B2B SaaS Founders Are Doing This Wrong | Joseph Lee

The company is you, you are the company, and you need to be yelling your vision and mission and why you matter across as many different platforms as possible. All of the times that I was nervous to share something, those posts are actually the ones that went viral and got the most engagement and support and even customers converting. Your conversion rate from a YouTube session to a free trial is 60%. Why do you think that that's working so well? I think a lot of it boils down to... My guest today is building one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in an era when SaaS is supposed to be dead. He's leaning into founder brand and zigging when others are zagging. Joseph Lee, welcome to Grown On. Thanks for having me, Caitlin. Yeah, of course. So SuperDemo offers interactive product demos. Are you guys bootstrapped or VC funded? We're a little bit of a hybrid. We did raise a small pre-seed round when we first started the company, but since then we haven't. you know, spent the money and we've grown in a pretty bootstrappy capital efficient way. Nice. And how fast are you guys growing? Yeah, I mean, I guess growing fast is all relative, right? So I think on average, we've grown by about 15x over the last three years, starting with small numbers, of course, but we're now into kind of our mid seven figures in ARR. And you guys have 150,000 users now. uh for this software yeah we're approaching uh actually a little past 200 000 now uh so we gotta update our collateral left and right but uh yeah 200 000 kind of operators marketers founders sales folks uh and about 3 000 uh paying organizations so i talked to ryan kuthers your head of growths before this and he told me to specifically ask you about the things that you guys did very early on to grow And he hinted at something even the week that you incorporated. And so it sounds like maybe there's a story in there. Yeah. Yeah. I think I've talked about this a little bit in terms of some of the tactics that we did when it comes to doing things that don't scale and making it really, really seamless and easy for people to say yes. Even nowadays with the proliferation of AI, I think people still make it too hard for people to say, hell yeah. There's a lot you can do in the early days to be gritty and make it easy. Did you want me to dive into the strategy? Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think specifically I want to hear like, what were some of those things that you guys started with? Yeah. Well, well, first of all, I think when you're small and scrappy, you need to be a megaphone, right? The company is you, you are the company and you need to be yelling. your vision and mission and why you matter across as many different platforms as possible and specifically when it came to doing things that don't scale we did the work for people right so what that meant in practice was i ended up signing up for hundreds of tools that i admired and loved and i wanted as my dream customers and i would sign up to every single product update and i would respond to their product update by creating them a super demo so i would sign up for their feature or their product i would read through their change log in their docs and i would essentially start with value or and say hey i loved your update i'm a big fan i use your product and customers are going to be able to adopt it a lot better and understand why this feature matters in their specific context if you let them actually click through and experience it instead of having to dig through screenshots or read text and so i would do that and most of the responses were pretty positive when i did get responses and at a minimum i got them to actually go in and try it out and duplicate the demo and then i would i would replicate this across you know indie hackers reddit different forums where i offered to create the product demo for the person so sign up there to sign up for their tool learn about why it mattered and yeah just taking the extra time to again make it a no-brainer yes i love the like scrappy things that early startups do to get their first like 100 or 200 customers like budget is really not a barrier it's like how creative can you get with things how are you figuring out who to send the emails to or like how are you actually reaching out to people and what was what was the response rates on some of those early days i mean the response rates weren't you know uh meteoric or super high by any means but it was definitely much much better than cold emails because again you're not asking for something you're you're adding value you're giving something and letting them run with it if they want to so yeah I think in terms of who to target I kept it very simple I just figured that hey if I respond to the actual email it's gonna get routed to say a group marketing email and be seen by three four five six people in that function i didn't over complicate things by trying to have enrichment be perfect or strictly go after the people that were in charge of documentation um and from there i just kind of doubled down on the type of messaging type of demos or even the type of icp that was a little bit more conducive through time i found out hey larger companies like air table or notion are less susceptible to respond but you know companies that are say in the sweet spot of 20 staff members or 50 staff members that have a little bit more budget but are still scrappy and reading every single update uh those are the ones that we had a lot more successful that's great were there any other kind of interesting non-scalable things that you guys did early on to help seed growth? I think the biggest thing and that calculus and formula is changing obviously with AI but for us we did a lot of programmatic things where our tactic was super demo has to be experienced and felt by the person for them to really understand what we do and how we can be helpful and for them to envision. their own use cases we can talk about it all we want but our marketing lingo is never going to carry the weight of them trying the product so um we did a lot of programmatic seo and free tools and different strategies to try to get our product front and center so on the top of funnel that meant doing things like demo.seo where we would target really popular keywords or search terms for adjacent tools like Figma or Canva, where people are already looking up how to do X, how to do Y, we would create essentially SEO pages with the super demo embedded right at the top and optimize it so people land, try our product, and assume that, hey, not everyone's qualified, but maybe 2% or 5% or 10% of people trying this out by clicking through it and experiencing it and not having to read about how to do it, they would envision their own. use cases we then extrapolated that for jobs to be done for adjacent free tools like screenshot editors video makers interactive presentation makers things again people were looking for and letting our product be be accessible for them without having to sign up where they could get their job done and access our product try things out and eventually you know 10 15 of them would ask hey what is this super devil thing that's letting me create presentations and videos and screenshots uh what else could i do and then they would sign up and again we'd make it easy for them to sign up and try out the product wow and how logistically was your team putting that together is kind of question one and then question two is all marketers are talking about how seo is dead you know organic has gone off the cliff now aeo is the big space to play in does that strategy still work like are you guys still driving organic yeah we're not doing as much of that today uh but we are still doubling down on valuable content so um i think the strategy for seo and ao is actually the same you want to niche down be very specific and and create valuable content that gets the viewer to the destination they want to get to so you're right in the sense that um top of funnel SEO tactics are not as effective anymore, but a lot of the motions that we were running, more so in the middle of funnel and bottom of funnel, I think those very much are still valuable for both AEO and SEO. Things like comparison pages, specific tactical pages, pricing pages, et cetera, et cetera. You've mentioned a couple of times now about kind of like reducing friction. to make it as easy as possible for people to experience your product to try the product when i was researching for the podcast i saw that you've kind of taken a lot of the core features and functionality and you've broken them into almost free tools that you can use within the site and you don't need to put a credit card in there to do it you've really removed a lot of that friction what was the kind of what's the strategy behind that how is that working And it looks like you guys are one of the only kind of companies in the space that have made it so easy and accessible kind of compared to your competitors. So I'm just kind of curious to hear more about how that strategy has played out for you. Yeah, I think free tool strategy has always been kind of a tried and true framework. I think companies like Canva, companies like Ahrefs have done a really good job. So I can't sit here and say I invented the category. I very much piggybacked off. the backs of people that have kind of paved the path. But the notion was really this. If we're thinking about our ICP, people in product marketing, people in design, people in product, people who are founding companies, what are they doing beyond creating interactive product demos? And how do we latch onto those jobs to be done and help them fulfill those needs in an elegant, easy, fast way? uh to the point where you know we can get them to come back over and over again and eventually cross sell them other jobs to be done and other tools and eventually our actual product getting them to sign up and start investigating what else super demo could do so just like you mentioned uh caitlin i think it starts with if a instructional designer needs to take screenshots in addition to interactive demos we want them to be landing on our free screenshot editor through like a Google search or AEO search and essentially be able to create interactive screenshots with nice backgrounds and easy annotations, easy blurring. They can create links and make cropping all without having to actually sign up for the tool and make that become kind of a part of their habitual daily driver. And eventually we can do things like showing banner, showing tool tips. retargeting to actually get them to try out the product or naturally they're gonna start using the free tool and ask them to ask themselves hey what is this demo tool it's added a lot of value I haven't had to put in a credit card or even enter in my email information maybe I should check it out I was gonna ask if you're requiring an email or not for the signup we're not so you can literally just go to the website try the tools like there's zero there's literally zero friction so i imagine then remarketing or retargeting campaigns would be a big component then of like bringing people back after they've tried something a little bit it hasn't been as much and that's purely just due to capacity we have a pretty small team of uh like 15 people so we kind of pick our battles where uh we can and uh retargeting is frankly something that we haven't focused on as much perhaps it should be hey if it's working it's you know it's working you're right you're like there's only so many hours in the day right yeah let's talk a little bit about product-led growth strategy versus sales-led growth strategy and kind of how you guys decided what the right path was and maybe how companies strategically should think about what's right for them yeah i think a lot of it depends on the market in the industry that you're going after right there are market dynamics that are set in stone if you have more of an enterprise play or you have traditional buyers that are accustomed to a traditional buying process you are going to have to be sales led or if your sales cycle is just long then you're going to have to deploy more of a sales team and traditional sales method to get the flywheel running. For us, we've always been very fixated on growing the business in a very capital efficient bootstrap mindset type of way. And for that, the only way that it could work was leaning on the product and letting it create that viral flywheel. Not to say I wasn't involved in every single product demo and doing outreach. But for us to grow in the type of market that we're in, I think people don't want to talk to salespeople before they get to take a look at the product and qualify themselves. They want to be able to poke around and explore and do their own due diligence. And so for that, we have to be product-led. Yeah, that makes sense. It seems like if you're leaning into a product-led growth strategy, then the play really is distribution. it is right like you really need a lot of top of funnel to make that work you need a lot of people showing up on the website testing out the product and then some percentage of that is going to convert down into uh you know a paying customer so let's let's dig i think this is a good segue to kind of dig in on the marketing side because you guys are doing a lot of cool things so on the one hand uh you're leaning into founder brand you guys have you mentioned team of 15 two youtube channels one is specifically kind of you and your story and the founder brand thing one is more of like a company page Walk me through the exact steps you guys are taking to create videos. What does that look like? Put me in the room with you. It takes a lot of strategy and planning. And really, if we go back to the core reason behind why we decided to do YouTube in the first place, it's easy to make content now. Everyone's making content to the point where you see AI slop left, center, and right. And we wanted to be a little bit more diligent about asking ourselves, what are the channels and areas that have a little bit more friction and require a little bit more thought and care. Our competition is just simply not willing to invest in because it's not easy to sit there and record a YouTube video and edit that and send it out and distribute it. So we want it to be thoughtful and kind of buck the trend and not be a follower, but a leader in that side of the content business. um and the second piece was defensibility nowadays a lot of it is about brand eminence and storytelling and there's no better way to tell the story than putting your face front and center and telling the why behind the tactics you're running the playbooks you're running the failures you've had the lessons you've learned and for that it comes off a lot more genuine and is it is more genuine if the founder is telling that story on you know their own channel uh and not being overly promotional and sending a mixed message having some videos be about features and the specific ways that the company could help rather than you know the founder being just raw with uh building in public and sharing their lessons so i think the intent of the video uh is different enough and we wanted that brand to be uh kind of separated enough for it to warrant having two different channels and yeah we try to record uh every week pretty much an episode or two um and right now we're very much early in our in our in our journey so we keep it pretty raw it's you know pretty much like zero production budget where we're filming ourselves um trying to do a lot of the editing ourselves we do work with an agency that helps with some of the editing as well but really the ideas um the the scripting the content a lot of that is still coming from us as a team I think a lot of people struggle to be real about the failures. And I watched one of your videos where, you know, you were talked about building your last company, going through tech stars, raising, you know, millions of dollars and then COVID hit and the whole thing imploded on you and kind of like what that journey was like. You know, I think a lot of people though, it's hard to be really honest about the bad things that are happening to them in the journey. yeah and when you don't you just don't come off human right um and it's funny all of the times that i was nervous to to share something the mistakes that i made the failures that i've had i think uh whether it's on youtube or on linkedin um those posts are actually the ones that went viral um and got the most engagement and support and even customers converting um and wanting to chat because they had kind of heard about it and empathize with a lot of things that we had also gone through versus the one that i'm you know more so posturing or talking about success or talking about different outcomes that we were able to achieve so um everyone's got a story to tell right you don't have to be elon or you know jeff bezos stories aren't limited to just them we all can tell stories that are valuable to some segment of the audience right I have had those posts that like, you know, those like, oh, should I do it? Should I do it? Okay, I'm going to post it. Let's do it. You know, and you're right. Those are the ones that people really respond to. It's almost like you got to look for that signal a little bit inside yourself. Talk to me a little bit about LinkedIn and the founder brand there and how that's, you know, that's how that's helping you guys grow. It's table stakes now, right? It's no longer a nice to have. Again. When a company can launch a copycat variation of your product over a weekend, really what matters is when somebody thinks of a category or a service, are you one of the three, the five names that show up? And most buyers, especially sophisticated buyers that don't want to deal with the whiplash of switching tools every single week or thinking about a brand new tool every week, they're going to be thinking about who has eminence over that domain who has category ownership over that industry or domain can probably pick one from from the list of three to five so how you get there is how do you storytell the right way and how are you present not just as a company but as a founder as a spokesperson in all of the channels that matter for your business right and for us especially being in b2b software linkedin is kind of a table stick so you need to have a brand and you need to spend the time to to shape and tell your narrative and it's been pretty helpful it's hard to you know boil it down to exact metrics of how it moves the dial forward i do know people have heard about super demo and have signed up but i think it really helps achieve that one key question i asked myself which is when somebody hears super demo as a name i want them to have a level of familiarity with the name and the brand and what we're all about because they've just seen it plastered and heard about it through the podcast through the linkedin channel through youtube um and if youtube is a one of the main net contributors to that then that's a win i feel like we're in such an interesting time period right now where if you look back maybe five or even ten years ago the big moats that VCs were funding were technology moats, right? It's like, how can you have the best features? And now with AI, it's almost completely erased that. We went from tech moats that could last you years to feature moats that maybe last a couple of weeks because it's so easy to duplicate and replicate what other companies are doing. So what advantages can companies create now that are durable and long-lasting well i think we touched on one which is uh brand and and eminence and and how penetrated you are into all the different channels that matter um i think that's one um the second one i think everyone's been talking about is distribution are you building a product that has an organic flywheel effect to it so for us it's all about doubling down on how do we make it how do we make product demos elegant product demos exceptionally easy to create but also to share and when they are sharing it how do we put in the right mechanisms so that the people viewing and interacting with a product demo that they've seen online are signing up themselves and and it's creating kind of that viral flywheel so distribution ethic is increasingly a bigger and bigger mode because you can build the perfect product but going from zero to 200,000, 300,000 users is frankly even harder than it was pre-AI because you have more noise, more fatigue, more information than ever before. And really, I would say the third and most important part that I think most people in software forget is how hard change management is to overcome. For us, it's all about you build the sensibility by integrating your product into habitual workflows and getting into not just one person's workflow, but into dozens, if not hundreds of seats within an organization. Because if they're investing in the change management required to train onboard and become power users of your product or your tool, there's a real cost for them to evaluate another tool and switch off of it. Now you have to do training. Now you have to get people onboarded. Now you have to ensure that they are going to become power users and utilize the product the right way. Then you now amplify that not just across one person, but 100 people, 200 people, 500 people in an organization. Or maybe they need to just even change the way they do sales follow-ups or email outreach, the way they do product announcements. There's a real cost to that that can't be displayed simply by having new tech. And we feel that ourselves, right? I'm on X often and I use it as a proxy to figure out like a pulse of what's going on. And there's so many tools that I want to use and they all seem revolutionary, like they're changing the landscape every single week, but I just don't have the time or the budget or the resources to just rip out what I just became an expert in a week ago or two weeks ago and just try that tool. And for an enterprise, that's even harder. Yeah, absolutely. this segues into the next topic when i was prepping for this episode i talked to a couple of your employees and they said that nearly everyone is shipping code there's actually a little bit of friction now that's existing internally where some of the engineers are having to review so many more prs or there's more bugs or things than there were before What's the right balance here? Because I imagine you guys are not alone in this. Every company is going through some version of this friction right now. Yeah, I think just because you can doesn't mean you should, right? You can build a million different things, but that's actually going to dilute your brand, your image, and the usefulness of your product. So the way I think about it is, yes, you want to empower. uh internal staff to be able to make changes and do things they couldn't do before like building dashboards and building automations but um i still do think that uh with the core product itself you need to have a gatekeeper gatekeeper has to have a really high standard for taste essentially it's like a tastemaker that acts as a steve or a filter obviously they should listen to all requests and review different recommendations that are coming both from customers and from staff but someone ultimately needs to set a standard for what should exist and what shouldn't exist and align that with the problem and the mission and the vision of where you want to take the company because if you don't you suddenly have this frankenstein product that solves nothing for anyone right you can't just try to do anything and everything all at once um so for us we try to draw the line of hey if it's like customer facing it needs to go through a filter but if it's internal and it's something that's going to enable your line of work go get it and do what you need to do yeah and are you the gatekeeper on this like are you the tastemaker so to speak a little bit yeah it's i'd say it's myself and my co-founder i'm definitely the bad cop uh i usually am the one that says no you need to have some people be the good cop and be a little bit more supportive but i would say in general it's uh it has to be the founders right because they're the most aligned when it comes to where you want to run to yeah makes sense what tips do you have to gain your first 100 subscribers on youtube oh man um and i i'm taking notes because i think we're at 62 right now okay so i'm over here ready to scribble it down for me it really boils down to um what i try to focus on is is being tactical obviously like understand the initial niche you want to sell to and for me it was like operators and and founders and be very specific about the narrative and the tactics that you're sharing i think there's too much content that is you know folks speaking in platitudes and over generalizations and guru advice right as they say I think the more tactical and more specific you can be where you make it easy for people to just like copy and paste playbooks and lessons and learnings directly into their own environment I think that's gonna be the best way to attract your first 100 subscribers so just creating valuable content that is very very specific to your niche so i saw a linkedin post that one of your employees posted that said your conversion rate from a youtube session to a free trial is 60 which is a pretty wild number why do you think that that's working so well yeah you might have to ask him but i think uh i think a lot of it is uh boils down to what i just said i think We try to be as tactical and strategic about learnings within the video as possible so that it encourages them to go in and explore and try out those tactics within our own platform. And we somewhat demystify the perceived workload of doing something. I think a lot of people, they perceive something is going to be hard or difficult or time consuming. And that's probably... one of the biggest reasons they don't do it. And so we try to demystify and reduce that perceived friction of doing something. And I think once we are able to do that, signing up for the platform and trying out whatever we're talking about, it becomes more of a formality than something that we need to sell them on. Is SaaS dead or is this mostly AI hype? I think some SaaS companies are going to be dead, but I think... A lot of SaaS companies are also very durable and flexible to change, and as long as I think you build the right team that iterates quickly, has a good pulse check on the ICP that you're serving, and is flexible to changes and reinventing themselves, I think SaaS is going to continue to thrive. If you had asked me two years ago, would I be worried about Figma? I would have said, hell no, what are you talking about? yeah no it's tough um and you see that with lovable too right and i think lovable had this hockey stick growth but now uh they're facing existential threats i think cursor uh had hockey stick growth but now they're uh trying to figure out what is the future of like programming and ides when people are just doing natural language prompting right to get to what they need but uh the value i think a lot of these companies brought forth a lot of them i honestly were were concentrated in the team right their ability to execute so you just need to reinvent yourself uh that's always been the case right companies have come and gone and new advancements have happened obviously not at the the rate it's happened uh in the last six eight twelve months and it's only going to get faster but um you know your industry and your icp and your customers better than anyone else you know what their needs are you just need to be willing and able to like Get rid of the golden handcuffs or the shackles and reinvent your company. And yeah, just rebuild. How important is brand in 2026? I think it's the most important part of building a durable software company. Going back to my earlier point, I think defensibility of software, it's not rooted in features anymore. It's not rooted necessarily on how fast you can move either or ship things. it's uh again based on when somebody's thinking about a category right photography or in design or uh in demos what are what are the core leaders or the three to five names that show up and that gets built up over time with brand you can't just build a brand overnight and that's what makes you defensible that's something that comes with years of executing treating customers right you know, shipping consistently, having a good taste of what should and shouldn't exist. And again, a startup coming out, out of YC, raising a lot of money and shipping a hundred different products, they're not going to shortcut their way to brand. I completely agree. I mean, I think the value of brand is you cannot, you can rip off and duplicate features. You cannot rip off and duplicate brand. Yeah. you can't you can't rip off and duplicate community or how people feel about you as a company those are real durable advantages that that companies can eke out for themselves yeah well joseph i really appreciate you taking the time this was a great conversation and i'm excited to follow you guys along and you know we'll be rooting for you over on the sidelines how can people find you if they want to connect Yeah, you can connect with me on YouTube, my founder channel, which is Superdemo Joe, or you can add me on LinkedIn. My name is Joseph Lee. There's a lot of Joseph Lees out there, but if you look up Joseph Lee, Superdemo, hopefully I'm one of the top names at show.

In this episode, Joseph Lee breaks down the SaaS marketing and product-led growth strategies that helped Superdemo grow to 200,000+ users with a lean team and almost no traditional sales motion. 

Host Caitlin O. Bigelow and Joseph dive into modern B2B marketing, founder-led content, LinkedIn growth, YouTube marketing, and the distribution strategies driving SaaS growth in the AI era. 

From programmatic SEO and lead generation to creator-led branding and content marketing, this episode is packed with practical lessons for founders, marketers, and anyone building a modern B2B SaaS company.


Whether you're a founder, marketer, creator, or operator, this episode will change the way you think about growth, content, and building a defensible business in 2026.

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WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

* Joseph’s early-stage growth tactics that helped Superdemo land its first users
* Why founder-led content and personal brand are becoming essential for SaaS growth
* How Superdemo uses YouTube and free tools as a product-led acquisition engine
* Why brand, distribution, and change management are the new moats in software

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TIMESTAMPS

[00:00] — Why vulnerability and honesty create the strongest engagement
[00:46] — Joseph Lee’s background and building Superdemo
[02:06] — The scrappy customer acquisition tactics that worked early on
[05:58] — Programmatic SEO and experiential product marketing
[08:06] — Is SEO dead in the AI era?
[09:18] — The strategy behind Superdemo’s free tools and zero-friction onboarding
[12:15] — Product-led growth vs sales-led growth
[14:08] — Building a founder-led YouTube strategy
[17:05] — Why sharing failures builds stronger audience connection
[18:25] — LinkedIn, founder brand, and category ownership
[20:13] — What makes SaaS companies defensible in 2026
[23:36] — AI, shipping culture, and maintaining product quality
[26:02] — Joseph’s advice for getting your first 100 YouTube subscribers
[27:12] — Why Superdemo’s YouTube audience converts so well
[28:23] — Is SaaS actually dead?
[30:01] — Why brand is the strongest moat in modern software
[31:31] — Wrap-up and where to connect with Joseph Lee

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LINKS AND RESOURCES

Joseph Lee on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhylee/ 
Caitlin Bigelow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitlinbigelow

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ABOUT GROWN ON PODCAST

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Topics covered: SaaS marketing, founder brand, entrepreneurship, product-led growth, B2B marketing, LinkedIn growth, YouTube marketing, distribution strategy, demand generation, startup growth, content marketing, brand marketing, creator economy, AI and SaaS, digital marketing.