3.9 million people have seen my B2B content in the last 90 days.
That’s just the top of my funnel, though, and an impressive top of funnel doesn’t matter if you don’t have the infrastructure to make sales.
A lot of founders I see doing founder-led marketing only have a top of funnel and nothing else. If you want to sell your product, you need to go from attracting attention to a sale, and that doesn’t happen in one step.
Building a founder-led funnel has five steps: Position, Attract, Capture, Engage, Scale. I call it PACES.
The first step is Position. In this step, you decide how you will represent yourself in your marketing. It is the topics you discuss on social media, your profile bio, what your website says, and everything else potential customers see.
Pick the few topics that attract your buyer and stick to them. Choose the ideas you believe about those topics. For example, I talk about marketing, startups, AI, and technology. Within those topics, I have specific beliefs like that founder-led marketing is the best way to win right now or that founders have never had more leverage over VCs than this new era of building.
Once you’ve figured out your positioning, you are ready for the Attract step. Take what you believe about the topics you decided to talk about and repeat them relentlessly until people associate them with you. If you look at my social media, I repeat the same core ideas, like “You don’t need VCs, VCs need you,” over and over.
Most people try to be too original with every post. They want every post to be a brand new thought nobody has ever said. The algorithm hates that, but it loves repetition.
Attracting attention on a platform you don’t own isn’t worth much: the algorithm can change at any time and throttle your reach. In Capture, you move people from social media to an asset you own, like an email list.
You do this by posting a call to action (CTA) once or more a week. It can be a dedicated post asking someone to sign up for your newsletter or a comment inside one of your posts asking the same thing. Chances are, you signed up for this newsletter because of a CTA I posted on social media, letting you know I write a weekly essay for founders.
Collecting someone’s email address earns you the opportunity to go deeper. Your short-form, top-of-funnel posts are short soundbites that grab attention. The Engage step is where you go deep and build a relationship, helping solve your reader’s problems. I help founders make more sales. I go deep into marketing tactics, focusing on content only I can write because I document real results from my GTM experiments. My email open rate is 58%, significantly higher than the average newsletter, which shows it is working.
Once your prospect is engaged, selling stops being persuasion and becomes logistics. You’re not convincing anyone. Instead, you’re telling someone who already trusts you what you offer and what it costs. All my fractional GTM engagements with startups have come from this funnel, without messaging strangers and trying to convince them to take a meeting with me. This works whether you are selling a fractional service like me or software.
Once you’ve built the infrastructure, it is time to Scale. Social media is just one way to get attention at the top of your funnel. There are many other options available, like getting PR, going on podcasts, giving talks, collaborating with other founders, and paying for ads. I’m negotiating a couple of sponsored deals on X right now, and I am starting to reach out to podcasts. I will report back on the results.
When you think of your inbound funnel as PACES and measure every step, getting it to make more and more sales becomes math + experimenting. The key is to look at each step of your funnel and try to improve it every week. Last week, I wrote about how I built a custom UTM tracker to improve my Capture step, and improved my signups by 817%.
This week, I focused on the Attract step and added new ways to get attention and bring even more people into my funnel, like sponsored posts on X. Do this week after week, and everything starts to compound, and you end up making more sales than seemed possible when you started.
What’s working in early-stage go-to-market right now.
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