Episode Details

A single blog post about bossless cultures in Silicon Valley caught the eye of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who shared it with his executive team. That one piece of social media lead generation content started a chain that led to Tony investing in iDoneThis.

Walter Chen shares the counterintuitive inbound marketing SaaS strategy he learned from Buffer's founders at AngelPad - write more, write faster, and let quantity drive quality. He explains how social media lead generation through high-volume content drove both users and investors to iDoneThis.

iDoneThis was approaching cash flow break even at the time of the interview, with 1,000 paying company accounts at $5 per person, growing nicely since early 2015 and expanding from small teams to larger enterprise companies like Uber and Twitter.

🔑 Key Lessons

• 🚀 Social media lead generation works best at high volume: Buffer's Leo Widrich wrote four posts per day at AngelPad. The quantity approach surfaces validated ideas that compound into higher-quality content marketing SaaS pieces, rather than agonizing over one perfect piece weekly.
• 💰 A single article can drive social media lead generation to investors: Walter's blog post about bossless cultures reached Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh via Business Insider. One piece of inbound marketing SaaS content started a chain that led to a meeting in Las Vegas and an investment.
• 🧠 Turn product research into social media lead generation content: When iDoneThis explored goal-setting features, Walter learned extensively about the topic and published that knowledge as blog content. The research serves double duty - informing product decisions and acquiring customers.
• 📉 Inspiration-driven content creates unpredictable SaaS growth: iDoneThis had months with thousands of signups from viral posts and months with zero. Walter acknowledged the need to move from sporadic, inspiration-driven writing to a systematic content calendar.
• 🤝 Business is a people business - every hard problem is human: Walter said every major mistake at iDoneThis involved people. From co-founder fallout to firing too late, the interpersonal challenges were harder than any product or market problem.

Chapters

• Introduction to Part 2
• The blog post that caught Tony Hsieh's attention
• How Walter generates content ideas
• Was there a content plan or was it ad hoc
• Inspiration-driven vs systematic content
• How long it takes to write a blog post
• The counterintuitive social media lead generation lesson from Buffer
• Quantity over quality in content marketing
• Writing and editing as separate processes
• The hardest thing about building a SaaS business
• Revenue and growth update for iDoneThis
• Pricing model and customer size
• Expanding from small teams to enterprise
• Lightning round
• Best business advice from Wistia's Chris Savage
• Book recommendation - Far from the Tree
• One attribute of a successful entrepreneur
• Personal productivity tool - Hackpad
• Follow your obsession not just opportunity
• Fun fact - doing differential equations on a cruise
• Most important passion outside of work
• Where to find Walter online

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/66
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email