Customer-Led SaaS Growth Without a Sales Funnel

Most SaaS “funnels” are built like a one-time transaction machine: attract clicks, convert a trial, celebrate the new logo. Bootstrapped founders pay for that mistake for months—sometimes years—because recurring revenue doesn’t care that someone signed up. It cares that they stay, use the product, and expand.

That’s why the “forget the funnel” idea lands so well for bootstrapped SaaS. If you’re funding growth with revenue (not VC), you can’t afford leaky onboarding, vague messaging, or a customer base full of people who never really get value. The cheapest growth channel you’ll ever find is retention—and retention is a customer insight problem before it’s a marketing problem.

This post is part of our SMB Content Marketing United States series, focused on content marketing strategies that work on a budget. Here, we’ll turn insights from Startups For the Rest of Us Episode 636 (Rob Walling + Claire Suellentrop, co-author of Forget the Funnel) into a practical, customer-led playbook you can run in a lean startup.

Why “forget the funnel” is the right stance for bootstrapped SaaS

A funnel assumes marketing ends when a customer converts. That’s fine for ecommerce. It’s sloppy thinking for subscription businesses.

In a recurring revenue model, the real “conversion” is when a customer reaches ongoing value—then keeps reaching it. The reality? A traditional funnel hides the most important parts of bootstrapped growth:

• Time-to-value (how quickly new users get a win)
• Retention (do they stick around after the first month?)
• Expansion (do they upgrade, add seats, or use more deeply?)

If you’re doing “SMB content marketing” for a SaaS audience, this matters because your blog posts, onboarding emails, and product pages shouldn’t just drive signups. They should attract the right customers and set them up to succeed.

A recurring revenue business lives and dies by retention. Marketing that stops at signup is only half the job.

Step 1: Identify your “best customers” (before you do any research)

Customer research fails when you interview the wrong customers.

Claire’s first move with clients isn’t “run interviews.” It’s alignment: who counts as a best customer right now? The definition is more behavioral than demographic.

A “best customer” usually looks like this:

• They get what your product is for (they’re not forcing it into the wrong use case)
• They’re low burden on support/customer success
• They pay happily (no constant discount pressure)
• They get repeatable outcomes and can describe them

Here’s my opinion: if your team can’t agree on your best customer, your content marketing will be random. You’ll publish one post for enterprise buyers, one for freelancers, one for a use case you don’t even want. Then you’ll conclude “content doesn’t work.”

“Is it too early for this if I only have 10 customers?”

You can start early, but the method changes.

• If you have a healthy base (say, dozens of engaged customers), you can interview your best customers and build messaging around what already works.
• If you’re early (a handful of customers or still validating), you’ll do more future customer research (forums, groups, existing alternatives, and problem-focused conversations).

Either way, the goal is the same: stop guessing.

Step 2: Run customer interviews that don’t poison the data

A lot of founders “talk to customers” and still learn nothing because they ask leading questions.

Instead of asking customers to grade your product (“Are you happy?”), ask them to narrate their experience in their own words. This is straight from the episode’s discussion and it’s the difference between usable insight and polite feedback.

Use open-ended prompts (and avoid feature fishing)

Bad question: “Are you happy with your experience so far?”
Better question: “How would you describe your experience so far?”

Bad question: “Which competitors have you tried?”
Better question: “How have you tried to solve this problem in the past?”

Bad question: “Which is your favorite feature: A, B, C, or D?”
Better question: “When you first tried the product, what convinced you it would solve your problem?”

Why this works: customers don’t experience your product as a list of features. They experience it as a path from “before” to “after.” The best content marketing pulls language from that path.

The one weekly question that improves your marketing fastest

If you only steal one thing, steal this:

“What happened in your world that made your old solution stop working?”

That “trigger moment” fuels:

• Better positioning (what you actually replace)
• Better content topics (what people search and ask when the trigger hits)
• Better channel strategy (where they went looking for alternatives)

Step 3: Learn from future customers when you don’t have enough data yet

Early-stage bootstrappers often don’t have enough “best customers” to learn from. That doesn’t mean you’re stuck.

In the episode, Claire describes a situation from early 2020: a restaurant operations SaaS suddenly faced a market where nobody wanted to buy “operations software” because restaurants were trying to survive. The team pivoted their marketing lens:

• They looked at where restaurant owners were talking (online groups and communities)
• They identified an urgent pain: restaurants needed online ordering fast
• They carved out a simpler part of the product (online menu + ordering)
• They launched a waitlist and offered it free to validate demand
• They onboarded just under 1,000 restaurants to that mini-offer
• Later, some of those became customers of the full platform

This is a powerful reminder for SMB content marketing in the US: sometimes the fastest traction comes from showing up where your buyers already gather and speaking directly to the moment they’re in.

Step 4: Map customer value to product actions (then fix onboarding)

Collecting interviews isn’t the win. Turning them into changes is.

The practical middle step (highlighted in the episode) is to take the raw research and extract:

1. The job customers “hire” your product to do (the outcome they want)
2. The value themes they repeat (why it matters)
3. The product attributes that create that value (features, flows, templates, exports, invites, automations)

Once you have that map, you can review your website, onboarding, and content and ask:

• Are we making the real value obvious?
• Are we pushing new users toward the actions that create that value?
• Are we teaching the right habits (not just listing features)?

Case study: SparkToro doubled conversions with onboarding changes

The episode includes a concrete example from SparkToro (Rand Fishkin’s audience intelligence SaaS).

One customer value theme was social/professional: SparkToro helps users look smart in front of clients or stakeholders because they can back up marketing recommendations with data.

Once you know that, your onboarding isn’t about “click around the dashboard.” It’s about getting users to the moment where they can share results.

The team implemented onboarding improvements like:

• An onboarding email series that highlighted high-value actions
• A clearer path to core outcomes (think checklists or guided steps)

Reported outcome: SparkToro doubled its trial-to-paid (free-to-paid) conversion rate in about a month from onboarding updates alone.

That’s the bootstrapped dream: growth that doesn’t require more ad spend—just better alignment between what customers value and what you guide them to do.

How to turn these insights into SMB content marketing that compounds

Customer-led growth isn’t only “product.” It’s content strategy.

Here’s what I’ve seen work reliably for bootstrapped SaaS teams: let customer research dictate your editorial calendar and distribution, not brainstorming sessions.

Build a content backlog from customer triggers and alternatives

From interviews/surveys, capture:

• Trigger moments (what broke)
• Prior solutions they tried (spreadsheets, agencies, competitors, manual workflows)
• Evaluation criteria (what they cared about when choosing)

Then create content that matches those moments:

• “What to do when [old approach] stops working” posts
• “Alternatives to [manual process]” comparisons (careful: keep it honest)
• “How to present [insight] to your boss/client” templates (ties directly to stakeholder value)

Write onboarding content like it’s part of marketing (because it is)

For subscription businesses, onboarding is a marketing channel with a conversion rate.

Strong low-budget plays:

• A 5-email “first week” sequence that drives 1–2 high-value actions
• A single “Getting your first win in 10 minutes” guide
• In-app checklist focused on outcomes (not feature tours)

If you’re short on time, pick one metric and own it for 30 days: trial-to-paid, activation rate, or week-4 retention.

A simple 7-day customer-led growth sprint (no VC required)

If you want this to be more than a nice idea, run it as a sprint.

1. Day 1: Define “best customer” with your team (write it down).
2. Days 2–3: Interview 5 best customers (30 minutes each).
3. Day 4: Synthesize: list the top 3 value themes + top 3 trigger moments.
4. Day 5: Map value themes → product actions (what features/flows create the value?).
5. Day 6: Fix one onboarding bottleneck (email, checklist, or first-run experience).
6. Day 7: Publish one content piece using exact customer language (headline + subheads).

Repeat monthly. Customer-led growth is a habit, not a one-time project.

Where to go next

If you’re building a bootstrapped SaaS, you don’t need a bigger funnel. You need a clearer picture of who succeeds with your product and why—then you need to bake that into your onboarding and your content marketing.

The fastest path to sustainable recurring revenue is usually hiding in plain sight: the words your best customers already use to describe their problems, their triggers, and what “success” feels like.

If you want to explore the framework discussed in the episode and the book preview, you can find it at https://forgetthefunnel.com. Then do the part most teams avoid: schedule five customer conversations and listen like your runway depends on it—because, bootstrapped, it does.

What would change in your growth this quarter if you stopped optimizing for signups and started optimizing for customer outcomes?