SaaS marketing foundations course

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 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 instead. Somebody whose positioning is the actual problem should take the SaaS Positioning Sprint, which goes far deeper on category and differentiation than lesson three does here.

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 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 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.

Lesson 4: channels and budget

Lesson four 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 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 handles the post-sale sequences that lesson one tells you are missing. 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 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.

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.