The Growth Syndicate

About Reveall
Reveall was founded in Amsterdam in 2021 as a customer insights platform helping product teams make customer feedback and research more actionable. 

Shortly after being founded in 2021, Reveall raised a pre-seed round of €1.5 million. The company became a notable European brand for the rapidly growing product discovery trend and served several top European companies including PostNL, Albert Heijn, Signify, WestLotto and WeTransfer. 

In 2023, Reveall was acquired by NEXT, one of Europe’s leading AI-powered enterprise product discovery solutions.

Goals and Context
Ferdinand co-founded Reveall after taking over and rebranding the user research platform, Sticktail. The idea was to leverage the rising tide of customer-led product decision making.

Not wanting to rely too heavily on the funding they had raised given the volatile landscape, the founding team wanted to build a leading brand in Europe and invest in scalable growth levers with increasing ROI.

Clement joined Reveall as interim Head of Growth in 2023 and led some of the company’s most important marketing initiatives leading up to the exit. 

Key Initiatives
Building an organic demand gen engine
Reveall was launched shortly before one of the most volatile periods that startups have ever faced. With fundraising conditions rapidly changing, it was important to rely on channels that did not require huge budgets or diminish in returns. 

To ensure a scalable growth engine, we focused on demand generation. Product discovery was a rapidly growing trend, but it was still relatively new to a lot of European product teams. Rather than tapping into existing intent, we aimed to position ourselves as thought-leaders to nurture intent and be top of mind for every customer-focused product team that matched our ICP.

Our demand-gen engine rested on 3 core approaches:

Driving organic traffic through SEO
Thought-leadership content
Leveraging “other people’s network”
For SEO, we decided to start early. We combined a “short-tail” approach where we went after high-intent, highly competitive keywords like “Customer Journey mapping” and “Product Discovery” with a “long-tail” approach, where we tried to sweep up lower-intent, more specialized keywords like “continuous discovery habits” or “how to use a KANO model”. 

For the short-tail strategy, we created comprehensive guides, placing importance on quality, originality and depth of content. At their peak, our guides generated over 15,000 monthly visitors after just a few months and minimal investment.

For the long-tail strategy, we created a “product glossary” that combined over 200 long-tail keywords. Many of these keywords had low search volumes but were highly relevant and not very competitive. The glossary allowed us to interlink content and entrench our content-relevance for the space.  

Alongside our SEO strategy we invested heavily into thought-leadership content. Product discovery was rapidly growing with the meteoric rise of experts like Teresa Torres, Melissa Perry and Marty Cagan. 

We crafted our entire brand proposition around the importance of customer insights and geared all of our content towards it.

We applied our core narrative in all of our own content. But as an early-stage company, we didn’t have time to just build our own audience from scratch. We wanted to tap into audiences that were already out there. 

That’s where our “other people’s network” approach comes in.

About Recruitee
Recruitee was founded in Amsterdam in 2015 and quickly became a disruptive force in the European HR tech landscape. Starting with a mid-market focus, Recruitee would go on to become the go-to applicant tracking system for mid-sized business and corporate enterprises alike.

Recruitee is a standout success story amongst European bootstrapped b2b SaaS companies, having been listed by Deloitte Fast50, SaaSMag and others as one of the fastest growing b2b SaaS companies in Europe.

In 2017, one of our partners, Ferdinand Goetzen, joined Recruitee as Head of Growth and quickly became the Chief Growth Officer, leading marketing and growth activities for the company.

Goals and Context

When Ferdinand joined Recruitee, the team consisted of just a dozen people. Though still in the early stages of their ARR growth, the company clearly had product-market fit and boasted some of the hottest startups in the Netherlands as their customers. 

The main goal at the time was to establish Recruitee as a leading player for medium-sized businesses, with ambitions to expand into new geographic locations and eventually move up-market.

Ferdinand’s goal was to build a predictable and scalable growth engine, hire teams for marketing & growth, and work closely with other departments to help the business reach its commercial targets. 

Key Initiatives

Building a scalable lead engine
We took a two-pronged approach to generating demand and leads at scale, running high-intent campaigns in parallel with awareness campaigns to create a ‘surround-sound’ effect for potential leads researching solutions in the market.

We leveraged paid channels like Google Ads and Gartner’s paid listings to quickly tap into existing intent in the market whilst relying on display advertising and LinkedIn ads to drive awareness and lift conversions.

In 2 years, we grew leads from paid ads 530% whilst keeping acquisition costs stable, with a fixed earnback period of 3 months.

Generating demand through a leading brand
Being in a competitive market with a handful of well-established players with deep pockets, we knew that we couldn’t just rely on paid channels. Building a strong brand and generating demand would be crucial for generating business in a scalable way. 

We sought to make the recruitment and HR tech space sexy and establish Recruitee as a rising star in the European SaaS ecosystem. The key to achieving this was creating thought leadership content and building a community around Recruitee. For this, we hired several content creators, including an in-house video and events team to ensure we could create the most engaging content in the market.

By combining SEO and thought-leadership content, we built ICP-specific content funnels aimed at educating the market and developing intent. Paired with online events, webinars, regular meetups and a major HR tech conference featuring some of the top professionals from across Europe (Talent Con 2019), we built a huge network and community of professionals around Recruitee. 

As a result of our brand efforts, we generated on average over 5,000 email subscribers every month and saw direct traffic (i.e. brand awareness) become our leading source for new qualified leads and opportunities.

Expanding into new markets

Positioning Recruitee as a market-leader in Europe was part of our high-level commercial strategy. Expanding into new geographic markets became key to achieving this.

As an internationally operating b2b SaaS company, we had natural traction across different countries. Based on traction with certain markets (and importance of localization), we tested and validated localized approaches and if successful, opted to localize fully, with all localization being managed centrally from Amsterdam. 
We hired a localization manager and built a team of freelancers who could translate and create content for different markets such as Germany and France. These two markets were particularly important as localization was key to competing with their local players.

A combination of localized paid ads, SEO, content and events (mostly trade shows) helped us expand into several new markets and established Germany and France as our 2 highest performing markets after the Benelux (our home turf).

Goals and Context
When Joliene joined Impraise, they had just raised their Series A and were looking into scaling their revenue and marketing efforts. 

The biggest challenge for Impraise was growing competition from the US and the fact that they were trying to serve several different ICPs who pulled the product into directions. Finding the right ICPs, defining the right channels, and optimizing the funnel quickly became the main priorities for the marketing team. 

Joliene’s goals included scaling into the US market, optimizing their existing marketing funnel, and creating a brand that could compete with much more established competitors.

Key Initiatives
Redefining our ICP’s to create focus
One of the first projects Joliene focused on was looking at the inbound funnel and customer-base. Impraise had a combination of both enterprise and SME customers, which led to very different and, often opposing, product requests.

This was also reflected on the website at the time. They were trying to talk to everybody, which created convoluted messaging that attracted a lot of different users that were impossible to serve. This was reflected in the funnel metrics at the time, with inbound conversion from MQL to SQL barely above the upper single digits.

As a first step, we decided to do research around what different personas we are serving and what specific target audience we should focus on. We looked at 3 criteria:

1. Size of the company
2. NPS of current customers (how well are we solving their problem) 
3. How easy it is to reach and convert this audience in a cost-effective way

While doing this research we found out that the biggest differentiator between the companies that used Impraise was the maturity of their organization and HR department (M1, M2, M3). This led us to identify 3 personas within our customer-base.

 

Funneling our website to focus on only busy betsy was key to driving our costs per lead down plus improving our other conversion metrics. By focusing all our marketing efforts we were able to cut our spend by ⅓ whilst more than tripling our MQL to SQL conversion rate.

SEO: the longtail game
The HR space is very crowded and there were many US competitors in the space with much bigger marketing budgets than Impraise, so we tried to focus our SEO efforts on longtail keywords, going after a higher volume of more niche keywords. 

After doing a keyword analysis we realized that most of the longtail keywords were focused on “how to’s”, for example, “how to set up a 1:1” or “how to encourage continuous feedback”. We decided to focus our SEO content on these types of search queries. 

This strategy proved very effective and Impraise was able to rank in the top 3 for relevant keywords around performance development:

As well as performance goals, which were even harder to rank for:

Within a year we increased our blog traffic from 70.000 visitors to 145.000 per month with 70% of all leads generated through this blog traffic.

Next to focusing on relevant keywords we also invested heavily in the mobile performance of our website. In 6 months we were able to improve our mobile Google rating from 27 to 84, which boosted SEO and helped increase our website conversions by over 50%.

About 3D Hubs
3D Hubs was founded in Amsterdam in 2013 and quickly became one of the biggest 3D printing platforms in the world. In 2018/2019 the company pivoted from a P2P platform focused only on 3D printing to a B2B proposition providing a range of manufacturing services to enterprise clients. 
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Shortly after the pivot, 3D Hubs raised a Series C of $18 million. Ferdinand and Clement were hired as part of a new leadership team that was hired to drive the new b2b proposition forward. 
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In 2021, 3D Hubs was acquired by Protolabs for $330 million, one of the most substantial exits in the Dutch tech landscape at the time.

Goals and Context
When Ferdinand and Clement joined 3D Hubs, there was strong validation on the pivot but a need to establish 3D Hubs as one of the leading players in the online manufacturing landscape. 

The biggest challenge was establishing trust in a new technology within a very niche and traditional industry. In addition to facing direct online manufacturing competitors like Protolabs, Xometry and Fictiv, 3D Hubs had to compete with more traditional factories and ‘mom & pop shops’. Building a team of marketing and growth experts who could operate with such a specific audience and market was a key challenge.

Ferdinand and Clement’s goals included expanding into new markets, driving a consistent flow of highly qualified leads for sales and building a powerful brand that would leave behind the company’s P2P 3D Printing legacy.

Key Initiatives
Creating a brand that inspires & builds trust
Looking at the manufacturing market, we saw a huge opportunity to differentiate on brand. Both the traditional and digital players seemed to have more conservative and corporate branding. 

We had the idea to emulate companies like Tesla and SpaceX and get engineers excited and inspired about the potential of their work. 3D Hubs shouldn’t be seen as just a manufacturing service, but as a way to make their innovations come to life. At the same time, we needed to balance “inspirational content” with “trust building” as what we offered was considered new, unusual and potentially risky to more conservative clients.

We coined “Empowering engineers to create beautiful products” as our core brand message and built our identity, messaging and content pillars around that.