# SaaS marketing foundations course > Four lessons covering how SaaS marketing works, choosing a motion, building an ICP and message, and planning channels and budget, with worksheets included. Source: https://saas-marketing.net/courses/saas-marketing-foundations/ Topic: SaaS Marketing Type: course-index Published: 2026-09-11 Last updated: 2026-09-11 Publisher: SaaS Marketing (saas-marketing.net) License: CC BY 4.0. Quote or republish with attribution and a link to https://saas-marketing.net/courses/saas-marketing-foundations/ ## Short answer This is a free four lesson email course for founders and first marketing hires at B2B SaaS companies. Each lesson takes 40 to 60 minutes and ends with a completed document rather than a feeling of progress. By the end you will have a written ICP, a documented go to market motion decision, a message hierarchy, and a channel and budget plan sized against your own CAC payback. ## Key takeaways - Four lessons, 40 to 60 minutes each, delivered by email and readable in full on this site with no signup wall. - Every lesson ends in a finished artefact: an ICP document, a motion decision, a message hierarchy, a budget plan. - The course is aimed at pre-Series B companies between roughly 200,000 and 10 million dollars of ARR. - Experienced SaaS marketers should skip it and go straight to the cluster playbooks, which assume the foundations. - The channel and budget lesson sizes spend against your own CAC payback rather than a blanket percentage of ARR. --- Most marketing courses are entertainment with a certificate attached. You finish four hours of video, feel informed, and produce nothing your CEO can read. This one is built the other way round: every lesson ends with a document, and if the document is not finished the lesson is not finished. ## Who this is for, and who should skip it This course is for founders running marketing themselves, first marketing hires, and people arriving in SaaS from agency work or from selling a product that gets bought once. The assumed company is somewhere between 200,000 and 10 million dollars in ARR, with real customers and no written plan. Skip it if you have run a SaaS marketing function before. You will find the four lessons obvious and the worksheets slow. Go straight to the [SaaS marketing](/saas-marketing/) hub and pick the playbook matching your contract value band. Also skip it if your problem is a single channel rather than the whole function. Somebody who already knows their ICP and just needs search traffic should take the [SaaS SEO Sprint](/courses/saas-seo-sprint/) instead. Somebody whose positioning is the actual problem should take the [SaaS Positioning Sprint](/courses/saas-positioning-sprint/), which goes far deeper on category and differentiation than lesson three does here. Lessons two and four need your average contract value, your gross margin and a rough monthly churn figure. Get them before you start. Guessing at these produces a budget plan that looks finished and is wrong by a factor of two. ## The four artefacts you finish with The point of the course is the output, so here is the output stated plainly before the curriculum. ## Lesson 1: how SaaS marketing works [Lesson one](/courses/saas-marketing-foundations/01-how-saas-marketing-works/) covers the structural difference between selling a subscription and selling anything else: revenue recognised over time, the product as a distribution channel, and churn as a negative growth loop. You map your own funnel, then extend it into the bowtie stages after the sale, and mark which of the post-sale stages currently has an owner. Most people find the same thing at this point. The left half of the map has four owners and the right half has none. That gap is usually worth more than any campaign on the roadmap. ## Lesson 2: choosing your go to market motion Lesson two runs the motion decision against your contract value. Under 5,000 dollars ACV, self serve is the only motion with survivable economics. Above 100,000, no free trial gets past procurement. The awkward band is 25,000 to 100,000, where product-led funnels quietly stop working and companies keep reporting trial signups as though nothing has changed. You calculate CAC payback for your own business during this lesson and compare it against the 16-month private B2B SaaS median. The worksheet output is a one-paragraph decision with the arithmetic attached, which is the thing you will point at in six months when somebody proposes a channel that contradicts it. The lesson uses named companies as reference points rather than abstract categories, because the bands are easier to place yourself against that way. Figma and Canva anchor the self-serve end, where a single user produces something shareable and the file carries the distribution. Notion and Airtable sit in the sales-assisted middle, where a free workspace spreads across a team and a rep appears once seat count crosses a line. Gong and Datadog anchor the enterprise end, where marketing is aimed at a CRO or a VP of Engineering who will never personally log in. ## Lesson 3: ICP, offer and message [Lesson three](/courses/saas-marketing-foundations/03-icp-offer-and-message/) is the one people want to skip and should not. You will interview or review five current customers, identify the pattern in why they bought, and write an ICP that excludes people. An ICP that excludes nobody is a description of the market, not a profile. Then you build a message hierarchy in three levels: the one-sentence positioning claim, the three supporting claims underneath it, and the proof for each. Proof means a customer name, a number, or a demonstration. It does not mean an adjective. Writing the ICP from the deck rather than from customers. The deck describes who you wish bought the product. Five call recordings describe who actually did, and those two lists overlap less than most founders expect. ## Lesson 4: channels and budget [Lesson four](/courses/saas-marketing-foundations/04-channel-and-budget-plan/) sizes spend. The starting reference is the 8 percent of ARR median that SaaS Capital reports for private B2B SaaS, but the real constraint is payback. Under 12 months of payback you should spend more. Past 24 months, extra budget brings forward the day you run out of money, and the correct move is fixing conversion or retention first. You score channels against your motion and contract value, rank them, and cost the top three. The output drops straight into the [SaaS marketing plan template](/templates/saas-marketing-plan/) if you want a formatted version to circulate. ## What this course deliberately does not cover Execution depth. The course gets you to a defensible plan and stops there. It will not teach you to write a comparison page, build a lifecycle email programme or run LinkedIn ads. For those, the cluster has dedicated material. The [SaaS Lifecycle Email Course](/courses/saas-lifecycle-email/) handles the post-sale sequences that lesson one tells you are missing. [SaaS marketing essentials](/guides/saas-marketing-essentials/) is the reference version of the same ground this course covers, useful if you prefer reading to worksheets. And if you want to keep learning after the four lessons, the roundup of [SaaS marketing books, newsletters and podcasts](/guides/saas-marketing-books-and-newsletters/) lists what is worth your time and, more usefully, what is not. ## Enrol, or just read it Both work. The lessons are published in full on this site and you can work through them today with no email address. The email version paces them one per week, which sounds slower and finishes more often, because a course sitting in an open browser tab has a completion rate close to zero. **Before lesson one** One person completing the worksheets produces a plan. Two people completing them separately and then comparing produces a better plan and a much shorter argument later, because the disagreements surface on paper instead of in a quarterly review. ## Frequently asked questions ### Is this SaaS marketing course free? Yes. All four lessons are readable in full on this site without an email address, and the worksheets are free too. The email version exists because most people who bookmark a course never return to it, and a lesson arriving on a Tuesday morning has a better completion rate than a tab left open for three weeks. ### Who is this course for? Founders doing marketing themselves, first marketing hires at a SaaS company, and people moving into SaaS from agency or non-subscription B2B roles. The sweet spot is a company between roughly 200,000 and 10 million dollars in ARR that has some customers and no written plan for getting more of them. ### How long does the course take? Between three and four hours in total, spread across four lessons of 40 to 60 minutes each. That time assumes you actually complete the worksheet at the end of each lesson. Reading without completing the worksheets takes about 50 minutes total and produces nothing you can use in a planning meeting. ### Do I need marketing experience to take it? No marketing background is required, but you do need access to your own numbers. Lessons two and four depend on knowing your average contract value, gross margin and rough churn rate. If you cannot get those figures from your finance system or founder, get them before you start lesson two. ### What is the difference between this and the SaaS SEO Sprint? This course covers the whole marketing function at a foundational level and outputs a plan. The SaaS SEO Sprint is a single-channel execution course that assumes you have already decided search is a channel worth investing in. Take this one first if you are not sure, and the sprint second if the plan says SEO. ### Will this help if we have no marketing budget? Partly. Lessons one through three cost nothing but time and are arguably more valuable when budget is tight, because the main risk at zero budget is spending scarce founder hours on the wrong audience. Lesson four assumes some spend exists, though the worksheet handles a budget of zero by ranking channels on time cost instead.