He bootstrapped to $4M ARR in 2 years. Here's his LinkedIn playbook you can't ignore. | Noah Greenberg, Founder of Stacker

Noah Greenberg grew a content-distribution product from zero to $1M ARR in just one year (and to $4M in 2 years) by focusing on a single channel most founders underrate: LinkedIn. He posted insights daily, highlighted key players in his industry, and made it impossible for prospects not to notice him.

In this episode, Noah reveals the exact step-by-step playbook, including how to structure 3-month pilots for fast feedback, craft DMs that actually get replies, and pick the right content “watering holes” so your future customers come to you eager to sign. 

If you're a founder trying to figure out your go-to-market approach, you need to see what Noah did.

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Why You Should Listen

1. Turning LinkedIn into a Free PR Engine – Noah shows how daily micro-posts drive high-value leads without needing to go viral.

2. Finding Your First 10 Customers with 3-Month Pilots – Short trials = instant feedback on who’ll stay and who’ll churn.

3. Never Stop Triangulating – How 50 customer conversations per month reveal the right product, price, and packaging.

4. Selling without Selling – The “this isn’t a pitch” call that makes prospects lean in and ask, “Wait, how do we buy?”

5. Earning Credibility at Scale – Noah’s “watering hole” posts spark real engagement from decision-makers (and reel in 5-figure deals).

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Keywords

B2B Sales, LinkedIn Strategy, Early-Stage Growth, Founders’ Playbook, Bootstrapped Startup, Content Distribution, Sales Prospecting, Pilot Contracts, Outbound Leads, Product-Market Fit

Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:35) Stacker's Origin Story
(00:06:00) How to generate warm leads
(00:15:53) How to use LinkedIn for lead gen
(00:21:42) No One Wants To Be Pitched
(00:26:06) How to get feedback on pricing
(00:38:08) LinkedIn Go-To-Market Strategy
(00:42:20) Breaking Above The Noise

Chapters

• 2:35 Stacker's Origin Story
• 6:00 How to generate warm leads
• 15:53 How to use LinkedIn for lead gen
• 21:42 No One Wants To Be Pitched
• 26:06 How to get feedback on pricing
• 38:08 LinkedIn Go-To-Market Strategy
• 42:20 Breaking Above The Noise

Transcript

Noah Greenberg (00:00):

I think especially in the early days, you don't know who the right customer is. So the goal is to bring 50 customers on, figure out which 15 stay, research the hell out of those 15 to figure out what makes them who they are and why they renewed. And then hopefully the next 20 customers you bring on more than 15 out of 50 will stay.

If you have 50 of these calls over a few months and you bounce pricing off of 50 people, you're going to pretty soon start to understand what pricing people will go for, what they won't go for, at what point you're going to lose customers as well as that's a market we definitely shouldn't go after. That is what you are focused on as a founder in your first couple years finding product market fit is you're having 50 conversations a month and you're triangulating between all these conversations to figure out what the product is, what the pricing is, what the packaging is, how to talk about it.

I think what's really important is in the early stages you're doing just as much exploration and learning as you are selling because the reality is A. you don't quite know who the customer is. 

Previous Guests (1:07)

That's product market fit, product market fit, product market fit. I call that the product market fit question, product market fit, product market fit product market fit product market fit. I mean the name of the show is product market fit.

Pablo Srugo (1:18)

Do you think the product market fit show has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone, you have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you.

Noah. Welcome to the show, man.

Noah Greenberg (01:33):

Great to be here,

Pablo Srugo (01:34):

Dude. So I found you way, I'm finding quite a few founders these days just through LinkedIn and I saw your post where you launched a product two years ago and now that product is doing like 300K MRR, so call that whatever, $3.5- $4 million a year, hit a million ARR the first year, tripled the year after, which frankly, who doesn't want that? That's the dream. That's what everybody wants. But what really struck me wasn't just that you did that, it was how thought through every step was of how to launch a product and make it successful and get traction. So I thought, you know, why don't we just expand on this post because you can only go so far on LinkedIn and just dive into every single step and your thinking and the details and just how you made it happen. And hopefully founders can just steal from that playbook as much as possible. 

Noah Greenberg (2:25)

Yeah, that sounds great.

Pablo Srugo (2:26)

Perfect. So listen, so I mean just really quickly, what was the product? Maybe a little bit of origin story and just what the product is just for context mainly. And then we can just start to think. Okay, what's step one? 

Noah Greenberg (2:37)

Even though we founded Stacker in 2017, the product we're talking about was formally launched in the back half of 2022. It is a product that helps brands investing in editorial content, whether that be thought leadership, whether that be data journalism from their own data brands that are investing in their own content. It's a product and a platform that helps them distribute that content to third party news outlets. So just so you can get a feel for the type of client, we're focused on enterprise brands, but the ACV is in the 60 to 90K a year range. We're signing annual agreements for somewhere between 60 and 90 grand a year. So kind of SMB up to enterprise trying to get in touch with probably the VP level or director level at enterprise brands.

Pablo Srugo (03:28):

And so the idea is an enterprise brand. What's this example client and what are they trying to get done with your product? What's the value?

Noah Greenberg (03:34):

Maybe Instacart. Instacart has hired an editorial and journalism team that is putting out content like most popular groceries in your state last week or looking at during the Super Bowl, what were the most commonly ordered items, et cetera. They're putting that content out there just for brand exposure. The more you see Instacart and think of Instacart, the better. Not a lot of people go to Instacart's blog. And so what we do is we take that story comparing all 50 states by their most popular groceries and we have relationships with thousands of news outlets across the country and we will get that story organically placed across hundreds of news outlets, whether that be the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, or Yahoo, AOL, MSN. We have a platform that will help them syndicate that story in full and get that placed across hundreds of news outlets.

Pablo Srugo (04:30):

Okay, makes sense. And you have a company happening already. We can get into the origin story of how this happened or whatever later, but when you have this idea of helping, let's say the Instacarts of the world just get their content distributed organically in as many places as possible, what is step one in that playbook to generate some revenue, to get some customers and to see if this really works out?

Noah Greenberg (04:52):

So it's a good question because when we launched this product, I had a lot of background and relationships in media and publishing, but I had never sold a deal in my life in advertising and to a brand. And so candidly, looking back on the past three years, I think it's been really exciting just to think about what you can do in three years, even if you have zero connections starting on day one. And that really speaks to : what does it mean? How am I thinking about cutting customers on day one is just getting out there and leveraging your existing network. So I on one hand am starting to think about, okay, I may not know who the perfect customer is, but let's just start to create a list of who are the hundred potential customers. If I could get on the phone and pitch to a hundred companies, who would those be?

(05:44):

And I think it's important at that stage that you're not reaching for the stars. You're probably not putting any Fortune 500 brands on there because it's important to remember that you only get one shot with these guys and at first you're probably working with more of an MVP, you're probably working with my product is this, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's what it's going to be in a year, but you're getting together a list of a hundred companies you would want to work with. And then you're also getting together a list of just anyone that has ties into that industry. And what I'm then doing is just getting on the phone with as many people as I possibly can. So on that first list of a hundred companies that I might want to work with, I'm literally just going to their LinkedIn, looking at all of their employees and looking at, okay, at this company here's the seven people I might want to talk to. And then looking at what mutual connections I have and seeing if I can get a warm intro. So I'm literally going company by company, okay, here's the company, open up their LinkedIn page search by titles to figure out who's the VP of content that I would want to speak with, who's the director of X that I would want to speak with. I'm pulling up all those tabs and then seeing what mutual connections I have and then asking for warm introductions. And then at times I'm also just reaching out to some people and saying, would you mind getting on the phone? I think what's really important is especially at this stage when you're super early on, you're not asking to get on the phone to pitch them as much as you're asking to get on the phone almost to just learn. I think what's really important is at the early stages you're doing just as much exploration and learning as you are selling because the reality is A. you don't quite know who the customer is and it's much better to get on the phone kind of just to meet someone than it is to get on the phone and try and pitch to them and realise, oh wait, you're not the right customer.

(07:38):

And the second piece is I think at this point it's really important just to acknowledge to yourself that the product as it stands today, the pricing, the packaging, the product marketing as you have today is probably not as good as it can be a year from now. And so you're using a lot of these conversations to inform a lot of those things.

Pablo Srugo (07:57):

And then just for clarity, you already have, because you have this company, you've already built the distribution part, you already kind of have on lock?

Noah Greenberg (08:04):

Yeah, exactly. So at this point, when we launched this in 2022, we had the distribution half of the marketplace on lock and we were really figuring out how to go get the supply side.

Pablo Srugo (08:17):

So let's get into those messages because the warm intro piece, it takes work to find the warm intros, but in a way it's the obvious and easy side of the equation. Obviously if somebody you know well knows somebody else well, they'll just use that kind of trust capital, that relationship capital and get you a call. That's easy-ish. How are you crafting, tell me a bit more about the cold outreach. What are you seeing in those messages? What kind of conversions were you actually getting and just all those kind of finer details there. The difference between trying on cold and just getting nothing and actually getting some real juice from it.

Noah Greenberg (08:55):

So the first piece I'll say just on the intro side, because again, I think there's a lot of nuance between, hey, can you introduce me to this person? And let's say the optimal way to ask for an intro is when you're asking for an intro to someone through a warm introduction that you are not, I think it's being very clear that you're not asking to get on the phone to pitch them, it's that you're asking to get on the phone to bounce some ideas off of them. And so a sample message in the, Hey, can I get an intro to this person is, Hey, I noticed you're connected with them, you, we've been working on this product, this person looks like an expert in this space. As I'm thinking about product strategy for next year, it'd be really interesting to connect with them. Would you be comfortable making an intro?

Noah GreenberNoah Greenberg (09:40):

And for one, no one wants to make an intro and be like, Hey, can I introduce you to this guy so they can pitch you on their product? That just feels icky and you're going to get a much lower response rate of someone saying, yes, I'm willing to introduce you. Whereas if you're saying, I really value this person's expertise, everyone wants to feel like an expert and it's much easier for that person to try and facilitate that call if you're looking to pick that person's brain than if you're saying, I'd like to sell my product to them. Can I get an introduction? But to your question of you're doing cold outreach. So before we dig into the actual message, what I will say is one of the things that has I think really transformed in go-to market strategies over the past couple of years is the proliferation of LinkedIn.

(10:25):

And I think that there are a lot of layers in terms of why and how you can use LinkedIn as a founder or as a sales executive with your team to get in touch with the right people and set up calls. The reason for that is if we think about kind of traditionally most sales teams we're using email and to just compare email and LinkedIn in its most basic form, if you're sending a cold email, you are literally just an unknown name face and company and you are anyone now who gets hundreds of spam emails every week, it's really hard to stick out. Even if you are Shakespeare with a pen and know how to write a really catchy email, it's really hard to stick out. And so if you're a founder, I think what's really interesting about LinkedIn is even before you do any additional work, when you connect with someone on LinkedIn, they see your name, they see your face, they see that you have CEO in your title or founder in your title or whatever it is, and already you have a leg up on 90% of the other SDRs that are doing outreach on LinkedIn.

(11:34):

So every founder is probably getting a hundred spam InMails every week as well. And just think about how just because someone has founder in their title doesn't mean you're automatically opening it, but it does at least separate you a little bit from everyone else because someone can see you and there's some authority principle backed in there, et cetera. I think what's really interesting about LinkedIn taking it one step further is that LinkedIn is a place where you can actually freely advertise or warm up your prospects before you actually reach out. And that's in the form of posting. So I think what's been really interesting that's really blown up over the past couple of years is as a founder you can actually connect with someone, have them accept, but before you actually message them, you're posting your thoughts on LinkedIn, you're establishing yourself as an authority putting stuff out that just puts your opinions and thoughts out there so that when that prospect that accepted your connection request, they go on LinkedIn, they're reading their morning posts.

Pablo Srugo (12:37):

Yes. Okay, so tell me about the content itself at that point. Here's what I see a lot of people doing and I don't really see that it works. I'm curious how you were kind of handling it. A lot of founders, they're kind of building- the content is too specific, they're just talking basically about their, in your case you'd be talking about Instacart blogging about whatever, or media publishers not getting enough distribution. Is that the sort of stuff? And at least what I see is when people talk about things that are so hyper-focused, they just get no reach, no visibility, and potentially the people that even follow you or connect with you barely see it. What kind of posts are you doing to actually make sure you get reach, you get visibility and you build that credibility and authority, otherwise it all kind of falls apart.

Noah Greenberg (13:25):

I think the first step is thinking about who your audience is. And so what I like to do is literally pick a person who is the person that I would like to get in touch with or in front of, literally pull up their LinkedIn profile and write down five or 10 bullets about them. Who is this person? Where did they come from? So we can do this exercise for me. I want the VP of content at this Fortune 500 enterprise or yeah, what's their background? They spent 10 years in journalism before moving over to work in the marketing department of a Fortune 500 brand. They've been in seat for maybe a year or two. What problems are they thinking about every day? Well, they're thinking about “how do I justify my budget?” They're thinking about how do I make sure that the work I'm doing gets noticed by the C-suite at my company so that I can rationalise my team's budget?

(14:13):

They're thinking about: this existential- I used to work in journalism, now I'm working in marketing and how do I reconcile all of that? Whatever it is you need to really understand your customer and who you're trying to get in touch with and think about “what do they want to read about?” And then you need to be posting about that because at the end of the day, you're not posting for yourself and how great you are and how great your product is. You're trying to show that you have unique and interesting thoughts that will make that core customer respect you look at you as an authority, say, huh, this guy's interesting and has interesting things to say because at the end of the day, what you're trying to do is make it so at the most basic form when you do end up sending that message in LinkedIn to that individual that for the past few weeks they've been logging on and in their feed, seeing thoughts from you and saying, huh, that's kind of an interesting take.

(15:12):

And it's okay if they 100% agree with it. Hopefully they don't think you're an asshole, but you're putting stuff out there that just makes it look like you're a player, you're a thought leader in the space so that when you do reach out again on that totem pole of likelihood of getting a response, very bottom is a cold email. On top of that, you have a LinkedIn message, you've never heard of me, but at least you can see that I'm the CEO of this company. And then on top of that is like, well, I've been seeing this guy's content show up for the past few weeks and now they want to talk to me?

Pablo Srugo (15:46):

And so to be clear, in your case, you were posting about journalism, you were posting about problems that are happening in that industry mainly?

Noah Greenberg (15:52):

Yeah, so I'm doing, I'd say a mixture of a few different types of posts, one of which is my take on that industry. So my take on the phenomena that seasoned journalists are now leading content at large brands and speaking to that experience, speaking to that trend, I'm also putting out content. For us specifically, we have the ability, we have a lot of data on: here's the types of content that are doing well. If you're looking for more audience for your content, we can see what types of stories drive audience, what don't. So putting stuff out like that, lots of brands have access to this data. I know you recently had Peter from Carta on. Carta puts out a tonne of really interesting content on here's what's going on in startups so that now founders have heard of Carta, right? So I think there is an opportunity for founders to leverage their own data or their own expertise and put out content that is both really valuable for their target customer, but also is second stance, an ad for their company. I've also found that job roundups are a secret sauce. So I'll do a roundup every other week of here’s 10 jobs in brand publishing. And those do very well. They buy you a lot of goodwill with the community. So there's a lot of different things you can do.

Pablo Srugo (17:12):

How often are you posting and are you measuring reach and stuff like that or is that all kind of secondary? As long as you feel like the content is high quality, you don't really care?

Noah Greenberg (17:21):

I'm now posting once a day. Candidly, when I started doing this a little over a year ago, the concept of posting once a day on LinkedIn felt gross. It felt very cringeworthy and as a bootstrapped founder, we just were not getting much press. And I had been spending a lot of time trying to get press and I just had this realization one day that if you get an article in your dream trade publication, it exists for a week and then it's kind of ephemeral and dies. But the LinkedIn-

Pablo Srugo (17:54):

You'd be surprised the viewership might not be- the amount of eyeballs, probably not that big man

Noah Greenberg (18:00):

Not that big. Yeah, I get on digit A. hundred percent. Yeah. Not that many people are reading it, but LinkedIn is the one publication that every single one of your customers reads pretty much every week and you can just post there yourself. So do you need to post every day? Should you post three times a week, four times a week, five times a week? I think the reality is if you're going to do this strategy, you just can't just be posting once a week. The reason for that is not as much. You need to put a ton of content out there that gets in front of people. It's that you're going to be really bad at this at first, and the rate of learning is just going to be much faster if you are doing it multiple times a week.

(18:39):

And so when I started doing this, I had a little reminder at 9:00 AM on my calendar every day to post just a kind of forcing function. The first few months it's like, oh, only 300 people read that. Bummer. But it also made it less cringe because only 300 people saw my shitty content. Over time though, the audience started to grow and you asked the question of what are you measuring? How are you thinking about audience versus other metrics? I personally am looking at how many of my target customers are engaging with my post. engagement could be a link, it could be a comment, et cetera. Something that everyone that I see get into this, a trap they fall into is you start just chasing impressions or you start chasing likes because all of a sudden you see, wow, that post 2000 people saw it, this other post, 20,000 people saw it and you lose sight of, okay, but of those 2000 or 20,000 people, how many of them could have been your actual customer? And so I'm really thinking about not how do I create a post that the most people see, but a post that likely the people seeing it, which you can see by who's engaging with it are potential customers.

Pablo Srugo (19:49):

No, that all makes sense. And so walk me through the next step. So you're doing this stuff, you're getting credibility. How are you setting up these calls when you're actually getting them?

Noah Greenberg (19:59):

If I'm hammering out a really heavy quarter by quarter, I change how much I am focusing on sales and go-to market versus over time I've transitioned a little into being able to let our sales team do this, but I'm still doing a fair amount. But if I'm heavy for the next three months I am focusing on setting up demos.

Pablo Srugo (20:16)

Well, I mean specifically then right at the outset of the, so the first couple years, few step process, one, every week you are sending a connection request to let's say 25 to 50 potential prospects. So on the side, yes, before you can do that, you need to figure out who you want to get in touch with. We're not going to talk about prospect and list building here. Let's assume you already have that, but you are every week sending an outbound connection request to 25 to 50 potential customers.

(20:45):

If they accept you are not immediately DMing them, you are letting them then see your content aka your free advertising so that you have a much more likelihood of them accepting your request when you do DM them, so step one, you're connecting with 25 to 50 people every week. Step two, you're not posting every day, every other day. Step three, once someone has been connected with you for a few weeks, you are sending a DM. What does that DM look like? Again, this can really change based on what you're selling, who you're trying to get in touch with, et cetera. But I think generally what I have found is first you need to look at all your inbound dms and try and do what they're not doing because again, it's essentially how do you stand out and big things to avoid: Huge word walls, someone needs to be hooked in within the first sentence or two.

(21:42):

A cheat code that I have found recently is I will start my message by saying, apologies for coming straight to you with this, but I was unsure of who the right person to talk to about X might be. No one wants to be pitched. Everyone when they're going through the LinkedIn cold DMs is on defence. And so by almost saying, I'm not trying to get on the phone with you, I'm just trying to figure out who to speak with in your org, I found that it can kind of diffuse the situation and someone is either much more likely to be like, oh, you should talk with Mike, I'll introduce you. Or they might say, oh, that's actually me. But there's something just psychologically about instead of saying, can I get on the phone with you, saying: wasn't quite sure who the right person to speak with would be, but I think without getting into exactly wordsmithing dms, you do need pretty early on to provide value to them. Why are they going to want to get on the phone with you? I think way too many people say, let me tell you about me, let me tell you about me. That's a separate podcast for sales copy 101.

Pablo Srugo (22:48):

I guess I'm curious on the calls, because you're at this early discovery phase and you talked about talking to them as though they're experts. Do you stick to that or do you start, you get in through that, but then you sell? You know what I mean?

Noah Greenberg (23:02):

Great question. So yeah, on these initial dms in the first, especially first six months, maybe it's not, Hey, let me tell you about my product. It's: I’m working on this. I thought it could be really interesting for you guys one day and if you'd be open to chatting through some ideas as I'm getting through 2025 product strategy, it'd be great to bounce those off you. Would you be open to that? What am I doing once I'm getting on the phone? I am not pitching. I'm saying just to say upfront, this is not a pitch, but I have some things that people have told me could be interesting to people in your industry or companies like yours, and I'm really interested to bounce a few things off you just for your feedback. And they say, okay, that sounds great. Everyone likes to feel like their opinion matters, and then you're essentially giving them the pitch or the demo just without saying, you're just kind of doing it to a third party.

(23:56):

Hey, here's what we have, here's kind of what we're thinking. And I think what you'll find is if your product is interesting to them, they'll say, wow, how much does this cost? This could be interesting to us. 

Pablo Srugo (24:07) 

Right, they lean in, lean in on their own, 

Noah Greenberg (24:09)

and so in those initial six months of trying to find customers, I was doing a shitload of calls by just saying, this isn't a pitch. Can I walk you through what we're doing and bounce some ideas off you? And then halfway through they'd say, this is really interesting. And the reality is if they're not interested, even if you are pitching them, they're not going to be, it's not your pitch that's going to sell them, it's the product demo.

Pablo Srugo (24:31):

How quickly did you know that you were onto something? Like how visceral were some of those early reactions to what you were pitching?

Noah Greenberg (24:39):

Well, I think that's the beauty is as you're trying to figure out product market fit, you're having 50 calls, 20 of them are going nowhere, 20 of them are: this is interesting, but I think if you did it this way or if you priced it that way, and then this could be really interesting, and then 10 of them are like, holy shit, how much does this cost? And are you actually selling this or did you actually just want my feedback? That is what you are focused on as a founder in your first couple of years finding product market fit is you're having 50 conversations a month and you're triangulating between all these conversations to figure out what the product is, what the pricing is, what the packaging is, how to talk about it. And to me, product development and go-to-market kind of sales calls are all one and the same because if you're doing 50 of those calls, you're finding customers, you're figuring out who your customer is, and you're also getting live feedback from potential customers of, if you built this, I would buy it.

Pablo Srugo (25:37):

Do you start selling when some of those customers indicate, do you have a price ready to go or where's the product at that stage? What do you say back to that?

Noah Greenberg (25:50):

Yeah, you have to have a product- Excuse me. You have to have a price ready to go because, well, you don't have to, but I do because I want feedback on the pricing, so I don't know what the pricing should be. I'm not hiring McKinsey to do a pricing consultation. 

Pablo Srugo (26:04)

They don't know what the pricing should be either. 

Noah Greenberg (26:06)

So yeah, I'm coming up with what I think a price should be. I'm getting on the phone, I'm saying the price, and someone's either saying, oh, that's it? Or maybe on the other end of the spectrum they're saying, yeah, that's way thanks, but that we would never be able to pay that. Right? And neither of those are the, oh, okay, then I know the answer, right? Because someone could say, huh, that's not that much. And maybe on the next call you should try adding a thousand dollars to the monthly price and see “when do people start to baulk. at the same time? Just because someone says, I could never pay that, maybe that means it's too expensive or that just means that's not the right customer for you. And so yes, I think on these calls you're figuring out feedback on the product, but just as important as figuring out feedback on pricing.

(26:55):

And if you have 50 of these calls over a few months and you bounce pricing off of 50 people, you're going to pretty soon start to understand what pricing people will go for, what they won't go for, at what point you're going to lose customers as well as that's a market we definitely shouldn't go after. So just as an example of that, in the early days, there's thousands of companies that have content that want to distribute that content, but the reason they might want to do that is a hundred reasons and just two very different reasons. Maybe Instacart is just literally trying to get in front of people so that they remember who Instacart is, right? I'm reading my local paper, I see the top 50 groceries on Instacart. I'm 2% more likely to order my groceries on Instacart later that day. We, early on, spoke with Lifetime Fitness, the gym company, and they were trying to get people to subscribe to Lifetime Fitness because someone read their article.

(27:57):

So they said, sure, we would pay three grand a month for this. We knew though, because you need to ask these prospects, why are you buying? They were saying, well, we hope someone reads the article and then immediately signs up for a gym membership for them. We realised that is not a good customer if you're looking for someone to use this because the next day they're going to buy your product, then our product is probably too expensive for you. Whereas if this is coming from your PR and marketing comms budget, then this is going to work out for you.

Pablo Srugo (28:29):

So you're actually doing some selection on the customers. Which leads to my next question, which is around those first few customers, do you at some point as people are saying, oh, how much is this? And you give 'em a price and like, okay, that's fine, I would pay that. Do you just start adding them up or do you set a kind of parameters and say, I'll take on three customers, five customers, design partners, these sort of things, as you kind of build things out? How did you play that part of it?

Noah Greenberg (28:55):

Yeah, so in the early days for us, I set a goal of bringing on 10 customers. And even though I knew eventually that I wanted this to be an annual subscription product for the first 10 customers, we said, we're only going to bring them on for three month pilots. And the reason for that is we wanted to know which of those 10 customers after three months wanted to keep working with us and which did not, right? Because that was going to inform who our next hundred customers were. And so I think there's a lot of, as much as eventually you want ARR people locked into annual agreements, et cetera, I think there's a lot of value in your first 10 or 50 customers being on shorter term contracts because if you sign people to annual agreements, it's going to take you a year to figure out do they actually like the product?

Pablo Srugo (29:43):

Man, it's funny you say that because it is the opposite of what- especially a bootstrap founder will want because a lot of times the ideal, the gold standard let's say is sign a year, pay me today, and then I'm positive cashflow. But to your point, you don't really know how well it's doing. I had one other founder in here, the founder of, I believe it was Numeric, who said something very similar. He's like, I only do monthly contracts, in the beginning, right? He's like, I only did monthly contracts because it forced us to care. He's like, the reality is we have so many things to care about. If I sign a year contract, yeah, I'm going to tell my team we care about retention, we want to retain, but it's going to be hard to prioritise that because nobody's churning and nobody's going to churn for a long time. And so by doing monthly contracts, in his case, he was like, it's a forcing function. We don't want to lose these customers, so we really have to invest the time to make sure that you love the product, that they use it, et cetera. So it's kind of similar. I mean it's kind of a two-way street part of it. It's making sure they're happy and the other part is finding the right customer versus locking in customers that are just not going to be helpful long term.

Noah Greenberg (30:47):

Yeah, I mean today, three years after the fact, we only sign annual agreements, but if we had done that on day one for one, it's a lot harder to sign an annual agreement. And so it was a way that we just need to get customers in the door on day one, but it was also a way of getting a much faster feedback loop on what customers wanted, why they were happy, why they weren't. I think another big problem you run into is a lot of times you'll have a customer that says they're happy, but when they come up for renewal, they don't renew because you realise maybe your contact was happy, but they don't have the data to show their boss that this is valuable. And so again, you could go a full year with your contact saying, this is great, this is great, this is great. And then at the end of the year realise shit, we never put the pieces in place to actually get a renewal. And so you just need to start learning those things much faster, which you can't do if you have an annual contract at the start.

Pablo Srugo (31:39):

Did you give discounts or any sort of guarantees to get those first few across the line? How did you add a bit of a forcing function to just get into move and sign those pilots?

Noah Greenberg (31:49):

We did not give guarantees. Maybe one or two. Did we give an initial guarantee? Possibly. I mean, I think at the end of the day, every product is so different that you gotta do what you gotta do to get the deal done. Did we give discounts? Definitely on those three month pilots, we gave discounts. We're bootstrapped, we have a high margin product. I was not going to charge so little that we were losing money, but I was fine having less margin. At the end of the day though, again, if everyone is saying, oh, I'll do this at the discount, then the question becomes, okay, but will we ever be able to charge twice as much of this? So I think it is really important to come out to market with the pricing that you hope to have because again, part of the value of all of these conversations is figuring out what your pricing is going to be.

Pablo Srugo (32:33):

And so once you're done, let's say these three month pilots with kind of design partner ish, you some I assume churn, some really love it, whatever, at what point do you set that goal of 10 customers? At what point do you have enough visibility that you set a goal of a million in revenue? And then how do you work backwards from that to getting that done? Because a high bar, because zero to a million in a year is like top decile. I mean, everybody wants to do it, but

Noah Greenberg (32:58):

90% we are fortunate in that our contracts are 60 to 90K ACV, which means they're five to eight, five to nine grand a month, and getting to a million run rate is only 83K A month. Am I doing the right math? 

Pablo Srugo (33:19)

You're good. Yeah, you're good.

Noah Greenberg (33:20)

So you're not bringing on that many customers right? Now again, you need to start to think about churn, and you're probably going to be churning a lot of your first 30 customers because I think especially in the early days, you don't know who the right customer is. So the goal is to bring 50 customer S on, figure out which 15 stay, research the hell out of those 15 to figure out what makes them who they are and why they renewed. And then hopefully the next 20 customers you bring on more than 15 out of 50 will stay, right?

(33:51):

But you're not going to reach a hundred percent NDR, hundred percent logo retention right off the bat. And if you are, you're probably not casting a wide enough net. Right now, Elon is famous for saying you need to keep ripping shit out, and if you haven't had to put stuff back in, then you haven't ripped enough out. And I think a weird inverse of that is if you don't have customers that aren't coming back to you, then you haven't cast a wide enough net of who could be using your product. We are thinking a lot about how do we cast a really wide net? It's okay that not all of our first hundred customers want to keep working with us. We're not going to take that personally. We're just going to learn that that's not the right type of customer for us. But to your question of, okay, we need to start getting on five or 10 new accounts every month, how do we scale that? I mean, candidly, I think that's where you start to blend from founder led sales into bringing on a sales leader. So we have an incredible VP of sales here. I think as a founder, that's where you start to go from being founder-led sales into founder-led marketing.

Pablo Srugo (34:53):

And is that, to be clear, that's even from zero to one or are you talking now or are you're going from 3-10?

Noah Greenberg (34:57):

No, that's once you're past a million, definitely past a million ARR

Pablo Srugo (35:04) 

Before that million, you're just running the same, 

Noah Greenberg (35:06)

you need to be on the phones learning, pitching well past the first million.

Pablo Srugo (35:11):

And so for that first million, are you just running that same playbook on LinkedIn, just dialled it up, just did more requests, more demos, and kind of rinse, repeat?

Noah Greenberg (35:21):

Yes, and we did start to hire sellers, and I think what I realised is I am always going to be the best, probably at setting sales calls up, but depending on who you are as a founder, sellers may be better at getting things across the finish line. So anyone with a founder title with the gift of gab in email or LinkedIn messaging can get someone on the phone.

Pablo Srugo (35:50):

Because that’s so different. Normally you have a BDR, which is the lowest a totem pole sends it to an AE, which closes it. And if it's an enterprise deal, the founder or head of sales comes in. In your case, you're saying because of the way LinkedIn works, you could actually invert that where doing a demo well to get somebody across the line is actually a bit more of a commodity, whereas being able to get somebody to open up your message on LinkedIn and take the call in the first place, that's the part where founders are a bit more of a lever point. There's just more differentiation.

Noah Greenberg (36:20):

So I will say that the strategy we're talking about here of using LinkedIn to get in front of people, get more responses. I think a BDR could do this, and I think BDRs are doing it right. There's great BDRs who are posting really interesting shit on Facebook and they're crushing the other BDRs on their team who are just sending a bunch of cold emails. But I think as a founder, you do have a unique opportunity to have a much higher hit rate. I think as a founder, it's your responsibility to be taking the first a hundred sales calls because again, you're figuring out pricing, you're figuring out who the right customer is, et cetera. And I think if product market fit is the most important thing for your startup eventually, then you can't afford to put someone else on this. What I will say is even if you're not a born salesman and you're maybe a great engineer, and this isn't quite your thing, hiring a seller to deal with negotiations to deal with the 19 follow-ups and going through procurement process, that is something that I think our bestsellers, how they show me, here's how we're going to schedule out the next steps with the prospect and keep things moving along and get things across the finish line.

(37:38):

They're way better than me at that. But I think as a founder or whoever's doing this, there's a real opportunity to be the person helping set up calls. 

Pablo Srugo (37:46):

Do you remember in those early days some of the leading indicators, I'm just trying to think about how you knew you had something magical here? Do you remember, for example, the demo to close rate or some other kind of early indicators that you might've been looking at to say, wow, this is kind of really getting simple, different than maybe other things you tried before?

Noah Greenberg (38:07):

What really clicked for me with this LinkedIn go to market strategy in terms of setting demos up was about three or four months in, I had a post which I now call my watering hole posts, which essentially was a post where all of a sudden prospects that I didn't even know they existed, but they were great qualified leads, started commenting on my post and more or less sticking their hand up and saying, I exist and I know who you are, Noah, and making it very easy for me to reach out to them. And I think no matter who you are and what industry you're in, you can create these types of watering whole posts. These are the ones where you go and you see God, everyone in this industry is kind of chiming in and showing off what they do, whatever it is. That's when I realised, holy shit, these are the people that I wanted to be reading that trade publication article, and they're commenting on my post. If I reach out to them next week, they definitely know who I am. Lo and behold, I had a much higher hit rate from that, and that's when I realised, okay, there's some real magic here to be had.

Pablo Srugo (39:12):

What is an example of a watering hole post? Or what's one that you remember specifically well?

Noah Greenberg (39:17):

Yeah, so I mean, we could talk about mine end, we could talk about another industry. So for Stacker, one example of that has been saying, here's to super simplify it. Here's five great examples of brands producing awesome content. Who am I missing? And all of a sudden they start commenting and being like, oh, you should see what we're doing. And they're tagging their friends. I've got this friend that does this at this company, and all of a sudden I'm like, oh, cool. You guys are just literally sticking your hand up that you'd be potential customers and you appreciate that. I'm kind of evangelising this trend and this phenomenon. I think if you are an AI-

Pablo Srugo (39:57):

you know what? Give me others. Give me others for Stacker because them the best. And even that I know is super helpful. Founders will figure out how to apply that for them, I'm sure. But yeah, give me another one. Give me another one for Stacker.

Noah Greenberg (40:07):

I'll give you a few. So one of which again has been the job openings and job postings. So basically the posts that go the most viral predictably is saying: “Here are five to 10 jobs in this industry. These companies are hiring” and it creates a lot of goodwill. People start commenting what other jobs are out there? et cetera, et cetera,

Pablo Srugo (40:32):

And are leveraging, are you tagging companies that you want to work with? Are you thinking about it that way or just not necessarily? 

Noah Greenberg (40:40):

That's a different post type, which is, I'll say, here's three companies producing amazing content in the health and wellness area that are basically replacing niche publications like Health Magazine and Men's Fitness. And I will tag both the company as well as I will tag the managing editor or editor in chief, which is the person I want to get on the phone with. And pretty predictably, if I say, here's three companies that are doing awesome work in this space, two of them will comment and be like, thanks for calling us out and within a month, we’re getting on the phone. So you can definitely get pretty scientific with this. I think that there is a fine line and a lot of nuance between it being very cheesy and people can read through your BS, but there's definitely ways to create content that become watering holes for people in your industry.

Pablo Srugo (41:41):

It's pretty crazy, but it's just like, it makes a lot of sense if you think about it, how do you add value before you extract? If you hit somebody up and you're like, Hey, here's my thing, listen to me, whatever. You're trying to suck time away, attention away, and you haven't earned it, you really haven't earned it. But in a way, when you're just putting stuff out there, you're creating value, you're creating content, and you just plant that seed and you turn somebody that's completely cold and uninterested into at least something slightly warm. It's a huge difference maker.

Noah Greenberg (42:17):

Yeah, I think today, doing outreach for sales. You have more competition and noise than any time ever in history. And the reality is it does not matter how good of a writer, how good of a email or InMail hook you have because there's just so much noise and this is the way, this is a way to break above the noise and become someone that someone is excited to get on the phone with as well as we talk about things like watering hole posts, as a way to get a lot more leverage out of your time than just cold outreach.

Pablo Srugo (43:01):

And just for setting expectations’ sake, what's some of your best posts in terms of reach? What's your average, what are we talking about? because thinking about doing this, and maybe they started doing it and they're like, am I doing well? Am I not doing well? What's the bar?

Noah Greenberg (43:16):

So I'm happy to share some with you if you want to put them in the show notes. But I mean, the bar really depends because again, it depends how big of an industry you're in. So I'm in a pretty small niche and I guess I'll say, posts that I'm excited about from a, I have a lot of my potential customers hanging out here talking, commenting, those will do between let's say five and 15,000 impressions. It took me five months of posting before I had something due over 10,000 impressions, but I drove a ton of sales calls before anything did 10,000 impressions. Again, what's really tough is I did that post that you found me on of effective go-to-market strategies on LinkedIn. 700,000 people read that post. I didn't drive any business from it. So that post was really good for my ego. It was really good for getting me on this podcast, but I didn't drive a single sales call out of it with 700,000 people reading it. Whereas a week before I did a post that only 4,000 people saw, and I set up three sales calls. So I think it's really easy to get distracted by numbers when the reality is: don't look at impressions, look at am I getting engagement from the people that matter?

Pablo Srugo (44:32):

It's huge, and I'll say this, when you talk to the LinkedIn editors, and it's important because obviously the algorithm is tailored to this sort of thing. This is exactly what they want people to use LinkedIn for. They don't want LinkedIn to become Twitter or Instagram or anything where the goal is to go crazy viral. That's why even if you see something viral on X, we're talking 20 million, 50 million views sometimes. I've never seen a post on LinkedIn that gets those levels of views. The most I've seen is 5 million, and it's super, super rare because LinkedIn is just not set up for that. And in any case, what's the value of it? But it's actually crazy. If you think about it, 5,000, 10,000 views in the world of online posting is really not a lot. It's truly not a lot, and yet it drives meaningful leads.

Noah Greenberg (45:18):

But on the other side of that 5,000 people, 10% of them are qualified prospects and you're in B2B?

Pablo Srugo(45:30)

It’s huge. 

G(45:31)

It's frigging huge. 500 of your core customer reading your post is pretty much all you could hope for

Pablo Srugo (45:36):

a hundred percent. But that's where you see the opportunity because, to be relevant on other platforms like YouTube or whatever you are talking about, trying to get millions and millions of views to be relevant on LinkedIn and get value, you need to get five or 10,000. They just need to be the right ones.

Noah Greenberg (45:52):

And obviously my strategy, we sell into businesses. This is a B2B sales strategy. I think the same thing could be used for if I'm a founder and I'm trying to raise money next year is, yeah, you could cold DM 50 VCs or you could do the exact same strategy with potential investors this year. Fast forward six months, and all of those investors have been reading your building in public LinkedIn posts, and they're way more likely to want to take the meeting. So I think this can be used. Sales is obviously a very broad term.

Pablo Srugo (46:25):

Well, Noah, I think this has been great. We've gone super deep. I love these types of episodes. They're super tactical. I think if people know a little bit about LinkedIn or they know nothing about LinkedIn, they should know how to leverage LinkedIn. Now it's just up to them if they actually want to do it, it takes real work to actually post every day or three times a week. It's no joke, but you're totally right. And it's the classic Mr. Beast thing. His number one advice to anybody that wants to produce content is do a hundred videos, get a little better on each one. And that's the same thing here. Post a hundred times, get a little bit better, a little bit more targeted, a little bit more punchier, whatever it is on each post and you'll see the results. But anyways, thanks for jumping on the show, man. It's been great. 

Noah Greenfeld (47:02)

I appreciate it. It's been fun. 

Pablo Srugo(47:04)

So guess what, I met this founder who listened to every single episode of the product Market Fit show. He just called me and he sold his company for over a billion dollars. That's right. If you listen to every episode of the product Market Fit show, that's what's going to happen. I can't say it's guaranteed, but it's what I've seen. It's what I've seen in the past. But you won't know for sure unless you try it out for yourself. So go back because there's over a hundred episodes of the product Market Fit show and you haven't listened to most of them. Check them out.