Lessons learned from working with over 90 B2B companies in 5 years
A little more than 5 years ago, we published the first blog post announcing Reify, our little two-person consultancy. Here’s how we described the idea in the post:
…to combine my unique experiences as a developer, a salesperson, a marketer, and evangelist to provide a service that is both unique and sorely needed at many early stage B2B SaaS startups: marketing and sales aimed at the developer market.
We thought it would be fun to share some of our experiences and lessons we’ve learned 5 years and over 90 clients later. We’ll break them down into the following categories: what we were right about, what we were wrong about, what we enjoy, and what we don’t enjoy. Finally, we’ll talk a little bit about what we think might be next.
Just the two of us More than anything else, the real foundation that has kept our business running has been our relentless focus on keeping it small. We decided to build a company in order to make something sustainable and impactful that would allow us to have as much free time as possible. Aligning on this took a lot of energy up front, but it has paid off tremendously: we have an iron clad rubric by which any major, strategic business decision can be judged. If it detracts from our quality of life, it’s not the right move.
There is a market for strategic B2B Software Marketing consulting We intuitively knew that the kind of strategic and tactical work we wanted to help companies out with was sorely needed, but we also knew that didn’t guarantee a real market for it. We didn’t have a lot of models to copy, and the actually hard advice we got from folks was few and far between. It turned out that we had our own set of packaging and pricing problems to solve. It wasn’t as much about what we were trying to sell as how we were trying to sell it. We’ve since settled on a core set of three services that effectively cover everything we think we’re good at. More on that below.
