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- GTM behind B2B tools, productized services, and funnels (and why PR rocks)
GTM behind B2B tools, productized services, and funnels (and why PR rocks)
How AI shapes the future of services, what I focus on, niche brands, directories, and more in this edition
This is a packed edition including a handful of things:
Transitioning to AI lead magnets
Also, bridging pain points and problems for new service offers
Building standalone productized AI tools for DevriX
Standalone Growth Shuttle/Robust Branding brands in 2024 and 2025
Directories as an SEO hack
Why PR is crucial in this AI era
Dive into strategy and pricing considerations from within + how we package this for existing B2B businesses (we always run tests with a couple of ongoing partners).
1. AI lead magnets pivot
We’ve all done PDFs and ebooks and case studies etc as lead magnets, but most of them suck.
Yes, we still do webinar sign-up magnets (next one on Nov 7) or some resources (templates, creative packs, checklists), but they do fade away.
Calculators have always performed well - I built my first one in 2012 and released it as a WordPress plugin to build more of these, and it’s solid. Micro-SaaS have performed perfectly, but they are expensive to build.
So we’ve been building and integrating GPT wrappers with three different systems, two in-house and an external one we test, which now leads to improved content with actionable instruments for visitors to engage with and get customized results ASAP.
Take a look at my advisory page as an example:
I integrate both a pretrained avatar responding real time questions with my voice and an AI optimizer tool that suggests some areas of improvement before we even connect. I also get the email and data after if I decide to follow up personally.
2. Productizing as Done-For-You services
We’ve been testing with augmented tools over the past year successfully for portfolio clients at DevriX, Growth Shuttle, and my own investments. So this is my go-to approach now.
📰 In terms of productized AI lead magnets, what we’ve been selling as a pivot to businesses is:
Fully-fledged AI micro SaaS with sign up and membership (including paid) and a simple GPT wrapper: $4,000
Custom GPT wrapper with some logic and taking emails, 1-pager (lander), no membership/billing/persistent data: $2,000
AI wrapper as a magnet (we ideate, build and embed in existing content): $500
The beauty of our packages is that our existing retainer clients get access to anything as we charge a monthly fee and can distribute time on whatever makes the most sense. And now we have focused services as a lead funnel for separate clients that want to start with something actionable.
Lower commitment, easier to explain and package. And drives immediate value in a matter of days.
We’re also testing “done with you” offers that we’ve never done before, but now understanding that teams are more nimble, B2Bs want to have an account manager or someone else internally picking up the mundane repetitive work at least. So there’s some knowledge sharing and not paying premium for some tedious tasks.
Luckily, we incorporate AI in packages that can replace human labor, but AI is always supervised, be it 10% or 80%.
Due to ongoing demand, we’ve packaged B2B executive thought leadership as a standalone service, too:
Costs $800/mo/executive for one channel or $1,300/mo/executive for two (like LinkedIn and Threads or X or Instagram)
Includes 30-60min a month on a call gathering ideas and specific topics on a video call
The DevriX team builds out a content plan and crafts content that conveys the message and builds engagements
Retainer clients get extra reach through our PR campaigns, case studies, paid ads, testimonial features on existing landing pages, and other community activities. But this package makes sense now as founder-led marketing is growing and B2Bs need more faces on the forefront, where CXOs and directors and VPs are great brand ambassadors working from within.
So a $20M - $50M business can send 5 executives our way for merely $4K/mo and get that brand message amplified consistently month over month while reaching a broader audience, targeting different topics (for each exec), and delivering high-impact value while closing business and growing the corporate brand.
No-brainer, right?
3. Standalone AI products (lead magnets, showcase, and funnel)
Based on #1 and #2 above, I put my money where my mouth is, which leads to new products in beta that we’re working on as standalone SaaS.
My team is also showcasing two of them to 3,000 visitors at the Webit Future Forum event today (Wed and Thu) and I love the instant feedback from ICPs at scale in one place 👨🚀
Again, we’re still working these out for a mass public launch as they are mainly designed for existing retainer accounts (that we supervise and can assist with vs. fully self-served).
But here’s Behavly:
AI-driven conversion rate optimization and reporting
And here’s the ICProfiler:
Pulling a company profile and fetching competitors for further analysis
Some of our work-in-progress tools also develop SWOT analysis, pain point breakdowns, offer mapping, even high-level social and ads copy.
👉 They are integrated in both our Go-to-market plans and Experimentation as a Service plans for DevriX clients, plans from $3k/mo to $20k/mo depending on velocity and number of iterations.
And if you want to pick my brain and work with me directly (and stay on top of the latest wild ideas I come up with as we build custom-tailored services and conquer AI):
My fractional CXO/advisory services
4. Standalone Growth Shuttle/Robust Branding brands
Another key transformation going on over the past 12-18 months is branching out and breaking out standalone and individualized products and brands vs. what was a consolidated experience previously.
Three years ago, we would have bundled Behavly and ICProfiler as DevriX subpages, period. Each tool living on the site, supporting the domain authority and all that.
However, this now faces several problems:
Google is unreliable for SEO considering the helpful content update in 2023 that tanked a bunch of sites, and now different cohorts are taking hits every 2-3 months. P.S. our last Q4/Q1 were non-existent for SEO, but Q3 and now Q4 are scaling fast as our traffic grew up by 360% again.
People use different search apps, too - chatbots, Perplexity, social media search
The cost of launching one-pager sites is going down. Our $2K - $4K microSaaS plans used to cost $20K several years ago and we’re optimizing based on boilerplates and building existing frameworks now.
The cost of generating content for blog and social is also going down. We can now manage entire brands for $2k/mo, that including social brands, email sequences, a lead funnel, and a few AI-assisted blog posts. It used to require a team of 3 FTEs several years back.
In a competitive space, it’s hard to stay in a single niche and get enough demand. Take a look at virtually every business making over $5M - $10M offering a handful of things at once. Agencies offer 15+ different services, Adobe offers 30 products, Microsoft does software, hardware, cloud, AI. Niche solutions are selling but a company dies if they only sell one thing.
So as a result, we bootstrap and launch standalone niche brands so that messaging could be crystal clear and laser-focused on ICPs. That solves the targeting and conversion rate problem and we facilitate that with GTM campaigns through paid ads and email.
This is how the Async Advisor came on board
I’m also building a CEO Playbooks brand for my advisory group that’s advisory + dashboards, competitive research, playbooks, and some of these tools integrated. It’s for $10M+ businesses who are on the scale trajectory.
I’ll be building new niche directories and tools that solve 1 problem and do it right
The space is shifting fast - and the digital dynamics are contributing to that (and so are tools like Kwanzoo or RB2B or Instantly or Apollo doing some identification today).
Here’s my interview with Kwanzoo’s founder if you’ve missed the podcast (it has nearly 400 likes and posted just 8 months ago!)
5. Directories as an SEO hack
Look, I’ve been passionate about SEO since 2008 and most of my businesses grew thanks to organic growth and enough patience. Ranking in 2012-2014 was also easier, but the core premise is clear.
So I’ve tried out different directories over time - but content production was harder.
We’ve also built successful directories for some outstanding businesses like Arms Directory - and I can confidently say we can do everything for clients who look for premium quality.
This is why we’ve scaled 14+ publishers past 100 million monthly views, built outstanding platforms for Audi, banks, telecoms, Fortune 1000s, and more. So bespoke quality is a thing.
However, do you know who owns Porsche?
Volkswagen.
And on this scale trajectory, we’re constantly optimizing for lower ticket and SMEs and try to offer solutions and products and help them scale to the point they can confidently order our Porsches without giving it a second thought.
Half of my personal time goes into the creator/indie economy for that reason - continuously testing and executing upon the latest tools and systems and finding ways to optimize processes or build solutions at scale.
Most of the time we can’t match 100% of the quality. We can do 70% or 80%. But that also costs 20% of the money.
So our mid-tier solutions are with disclaimers in mind, but if a usual $10K build can be done for $2K or $3K with compromises, this is good enough for some clients. We just bring the VW Polo instead of the 911 Carrera.
So my next ongoing experiment is bringing directories back following the John Rush framework:
I’ve been following both John and Greg for a while and went through the directory playbook (and it makes sense). Now, empowered with some AI creation tools, a faster way to launch sites, and a better domain authority for launch funnels, we can do more of these - better and faster.
So buckle up as these are getting integrated into content sites and AI directories around my B2B advisory. Delivering more value at scale.
6. Why PR is crucial in this AI era
And last but not least, all that AI consumption, mass content generation, accounts running on autopilot - and virtually zero control for brands to be claiming any testimonials or reviews (be it true or not) - and how easy it is to run faceless brands…
We’re also compensating with a good chunk of earned media and PR.
I have 50+ articles on Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur and other prominent outlets. And have appeared on 100+ webinars and podcasts, let alone my own.
Bottom line, I’m trustworthy and a real human being, no questions asked, not a phantom account in Dubai that is wiring something through Bermuda and Belize and looking like Bitcoin’s founder Satoshi (who may or may not exist at all).
We treat our clients the same way and incorporate more real-world events and public trust factors to build resilient brands.
I met with Richard from RLM in May in Manhattan and we covered the state of PR which is just as valid today. So given that, I have repackaged this as a whole new episode on the podcast (which btw grew to 7,500+ subs after being at 500 in June):
I know it’s a lot to unpack, but I hope this issue has been valuable.
Feel free to share it and forward to colleagues, partners, investors, GTM strategists, students to spread the word and bring new ideas into the ecosystem.
And if you want an invite into my Slack for weekly accountability (usually kept for my book readers), reply and I’ll send a link over.
Yours,
Mario
My Take
✍️ 2024 B2B SaaS Spending Report - The B2B SaaS space has undergone a massive transformation in the past 2 years - and building 2025 roadmaps is guesswork at best. This is why we rely on heavy data and behavioral analysis by the best. Curious how SaaS companies are adjusting their spending in 2024?
✍️ The Growth Blueprint Podcast #9: 32 Years in PR w/ Richard Learmer - Public relations is shifting, and few know it better than Richard Learmer, a PR veteran with over 30 years in business. We sat down to dive deep into what makes PR indispensable, even as AI-generated content and automation flood the market. Richard reveals the timeless strategies that still work, why genuine media relationships matter more than ever, and how events and real-world connections are gaining new ground.
✍️ The Gap Between Business and Education - When I wrote "MBA Disrupted", I reminisced about the global MBA programs in the introduction. Harvard, Cornell, UPenn may be awesome, but tens of millions of global students are exposed to different principles, and the bottom 50% are often outrageous. It looked weird early in 2023, virtually ancient mid-2024, and out of line as we're approaching 2025. The job market tension won't improve until career expectations get aligned with the macro data.
Newsletter Recommendations
📧 Entrepreneur - They’ll be in your inbox every morning Monday-Saturday with all the day’s top business news, inspiring stories, best advice, and exclusive reporting from Entrepreneur.
📧 Statista - Within just a few years, Statista managed to establish itself as a leading provider of market and consumer data. Over 1,100 visionaries, experts and doers continuously reinvent Statista, thereby constantly developing successful new products and business models. Subscribe by logging in.
Business Strategy
📃 Meta’s celebrity’s scam recognition. Meta is trialling a new facial recognition system designed to combat celebrity scam ads, making its social media platforms—namely Instagram and Facebook—” difficult for scammers to use.” Scammers often use AI and fake images of celebrities or public figures to encourage people to engage with their ads, which then leads them to scam websites where they’re asked to share private information or even send money.
📃 Perplexity sued over kleptocracy. News Corp’s Dow Jones and the NY Post have sued growing AI startup Perplexity over what they describe as a “content kleptocracy.” In a lawsuit filed in New York on Monday, the media organization claimed that Perplexity engages in copyright violations on a “grand scale,” simultaneously duplicating and misrepresenting original content created by others.
📃 Google’s new segment-sharing features. Google Analytics 4 introduces segment sharing, improving data consistency. New features include a shared library and expanded user permissions. GA4 now allows segment sharing across users. Shared segments improve consistency and efficiency. New features include a shared library and expanded permissions.
📃 X expands access to Radar keyword analysis. While X’s Premium offerings have been enough to entice a significant number of users to start paying for the app as yet, its latest updates to its analytics tools could be a significant value add for business users. This is a new element to X’s analytics tools called “Radar” which enables you to set up keyword analytics so that you can track conversation volume over time, and measure topical trends related to your business and/or niche.
📃 Elon Musk sued over using Blade Runner imagery. Elon Musk, his car company Tesla and Warner Brothers Discovery were sued over their alleged artificial intelligence-fueled copyright infringement of images from the film “Blade Runner 2049” to promote Tesla’s robotaxi concept. The lawsuit by Alcon Entertainment says that Musk and the other defendants requested permission to use “an iconic still image” from “Blade Runner 2049″ for the Oct. 10 event hyping the Cybercab at Warner Brothers Discovery’s studio lot in Burbank, California. That request was denied.
Global News
📈 The start of the week saw a huge spike in Treasury yields clobber virtually all but the most important stock, Nvidia. Whether it’s a one-day tantrum on fears about the government’s deficit going to the moon remains to be seen, but maybe a heavy dose of corporate earnings can distract from that concern.
Since COVID it’s been difficult for markets to figure out just where in the business cycle the economy is, and therefore what kind of stocks to pick. If the Federal Reserve interest rate cuts signal the economy is about to slow, if not fall into a recession, then typically high-quality stocks would be the place to go; if it’s a sign actually that animal spirits are about to erupt again, then hard-hit small-caps and value stocks might make more sense.
S&P 500: $5,851(-0.05%)
📈 Average mortgage rates rose for all types of loans compared to a week ago, according to Bankrate data. Rates for 30-year fixed, 15-year fixed, 5/1 ARMs and jumbo loans increased.
30-year mortgage rate: 6.64%(+0.04)
15-year mortgage rate: 5.99%(+0.07)
📈 Bonds extended losses as investors mulled the prospect of slower US interest-rate cuts, a trend that risks upending debt positions everywhere.
The selloff pushed yields on two-year Treasuries higher by as much as two basis points on Tuesday, while 10-year yields briefly topped 4.2% for the first time since July. The rate on 10-year German securities touched the highest level since early September. The rout also spread to Asia, where the yield on Australian benchmark debt surged as much as 16 basis points. US yields subsequently retreated to little-changed levels.
📰 Here are some of the most prominent headlines this week:
U.S. officials are investigating the apparent leak of two top-secret U.S. documents that show American spy agencies tracking possible Israeli preparations for conducting an attack on Iran
Electricity is out on the entire island of Cuba, leaving 10 million without electricity, after one of its main power plants failed, according to Cuba’s energy ministry.
Donald Trump overcharged Secret Service agents protecting him and his family for rooms at his hotel in Washington while he was president, a new report from House Democrats alleges.
Investment News
📈 September 2024’s Portfolio Success stories from SeedBlink - We’ve featured many of these companies throughout these months. If any of them have caught your eye, you can have a look at how they’re doing in SeedBlink’s latest article.
InstaSun - redefines the beach experience with a revolutionary 360° solar protection device.
Klarna - Klarna, a global fintech leader, has evolved beyond "buy now, pay later," serving 150M users across 45 countries with over 500,000 retail partners.
Brainactive - Access +300 million consumers globally, gain key insights and optimise your decisions with a user-friendly AI-enhanced survey builder.
Note: Got a round going that you want to feature - your own business or a portfolio company? Get in touch.
There’s an exciting Flippa update I want to share with you. They’ve now created a category for digital agencies.
The global market for them was estimated in 2021 at about $4.2B and is expected to double by 2027. As part of the digital agency community for about 15 years, exciting times are up ahead!
Game Replay YouTube Channel - This YouTube channel featuring various replay segments from video games includes 1.06M subscribers and drives 28.3% views from US traffic.
Monthly profit: $9,638
28-day views: 3,785,117
Business age: 10 years
Psychology & Relationships Newsletter - This newsletter covering self-improvement-related topics includes an email newsletter and active Quora community.
Monthly profit: $701
Active subscribers: 14,900
Business age: 2 years
Canopy Tent Blog - This blog featuring content on outdoor event tents is the #1 authority in the niche and drives traffic 100% organically.
Monthly profit: $1,486
Domain authority score: 24
Business age: 7 years
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🚀 Want to scale and optimize your business? Growth Shuttle offers personalized advisory plans starting at $600/hr. Tap into my personal pool of business know-how and my data warehouse of industry data.
👥 Want access to my blueprints/books and a weekly Slack planning session? Join my Community and grab my Entrepreneurship book.
📈 Looking to start a US company? Check out doola and their “Business in a Box” model. Suitable for both foreigners and US citizens and both for residents and non-residents.
📊 Have you tried buying and selling digital property? Have a look at Flippa’s marketplace. They offer a vast variety of online businesses for any buyer’s interest. Or if you’re ready for an exit, Flippa provides you with the necessary tools to list your business and close the deal.
💡 Eager to incorporate my recommended solutions? Track my angel investments. Sharing, applying for open roles, or writing reviews helps a ton. And anything else I try to publish on my blog and my courses here!