How Artisan (YCW24) Grew to $1M ARR in 3 Months

Recently the founder of Artisan shared how they grew to $1M ARR in 3 months, specifically their marketing channels. Since it was a long PDF and behind lead form, wanted to share a synopsis here with some thoughts. I believe this is a good checklist for most startups to experiment with.

1. Emails (38%): They claim their largest lead source was email with a lead conversation rate of 1.3%. A little suspicious since they are an outbound marketing platform. However I have personally seen b2b startups use Apollo to cold email people using these primary filters: Company Size, Location, Title and Recently Raised Funding signal.
2. Organic SEO (26%): This was their most efficient channel with a 2.7% lead conversion rate. They suggest hiring link builders to build high quality backlinks for this. A free way to get quality links is get press coverage.
3. Blogs (26%): Once your domain has good authority, they suggest writing blogs to double down on SEO so customers find you faster. They suggesting hiring writers from Upwork to write blogs at least once a week. Alternatively you could use something like Wosily to automate this with AI.
4. Organic Social (15%): They found success posting at least once a week to Linkedin etc with articles just like the one I read which usually said something like "5 mistakes we made when trying X", "We achieved X by Y
5. Paid Search (11%): Their most expensive channel with $133 per lead. They do not seem to be using it a lot

*Percentage next to the channel is the lead share %

And that's about it. I did not want to like the PDF directly but you can find it on the founders linkedIn if you are interested 🙂