How to attract an audience for your product

🔥 Inside Adam Schoenfeld’s unique approach to SaaS + media + community

What if I told you that my next guest reached $100k in ARR without a website or an app – just 100% community hand-raisers? 

Or that they grew a newsletter audience from zero to 14,000+ in less than 18 months without paid ad spend?

You’d probably think I was lying. But this story is 100% true.

It’s about Adam Schoenfeld, founder of PeerSignal (the niche media company) and Keyplay.io (the seed-funded platform for building your ideal account list). You likely already know about Adam from his viral LinkedIn posts where he shares PeerSignal’s research on everything from hiring to pricing to PLG along with his experience building in public. 

Adam and I unpacked the PeerSignal <> Keyplay SaaS and media flywheel. He also took us behind-the-scenes into his exact playbook for building an enviable founder brand on LinkedIn (he’s rapidly approaching 35,000 followers – I’ve got some catching up to do 🤣). 

Let’s get into it.

---

KP: Why start with content and community before having SaaS or a monetizable product? 

We knew who we wanted to serve before we knew the problem they needed us to solve. So we started with the research we felt was missing in B2B SaaS. We created this process:

1. Publish free data-rich resources for GTM leaders

2. Participate in the community

3. Listen carefully

Months passed. Then two dots connected. 

It was increasingly frustrating to get our research lists right. Lots of data gaps and inaccuracies. Painful maintenance workflows.

People started emailing “can you help with my ideal account list.” Not for research – for sales. Such an old problem, but they didn’t have a trusted solution. That’s when we began turning what started as a research project to study GTM into a SaaS-media flywheel.

---

KP: What was your initial wedge and what did you do to get initial traction on it?

The first wedge was our PLG Index on PeerSignal. 

We built a dataset of PLG companies and did some web crawling to compare companies by different dimensions of the GTM orgs and tactics. We published the raw dataset in Airtable and made it available to anyone who signed up for our content. We then used that dataset to do research and publish our findings.

Because PeerSignal started out as just Andrew and me, we mostly relied on my LinkedIn audience to get the word out. The best content for us was data-heavy decks that I’d post as “zero-click content” on LinkedIn. This drove a lot of engagement and subscribers. As people subscribed, our newsletter became a big part of the growth loop. This helped convert some of that borrowed LinkedIn audience into PeerSignal subscribers, which created a better feedback loop and credibility for our mini media company.

Once we had some traction with PLG data and content, and published our findings in an almost-weekly newsletter. 

When Camille Trent came in to lead content and community at PeerSignal, we were able to double our borrowed LinkedIn audience as she started posting about our research on LinkedIn as well.

---

KP: How did you manage to scale the community to 14,000+ subscribers in such a short period of time?