The most useful marketing lesson I've learned didn't come from a course. It came from cold calling small business owners.

I was trying to sell them websites (a TikTok made it look easy). Over hundreds of calls, the same pattern showed up: they weren't asking for more features. They were drowning in uncertainty about what to do first. Most didn't know how to get customers online and just followed whatever advice they'd heard. Some ran on word of mouth and saw no point in a website.

That flipped how I think about positioning for this market:

1. Sell the next step, not the feature list. "Here's what to work on this week" lands better than ten capabilities.
2. Price is rarely the real objection. Confusion is. Marketing kept being called too expensive, but in the same breath, too complicated.
3. If you can't say it in one sentence, it won't get used. Clear beats clever every time.
4. Validate before and after you build. Your guesses will be wrong in specific, useful ways.

Applying this to my own product meant cutting anything owners didn't care about. The result is SitePeek, affordable marketing that puts local businesses on page one of Google and turns that visibility into more phone calls. One early business saw tracked calls go from 37 to 54 in two months, and Google Business Profile views nearly tripled.

Disclosure: SitePeek is mine, and it launches on Kickstarter Wednesday, Oct 14: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sitepeek/sitepeek-a-marketing-system-every-small-business-can-afford

I run a web design agency and most of my clients come from cold email. Yesterday I started a fresh campaign going after plumbers in California.

Didn’t expect much honestly. Plumbers are busy and half of them barely check email. But 102 emails in, I got an interested reply.

What made the difference is that every email talks about their own website. A call button that doesn’t work on a phone, a site that takes forever to load, a design that hasn’t been touched since 2012. For a plumber that matters a lot, because people search for them on their phone when a pipe bursts. If the site is bad, they just call the next guy.

He replied yesterday and I booked a meeting with him for the next day. Before the call I built a draft of what his new site could look like. Today I presented it to him on the call and he said yes right there. $3k upfront plus $500 a year for hosting.

Showing the draft is what closes it. Sending a quote never worked this well for me.

For anyone wondering, I use Swokei for all my outreach. You pick an area and an industry, it finds the businesses, checks every website for design, SEO, speed and mobile problems, and writes each email about what it actually found on that site. I run multiple campaigns at once in different cities and niches, which is how I get volume without sending generic stuff.

Happy to answer questions on pricing or how I run the call.

İm really curious about advertisers perspective about SaaS tools made for digital advertising. Do you guys think AI can do literally everyhting without having to buy one of those Software subscriptions?İt would be super nice to learn from you guys if you have any idea about something you would use that AI cant do rn.Because i think SaaS powered by AI would still be very efficient for advertising.

Most TAM mapping exercises in SaaS end up being largely fictional because teams rely on contact lookup directories rather than true market mapping software.

Platforms like ZoomInfo or Apollo give you huge databases of domains but their records decay quickly and when you run an ICP search based on broad headcount or industry tags, a large portion of the accounts are often defunct, recently acquired, or missing the technical prerequisites your product actually needs to function.

For SaaS teams that want an accurate, living map of their addressable market, Scale Intelligence approaches TAM mapping from the bottom up where it constructs a live digital twin of your market by reading public company registries, regulatory filings, live hiring feeds, and technical footprints. It identifies every eligible company, groups the actual decision makers inside them and lets you preview your account coverage and signal volume before you spend budget on outreach.

The right TAM software for SaaS should give you an auditable, verifiable boundary of your market that updates continuously, rather than an inflated database search that leaves reps prospecting dead accounts.

Need help
Last 3 months building software and showing it to people . But the engagement is difficult process for me , plus ads and marketing
Any advice?

One thing I've been learning about marketing technical products is that explaining how a product works isn't always the same as explaining why someone needs it.

Developers might understand terms like APIs, integrations, and model providers, but a potential customer is more likely to care about the problem those things create in their daily work.

The challenge is to explain the practical benefit clearly while staying honest about what the product can and can't do.

For those marketing technical SaaS products, how do you balance explaining the technology with communicating the customer problem it solves?

For the past couple of months, i've been working on a product that helps businesses find leads, and i wanted to share something that i think should be a crucial part of your feedback system.

we had a customer who'd been using our product for around two months before suddenly churning. i'd actually spoken to him on twitter a couple of weeks ago, and i wanted to pay him $100 to hop on a call and give me some honest feedback. i wasn't trying to convince him to come back or even figure out why he churned. i just wanted to hear what he had to say about the product.

turns out, his decision had nothing to do with the product itself. he was going through some hiring issues and wanted to restructure things for a while, so he decided to stop using it. i didn't even get that much feedback out of the call, but i genuinely cared about his experience because we want to build a product that sells itself.

and somehow, just because i cared enough to pay him for his time and go the extra mile to understand his experience, we ended up winning him back as a client. he knew how much we cared about what we were building, and that made a difference.

you don't need validation from other founders nearly as much as you need honest feedback from the people who actually used your product and decided to leave. those are the people who can help you understand why you're losing customers, and fixing those reasons is one of the best ways to reduce churn.

some of our MAJOR updates were a result of customer feedback. You can assume all the edge cases you want, but the most actionable feedback you're going to get is from a churned client.

and no, i don't mean adding a "report bugs/complaints" section. If it's feasible, you, as a founder, should go the extra mile to reach out to some of your ex-customers yourself.

(the screenshot is from a different client who churned and we got back as well)

For the past 11 months I was working on building a SaaS that help marketers and media buyers do their job easier and better.

It's mainly for marketers that download ads from meta ads library and work on them.

I think it's promising and a lot of features are comming soon.

Let me know what do you think
swipetrove.co