You grow through word of mouth. Your buyers still Google you before they buy.

0:00You tell yourself you grow through word of mouth. A customer tells their friend, the friend signs up, you don't have any ads running, you don't have content, no funnel basically, super clean. Here's the part you don't see. The friend hears your name on a Tuesday and by Thursday they've googled you, read a Reddit thread, they scanned the G2 review and decided whether they even visit your website. If your web presence is empty, the referral dies before it reaches your homepage. I'll show you the data on what referred buyers actually do and why word of mouth

0:34is step one, but not the whole journey. I'm Deian and this is Before They Buy. If you're a bootstrapped founder, this is the line you've told an investor or a co-founder or yourself. We don't really do marketing. Our customers tell their friends. You're not wrong about the channel. Worth of mouth totally works, but I see this trap all the time and not just with SaaS founders. It also happens with freelancers and agencies. They just rely on referrals a lot, so much that once this dries out, they're in really big trouble.

1:08The data on it is actually very staggering once you get into it, but the version of word of mouth you have in your head is that customer sends a Slack DM, the friend signs up, and that's the end of the story, right? That's not really what happens in 2026. The friend takes the recommendation as a tip. It's not a decision for them. So they have to go and validate it. The people they trust the most on that validation step aren't also your customers. They are, as I mentioned, on Reddit, so they're complete strangers.

1:39They are on review sites, which could be super old and half stale or have wrong information. AI overviews at the top of Google and now obviously with AI, all kinds of LLM responses. In the last episode, I walked you through what buyers find when they Google you. and this one here is for the founders who heard that and thought it doesn't apply to me. My customers come from referrals. What I want to tell you is, it applies actually way more than you think. This is a SaaS company that grew through word of mouth for three years before

2:10realizing the channel had a ceiling. And the founder said something about it that I think every bootstrapped founder should hear. The story is about the company Winter with a Y. They ran a survey in 2025 of B2B SaaS marketing leaders. And peep liars team had 100 cmos answering questions about how they actually bought software in the last 12 months the results were that 72 percent said their buying journey starts by asking peers and private groups so these are whatsapp groups

2:41select channels this is obviously not google but just 12 months earlier 54 percent of buyers said they started with a google category search. Now it's only 9%. So you can see how that shifted within just a single year. So word of mouth wins step one, right? The part of the founder narrative is still true today. Here's the part that makes it very difficult though. 100% of those buyers visited the vendor website before purchasing. Every single one of them. 51% used Google during the buying process but not to discover rather than to validate.

3:17One CMO in the survey put it this way. Google is a foundational tool that supports all other research. It's a way to verify claims and fill in knowledge gaps. This is basically a perfect description of Google's new role. They're a fact checker. As you know, LLMs like to hallucinate every now and then, so they often do a Google search just to fact check. I covered the Forrester and Sixth Sense numbers in the last episode. Here's why they matter more if you grow through referrals.

3:4992% of B2B buyers start their journey with a vendor already in mind. 95% of the time, the eventual winner was on that day one shortlist. And the shortlist does get built from word of mouth. However, the decision gets made on what they find next. And if you're not on the page they land on, the friend's recommendation gets quietly downgraded to I'll just look into this B2B SaaS later. Let's get into a proper example. And I want to talk about Alex Turnbull,

4:20who bootstrapped Groove, which is a helpdesk SaaS. For the first stretch, their growth came mostly from word of mouth and some press hits every now and then. In his own words, he said, 100 visitors a day, pretty small and uneven. He wrote about it publicly that that's not a sustainable way to grow, and we knew that we needed a better long-term strategy. So what he did was he started a blog, wrote in public about building a SaaS as the very popular built-in-public strategy that you can see on X,

4:52and within a few years, a thousand plus daily visitors reached his website. So the word of mouth didn't really go away, it got a place to land. And that's the move Bootstrap founders miss today. Content isn't a replacement for word of mouth, It's the thing that catches it. If you look at the different SaaS, EchoSign, which was founded by Jason Lemkin and sold to Adobe, he said it took three years for EchoSign's viral word of mouth to translate into actual cash flow. Three years.

5:26With a product people loved and shared, that's the speed of pure word of mouth at a larger scale. And most bootstrap founders, they don't have three years of runway because they need to make money as soon as possible. And here's a number that should make any referral-dependent founder really uncomfortable. Harvard Business Review published a study last year. One company, 41 million customers tracked, and the customers who joined through a referral went on to refer 30-57% more new customers than people acquired through any other channel.

5:57So, referred customers are the ones who pull in more referred customers because they basically compound. So every single referred buyer you lose to some old outdated G2 page or badly branded Google result page, you're not just losing the sale, but the next 30. And Dell Analytics make one more thing actually worse. Hootsuite ran an attribution test on dark social. So WhatsApp, Discord shares the drive word of mouth.

6:27100% of those clicks show up in Google Analytics as direct traffic. And this is something that's really troubling for anyone running a SaaS because attribution is still incredibly difficult to get right. So when you look at your dashboard, whichever it is, Google Analytics, any of the other tools you like, and you see direct traffic growing, you think people are typing your URL from memory, right? Or they heard it on a podcast and then they typed it in, which could be true, but they're not necessarily. They might be also clicking a link a friend send and before they hit your site,

7:01half of them pause to google your name. So you can't really see that pause, but your competitor's branded search result can. I hear three things every time I have this conversation with a founder. Word of mouth is our moat. Content would water that down. It wouldn't really, because the referred customer is still going to Google you. The question is whether they find a thoughtful page or a Reddit thread from 2023 with a lot of outdated information. So content doesn't replace the channel, it helps it actually validate it.

7:33Another thing I hear constantly is, we are too small to invest in marketing right now. I talked about Groove earlier, there were just three people. I've mentioned Missive in my other episodes. There were also three co-founders bootstrapped to 6 million ARR. They didn't really outspend anyone. They just wrote good comparison pages, alternatives pages. They kept their review listings very up to date. So small teams can ship those in a month. And if they focus on the right things, they can totally outpace larger teams.

8:06Lisa Calhoun, a board member at Women Who Codes, set it cleaner. If you think marketing is too expensive, try how expensive it is to build a company without it. The third thing I hear is, our analytics show direct traffic growing. This is what I mentioned earlier about attribution. Your analytics are not showing you the full picture. It's very difficult to get attribution correct. And dark social hides inside direct traffic. I know with LLMs, those also sometimes don't have a referral.

8:39So you see maybe chat GPT referrals being 5%. It could be 15% because some of them are just direct traffic. So you don't know which of those visitors came from a referral or something else. Or which ones bounced because your G2 page hadn't been touched in two years. If you go through referrals, here's what your referred buyer will land on before they sign up. And I want you to build these in the exact order I'm mentioning. Number one is obviously your homepage. It should be written for a buyer who already knows what your product does.

9:09It shouldn't be a feature dump. Make one-line statements of who it is for and what changes after they use it. The referred buyer has been told you're good. Your job is just to confirm it in five seconds. Number two is your branded SERP google your company name in incognito and obviously, use a vpn if you're not in the u.s just to check the u.s results or use one of the free tools just to get a look at what the u.s search results look like for this for your brand term update your review sites like g2 capterra anything

9:44where your company is listed so that everything matches the state of your company today. Number three is build one comparison page against the competitor your buyers mention most often. This is the page the referred buyers opens in a tab after Google. So if you don't write it, your competitor will most likely do it and they will spin the narrative however they want. Number four is build an alternatives page for example best alternatives to whichever the

10:15category leader is this is what the buyer types when the referral mentioned you as one or three options and i broke this down in episode seven and more detail and number five is build a use case page that matches the exact reason your customers refer you so this is not a product overview, but a specific job. And I have the full playbook in episode six. This is basically the surface area. None of it replaces word of mouth. It just helps amplify it. Now I want you to do the following.

10:47Open an incognito tab, connect to a VPN in the US and search your company name. Then search whatever your category is plus the keyword software. So let's say customer success software. Look at what shows up before your own homepage. If a referred buyer landed on those results tonight, would they still sign up tomorrow? If you can't say yes, then you don't have a word of mouth business, you just have a very leaky one. This is Before They Buy. I'm Deian. See you next week.