Episode Details

Garrett Moon wrote a blog post before writing a single line of code. He mocked up screenshots in Photoshop and got 300-400 email signups in 24 hours. That inbound marketing SaaS approach - writing content before building product - became the foundation for CoSchedule's organic growth SaaS story to 7,000 customers and a seven-figure business.

CoSchedule's inbound marketing SaaS strategy was built on SaaS content marketing at scale: 500+ in-depth blog posts, each several thousand words with downloadable resources. The content marketing SaaS playbook used Blue Ocean strategy - creating dramatically better content than competitors were willing to produce. The Headline Analyzer tool, built from 1 million headlines, drove massive traffic.

Garrett Moon is the CEO and co-founder of CoSchedule, a content marketing and social media publishing calendar helping 7,000+ customers in 100+ countries. The company raised around $500,000 and self-funded the rest from consulting revenue.

🔑 Key Lessons

• 🎯 Write content before code for inbound marketing SaaS validation: CoSchedule's first "MVP" was a blog post and Photoshop mockups that generated 300-400 email signups in 24 hours - proving demand before development.
• 📉 Don't sell to existing clients when validating inbound marketing SaaS: Garrett deliberately avoided pitching consulting clients because SaaS must sell to strangers - leveraging relationships creates false validation.
• 🚀 Apply Blue Ocean strategy to SaaS content marketing: CoSchedule published fewer but dramatically better posts - several thousand words, deeply researched, always actionable - because most competitors won't invest that effort.
• 💰 Build free tools from your data to drive growth: CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer, built from 1 million headlines, drove massive traffic and email signups by giving back insights to the community.
• 🧠 Being 50% focused on two businesses means 100% focused on nothing: Garrett's hardest lesson transitioning from consulting to SaaS was that split focus dilutes everything.

Chapters

• Introduction
• Meet Garrett Moon and CoSchedule
• The problem CoSchedule solves
• Four failed products before CoSchedule
• Self-funding from consulting revenue
• The hardest part of transitioning from services to SaaS
• Writing a blog post before writing code
• Your MVP is a blog post and 10 slides
• Why you shouldn't sell to consulting clients
• Inbound marketing SaaS as the primary growth engine
• How long it took to see content marketing traction
• Standing out with Blue Ocean strategy
• Product development mistakes
• Building an editorial calendar for consistency
• How to brainstorm content ideas
• Social media promotion and the re-queue feature
• Lightning round

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/130
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email