My cofounder Charlie and I built an API-first B2B SaaS platform for building and managing gamification features like streaks, leaderboards, and achievements. To grow it, we designed a sales & marketing engine that could be operated by just one person (Charlie) so that I could continue to work on improvements to the product. The approach we came up with is an interesting one that merits some documentation here.

Goals

Our goal was to design a set of processes that together would meet the following criteria:

1. Be manageable by only one person
2. Outputs a significant amount of written and visual content that can rank in search engine results, be sourced by LLMs, and get discovered on short-form video platforms like YouTube shorts and TikTok.
3. Generates a steady stream of qualified leads that we can eventually convert into Trophy customers.

Of course we wanted to maximize the amount of (2) and (3) we could get out of this engine.

First Attempts

At the start, we had separate processes for sales and marketing. On the sales side, we tried a bunch of different approaches to cold email (automated and manual) with limited success. On the marketing side, we did some programmatic SEO, which helped us start ranking for some keywords but not always the highest-value ones. And since these were two entirely different processes, it wasn't very efficient.

Joining Sales & Marketing Together

We realized that there was one particular thing we could do that would yield both content (lots of it!) and leads: a podcast.

So we created the Levels Podcast and wrote a script that would scrape the Play Store for mobile apps that fit our criteria for potential customers and automatically emailed them with an invitation to be on an episode of the podcast.

Then we started following this set of steps:

1. Set up an intro call with anyone who responds to the automated outreach. During the intro call, qualify them as a potential customer and as a potentially good podcast guest.
2. Record an episode of the podcast with all qualified guests.
3. Convert the podcast episode into short form video, blog posts, and social posts with the help of AI.
4. Schedule sales calls with any qualified leads that came through the podcast outreach.

Results

First of all, our reply rate for podcast invitations was way higher than our reply rate for sales emails (6% vs. ~1%). Even more importantly, we were getting replies from fairly big names, apps with millions of downloads! These types of apps weren't replying to our cold outreach in the previous approach.

The podcast itself has been a ton of fun to produce, and it has yielded tons of blog posts, social posts, and clips to help increase the gravitational pull of the Trophy brand online. And it's allowed me to meet a bunch of very cool people building interesting businesses.

The one area this strategy hasn't been great for is sales. Despite recording many episodes and doing many sales calls, we've yet to close a customer that came in via the podcast. However we think it's a matter of time... Trophy requires significant buy-in from the product team since it requires being integrated into the product roadmap and messaged to users, so it takes some time to sell. The podcast has helped us establish many leads that we hope will convert when the time is right. And we've also recorded episodes with many companies that we know won't become customers, just to have the interesting conversations.

Looking forward, though, we'll be setting aside some extra time for founder-led sales external to the podcast efforts.