This Vertical SaaS Replaced a 120-Year-Old Eye Exam

Bootstrapped 7 Years Then Skipped VCs in SaaS Fundraising

500 Posts to 7,000 Customers: SaaS Content Marketing

7 Mental Hacks for the Overwhelmed SaaS Entrepreneur

From Internal Tool to $1M: A Bootstrapped SaaS Growth Story

The SaaS Distribution Channel That Drove 100% of Early Users

SaaS Product Validation With Zero Code and 9 Doctors

From $50 to $1K/mo by Raising SaaS Customer Lifetime Value

5-Step SaaS User Onboarding Framework That Drives Retention

From 0 to 100 Customers Through SaaS Customer Development

How Chameleon Validated the SaaS Onboarding Problem

Dropout to 7-Figure SaaS With an Entrepreneurial Mindset

How Thrive Themes Built SaaS Retention With 30K Users

5 Years of Audience Building Before a SaaS Go-to-Market

A SaaS Content Strategy Built on Storytelling Not Tips

How a Failed $80K Product Became a Self-Funded SaaS

From Evernote Idea to SaaS Product-Market Fit

How a Website Metric Sparked a SaaS Go-to-Market Shift

From a Failed Startup to SaaS Product-Market Fit