The SaaS Growth podcast: Rebuilding SaaS Marketing in the AI era

Author: Digital Hunch

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The SaaS Growth podcast about marketing & GTM strategies. Rebuilding SaaS marketing foundations with Digital Hunch.

AI is rewriting the rules of marketing, and founders are learning to rebuild from scratch. Proven playbooks no longer work. They’re slow, expensive, and built for a world that no longer exists. New approaches are still emerging — often messy, improvised, and driven by founders who figure things out in real time.

This podcast is for those founders.

Each episode features a real story of a SaaS company learning to grow in the AI era: how they built demand from zero, fixed what was broken, and tested their way to traction.

What you’ll hear:

Real Founder Stories: Practical insights on SaaS marketing strategies and overcoming growth plateaus.
AI & Tactics: Deep dives into AI marketing tools, automation, and new growth mechanics.
Expert Insights: Hosted by Renata Zinnatullina, fractional CMO and co-founder of Digital Hunch (AI marketing agency).

Where to find us Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Digital-Hunch

Or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow Renata Zinnatullina on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renatazinnatullina/

Follow Digital Hunch on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-hunch-agency/

Visit our site: https://digital-hunch.com

Behind this podcast is Digital Hunch — a distributed team of fractional CMOs, strategists, and growth operators helping B2B and SaaS companies build sustainable marketing engines. The agency was founded by people who have spent years working with B2B and SaaS brands and know firsthand how hard it is to connect strategy with execution when budgets are tight and markets shift weekly.

We combine senior-level strategy and hands-on execution in one team, so you get a marketing department that plans, tests, and scales growth across your SaaS funnel.

That’s the same mindset we bring into the podcast. Each story we tell is a look inside how modern founders rethink growth under real constraints — distributed teams, AI-driven tools, shifting buyer behavior, and rising CAC. Some episodes explore the early GTM phase: identifying the right audience, shaping the offer, and validating demand. Others dig into scaling challenges — finding the balance between automation and human touch, building a brand that drives trust, or managing marketing operations across multiple markets.

We focus on fresh, data-grounded cases that reflect the reality of today’s SaaS landscape. The goal is not to glorify success but to document how founders adapt — step by step, pivot by pivot. You’ll hear how they measure traction, how they integrate AI into workflows, how they make hiring decisions, and how they rebuild their marketing stack when old tactics stop performing.

Every episode is both a case study and a conversation: practical enough for your next campaign, but reflective enough to reshape how you think about growth.

Whether you’re designing your first go-to-market strategy, re-evaluating your demand generation model, or building a distributed marketing function, you’ll find stories here that resonate.

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“We don’t need 15 people anymore”: what modern SaaS marketing looks like when you cut the team to the bone

2025-12-0501:09:52

They entered HR tech at the worst possible moment: the remote-work boom was over, the category was overcrowded, and every keyword was already taken. Yet BuddiesHR still managed to grow, because they tested every hypothesis so radically that, at one point, they even built a competitor to themselves.This episode focuses on J.Y. Delmotte, the co-founder of BuddiesHR. He explains how they chose to bootstrap after raising $6M in VC funding.J.Y. shared his sharpest insights — what they did, why they did it, and what results it led to:how they entered one of the most overcrowded HR markets in 2023 — when the remote-work boom was over, Slack apps looked interchangeable, and every relevant keyword was already dominatedwhy they stayed a two-founder team in a market where everyone hires early — and how this constraint forced them to design a cleaner, faster GTMwhy they spoke to more than 40 HR leaders before writing a single line of codehow a tiny birthday-automation app became their entry point — and why this lightweight product helped them break through marketplace noisehow cold outreach collapsed for them from day onehow Slack Marketplace became their strongest early channel — and why this ecosystem rewarded focus, not breadthhow they crafted a meme first, a culture-driven tone of voice that speaks only to their best HR buyers, something radically unusual in the corporate HR tools spacewhy their AI SEO strategy backfired — thousands of programmatic pages that hurt domain health — and how switching to topic clusters revived their organic traffichow their first Google Ads attempt resulted in ~$500 per signup with no ROI, and why their later shift to competitor-keyword campaigns and “X vs BuddiesHR” pages finally started showing early positive signalshow they improve messaging by watching real visitors interact with the site and letting a 10-member ICP board critique the copyhow they divide marketing and product between two founders — and why this structure prevents slowdowns even with zero full-time hireshow ChatGPT became a practical tool for editing, clarity, and risk-control — and why they use it selectively to avoid brand damagewhy they rely on small, fast experiments instead of big, resource-heavy bets — and how this mindset keeps their growth steady while staying fully bootstrappedConnect with J.Y. on Linkedin. Learn more at BuddiesHR.com

#box-pro-ellipsis-176607810089095{-webkit-line-clamp:2;}The SaaS Growth podcast: Rebuilding SaaS Marketing in the AI era

The SaaS Growth podcast: Rebuilding SaaS Marketing in the AI era