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- 🫠 RIP gated content
🫠 RIP gated content
Why satellite apps are the new lead gen play
Ian Ito
February 15, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
ISSUE #281
B2B SaaS growth plays, right in your inbox
Happy Sunday 👋
Three reads to think about this week:
Goodbye lead magnets – hello satellite apps
Why events are one of the most effective GTM channels in 2026
Lessons from auditing 100+ B2B SaaS funnels
Let's dive in!
Ian at SaaS Weekly
THIS WEEK IN SAAS
Interesting LinkedIn posts and industry news
Gated content is dead – for real this time.
I think the framing here is interesting: Gated content was built for the old discovery model (search, land, consume), where value lived within the content itself. A whitepaper, an ebook, a PDF you'd download and (theoretically) read.
However, the buyer journey is shifting from search to direct answers. Think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if a lead is uploading your gated content to a chat interface and asking for the main takeaways anyway. I'd do that instead of reading it. Not because I don't like reading (you should see my bookshelf…), but because I'd prefer the content presented in my personal context.
Jonathan and Elena call the alternative "Satellite Apps" – free, lightweight micro-products that deliver value immediately instead of promising it behind a form. “AI-assisted coding” makes these cheap to build and allows marketers to build them themselves.
Crazy idea: you could have users interact with the app, solve a real problem, optionally ask for their email (or require it to send the output), then use the engagement data to drive personalized follow-ups instead of generic drip sequences.
That would be pretty cool. And honestly, a better conversion play than a PDF sitting in someone's downloads folder.
Building a brand around a person: Ramp brings back The Office
I wrote a few weeks ago about why the highest-leverage media format in B2B is a person – the individual carries the trust, not the brand. Ramp has been running this playbook for months.
They made Brian Baumgartner their spokesperson – first as "CFO for a day" in October, then livestreaming him processing expenses in a glass box in Manhattan (85 million views across platforms), now scaling into their Super Bowl campaign. One recognizable person, one clear workflow pain, zero marketing jargon. Rather than explaining their Policy Agent (the AI model within the product), Ramp let someone the audience already recognizes carry the message.
What’s interesting is the consistency. Ramp built a multi-month content engine around a single person and a single metaphor – then extended it across formats.
Of course, celebrity campaigns are not a novel concept. But here’s a question for Marketing leads: what spokesperson/ creator can you build your brand around – one that has reach, speaks to your audience, and has a strong brand?
HOW COMPANIES GROW
Examples of growth plays and GTM Agent usecases
How Canva enables its agentic GTM motion
GTM Engineering | Brendan J Short, The Signal
I've been thinking about a pattern lately: GTM teams are racing to adopt agents.
The energy is there. But the conversation skews toward use cases and demos, and not enough toward the infrastructure that surrounds them – the data pipelines, the enrichment timing, the routing logic. To me, that infrastructure layer is the more important one to get right – the data layer determines whether your agents can execute the work.
Canva is a good case study for this. They didn't start by building a better agent. They started by fixing what the agent would see and when it would see it. The company built real-time enrichment directly on top of their data warehouse.
The solution: Any email collected through product or marketing triggers immediate enrichment: who the person is, what company they're at, ICP score, usage patterns, and marketing history. All computed the moment the lead enters the system. From there, the system makes an instant routing decision. High-fit account, senior title, core features activated? Route to an agent-led sequence and alert an AE. Low-fit, casual usage? Nurture flow, no human touch.
What to consider: The key distinction is timing. When sales reps acted on stale data, you got inefficient outreach. When agents act on stale data, you get bad decisions scaled across the GTM system. If you're investing in agents right now, the lead journey through your system is worth auditing first.
ARTICLES TO BOOKMARK
Resources to build your next growth play
Why events are one of the most effective GTM channels in 2026
Event Marketing | Maja Voje & Aatir Abdul Rauf, GTM Strategist
Bookmark this for when: You're building an event program OR need help securing marketing budget for one.
Why this matters: I've seen events carry some of the lowest direct attribution but highest influenced attribution, which makes them one of the hardest channels to defend when budgets get tight.
At face value, you can say events just bring in leads, but that's a surface-level analysis. Different formats accommodate different motions at different stages of the buyer journey.
Key takeaways:
Start by mapping event formats to your GTM motions:
Lead generation: webinar series & sponsored booths – broad reach, scalable, but leads are early in their buyer journey
Deal creation / expansion: summits & customer workshops – sales teams working the floor OR AMs unblocking onboarding and demoing other products
ABM / deal acceleration: small dinners (8-15 people) – high-trust settings where conversations happen with decision-makers mid-evaluation
Pre-and post-event motion: Then build the motion around the event. Deal generation happens before the doors open – hand registration lists to sellers, have them invite prospects, and pre-schedule meetings. During the event, log conversations in a shared Slack channel. After the event, have reps send personalized follow-ups referencing those notes.
How to fix your lead journey: Lessons from auditing 100+ B2B SaaS funnels
Demand Generation | Sam Kuehnle, Sam's Marketing Meditations
Bookmark this for when: You're behind on pipeline pacing OR looking for efficient growth levers to pull.
Why this matters: In my experience, every funnel audit comes back to two levers: increase volume or improve stage-to-stage conversion rates. While increasing volume with paid acquisition is the easier move, it’s not the sustainable one. The better approach is to fix conversion mechanics before you touch spend.
Key takeaways: Strip your funnel down to five inputs (spend, demos, opps created, opps won, ARR). Keep it simple so you don't hide drop-offs behind custom stages. A $30 cost-per-demo that converts at 0.3% to a sales qualified opportunity (SQO) isn't cheap.
From there, diagnose by stage:
Marketing/sales misalignment: strong inbound, weak demo-to-SQO conversion. Often, the fastest fix is calendar scheduling and resetting sales expectations on lead quality
Product-market fit gaps: healthy pipeline, but win rate craters on price, functionality, or competitor losses
Unrealistic goals: everything is efficient, but the absolute numbers had too many ungrounded assumptions
FROM THE TRENCHES
Perspectives from industry operators
The attention gap: why context is often the missing layer
Messaging & Positioning | Mike Northfield, Artifacts of Influence
The longer you work on a product, the worse you get at talking about it.
It's the curse of knowledge. Once you deeply understand something, it becomes almost impossible to un-know it. You start treating your context as common sense. But your audience doesn't share that context; they only see pieces of your story through narrow, intermittent exposures.
They have to connect dots with their background, not yours. And if the pieces they happen to see are too abstract or granular to be meaningful, they fill in the blanks or they move on.
A common response is to double down on message consistency: pick one story to repeat everywhere, and stay consistent on the message. That instinct isn't exactly wrong, but it lacks nuance. A single message at a single level of abstraction only works if your audience happens to catch it at the right moment with the right prior context to see how it fits into the big picture. Which is a lot of ifs for a buyer who's barely paying attention.
Instead of repeating one message, increase the surface area of your message. Cover the full spectrum of abstraction and connect every big-picture "why-does-this-matter?" claim with concrete "how-does-it-actually-work?" functionality.
TOP READS FROM LAST WEEK
The most clicked-on links
The SaaSacre of 2026 [Next Big Teng]
The Great SaaS Crash of 2026 [Infinite Runway]
100 Unicorns: 12 different GTM Motions [First 1000]
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