What's up, it's Zayd

I've been building Valley for a couple of years now. In that time, marketing has been the department where we've made the most preventable mistakes (and also where we've found the most leverage once we figured things out).

Most of what I learned, I learned by doing it wrong first.

I posted a list of 20 lessons on LinkedIn recently and it got a strong reaction, so this week I'm going deeper on the ones that actually hurt, and the ones that changed how we operate.

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My favorite finds of the week

This sounds obvious in retrospect. When we started Valley, we learned it the hard way. 'Valley' shares search results with Valley Girl, Silicon Valley, Valley Medical Center, and about forty other things. Every time someone searched for us after a meeting, they had to wade through unrelated results.

Pick something distinctive. Something you can own on the first page of results from day one. Your marketing team will thank you.

We didn't do this properly for months. That meant months of attribution data that was incomplete, misleading, or just wrong. We couldn't tell which content was driving demos, which channels were converting, or which campaigns were worth repeating.

UTM parameters take an afternoon to set up correctly. Do it on day one. You will look back on this decision with profound gratitude.

We made this mistake. Beautiful site. Custom design. Took months. Cost significantly more than it should have.

Six months later, our positioning had shifted, we understood our ICP better, and the copy was wrong. We rebuilt it. The expensive version we'd paid for was basically obsolete.

In the early stage, your website should be fast to build and fast to change. Use templates. Use Webflow or Framer. Spend your money on things that don't become outdated every time you talk to customers.

More specific but important: Framer's CMS won't let you upload thousands of AI-generated blog posts at scale. If programmatic SEO is part of your growth strategy, you need Webflow. We didn't know this until we were already deep into the build. Switching was painful.

That screenshot gets shared everywhere when your site gets mentioned. It shows up in screenshots people send in Slack. It's in the background of product demo videos. Make it specific, make it clever, make it impossible to misunderstand what you do and who you do it for.

Generic above-the-fold copy is a lead generation problem disguised as a design problem.

We pay a premium for employees who are active on LinkedIn because people who share their thinking publicly are usually sharper, more articulate, and more plugged into the industry than people who don't.

The side effect is that Valley gets distribution through their networks, but that's the bonus, not the reason.

Even if your first users are friends. Even if the testimonial is two sentences. The earlier you start, the more you'll have by the time you need them.

We built a 'wall of love' relatively early and it has been one of our best conversion tools on the website. Gumloop did this beautifully. Social proof compounds.

Every sales call is a content mine. The questions people ask you are blog post topics. The objections they raise are copy for your FAQ page. The exact language they use to describe their problem is the language you should be using in your outreach.

We have automations that pull common questions from transcripts and surface them weekly. It's one of the most consistently valuable systems we've built.

We put case studies in our email signatures. Every email any Valley team member sends is an opportunity to show a prospect or customer what results look like for companies similar to theirs.

Most people use their email signature to share their phone number. That's fine, but a short case study teaser with a link outperforms a phone number every time.

Tiny detail. Real impact. When someone has 30 tabs open and is trying to find the tab they were on, the favicon is how they find it. If yours looks like every other blue SaaS icon, you're invisible.

Examples of the best performing LinkedIn outreach messages

Your positioning to investors is not the same as your positioning to customers!

Investors want market size, defensibility, and narrative momentum.

Customers want to know exactly what problem you solve and how fast you can solve it. These are fundamentally different conversations that require fundamentally different language.

I've watched founders pitch their investor narrative to prospective customers and wonder why conversion is low. The customers don't care about TAM!

All they want to know about is whether their calendar will fill up with qualified meetings.

Isn’t that what you would care about?

Be clear about which conversation you're in.

Adjust accordingly.