How to grow your startup without a big marketing team
Growth advice for founders with Dani Grant, CEO of Jam
Growing a young startup is hard. Really hard.
It’s all well and good to hear strategies from unicorns, but if you’re an early-stage founder, those lessons can feel…well, not very applicable.
That’s why I wanted to talk about founder-led growth with Dani Grant, CEO and co-founder of Jam, a bug reporting tool used by 80K+.
I came across Dani’s work when the LinkedIn algorithm served me up her writing — I loved her approach to building in public as she shared about what she learned about scaling her company.
If you’re seeking product-market fit without a big marketing or sales team, read on. We cover:
How to decide whether to launch or keep iterating
The growth tactics & programs resonating with developers
Concrete practices that keep Jam’s team close to their users
How to prioritize target audiences when your product spans functions
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A lot of our readers are early-stage founders without a big marketing team. So to start, what’s Jam’s current growth strategy?
Jam is PLG, product-led growth. Because we’re a collaborative product, the more you use the product, the more you spread it. I love how that incentive aligns us with our users.
The biggest bang for the buck we’ve gotten with marketing is actually just making the product better. The better the product, the more people engage with it.
For PLG, the best distribution channel is simply the product itself and word of mouth.
Often a founder comes to me for help with marketing, and then when we dig in, we realize they haven’t actually reached product market fit.
Yes. I thought the hard part of growth would be from 10-10,000 users. Actually the hard part was going from 0-10, and the rest of our growth was from PLG.
But it’s hard to see this in the beginning. If you double in 3 months from 10-20 users, it doesn’t feel like you’re growing fast, but when you double from 5000-10 000, you really notice it.
In those early days, there’s a lot of “trusting the process” that has to happen, and that can be hard as a founder.
Was there a moment you realized you had product market fit?
The best advice I got was from the founder of Grain, Mike Adams. He said, “There was a point when all we thought about was product market fit, and at some point we realized we hadn’t thought about it in a while. Somewhere in that time, we had reached product market fit.”
This was true for us. There was a time when my phone autocorrected “OMG” to “PMF.” It was all I could think about. And at some point we were on to different problems.
More concretely, retention and PMF basically map 1:1. If people are sticking with your product, then it works for them. So this was all we tracked.
We put all our Alpha customers into a spreadsheet, and every week we would color in green if they used the product. We just cared about these streaks [of retention].
How did you know it was time to invest in growth and marketing?
If I’m being honest, we got it wrong the first time. We tried to invest in Growth too early.
The painful lesson learned there is that you have to build a company in order. You can’t grow something unless you have PMF, and you can’t skip a step.
The first time we tried to “do marketing” it was a false start. I didn’t quite appreciate that every product gets one shot at a first impression.
Like, the first time I used Apple Maps, it wasn’t as good as Google Maps, and I haven’t touched it again in 15 years.
We squandered a lot of first impressions when we tried to grow too early, and I wish that we had been more patient with ourselves.
You said it took 7 failed launches to get to one that worked. Tell me about that journey.
My founder and I met as PMs at Cloudflare, so we’d never worked on a product that didn’t have PMF before.
When we started Jam, we did a bunch of user interviews, built a product, and then launched it on Product Hunt.
And what we expected to happen was that people would just use it and then we’d grow it forever. Tons of people signed up that day, and nobody used it again.
We just kept launching and launching. The advice we were following was “launch early and launch often; if you’re not embarrassed by your first product then you’ve launched too late.”
But I think this advice doesn’t age to the modern era of startups, and it’s actually bad advice. It didn’t work.
The thing that did work was that we said, okay – we’re not letting anyone external use this product until we would miss it internally when it’s gone.
We did a bunch of iteration and internal dogfooding. We just wanted five happy weekly active users. Then we tried to get to ten. Then twenty.
We kept things super quiet for a really really long time. And that focus mode gave us a lot more clarity about the product than any of our public launches.
We learned this the hard way: be quiet, stay focused, ship high quality.
How much do you think about marketing today?
In some ways I think about marketing all of the time, and in other ways I think about it none of the time.
We now have two people at Jam who are actually doing marketing. We have someone who does all the content and community, and we also have an incredible creator who is sharing stuff happening inside the company externally.
That’s part of building for developers – saying “We’re both builders, and we want to show you how we are building for you.”
Often, because growth is so product- & community-driven, we think about marketing indirectly.
I spend a lot of time thinking about product, and I spend a lot of time connecting with our users, and often those things are the same [as marketing].
Every startup wants to know what tactics and programs they should invest in. What has worked well for you so far?
In the beginning we decided to just experiment and see what stuck.
Every user who signs up for Jam gets an email from my co-founder saying, “Do you need any help getting started? P.S - How did you hear about Jam?”
We started manually counting responses, and we realized two things from adding that question:
One is, our users are super chatty! They want to talk about products, their process, what communities they are involved in, and all of the things.
And secondly, our growth is mostly word of mouth. And so we thought, should we bring our users together and create space for that?
Our first event in New York was engineers telling stories off-the-record stories of when they broke production. We’d stolen the idea from one of Segment’s events, which I’d loved.
It was so amazing to meet our users; they would bring friends, and those friends would become users. Community events became a core marketing strategy.
What other strategies have really worked for you?
I love the “build in public” people. I follow them on Twitter. I loved the podcast “Startup” by Gimlet. So because we’re building for other builders, we thought we’d share what we’re learning building Jam. That’s been the type of content that has worked best.
What surprising lessons about growth have you learned?
When you’re in PLG you hear a lot about product loops. I thought product loops would be, like, a really deep science.
So we added a couple basic [loops].
For example, when you view a Jam for the first time, we say “Sign up here.” Really basic. This actually drives a lot of signups!
Which is great, but it wasn’t as complex of a science as I’d thought. In reality most of the growth is word of mouth – more than half of our signups.
For developer products especially, time spent on product is basically time spent on marketing. Nothing replaces a product that’s working.
How do you make sure everyone is staying close to Jam’s users?
We have a lot of internal systems to make sure we stay close to our users as the user base grows:
Every new user gets an email from our cofounder, and it’s really him that replies. They get into deep conversations.
Every single week, I reach out to the top 100 users from the week before, asking for feedback.
The most interesting answers from those two touchpoints get put into a Slack channel called #users-say-the-darnest-things. There’s a full team discussion in a thread for each one. In that way, user feedback becomes real action items in the product.
My cofounder and I will often get on a call with the user if we’re interested to hear more [about their feedback]. We’ll record those calls on Grain, clip them up, and listen to the clips as a company during Standup and we all discuss them. We’re trying to get everyone to hear directly from the user.
Jam has notably strong product marketing. What does your messaging process look like?
The way we think about product marketing is what we build is the message. Every time we announce something, we are telling users that we’re focused on solving this thing for you.
An example is that last summer we did a three month “summer of devtools” sprint where the only thing we were focused on was making the debugging experience a lot faster.
Every single week there was a drumbeat of “devtools, devtools, devtools.” We just kept saying, “It’s the summer of devtools, and this week we’re shipping [blank].” The product really is the message.
Tone really matters, especially when speaking to developers. We want the product to speak for itself. You want to show, don’t tell. We try to make things visual and we take out any fluff words.
I first came across Jam from your personal writing on LinkedIn – you were capturing what it’s like to be a founder and what you are learning along the way. How much of your writing is a conscious growth play for Jam?
By my nature, I am very shy on the internet. I felt very happy tweeting from Jam’s account, but I was not doing anything from my own.
I started doing this [personal writing] in 2023, when my cofounder and I had the hypothesis that founder-led sales is happening passively online first.
Before you’re even having a conversation, you’re already passively selling them on the strategy, mission, brand, product. To do that, you have to be on the internet and write.
I was really nervous, but users started to respond on LinkedIn and Twitter. So much positive has come out of it that I’m so happy we made the leap.
At this point I have help, which is really nice. As we’re learning things, I’ll send [my thoughts] to a writer who I work with.
I’ll write draft one which will have too many words, be too winding, and not get to the point – then he will go in and edit and make it nice. That way we’re able to keep sharing what we’re learning but I’m not spending four hours per day writing.
How did you calibrate this person to make sure it actually feels like you and not a ghost writer?
The key is that he’s not a ghost writer – I’m still writing, but he is editing. That way I spend 20 minutes writing and he spends another hour editing.
It should still be you, your thoughts and your words, but let someone else figure out how to make it polished and concise.
Your product serves many functions – developers, PMs, etc. How do you think through the priority of Jam’s target audiences when you’ve got a product that is used across many roles?
This is, honestly, very tough. We try to speak to both audiences. Ultimately, Product Managers use Jam to speak to developers, but often times we see that the developer asks the PM to use Jam because it makes their lives easier.
We bifurcate our Marketing efforts and then try to be clear about who we are talking to. For example, at our community events, we’ll have AI Nights where we bring together Product people and engineers.
Then we’ll do Tech Talks to bring together just engineers.
We’re very clear who each event is for, and that way we speak to each audiences’ needs.
Any hot takes on startup growth?
There is a trope that says, “first-time founders focus on product and second-time founders focus on distribution. The products with the best distribution win.”
There is an element of truth to that. But I think we underestimate in our industry the power of great products.
Right now, Chrome has more market share on Mac than Safari.
Safari has incredible distribution – it is installed on 100% of Macs and you have to go out of your way to get Chrome, and yet Chrome is leading.
You see these startups that are really crushing taking on the Goliaths by focusing on product. Like Partiful taking on Facebook events. Arc, of course. Linear versus Atlassian.
It’s the power of a good product.
Thanks for reading. If you haven’t already, subscribe to get our next interview directly to your inbox.
Dani is the co-founder and CEO of Jam – helping 80,000+ fix bugs faster. Previously, she was a VC at Union Square Ventures and a Product Manager at Cloudflare. Follow her on Twitter.