SaaS Go-to-Market: Build a Community Before a Product

Three first-time founders set out to build an account-based marketing platform when most people didn't know what ABM was. Their SaaS go-to-market strategy was radical: build a B2B community first, product second. A single blog post led to a 300-person conference, which grew into a community-led growth movement of 10,000+ people.

This SaaS go-to-market approach created category creation SaaS results. LinkedIn, Marketo, Salesforce, and HubSpot all sponsored FlipMyFunnel conferences. The B2B community building gave Terminus multiple chances to succeed - when customers churned due to product gaps, the community brought them back once the product caught up.

Sangram Vajre is the co-founder and CMO of Terminus. Before founding Terminus, he led marketing at Pardot through its acquisition by Salesforce. His SaaS go-to-market insight: pursue problem-market fit before product-market fit by building a community around the problem first.

🔑 Key Lessons

• 🎯 SaaS go-to-market through B2B community building creates category leadership: Terminus didn't compete in an existing category - they created ABM through community events, a book, and education. Salesforce and LinkedIn sponsored their events.
• 🔄 Communities give your SaaS go-to-market multiple chances to succeed: When Terminus customers churned because the product lagged behind the vision, the community kept them engaged. Those same customers returned once the product caught up.
• 📉 Mismatched expectations hurt more than missing features: Terminus's community marketing set expectations higher than the product could deliver, causing painful early churn. Invest in product to match the demand your community creates.
• 🧠 Pursue problem-market fit before product-market fit: Sangram argues founders should go from problem to community to product, not problem to product directly. Community-led growth validates the problem and creates built-in demand.
• 🤝 Educate, don't pitch, at community events: Terminus never did product pitches from the keynote stage. By educating the market on ABM, they attracted buyers who came to the booth on their own.

Chapters

• Introduction
• What motivates Sangram - building something bigger than yourself
• What Terminus does and the ABM market
• How Pardot experience shaped the SaaS go-to-market playbook
• Writing a blog post that launched the FlipMyFunnel movement
• Organizing the first conference with 300 attendees
• Scaling to multi-city events and 1,500 attendees
• How community education drove SaaS go-to-market sales
• High early customer churn and mismatched expectations
• Product gaps vs. feature gaps and managing expectations
• Would they have done it any other way
• The book, the conference timeline, and category building
• Lessons from Salesforce and thinking 100x
• How the community conference evolved organically
• Closing deals through community events not sales pitches
• Funding journey and seed stage
• Problem-market fit vs. product-market fit
• Without a community you're building a commodity
• Lightning round

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/184
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email