About Alex Chaidaroglou

I am Alex, B2B marketer specializing in SaaS. Below I will give you an overview of my past and things I learned. Let’s start with the early stage or phase 1:

Phase 1: Blogging and niche sites.

In 2012 there was still the hype of “build a niche website, rank for keywords and make money”. So, being a recent graduate from Statistics and Actuarial Mathematics, I started my journey in digital marketing in 2012 by building blogs and small media websites with a friend in order to build income streams.

Most of these sites had moderate success, one of them did very well and another one flopped.

All of them still exist, but they are either not updated or run by our VA. A couple of them that had traffic but didn’t bring any revenue were sold to bigger companies.

Results: Although these websites still bring in some money, they are just there to pay a couple of bills. Although in terms of strictly time invested and money earned it wasn’t worth it, all this process taught me some digital marketing, got me in the space and more importantly I learned the foundation of how to direct traffic from other channels to my blogs.

Phase 2: Freelancing and subcontracting.

In 2013, one year after phase 1, I don’t remember exactly why, but somehow I ended up applying for a job at a small digital marketing agency. The job description was very attractive and to the point.

I ended up getting hired and trained. My job would be to manage whole SEO and content marketing projects end-to-end except from writing the actual content. The hours were insanely long (Saturday included) and the pay was insanely low. However, I learned a ton both in actual skills (cold outreach from one of the best out there) and in work ethic (meeting crazy deadlines and being efficient).

Did I mention I was trained to become their subcontractor and not an actual full time hire? (no one was full time there)

All in all a useful experience, I gave up some money and energy to be trained in very valuable skills that I will use for the rest of my professional life.

By the way, apparently this agency was a subcontractor of other bigger agencies.

So, here is the interesting part: a digital marketing agency that has a reputation and lands clients easily, often gives the project to smaller agencies to do the work for them. In essence a client is paying top dollar for work that can be done by a less known and smaller agency.

This is pretty standard, but back then it was mind blowing for me. The good part is I ended up doing projects for some pretty big global companies and I saw behind the curtain of how things work.

After that I was doing various work for SMB clients, mainly Facebook ads and some content marketing.

Results: I didn’t earn much money that period, but I learned a ton. One thing was sure: working for an agency is the best thing one can do for their early professional career; ideally using that knowledge to land and serve clients for himself/herself.

Phase 3: Growth Marketing for a Learning Management System

Later in 2014, a friend posted about a job listing for a growth marketer and the job description seemed to fit my profile (with some stretch) and it was the next logical step for both where I was and where I wanted to go.

So, I applied for that job, got interviewed, wrote an in-depth strategy for both of their products (an enterprise, deployed LMS and a cloud SaaS LMS) and in the end I got hired.

Funny thing was that I had never worked full time in an actual office before and I certainly knew nothing about SaaS, Learning Management Systems or even the differences between Cloud and Legacy.

Fast forward many hours of studying, executing, QnA, brainstorming and I now have a pretty good understanding of not only growth marketing for B2B SaaS, but also *when* to apply which tactic and what conditions need to be met before we engage in a marketing activity.

“To a man with the hammer, everything looks like a nail”

If you are an Adwords expert, you deploy Adwords everywhere. If you are a content marketer expert, you deploy content everywhere. This is wrong and experienced marketers are faithful to no single tactic. They deploy whatever needs to be deployed that has the higher chance of success.

What was interesting is that I learned a lot in a relatively short amount of time, by simply putting in the work, building on my previous experiences and skills, while analyzing correctly successes and failures. So, time is not the most important metric for someone’s knowledge and skills.

Feel free to read my posts though and judge for yourself 🙂

All these were learned both from my full time job at Epignosis, but also from working with B2B SaaS clients and seeing what worked, what not and under which circumstances.

To be continued…

About WeeklyGrowth

WeeklyGrowth is a blog about growth marketing/hacking for B2B SaaS startups that have found product/market fit.

It’s here to help CEOs, Growth Marketers and founders grow their B2B SaaS by proposing tactics to try, mindsets and frameworks in which to operate as a team, pitfalls to avoid and hopefully challenging some industry norms.

There will be both tactical and strategic points of view.

This blog was started by me, Alex Chaidaroglou, because I found there was a lot of bad advice on the “internetz”, especially for young marketers, and I wanted to share my views and take on what really matters for B2B SaaS without a hidden agenda.

Anyway, in this blog I will share what I have learned about B2B SaaS startups with as much objectivity and analysis I can. I hate headline readers (as Gary Vaynerchuk calls them) and sensationalism.

Furthermore, I will be focusing in areas in which I have practiced what I talk about like driving traffic, content marketing, etc. If I want to mention something that I don’t have real world experience on, I will say it upfront and just lay down what I know others are doing.

Whatever you read on the blog, please take it with a grain of salt, because every startup’s circumstances are different and there is no single bullet. I will do my best to cover 99% of the cases though. There will always be at least 1 outlier for every 99 that conform to the norm.

In time, I want to be able to bring guests who have experience in other areas of growth marketing/hacking and startups to share their insights here.

The name (WeeklyGrowth) is based on a concept coined by Paul Graham, where he states that a startup should be doing what’s necessary, even non-scalable growth activities, in order to achieve week-over-week growth of the said startup.

Lastly, I will try various tactics to grow this blog and I will be sharing the results with WeeklyGrowth’s email subscribers.

Thanks for reading WeeklyGrowth and see you in the trenches!