I started SlopeFillers in 2010 as a dude looking for his way into the ski industry and trying to find the most creative way to both learn the ropes and market himself along the way.

Luck was on my side as resort marketers were doing amazing work and not getting a lot of love for it.

Within a year the site was seeing more traffic than any I’d ever run and I had Corey Ryan from Ryan Solutions calling me one random day offering me a job. With support from Corey and a lot of momentum, I’ve been able to keep this project going ever since. It’s just me and a few minutes a week so typos are a plenty, but gathering great resort campaigns remains of my favorite hobbies.

https://www.slopefillers.com

For example, we want folks to use the platform more because more usage correlates to more value they get from the product and the likelihood they’ll keep paying for it. We also want to partner with more agencies because they’re constantly working with email clients at the point where competitive insights are most useful. Then there’s the affiliate angle. I’ve tried to crack the “reward people for telling others about us” concept a few times but never quite found a way to make it work for the right voices in the email space (or at least never had the time to give it enough of a go).

Today when I was listening to Nathan Barry’s recent work session with Michael Sliwinski from Nozbe, I started hearing some similar challenges their team has tried to solve. Specifically, the correlation between someone getting setup up really well on the platform and that user sticking around.

So I pulled up their site and poked around when I found an idea I thought was really clever: Nozbe Experts.

Interestingly, within a few minutes Michael shared that he saw this effort as a bit of a failure, but Nathan started to drill into this idea because he saw its potential as a channel for growth.

Nozbe Experts

This program combines a handful of different marketing concepts under a single program, many of which were the ones I sketched out at the top of this post.

1. A Name

First, I love that it has a name to help it feel more concrete. Names aren’t always needed, but I like the way they kept it simple with a single, descriptive word.

2. Certification

Having a certification tied to this feels like another strong move. It’s not just a group of smart people, it’s a group a smart people who you can trust know the product really well.

3. Affiliate

Next, these Experts also get access to an exclusive tier of Nozbe affiliate commissions. Nathan correctly hit on the fact that this tier may not be enough incentive (25% vs 30%), but I love that this is an option they’ve woven into this program.

4. Selling Point

The existence of this group is a nice selling point. For potential users, it’s great for them to know experts are available to work with. For the experts, that visibility is a nice perk that can help recruit folks to the program.

5. Voice at the Table

You’ll notice below in the feature table that the group gets regular strategy sessions with the Nozbe CEO. This tie back to the product roadmap is really smart and a win-win for both the Expert and Nozbe.

Add it All Up

Add it all up and you have a group of:

• Savvy, trusted experts in Nozbe’s market…
• Understand the value of Nozbe on a deep level…
• Sharing ways to improve the product…
• Telling their clients / others about Nozbe…
• Helping (some) Nozbe users become less likely to churn.

When I look at this list, I agree with Nathan: There’s a ton of potential in that combination. I really love that they dug into this during the last half of the video.

That said, I can empathize with Michael that they tried this, but only had one person really knock it out of the park and feeling like it was a failure. I’ve had similar concepts I’ve chased that, at the time, felt like a strong direction but didn’t panned out. But I also very much agree with Nathan the direction can be right even if there were a couple things missing. In this case, incentives (to increase conversion) and increased direct sales outreach (to increase awareness).

There is no perfect channel, but it gave me a lot to think about how we’ve tried to work with partners in the past, the incentives we’ve offered, and how much effort I put into this channel. Like Nozbe, it feels like there’s both more meat on this bone and a better way to tell this story for SendView.

Kudos to Michael for being so open to feedback and Nathan for his approach.

Good stuff.

SaaS markets are unique in that your market is always changing. New businesses pop up, folks change roles, the old guard retires and younger faces take their place. Which means that you always have to be teaching your marketing about the core thing you do.

This is something that Sensible Weather does really well.

They’re a company that’s carving out a space in the travel/outdoors market for something they call a “weather guarantee.” Like travel insurance that reimburses you for bad weather, this core functionality is the thing they need the market to know, to understand, and to remember. So, yes, their platform is easy to use and, yes, they have a partnership with some key players (including Inntopia) and, yes, it’s beautifully designed, but the market needs all of those ideas to be connected to the core in order to make that core more attractive.

The need a tree to hang all of these shiny ornaments on.

So when I looked at their Ad Library on LinkedIn the other day, I loved how much time they’re spending on the core, how they write their copy to keep the core right up top, and how they’re educating the market about the thing that’s at the center of what they deliver to their customers.

The copy is clear and focused: a one-sentence description of the problem, to spaces to visually separate it and make it easy to glance at, then straight into the core.

Give travelers the confidence to book, no matter the forecast.

With Weather Guarantees, guests receive automatic cash reimbursements from Sensible Weather if unexpected bad weather occurs during their stay. For each guarantee sold, your hotel earns incremental revenue, with no operational lift. Elevate peace of mind.

Increase conversion. Make every stay feel protected.

Humans are a little slow, it takes a few times. Duolingo had to reminder me what “spülbecken” means 20 times before it sunk it. Sensible Weather is reminding the market what a “Weather Guarantee” is over and over again for the same reason.

And, as far as I can tell, it’s working.

It may not be sexy, but this is simple, smart, effective marketing from Sensible Weather.

Some sort of information designed to move whoever reads it closer to becoming a user of your platform.

As you can imagine, some content pushes folks hard toward that goal with a clear tie to the product and a strong call to action, some content plays a softer angle and longer game, and some content strikes some sort of balance between the two.

For smaller SaaS platforms I tend to err on the side of more direct, product-tied content that pushes a little harder, but the thing I want to do today is just document some of the content types I lean on and explore the purpose of each toward the goal of user growth. Rather than just make a list, I’ll try to group them by how hard each one is pushing and share a few examples of each.

Hard Push

Core: For Inntopia, we regularly push messages to our audience that are essentially repackaged versions of our main sales page. We call these “core” messages. They’re not as fun to read, but I like to sprinkle them in to ensure our audience never loses sight of the main thing we do for folks (example).

GTM/Features: Similar, talking about features whether they’re new releases or highlighting those core features users love than often act as the reason folks decide to try. These pair well with a “get a demo” or “try it out” CTA and, given the demand for a given feature, can often be a stronger push toward becoming a user than core messages (example).

Case Studies: I often call these customer stories just to take the edge off, but the point is to show real examples of real people using and loving your product. It’s a strong blend of social proof and core/feature messages in a narrative format that humans enjoy (example).

The upside of these types of content is they sell your product. The downside is that they may be harder to make engaging for your audience.

Medium Push

Free Tools: A free tool helps solve some part of your audiences problem and may set up your product as a nice next step, but there is some amount of value the user is receiving from the tool itself regardless of whether they sign up (example).

How Tos: I love a post that starts with “how to” because not only is that how humans often start things like buying journeys, it’s the stuff that Google/AI likes as well. In other words, it’s both engaging content and easier to rank/distribute. These set you up as an expert for a little branding, solve part of their problem to tap into the law of reciprocity, and pave a nice path toward your product, but, again, the recipient gets value whether they head down that path or not (example).

Tips/Tricks/Insights: This is where you impart some of your wisdom and experience on your audience. Like the other “medium push” content, it’s a great way to show you’re good at what you do and get on their good side, but they can still enjoy their free sample of your expertise even if they don’t buy the whole jar (example).

The upside of this type of content is that it’s much more engaging than the “hard push” stuff, but it keeps a healthy dose of the sales-related message.

Soft Push

Humor: If you post a meme, it may get a lot of engagement and create some affinity for your brand, but it doesn’t really do much to move folks toward becoming users. Especially when you consider that anyone might find it funny rather than just the right people (example).

Name Up in Lights: Shouting out other people or highlighting things you love is a great way to get them to share it with their audiences and build community, but the direct benefits in terms of pushing people to your product are obviously lessened because that’s simply not the topic of the story (example).

Awareness/Branding: As you might have guessed, much of branding fits into this category. These are messages that add a small, lightweight connection between your brand and your audience in a way that nudges them ever so slightly in the direction of your brand as those interactions accumulate into something more or just build top of mind awareness for when they make a decision.

These types of content are often the easiest to make engaging and, in turn, more likely to be consumed, but each interaction has a smaller, individual effect on how much closer it moves any one person toward becoming a user.

No Right Answer

Ideally I want a healthy mix of all of these things: soft pushes to build brand affinity, medium pushes to start getting them to realize we’re experts at this problem, and hard pushes to give them a yes/no moment to actually seal the deal. They all play off each other and play different roles in the journey.

But the reality is that I have to pick and choose depending on my goals and constraints of the smaller SaaS product I’m marketing.

At Inntopia I tend to err on the side of harder pushes, with SendView almost all of my content is in the medium push category, as we talked through some content for AthleteReg today I could see a lot of value in some content that it’s more on the softer push side. For me, the trick is mostly one of choosing the 3-4 that I can sustainably produce and are likely to have the biggest impact on those goals, then embracing the fact that’s all I can do, doing my best with what I’ve decided, measuring the results, and being willing to drop underperformers to make space for trying something new.

Solve part of your customers problem.

The perfect example of this is a free sample at the grocery store. The main problem the customer needs solved is a jar of salsa for the fridge, but that problem is full of lots of other things like spiciness and flavor and cost. A sample doesn’t solve the whole problem – needing a bottle of salsa – but it solves part of the problem – whether they’ll enjoy it – and increases their chances of buying many times.

It also invokes the classic law of reciprocity where folks are more likely to return a favor (buying a bottle of salsa) if given one first (a free snack during their shopping trip).

This principle works beautifully in the world of smaller SaaS.

Let me share a few examples.

1) Part of the Platform

Offering a free plan for your product includes the expectation of support which, if your conversion on free plans to paid is low (like it usually is) can crush a small SaaS platform. However, if you pull out one feature from your platform that solves one part of your customer’s problem and offer that as a free tool separate from your platform? Suddenly you have a great bit of marketing content (yes, I treat tools as content) with no expectations of support.

A perfect example is ESP Finder that I build for SendView (my side hustle). One part of the platform is our ability to identify the ESP of an email purely from its code. So, we made it so you can forward any email to esp@sendview.io and instantly get a response with the ESP.

It works because it solves part of their problem (the answer to “what ESP is ___ using”) but not the whole problem (tracking everything about your competitors’ emails) while also proving that we can actually solve that problem along the way.

Last year almost 20,000 people used this tool and it was one of SendView’s main sources of growth even though I only get a few support emails a year from those users.

2) Stuff They Need to Use the Platform

A marketing platform is a perfect example of something that you don’t just flip a switch and you’re done, you have to bring ideas and strategy to the table. The better the ideas, the more value you get from the platform. This was the case with Inntopia Marketing Cloud, my day job. So, we pooled all of our account manager’s experience, lessons, and expertise into a book we called the Ultimate Guide to Resort Marketing Automation.

It solved part of our prospects’ problem by giving them great ideas for marketing that could increase revenue and guest loyalty, but it didn’t give them the platform they needed to act on those ideas. As a result, we got over 300 people to download the book after we launched which turned into a decent number of meetings with the sales team.

Not bad when you consider our market is only about 1,000 resorts.

3) Questions They’ll Face

When I joined Ryan Solutions (now Inntopia Marketing Cloud) in 2011, they were the first company to have really cracked open the insights and value locked inside resort guest data. As a result, our clients were doing some amazing things. We did a good job of showcasing those campaigns, but we wanted to showcase the data, the depth, the power that we were unlocking.

So we started The Stash where every week we’d ask some question resort marketers were curious about, dig into the data, and share the answer in a short article like this one where we compared different methods of showcasing discounts in email subject lines. We even turned groups of similar answers into books so we could take our problem-solving content to tradeshows and events.

We did this every week for nearly 5 years and for a good chunk of that time this single, weekly series was generating the majority of our leads. Why? Because we were solving part of their problem – answering questions they needed to make daily decisions as a marketer – but, like the previous point, they still needed a platform they could use to act on those answers.

The cherry on top was that, the longer this series went on, the more we were also showcasing and proving the depth of our data.

Just a Little

I think the key here is to not solve too much of the problem. That, after all, is the job of your product that people should be paying for.

But if you can find some part of the problem you can solve and provide for free, that’s huge. For example:

• Profitwell offered free SaaS analytics to help you identify issues, then the paid platform helped you solve them.
• Transistor has a free podcast art generator for your episodes, then the paid platform gives you a place to upload and host them.
• Rewardful has a calculator to calculate affiliate earnings, then the paid platform actually lets you run an affiliate program.
• Userpilot has a blog teaching you how to do engage customers, then the paid platform enables you to do the things they teach.

As is probably obvious by now, I’m a big believer in the idea that tools are content in the world of SaaS marketing. That probably deserves a separate post, but I’ll wrap this up for now by pointing out that I love how this idea has helped me simply focus my content brainstorming on the things that actually move the folks who consume that content closer to becoming actual users of my platform.

I’m not just looking for content that’s nifty or entertaining or interesting, I’m looking for content that solves part of my audience’s problem.

I feel like a pretty creative person, but more often than not, it’s data that tells me where to focus that creativity.

A great example of this was when I started supporting the AthleteReg team a few months ago. Their marketing manager was doing amazing work, but she had never really been given much in the way of direction. So, one of the first things we did was dig into the data. I knew if we could get a better idea of a few, core metrics – conversion rate, average revenue per user, existing search demand, etc. – each one would give us a little more clarity around where she should invest her time and talents.

For example, once we found the conversion rate of their sales page, we saw that it was below what I’d expect for a platform like theirs.

So we focused our creativity onto trying to improve conversion rate with a rewrite/redesign.

Once we knew average revenue per user, we could back into how many new users we needed to hit our goals and, in turn, how many visitors it would take based on our conversion rate compared to current traffic levels.

So we’ve been brainstorming ways to get more traffic from more channels to help hit that number.

Once we had a rough idea of search volume for our main keywords from Google Search console, we knew this could be a good building block toward our goal.

So we spend a couple days getting copy and taglines together for a paid search campaign.

Once we started to get a rough idea of what our marketing budget would be, we know how much would have to come from low- or no-cost channels.

So we’re now focusing our efforts a little more on free traffic than paid.

But there’s one extra benefit to data, especially for smaller SaaS companies, that is especially helpful: Data also tells you HOW MUCH creativity you can justify putting into one project.

Salesforce may spend millions on a new homepage design because the upside of a small increase in conversion is measured in the tens of millions, but we’re not Salesforce. With AthleteReg, we modeled out the impact of various conversion rate changes at various levels of traffic to understand what, say, a 25% increase in conversion would translate to in terms of revenue. That was a meaningful number but definitely not measured in millions, so we had to be a little scrappy with some in-house talent to pull it off.

In other words, data tells you where the opportunities are, creativity helps you capitalize on them. You can have all the data in the world but never grow unless you come up with ways to improve those metrics. Likewise, you can be an bottomless well of creativity but never put it on the things that matter without data to point you in the right direction.

It’s not an either/or, you’ve gotta have both.

Now that the potential for revenue exists, we’ve been talking through how to grow. And, specifically, the idea of demand.

For the vast majority of smaller SaaS companies – anniversary logo makers very much included – there is a pool of existing demand. These are the people who, based on a bunch of different factors, a going to search for “competitor email tracking” or “race management software” (or some semi-related topic/question) today. They are already demanding the thing you’re selling.

As a smaller SaaS marketer, this is typically my highest converting, highest ROI audience.

This is my core.

The trick, however, is that there are only so many people out there on any given day who fit this level of demand. We work in niches and niches have limits. There is no endless, universal demand for, say, food three times a day you can tap into like a restaurant. There may only be 37 people out there who will search for “resort booking engine“.

And that’s it.

Which is the other side of this coin. Yes, this demand already exists whether you do any marketing today or not, but it also has very defined limits. Limits that are really hard to change, especially for a small company with limited resources.

I loved how Justin Jackson described this when he wrote about waves of demand:

“Business is like surfing: the founder paddles out past the break, sits on their board, and evaluates the waves (the business opportunities) coming in. Specifically, they’ll observe the size, shape, and momentum of customer demand.”

I agree 100% with Justin’s suggestion that entrepreneurs should follow big waves of demand when choosing business ideas. Why? Because you only have to capture demand instead of create demand, and creating demand (which I’d imagine is something I’ll write about soon) can be a long, tough, uphill battle even for the biggest companies with the deepest pockets, much less a scrappy team of 3 like mine.

But as a marketer of a smaller SaaS, you’re likely marketing an existing product. What do you do if the business and target customer is already set? You can’t choose a new wave, your job is simply to capture as much of your existing wave as possible.

Which is what my daughter and I discussed.

We sat down and starting looking at our analytics. Our primary channel is SEO and, based on our Search Console data, we’re already ranking #1 (or just about #1) for many of our core search phrases in terms of both image results and site results. This was great to see.

But the key is in that word; most.

Because as we dug into deeper we found two interesting things.

1. First, we found places where we’re not ranking quite as high (we average #9 for “corporate anniversary logos”) and how we ranked higher when we had more logos in a category.
2. Second, was how much of our new traffic is coming from people looking for specific logos (we average #8 for “america 250 logo”, but it accounted for 10% of our traffic one day).

What I explained to her was that these two insights are showing us where the site’s growth will likely come from: adding more (especially well-known) logos to the site. That’s our fuel for growth.

So, she made a goal of reaching 450 logos on the site by the end of the year.

At some point she will capture as much of the anniversary logo demand as she can, but the key is that she’s not there yet…

…which is how I want to wrap this up.

If I’m honest, that conversation caused a decent bit of introspection about how well I’m capturing existing demand for the smaller SaaS products I market. In some cases, I feel pretty good and don’t see much left in the well. In others, I’m not as sure and I’m sensing there might be more left in the tank. So, that’s exactly what I’ve started to do the last couple weeks: ensure that I’m capture as much of that existing demand as possible before I put any more of my limited resources on the much harder task of (trying to) create demand on my own.

In other words, they have no choice.

Smaller B2B SaaS companies? We do.

And that ability to do the stuff that doesn’t scale and work on a one-to-one basis? In my experience, that’s where a lot of opportunity is found.

For example, right now I’m exploring getting SendView embedded into other platforms. Specifically email marketing platforms of which there are about 300 in the world and about 100-125 in English. When I email these ESPs, I’m not copy/pasting a generic message over and over because I’d burn through that list in a couple days, only get a few responses, and…then what? It’s not like there are 10,000 more ESPs out there to move on to. This is all I’ve got.

So I’m putting their logo into mockups, I’m recording personal videos, I’m sending them credentials to a fictional ESP demo of the embed functionality they can play with, I’m doing things that a Fortune 500 probably can’t do.

And, as a result, my response rate is 10x what I usually see with cold email.

A couple years ago at Inntopia we uncovered a group of roughly 250 new prospects we had never engaged with. Instead of just an email intro, we put together custom packets for each one using their assets showing exactly what our booking engine and marketing technology would look like if they were using it. Inside each packet was also a hand-written note. We tracked each one and follow up with an email shortly after it arrived.

And the result? A 5x increase in response rate over other outreach we’ve done to similar brands.

Yes, having a small market is a constraint. And it can be a tough one. If you don’t sign at least a few of those 10 deals in the pipeline there aren’t thousands more out there you can hammer to try to fill things up going into Q4. But that, I guess, is also the reason why doing stuff that doesn’t scale is so important. If you only have 1,000 potential customers, doing the campaign that gets a 20% response rate is probably a lot smarter than doing the stuff that only gets a 2% response rate.

And if you’re competing against big Fortune 500 companies like I occasionally have? Their inability to match that type of connection is yet another point on the board for doing the stuff that doesn’t scale.

Small SaaS markets absolutely present a challenge. But they also feel a lot like an opportunity.

There is a limit to how much information a SaaS marketer should give a potential user.

At some point, you pass some peak level of information. After that, more information is only going to hurt your chances of getting them to click “register” or fill out that lead form. In fact, if you thought about this idea on a long walk like I did, you could probably apply some general buckets to these areas of the curve to better explain what is happening at each phase.

• You start out with your core: “We can do the thing you’re looking for.”
• They you ramp it up with some differentiators. “We can do things nobody else can.”
• Likelihoods start to level off as we get to parity, “We can also do what others do.”
• Finally are detractors, “We wish these things didn’t exist.”

When you look at this chart that I totally didn’t draw on my touchscreen Chromebook in 60 seconds (sadly it took closer to 5 minutes) you start to visually see the question I started with:

Where do you draw the line and stop giving someone more information?

There are four things that are worthy of exploring as we think on that question.

1. Humans vs Non-Humans

The first is that, generally speaking, humans are better at giving information to other humans than non-humans are (like websites).

This may change one day thanks to AI, but a website simply can’t understand and adapt to a humans individual needs like a good salesperson can. But salespeople are expensive, they can’t interact with every single person in the market individually. There has to be a balance which, to my point above, is another way to say you have to draw a line.

2. Self Service vs Lead Gen

Which leads to a key point: because some smaller SaaS platforms are more self service. They don’t rely on a sales team to close deals, their audience has to make this decision all on their own.

For a simple product? Maybe just a few details will suffice. More complex? That could be a lot of info. For enterprise, however, you’re not selling the product you’re just selling the idea enough to get them to talk to a human. And that, in my experience, usually don’t take much info.

3. Slope Matters

But there’s another point that I think is interesting which is the perception of your audience about where they are on the curve.

For example, if you’ve just dropped three big differentiators then they likely feel that positive momentum. For all they know there could be another 3 of those ready to knock their socks off. If, however, you’re working through the plateau of parity? They can probably feel that too. If I’m going to ask some to act, I want to do it with as much momentum as possible.

4. So Does Maintenance

Marketing, however, doesn’t write (or update) itself. And smaller SaaS platforms are typically have smaller teams wearing a lot of hats.

Which means that every page on your website you build also has to be updated when that screenshot is out of date or you find a better way to say things or that testimonial can’t be used because the client left or…you get the idea. Every hour you spend updating some page that 12 people saw last year is an hour you’re not doing something more impactful.

I Err on the Side of Less

When I’m writing copy for the smaller SaaS products I’ve marketed, I’ve found that brevity is my friend:

• It’s easier to create so I can focus all my storytelling powers on the differentiators
• It’s easier to maintain, which means I have time for other efforts
• It keeps the prospect on the upslope so they feel momentum around my story
• It saves parity and detractors for a human who can better handle their nuance
• It aligns with the short attention spans we find in virtually every modern audience

It’s always tempting to keep telling the story, to add one more feature, to go further up the curve, to really try to drive that point home or nail them with that clever line you love…

…but…

…at least for me, when in doubt? I say less.

For example, I have an incredible network as a result of SlopeFillers. Which means that a good chunk of folks think of me as a resort marketing guy. Many others know me for my competitor email tracking side hustle, SendView, so they think of me as an email marketing guy.

But the thing I do with 95% of my time? The thing I’m strongest in? It’s not resort marketing and it’s not email marketing.

It’s software marketing.

More specifically, software marketing for smaller, niche, B2B platforms.

And this isn’t new. My first marketing job nearly 20 years ago was with TimeClick (a tiny time clock software in Utah). SlopeFillers was a blog about resort marketing but it opened the door for me to join Ryan Solutions (resort CRM software with, at the time, 10 employees). Eight years ago I began leading marketing for Inntopia (resort ecommerce software), I’ve built and grown SendView (competitor email tracking software), I’m now responsible for AthleteReg (race management software)…the list goes on.

Yet, if asked, how many of my peers would describe me the same way I describe myself?

Honestly, I don’t know if any would.

I’ve thought about this mismatch a lot the last couple of years, but in 2026 I’m doing something about it. And I’m going to use the same tool that has helped me over and over again through my life: writing.

I have a database of 500+ smaller SaaS companies I’m eager to learn from, lots of campaigns from my own career to analyze, and plenty of other experiences in this world of niche, B2B SaaS to process as part of a new category on my personal blog I’m calling “Smaller SaaS”.

When I first started writing this post I titled it, “A Career Identity Crisis”, but that’s really not what happened. Instead, for the first time in a long time I have clarity about my career identity. I’m not a resort marketer or email marketer, I’m a software marketer. A good software marketer. And now that I have the confidence to embrace it as not only my past and present, but my future as well?

Maybe, just maybe, I can turn that good into great.

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