Happy Sunday from NYC!
Kicking off my first newsletter of the fall feels so good. (Fall is my favorite season, btw.) It’s so fun connecting with you every week.
Last week, I got a ton of replies, requests, and reachouts (which I love).
Just a reminder: if you ever need help on growth strategy, advice on what to run next, intros to the right people, or hiring your marketing team, my inbox is open ([email protected]).
The next time you think “I wish I could run this by Julia before I pull the trigger,” consider this your official invite….I’m here!
Lately, I’ve been getting tons of questions from my B2B founder friends like:
How can I grow my product faster with marketing?
What product led growth hacks can I steal?
WTF do I do to build a sexy B2B brand?
So this week, I went through my top 10 zero-to-one hacks that B2B (business-to-business for all my non-techy people here) companies can steal from consumer companies. Real examples included.
Enjoy!
Top 10 Zero-To-One Hacks B2B Can Steal From Consumer
Making your product not boring: Give your product a personality. Boring B2B SaaS tools are so over. Imagine how much better your product would be if you gave it a personality and tacked on viral consumer stunts.
Example: Rilla. The CEO, Sebastian, (also a subscriber to my newsletter so, hey!) is one of the most exceptional founder marketers. He just put on a Rilla Invitational where he transformed a Brooklyn warehouse into an interactive game with 35 rooms where customers had to use the product to sell to actors playing homeowners. This is one of the coolest B2B live experiences I’ve seen in a long, long time.
Self sign-up flows: This has been a super hot B2B adoption this year. If you’re a B2B founder who hasn’t already done this yet, you’re either behind or must have a very good reason.
Even if you want to leave pricing out (so you can sell via a sales team) you should still let people make an account with your company, then try something like dropping them a hard modal so they have to book an intro call.
At least this way, you can start to curate a list of higher intent customers. I would try to make the product sticker in the onboarding than “sign up for a demo.” You should give them a little taste of the action and style of the product. Example: Cursor
Hard paywalls: Give your customer the option to self sign up (rather than book a demo with your sales team) and pick a plan
Youtube style resource hubs: This gives your brand the opportunity to develop a personality + gives your customers an already familiar platform to learn your product.
B2C products are usually incredibly intuitive, and B2B products are typically a bit less sexy and way more industry specific. Either way, you want your user to reach a desired end state. The best way to get there is to show them how.
Example: Beehiiv will always be my favorite co that does this.
Example: I’ve seen Midjourney paying a lot of videographer Youtubers to make content demo-ing their products.
UGC Content: Consumer brands flood feeds with short, buzzy UGC videos; B2B doesn’t. But your customers live on social media too. Even off the clock, they’re scrolling work-related tips, takes, and industry content.
Copy this: commission UGC videos that show your product in action and create social proof that smart people in your industry already use it.
For me, I get served a ton of marketing and startup content, whether its making videos, AI production, social media strategies, VC tips etc.
Example: Truthfully, I’m not seeing B2B tap into this yet, although it’s HUGE in the consumer world right now. Great opportunity for all my B2B founders reading
If you have any questions on how to set a UGC program for your B2B company so you can ship hundreds of buzzy creatives/month, reply here. Get ahead before B2B catches onto this growth hack.
High volume creative rotation in paid ads: Did you know you can go into meta ads library and see all the ads your competitors are running? I promise you, they probably aren’t as good as you think. And if they are, you can learn directly there.
At Citizen, we rotated in new paid ad creative assets every ~7 days. This is incredibly fast; typically companies rotate in new creative every 4 weeks.
B2B should totally steal this hack for fresh angles, constant testing, and new faces repping the brand before audiences ever got bored. Creating new content isn’t as expensive as you think it is if you can do this correctly. Here’s exactly how I did it at Citizen.
Tight feedback loops with customers: If you can’t get signal from data, pick up the phone. Early on, build a small circle of power users you can test ideas with. They’ll tell you fast if what you built is good and they’ll become your loudest champions.
In B2C, customers give this feedback publicly on socials. In B2B, it’s on you to create those loops directly.
Sign-in with Apple or Google: Just a thought here to try to get more sign-ups. People should be able to sign up for your product without a demo and you should be directing them to a mini product experience instead of a “we’ll be in touch” page.
Social-first Design: Instead of hiding products behind logins, design so that there’s a page where people can show off. Let users brag about what they’ve built inside your tool, directly on Twitter/LinkedIn.
Example: Companies on Beehiiv screenshot their metrics page all the time to show off their newsletter stats.
Community as Product: Consumer brands (Figma, Glossier) thrive because they build identity communities. B2B founders underestimate how lonely workflows are. Build in peer-to-peer spaces.
You should even consider allowing your customers to access a discord channel and talk to other customers for help/support/or even just a peer-to-peer industry space.
Integrations as a Growth Hack: In consumer, apps grow by offering features that plug directly into culture (example: TikTok sounds let people make content to top music). Ecommerce brands grow with collabs (example: Erewhon smoothies x celebs).
In B2B, your “culture” is workflows, so every integration is basically stealth distribution. By that I mean that your product grows not because you’re actively marketing it, but because it naturally spreads itself every time someone uses it inside another product or workflow. The distribution is “hidden” inside the usage.
Example: Loom’s biggest growth lever wasn’t just video messaging. It was the Gmail + LinkedIn previews. Every time someone shared a Loom link, the recipient got a branded thumbnail → free marketing.
Example: Slack did the same with its “Add to Slack” buttons, that allowed devs to place the button directly on their own websites + Slack gained access to new audiences and promoted organically. Check out this article from 10 years ago where the author was invited to this beta feature!!
Example: Calendly hijacked Google Calendar. Every scheduling email doubled as a Calendly ad; “pick a time on my link” is basically product-led growth in one sentence.
Well, How’d I Do?
B2B doesn’t need another “demo request” button from a landing page that looks like a copy and paste from everyone out there.
It needs personality, high-volume content, growth/feedback loops, and community. Pick one of these hacks, ship it this week, and lmk how it goes.
B2B stealing from consumer is only getting hotter, but most founders still struggle to decide what to steal.
This list is a good place to start.
Crossing both sectors has given me a wide toolbox, and the truth is: if you swap the way you’re thinking, there’s a lot to unlock.
I hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter (I know the format wasn’t the prettiest this week). Go make something in B2B unboring and have an incredible week.
Julia
