Brendan Hufford

Director of SEO

Exploring how SaaS companies *actually* get customers

Getting results via my 4-part SaaS growth framework is what I do.

Having led and scaled growth teams at two agencies, most of the clients I worked with didn’t want (or need) 6-12 month marketing engagements. I knew there was a better way, so I created this service.

My best clients could be incredibly successful if only they just had a little help guiding them along the path of making sure they had a strong website and were perfectly positioned to rank in Google.

It’s why so many of them double, or even triple leads and MQLs after working together:

📈  +2,750% MQLs for ETL Software company

📈  Launched content marketing campaign that brought in 100k site visitors, 1,000 new backlinks and  $130,000 in monthly traffic value for Cloud Operations software company

📈  Led strategy for a multi-pronged SEO and content marketing campaign for an established software company resulting in +100% website traffic in only 3 months.

Founder

We Help Take SaaS Companies From $10M to $100M ARR. Using our SaaS Growth Sprint Framework, we help Saas companies increase revenue from Google through short, focused marketing sprints.

"Our product is so technical, no one can write for us."

I hear this on at least half my discovery calls. 

And I always ask the same question:

"Can no one do this? Or has no one done it so far?"

Nine times out of ten, they pause.

Because they've hired a bunch of generic content writers who gave them generic content. And now they're convinced the problem is their product complexity.

It's not.

The problem is they hired writers who don't understand the problem they solve.

Here's what's actually happening:

- You're so in love with your product that you think it's completely unique.

- You think because YOU live in the weeds of your data science platform or your DevOps tooling, the market must see it the same way.

The market does not.

I had a client, super smart marketer, genuinely innovative product. 

He kept telling me "we're nothing like [their biggest competitor]."

I'm like, "First of all, your [biggest competitor] has an awareness problem and they're incredible. Second, the market is trying to figure out what problem you solve. And unless somebody's actively thinking 'we have a data science problem,' you're invisible."

There's a huge difference between:

A. A writer who can explain your features

and

B. A writer who understands why those features matter to someone at 2am trying to solve a specific problem

The first one gives you generic content.

The second one gives you content that actually converts.

Stop playing small behind claims of "we're too technical."

Instead, answer this - "Have we hired people who actually understand the problems our buyers are trying to solve?"

⚡️

PS - The companies with the most "technical" products often have the clearest content strategies. 

Because they can't hide behind vague marketing speak. 

They have to get specific about the problem. 

And specific problems attract specific buyers.

SaaS Marketing - Content, AEO & SEO | Newsletter: How SaaS companies *actually* get customers

Content marketing in 2026 has 4 ingredients.
Most teams have all 4, but almost nobody has them working together.

You can do SEO, AEO, social, and newsletters. You can even have a clear point of view.

But if they're running as separate projects with separate calendars and separate goals?

Nothing compounds. It's just activity.

The teams winning right now figured out something simple:

1. Content IP (your language layer)

Out: Jargon. Naming solutions instead of problems. Copying competitor messaging.

In: Pick one problem to solve. Give it a snappy name. Make people say "oh, THAT'S what that's called."

This is the foundation.

2. Discoverability (SEO/AEO)

Out: Checklist-driven. Clicks over intent. Too general, too siloed.

In: Problem-driven. Partnered with sales, success and support (3S content). Content that doubles as sales enablement.

3. Virality (social)

Out: Chasing trends. Rage baiting. Generic ghost-written posts that could belong to anyone.

In: Focused on your audience's actual problems. Making people feel seen. The "I see you at the top of my feed every time I log on" energy.

4. Relatability (newsletter)

Out: Blog distribution. AI rewrites. Treated like an afterthought.

In: Feels human. Conversational. Focused on insights people actually forward to their team.

--

Repetition IS the strategy.

Saying the same thing from different angles across all 4 channels is how ideas stick.

The best content gets discovered. Saved. Shared with teams. Forwarded to a boss.

Because it gives people language and ideas they can reuse.

⚡️

PS - If your SEO team has never talked to your social person, and your newsletter is just "here's what we published this week"... you don't have a content strategy.

My wife looked at me and said, "That's not normal."

I was telling her about a rough stretch in the business. 

She asked if I'd ever just... quit.

And I said no. I'll never quit.

Now listen, I'll humble myself and do literally any job if I have to. 

Family first. 

Also, all work is valid.

But I'm not going to wake up one day and decide *this* is too hard.

That's when she hit me with it.

"That's not normal. Not everybody thinks like that."

And she's right.

If I took a landscaping job tomorrow, within 6 months I'd be:

- Writing down every house I visited. 
- Learning every client's name. 
- Sending follow-up cards nobody asked me to send.
- And quietly planning to run things some day..

I can't turn it off.

Nick and I were laughing about this on a call the other day. He said the same thing — he'd take any job, and his brain would immediately start figuring out how to run the place.

Not everybody’s like that.

But some of you are.

- You sit in on sales calls because you want to hear how customers actually talk
- You read the board deck because you want to understand where the company is headed
- You learn the P&L because you're tired of marketing being treated like a cost center

You're not a specialist. You're not a generalist either.

You're a deep generalist.

You analyze. You synthesize. You make connections across channels and functions that nobody else sees. And then you turn those connections into new skills.

Most people become myopic about one channel. They get religious about SEO or paid or email and stop there.

You can't do that. You need to understand everything.

And thanks to that - if you got laid off tomorrow, you wouldn't panic. 

You'd start reading. Watching. Talking to people. Synthesizing everything you learned into your next move.

That's the deep generalist brain. It never turns off.

You don't have to be crazy to do this work.

But it helps.

⚡️

PS - If you're nodding along, you're one of us. Acquiring skills and taking ownership of things that aren't technically our job. It's what gives deep generalists teeth. 

That's why when people compete against us... they lose.

The winners in SaaS marketing are already playing a new game.

+ Klue
+ Ramp
+ Gusto
+ Lattice
+ Dropbox
+ Sendoso
+ ActiveCampaign

Intuit, Datadog, Cloudflare and Notion, too.

ALL have public interactive product demos.

I’ve been pumped about interactive demos over the past few years because they WORK.

+71% click-through rate (yes, in 2026!
+ Convert 12% better than product videos

oh and...

+450% lift in free trial signups
+100% lift in users reaching activated trial status
+175% lift in users converting to paid customers in that same timeframe

The list gets longer every day.

But now it’s about to get REALLY long.

Navattic just their State of the Interactive Demo 2026.

40,000+ Navattic demos have have been built in the past year.

And they analyzed every single one of them.

In a few years, we'll look back and wonder why it took us all so long to surf the wave with them.

⚡️

PS - If you've got big 2026 goals to hit, this is the move.

Fernando Mendoza might be the best thing to happen to LinkedIn:

1. Wins Heisman Trophy

Adds it to his LinkedIn bio.

2. Undefeated season and win a national championship

Posts  "Here's what winning a National Championship taught me about B2B sales"

💀

But it gets better.

3. Declared for the NFL draft this week

Changes his status to #OpenToWork.

Updated his profile picture with the green banner and everything.

The man is clearly having a GREAT time on here.

And you can tell.

Fun fact: Mendoza deleted every other social media app during the season.

Kept only YouTube and LinkedIn because, in his words, "it's a positive site."

This is the energy I want to see more of.

⚡️

PS - If you're not following Fernando Mendoza on here yet, fix that immediately. 

The man understands the assignment better than most of us.

I've been looking at Search Console data across a dozen different companies lately. They're all seeing the same thing.

I call it the crocodile curve.

Impressions up. Clicks down. A little mouth opening wider every month.

Google is showing your links more than ever. And less people are clicking them.

Most people think this is bad and traffic their job is to get traffic to go back up.

I disagree.

My take: The value of a click just doubled.

If you used to get 1,000 clicks and now you get 500, each of those 500 clicks is worth twice as much. 

The people who DO click actually give a damn.

So why are you still serving them the same generic content you were writing when clicks were cheap?

This is where most companies get it backwards.

Traffic is down, so they panic. 

They pump out MORE content. 
More keywords. 
More volume.

Checkbox marketing at its finest.

But the answer isn't more checkbox content. It's better content for the people who still bother to click.

When someone lands on your blog in 2026, you have about five seconds to prove you're worth their time.

The fastest way to do that? Name the problem they've struggled to articulate.

If the first thing they read is "digital fatigue is higher than ever" or "checkbox marketing is destroying your pipeline" (and they've felt that in their bones for months) you've got them.

They're not skimming anymore. They're reading.

Clicks are the new currency.

And the people who click deserve better than recycled content that could be swapped with your competitor's.

⚡️

PS - If your traffic is down, "how do we get more?" is the wrong question.

"How do we deserve the clicks we get?" is the right one.

I don't think about clients. I think about careers.

Told a client last week, "I get the privilege of helping you, but at the end of the day, you put this work on your resume forever."

This gets your next job. 

Your next promotion. 

Financial stability for your family.

I think about that constantly.

If we do this *right*, this person's ENTIRE career gets easier.

When I'm on a sales call, I'm not just talking about content strategy or pipeline. 

I'm talking to someone whose career is on the line.

They don't hire me for "more" content.

With Chatty G, every company can content volume themselves into oblivion if they want.

I get hired because we need to prove to their CEO that marketing actually works. 

They need wins they can point to. 

Results that follow them to their next role.

I'm competitive. I want to win. But this isn't really about me.

It's about the director of marketing who just got promoted and has six months to show impact before the board meeting.

It's about the VP who left a safe corporate job to bet on a startup and can't afford for this to not work.

It's about the CMO who's four months in seat and needs to show their new team they made the right choice.

These aren't just clients. These are people with mortgages and kids and careers they've spent years building.

So when I say I take this work seriously, I mean it.

Not because I'm trying to close a deal. Because I understand what's actually at stake.

Your content strategy isn't just a marketing initiative.

It's your career. 

It's your life.

⚡️

PS - If you're working with someone who doesn't understand the weight of what they're helping you build, find someone who does.

Invisible content gets approved instantly.
Visible content gets torn apart.

Why does the content nobody reads ship every week, but the newsletter and social posts that could drive $100K in pipeline sit "in review" for three months?

“This is going on social?! I need to scrutinize EVERY WORD” - Your CEO who doesn't know anything about marketing.

Terry from product marketing needs to review the carousel because "is that how we talk about the product?"

Legal wants to weigh in.

And don’t forget about your boss's boss that has "just one small note."

So, the social content sits. The newsletter sits. The stuff that could actually build relationships and drive pipeline just…sits.

While the content nobody reads keeps shipping on schedule.

This isn't a people problem.

It's a visibility problem.

Social and newsletters live somewhere public. They're exposed. Leadership sees them. Customers see them. 

Your CEO's college roommate might see them. (gasp)

The blog is safely tucked away on your website where nobody's watching.

So you keep producing the invisible work that ships easily and avoiding the visible work that actually matters.

And six months later you're wondering why your content isn't driving pipeline.

⚡️

PS - When I ask discovery call prospects "Are you thinking of hiring somebody? Why not keep doing what you've been doing?" this is usually the answer. 

They've been doing SEO for years. It works. But it's not enough anymore. 

In 2026, you need 3 loops:

1. Discovery loops (seo/aeo)
2. Viral loops (social)
3. Relationship loops (newsletter)

But the content that builds real relationships keeps getting killed by committee and they know that needs to change.

Goal: 50k followers (49,930) - SaaS Marketing - Content, AEO & SEO | Newsletter: How SaaS companies *actually* get customers

"I know this is working. I just can't... prove it."

1. The sales team is mentioning content in deal notes. 
2. Prospects are showing up warmer. 
3. The brand is getting recognized at events.

But when it's time for the exec update?

Crickets. Fuzzy charts. Defensive posture.

Newsletter. LinkedIn. AEO. Community. SEO. Influencer. Events.

All of it shows up later.

And "later" doesn't fit in a weekly, monthly, or quarterly dashboard.

So you end up in prove-it purgatory.

You know something is true. And you still have to defend it like a courtroom case.

The gap between impact and proof is the real stressor.

Not the work itself.

The work is actually working. You can feel it. Your team feels it. Your audience definitely feels it.

But feelings don't get budget renewed.

Here's what I've learned:

The work is always hard to measure.

But it's FAR harder when you're checking boxes.

Before they've named the problem they're solving.

Before they've picked the leading and trailing indicators that matter.

Before they've given leadership a story to tell the board.

If you don't build the executive narrative before you scale execution, you'll spend every quarterly review playing defense.

And that's exhausting.

The best marketers I know build the case for the work FIRST.

⚡️

PS - If you're stuck in prove-it purgatory right now, you're not alone. 

The gap between what you know and what you can show is real. 

Trust your gut. 

Then build the narrative to match.

Marketing channels should be about customers.
But they're really about careers.

The budget doesn't go to the channel that might work best.

Especially in big orgs, it goes to the channel that's easiest to explain when it doesn't work.

"We ran Meta ads."

Nobody gets fired for that. It's the safe choice. The explainable choice.

But pitch a newsletter strategy? A LinkedIn play? Something newer that might actually reach your buyers where they are?

Now you're on the hook.

If it works, you're a genius.

If it doesn't? You're the person who wasted budget on something "unproven."

So what happens?

Conservative budgets win.

Newer channels get scrutinized to death.

And mediocre-but-defensible beats promising-but-risky every single time.

The problem isn't that marketers don't know what might work better.

You do!

The problem, especially for new leaders, is the org punishes them for being wrong about anything that wasn't already approved by consensus.

This is why so many marketing strategies look identical across competitors.

Because they're safe for the marketer.

The customer comes in second to safety.

And until that changes, we'll keep funding the explainable over the effective.

⚡️

PS - If you've ever killed a promising idea because you couldn't defend it in a meeting (to non-marketers, of course), you already know this is true.

Most channel decisions are career decisions.

Positioning for Sales-Led SaaS companies | My clients win 6+ out of 10 deals, in 3x less time, at 40%+ higher value using my 4-week "Pressure Cooker" program.

Tired of losing to better-funded US competitors?
Stuck at 20–30% win rates?
I help Sales-led SaaS scaleups reach 60%+ — without new features or price cuts. Unlike consultants who deliver frameworks and disappear, I stay until your revenue proves it works.

The symptoms I fix:

- Sales teams explain features, not why you’re the only logical choice
- Losing to “do nothing” more than competitors
- Discounting because you can’t create urgency

If you’re closing less than 60% of qualified deals, we should talk.

Like Arrow Labs CEO Rami Darwish:

“My mind was stuck on the solution. Ton kept reframing me out of it by constantly asking ‘who cares? Why is that important?’
It was annoying. It pissed me off several times. But that’s exactly what I needed.
Win rates jumped from 30% to 60%, cycles were 3-4× faster. Now there are fewer competitors because we’re their people, not just another option.”

The root cause?
Almost always the same: positioning confusion.

The solution isn’t more features or lower prices.

It’s learning to own the remarkable effect—when your positioning, value proposition, and sales execution align to double win rates, halve sales cycles, and increase deal sizes by 40%. Not incremental improvement—pure leverage.

After 30 years in enterprise software, I’ve codified this in my book The Remarkable Effect—the playbook for how three strategic levers (Value, Viability, Volume) create 11x impact instead of 3x.

From “just another option” → must-have choice for the right customers.

Not with decks. Not with theory.
With positioning your sales team wants to use — because they can confidently explain how you’re different, why that matters, and close more deals.

I stay until your revenue proves it works.
That’s why my fees are tied to your actual growth, not just deliverables.
Because outcomes > input.

What your peer CEOs say:

- “No BS. Outcome-obsessed.”
- “Laser-sharp pipeline. Doubled our win rate.”
- “Not just advice — Ton stays until it works.”

I’m Ton — son of a Dutch tulip farmer. I live with my beautiful wife. 2 sons and 3 dogs in sunny Jávea, Spain.
Host of the weekly Remarkable SaaS podcast and creator of the Growth Catalyst Program.

Start here → https://valueinspiration.com/growthcatalyst
Or DM me for a no-pitch sanity check.

Ton Dobbe 🔆

He quadrupled revenue in 2 years by shrinking his focus.

Jim Whatmore (CEO of Joblogic Service Management Software) spent over a decade building patiently. 

From a management buyout in 2013 with 11 people and £500k in revenue, the priority was never speed. It was depth. Product. People. Customers. 

Rather than overstretching the business in pursuit of rapid expansion, Jim opted to focus on home territory and build market dominance before embarking on global presence. 
 
The platform was rebuilt properly from the ground up. Trade-agnostic workflows unlocked a much larger market. Strong customer relationships turned into long-term growth.Joblogic grew to £9M over ten years. 
 
Then quadrupled in the next two. 
Largely through organic growth and disciplined acquisitions.Not by chasing every opportunity. 
 
By executing well on the right ones.  

Most SaaS companies optimise for reach before they have real dominance. Jim’s story is a reminder that focus, patience, and consistency often outperform speed.

Losing to better-funded US competitors? I help Sales-led SaaS scaleups turn 5% win rates into 50+%—same team, zero discounting.

Yesterday I left Spain. +17 degrees. Four hours later I landed in Helsinki. -18 degrees. 35 degrees difference. One flight.

You know what was NOT my problem? 
The temperature. I had my winter coat.

I see this too often with sales teams. 

They come back from a meeting and say: 
"Maybe they're interested—but it felt a bit cold."

The prospect wasn't cold. 
You walked in with the wrong message.

"We're the market leader in..." → ice-cold reception. 
"I spoke to three CFOs last week who had exactly this problem..." → warm welcome.

Same prospect. Same day. Different temperature.

Average software companies blame cold prospects. 
Remarkable software companies bring the right coat.

Wednesday I was in Germany for a full day Pitch Battle.
Six sales teams pitched, got scored and ranked.

Daniel did everything right. 
Researched the customer. 
Opened with their reality. 
Quantified the pain perfectly.

He scored a 7.

Lisa won with an 8.9.

The difference? 
She stood for her case. Full conviction. 
The kind you feel in your chest before you process it in your head.

Everyone can teach structure. 
Everyone can train frameworks.

Good coaching creates solid 7s.

But Lisa didn't win because her mechanics were better. 
She won because there was no gap between what she said and what she believed.

Customers feel that gap - instantly.
Even when the deck is perfect.

This nuance is exactly why I stay on after I've repositioned a sales-led software company.

Cause a new value proposition means nothing until sales get dangerous with it.
That's where the magic happens. Not in the slides. In the conviction.

Average software companies train salespeople what to present.

Remarkable software companies build salespeople who believe every word they say.

€6M ARR. Growing 40%. Clear ICP. Strong positioning. Everything working.

Except you can see the ceiling. And the board sees it too.

So now it's Germany. Or France. Or the US. 
Expansion isn't a choice anymore - it's what comes next.

And here's what most CEOs assume: 
The hard part is behind us. Product is built. Now we just need to sell it there.

That assumption kills expansion.

I watched Exact try this in the early 2000s. Greenfield expansion into international markets. "We figured out the Netherlands, we'll figure out Germany." They underestimated what it actually takes. Years of struggle.

At Unit4 we learned from their pain. We bought what we couldn't rebuild fast enough - local credibility, customer base, trusted relationships. Expensive. Integration risk. But we started from somewhere, not nowhere.

Your product crosses borders. Everything else that made you win at home - the brand recognition, the trust, the network, the references - that doesn't travel with you.

So before you expand, ask yourself: 

If you walked into that new market tomorrow with just your product - no reputation, no network, no local references - why would anyone choose you over the local alternative?

Tal Peretz's (CEO of Onfire AI) customers are generating 4x more pipeline with the same headcount. 

On the podcast interview I had with him, he explained how: 

"AI makes sales harder, not easier. Everyone's adding AI features. The noise-to-signal ratio exploded. Everyone can now send 1,000 personalized emails. Everyone can generate content at scale."

But Tal didn't add AI features to an existing product. 
He built AI on top of proprietary data infrastructure—what he calls a "Onfire knowledge graph." 

While competitors chased obvious AI wins, he spent months building invisible infrastructure. Signal detection, not feature addition. 

This is Trait 3 from The Remarkable Effect: Be different, not just better. 

Tal didn't play the AI feature race. 
He built a data moat first, then added AI on top. 

Average software companies mindlessly add AI to existing products. 
Remarkable software companies rethink and rebuild their foundations first. 

That's what creates outcomes customers start talking about and keep talking about - like 4x more pipeline growth. 
(And yes, that also attracted funding. But that's the outcome, not the strategy.) 

To listen to the full conversation: link in comments

"We're totally focused. We target €5M-€25M manufacturing companies selling to enterprise."

I asked: "When's the last time you sent a prospect to a competitor?"

Silence.

"So... you're not focused at all."

Here's the thing most SaaS CEOs miss: ICP isn't a targeting tool. It's a shield.

You don't just use it to find the right customers. 
You use it to actively reject the wrong ones.

If you're not regularly sending prospects to your competitors, you're treating your entire market as your test market.

I worked with a CEO last quarter. His pipeline looked healthy - 40 deals, average €50K. But win rates were stuck at 22%.

We scored every deal against his ICP. Twelve of them had no business being there. Not that he couldn't offer the functionality they wanted. He could. 

No, because there was no obvious differentiation.

"Send them to your competitors," I told him.

"But that's €600K in pipeline!"

"It's €600K in false hope that's killing your team's velocity."

He did it. Pipeline shrank by 30%. Win rates jumped to 58%.

This is Trait 1 from The Remarkable Effect: Acknowledge you can't please everyone.

The real test of ICP commitment isn't in who you pursue. 
It's in who you turn away.

Average software companies chase every qualified lead. 
Remarkable software companies use their ICP as both compass and shield - knowing exactly who to pursue and who to reject.

How many deals in your pipeline right now have no business being there?

"We've implemented BANT, MEDDIC, CHAMP—you name it. Yet deals we rate as highly qualified still slip through our fingers."

90% qualification scores. 20% win rate.

Here's what all those frameworks miss:

They measure if prospects can buy. 
They measure if prospects will buy.

Not one forces you to honestly answer: Will they buy from you?

Because you solve something they can't solve without you.

Without that, you're guessing.

"We grew last year, but not as much as we hoped for."

A CEO of a software company from Norway told me this last week.

"We made enough calls. Booked enough demos. Pipeline looked healthy. My team did everything right. Yet we came up 23% short."

I asked him one question: "When you review pipeline, what do you look for?"

Silence.

Then: "Size. We need 3x, ideally 4x, our target."

There it is.

He'd built a culture where looking good mattered more than being accurate.
Reps stuff their pipeline with 'opportunities.' They keep deals alive too long because 'it's not lost yet, we still have a chance.' And they're genuinely too optimistic.

Deals check every box. Budget. Timeline. Champion. Yet they slip anyway.

Because nobody asks the only question that predicts close rates: 
Will they buy from us?

Not just buy. 
Buy from us.

He looked at me. "We never ask that."

Most don't.

Average software companies celebrate pipeline size.
Remarkable software companies celebrate pipeline accuracy.

10% of your home market captured. 90% still available.
But your board wants Germany.

I had this conversation with a CEO of sales-led software business from the Netherlands last week. 

€8M ARR. Growing 30%. Investors pushing hard for expansion. Board meeting in two weeks where he needs to present the plan.

I asked: "What percentage of your home market have you actually won?"


Long pause.


"Maybe 10%. There's still a lot of companies we haven't reached."

"So there's 90% of your market still available. Why Germany now?"


Another pause.


"The board wants to see we can scale internationally. And honestly - closing deals here has gotten harder. Takes longer. More competition. Germany feels like a fresh start."

There it is.

Germany isn't strategy. It's relief.

I've heard this conversation dozens of times - with clients, in my own career at Unit4, with CEOs planning expansion now.

The problem isn't that expansion is wrong. 
It's that most CEOs expand for the wrong reason at the wrong time.

Here's the question that changes everything:

Is this expansion strategy - or an escape route?

I reviewed a pipeline with a SaaS CEO last month. 
Numbers looked fine. Healthy, even.

Then I asked a simple question: 
"How many of these deals are nice-to-have for the customer?"

Long pause.

"9 out of 10."

That was fine in 2021. 
It's death in 2025.

Budgets are tight. Committees are cautious. 

If your solution isn't tied to something keeping someone awake at night, you're not managing a pipeline.

You're managing a wish list.

And wish lists don't close.

"Three competitors just stole our biggest enterprise deals."

The CEO across from me looks different. Six months ago: celebrating Rule of 40. Today: exhausted.

"Companies we'd been nurturing for years. And these competitors? They're at Rule of 30. Burning cash. Growing faster than us."

He pulls up their investor decks on his phone.

"Look at this. One just raised €50M at 3x our valuation. Another got acquired for €400M - ten times revenue. We're profitable, they're not. We hit Rule of 40, they didn't."

Pause.

"So what are we doing wrong?"

Rule of 40 measures whether you're financially healthy today. 
It doesn't measure whether you'll matter tomorrow.

You can hit Rule of 40 while losing your strategic edge. 
The metrics say you're winning this quarter while your position erodes for next year.

Those competitors burning cash? 

They're not being reckless. They're building strategic moats. Their win rates are climbing. Their deal sizes are expanding. 

They're accepting Rule of 30 today to build Rule of 60 tomorrow.

While he was cutting his way to 40, they were investing their way to dominance.

The question isn't whether you hit Rule of 40. 
The question is whether it's the outcome of strategic clarity or financial engineering.

Is your Rule of 40 driven by pricing power or cost reduction?

I just had a conversation with Panos Siozos from LearnWorlds about what actually makes expansion work.

He told me: "We failed to find any traction within Greece."

This was 2014. Middle of the Greek financial crisis. Big businesses had no budgets. Nobody was investing in software. Nobody cared about online learning platforms.

So Panos had two choices: Give up. Or go international.

Most founders would have waited. Built more local relationships. Tried harder at home.

Panos didn't have that luxury.

The crisis forced him out. Within months he was approaching European and American markets. No local reputation. No network. No references.

"We put the scientists in the backseat," he said. "These customers had real problems. We needed to solve their problems - not the things we had in our minds."

American customers were already selling online courses at scale. They knew what they wanted. Strong e-commerce. Checkout funnels. Coupons. Black Friday strategies.

All stuff that felt exotic to a European team.

But LearnWorlds didn't argue. They listened. They adapted. They shipped features almost daily.

100 customers in 2015. 1,000 by 2019. 12,500 today across 150 countries.

I've seen this pattern before. At Unit4. With clients expanding now.

When you choose to expand, you bring assumptions. 
You think you know what will work.

When you're forced to expand, you become curious. 
You listen because survival depends on it.

This is Trait 4 of The Remarkable Effect: They master the art of curiosity.

Average software companies expand with confidence. 
"We figured it out here, we'll figure it out there."

Remarkable software companies expand with curiosity. 
"What would it take to be the obvious choice here?"

That question changes everything.


Full conversation with Panos:

Open article: #388 – How Panos Siozos reached 12.5K customers across 150 countries - Value Inspiration by valueinspiration.com

#388 – How Panos Siozos reached 12.5K customers across 150 countries - Value Inspiration

"We went from number four to number two in under three years. For greenfield, we're number one."

Pete Hunt , CEO of Dagster Labs , told me this on my podcast last week.

Same market. Same competitors. Less funding than most of them.

So I asked him: What changed?

"We decided our product is for the technical buyer. The less technical ones - we're just not going to serve them."

They picked a side.

Their users started picking sides too. Defending the product like it was personal.

That's what happens when you choose a side. Your customers notice. And they choose sides too.

Average software companies try to serve everyone.

Remarkable software companies pick a side - and attract people who'll fight for it.

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