Dirk Sahlmer

Acquiring SaaS companies @ saas.group | saas.wtf Newsletter

Engineer turned M&A professional. After 20+ transactions on the buy-side, I'm now helping tech founders run a structured exit process.

Posting regularly here on LI and in my saas.wtf newsletter on SaaS and  M&A topics.

Head of Origination

It's Sunday and you're scrolling LinkedIn instead of doing anything productive? Cool, I have something for you..


Alexander from MRR Unlocked 🚀 asked me to contribute to a playbook for SaaS founders scaling from 0 to €1M ARR.

My brief: Share your #1 tip.

If you've been following me for a while, you can probably guess what mine was ab

(Spoiler: It involves KPIs)

The article also includes insights from many other people who are smarter than me covering positioning, ICP, content strategy, pricing, and CRM.

Definitely worth a read: https://lnkd.in/es-EzACY

One more thing: Alex asked me to post about it tomorrow. But I'm doing it on Sunday evening because I like to make life difficult.
 
Please engage and help me send this to the moon, so he won't complain that I didn't follow directions.
 
Thanks in advance. 🫶

I help Tech founders exit | Partner @ FE International | saas.wtf Newsletter

Head of Growth @ Default

I am an ex-professional Olympic athlete who sold a dozen vintage Louis Vuitton bags every month to support my journey towards a shot at the Olympics.

When no one wanted to hire me, I launched my first outbound prospecting agency, but deep down, I wanted to build software.

After sending many cold emails, Jason Calacanis gave me a $100k check to build the next generation of sales productivity software.

Ultimately, I failed, even though we were able to grow to $5k MRR in just four months. I learned so much about how to build a great product, make sure people want it, and how to grow (fast).

I decided to look for a marketing role, but deep in my heart, I wanted to move to the US. After years of trying, I can finally call myself a proud immigrant. I am now growing Default.com with the personal goal of becoming a world-class CMO.

Stan Rymkiewicz

Last week, I created new website copy using 95% AI. It's 10x better than I would have written, and it scored 0% on all AI-detection tools. A one-shot prompt will get you AI-slop - here is a workflow I engineered:

I'm anti-AI-slop, but I love the speed AI gives me. So I spent an entire week trying to create new website copy using just AI + heavy editing.

I tried creating massive prompts like these:

”You’re a B2B SaaS copywriter that…”

But it never hit the mark.
Everything changed when I started thinking in workflows.

BEFORE:

[Prompt] → [COPY]

AFTER:

[Prompt] → [Output] → Human → [Prompt 2] → [Output 2] → Human → [COPY]

Here is what worked for me:

STEP 1.
My first step was to prepare a base for all outputs. This is a core message you're trying to get across. I needed this to give an LLM guardrails on how to act when it needs to make autonomous decisions.

For me it was:

1. Positioning memo
2. Brand voice guide

STEP 2.

Next, you need your inputs that are going to be feeding required context. This is the most important part that gets you out of AI-slop territory.

I gathered about 100 pages of customer call transcripts, from first demos to customer success check-ins, split by multiple personas and customer segments. Then, I used an AI prompt to create Persona Briefs which capture:

- Customer POVs
- Problems & pain points
- Before & after transformation
- Quotes, testimonials, success stories


STEP 3.

Once I got the Persona Briefs, I used the same transcripts to create a Website Styling Guide. I taught AI to capture how our customers describe their problems and what language they're using.

The main goal of this step is to remove any boring B2B marketing jargon. If you do this step correctly, your copy will sound 95% human-written.


STEP 4. 

We're not done yet! The next step is to create a page structure. I personally wanted to follow a specific website structure, so I used AI to generate guardrails on how benefits, features, or use cases should fit in, and in which order.


STEP 5.

In the last step, I attached all content and guardrails documents and hit generate. This got me to 95% of the finished copy.

—

Here is a visual that explains my process:

Yesterday, Default & Equals hosted a private RevOps Thanksgiving dinner with NYC 30+ leaders.

 A few highlights:

 1. Plenty of space and cold appetizers for people to connect and swap ideas before the sit-down dinner. (& great photos!)
 2. Great food, wine, and NA drinks around a fully booked 30-person table.
 3. A perfect Mille-feuille at 8:30 PM to close out the night.

Thank you all for coming! I had so much fun putting this together with Abbey Lauren Minondo.

If you want to join the next RevOps/Marketing Ops dinner, drop me a DM or comment. We’re doing these monthly.

Last Friday, I launched my 6th website since joining Default 3 years ago. Very little design changes, yet it feels so much more powerful!

Every website we launched was based on the same story.

Because it worked.
It got us to multiple millions in ARR in under 2 years.  
It helped us raise over $20M in under 2 years.  
It allowed us to hire over 30 amazing people.

But the same POV started to feel very limiting.  
The narrative no longer matched how we thought about the problem.

So rather than redesigning the website (which we’ll still do), we focused on getting aligned on positioning. And it was WAY harder than any redesign I’ve ever done. (!!)

Thankfully, we got help from Alison Gonzalez. 

Here’s how she approached our positioning:

1. Internal problem  
Alison started by understanding why the new positioning felt limiting to us. For us, it was a challenge of staying too small or going too big—where we’d risk losing our current customers by trying too hard.

2. Research & data intake  
Once we aligned on what we wanted to solve, Alison got to work and reviewed hundreds of customer calls across all segments, pulling together 14 pages of insights.

3. Feedback & delivery  
She wrote the first draft of the positioning memo and gathered feedback from everyone. It took us six versions to nail down the story we want to run with next year. 

This was the first time we’d had someone exceptional working side by side with me. Excited to see the results over the next few months.

My favorite tool for increasing ROI on LinkedIn Ads (Factors.ai) just dropped a report on marketing benchmarks from 125+ marketing leaders from top-tier companies. Here are 3 insights that shocked me:

1. Search + gated down, conversions up
65% of companies saw paid search conversion rates decline, yet 63% still reported an increase in demos. Buyers are doing more research. By the time they reach your site, they’re more likely to book a demo. The quality of demand is up, even if paid performance is down.


2. Trust + brand drive decisions
LinkedIn budgets grew 31.7%, and brand awareness and engagement campaigns nearly doubled as a share of objectives. Teams are deliberately shifting spend toward staying visible and credible with the right accounts, knowing buyers often decide who they prefer before “official” buying starts. 

3. Teams intentionally turned off the MQL machine
Over 70% of marketers are shifting their budgets away from pure lead-gen campaigns on LinkedIn Ads and toward brand, education, and account-level engagement. I’m seeing that too in our account. Campaigns focused on just leads are performing worse and worse.

Factors.ai packed 67 more pages of insights like these into the full report. 
Read it here → https://bit.ly/4peYCZI

One of the highest leverage things we did to 5x our ARR this year is applying the "explore-and-exploit" decision framework. Here is what that is and how I'm using it everyday:

There are 2 stages in growth:

1. Exploration — new ideas & making mistakes
2. Exploitation — optimization of the given insight

Staying in either of them for too long and you'll feel frustrated:

Just exploring? You won't ship real impact.
Only exploiting? You will run out of things to do real quick.

The idea: first look for insights, then implement them across the org.

MY EXAMPLE:

A set of ads has been performing better than the others. Turns out that deep personalization of pain points by persona really works well. I decided to see if creating more pain-based marketing would bring similar advantages by:

- creating more ad variants
- creating a campaign for a new audience
- updating target landing page copy
- sharing the insights with BDR team

1 insight → 4 new experiments

It also made me prioritize experiments that led to higher-impact insights.
Now each time a new hypothesis is true, I can run 2–4 experiments to exploit it.

This is the most powerful growth flywheel.

The goal of any growth leader is to find and exploit any advantages.
And the success comes from balancing both.

taplio

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Dirk Sahlmer

Stan Rymkiewicz

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taplio

The Battle

Dirk Sahlmer

Stan Rymkiewicz

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Dirk Sahlmer's LinkedIn Performance

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Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreDirk Sahlmer's LinkedIn Performance