Aaaaaah zavingaaaaa zeeeva veeeecheee vavo 🦁🎶

Last year, I decided to do the marketing and sales fix-it stuff for the agency that i’d been putting off for years.

Or as inspired by an IG carousel seen at an unholy hour:
“Crashing out and locking in”.

Here’s the thing.

It takes about a year to get your marketing to work consistently when you’re starting from scratch.

And by scratch, i mean, zero systems, customer research is kinda random, and marketing is….. a wisp of a hope and a prayer and some tactics you found here and there.

The pattern I see over and over again with marketing is this:

1. You do your customer research and lay out your marketing channels

2. You start posting, publishing, talking to people

3. You run experiments and get wins (some big, some small)

4. You fix your sales systems when stuff gets close…but not quite what you were expecting

You wait….and hate waiting….and keep doing marketing (and sales)

5. Everything everywhere all at once new clients are signing, subscribers are buying, it’s raining cash, you’re wondering where this was during the months of the locust.

You take a moment to bask and catch your breath…

Then the cycle repeats as you expand to a new audience, add a new product line, or offer an additional service.

And yes, consistency in the middle is what makes marketing (anything really, but especially marketing) work.

But it annoys me to no end to hear "people in marketing" talk about consistency with zero definitions on how much time and what that actually looks like.

So, without further ado, here’s what just over a year of marketing work looked like for us at Ignore No More (INM).

And what to expect each month as you’re working through your own, whether you’re running a SaaS co, a service one, or a tangly mix of both.

Let’s start at the very beginning: Nov 2024.

Here’s what I wanted out of our marketing and sales efforts

November is always when I get the lightning strike of great ideas and set the course for what I want (what I really really want) in the next year.

November 2024 I wrote down this wishlist.

• Predictably having a new client close every month

• A systematic way for finding and closing leads

• Marketing to feel less like a manual headache

• Know which channels were working the best for us with data, not just ✨vibes✨

• Consistent content output so we were actually visible beyond just me as a networking butterfly

Sound familiar?

And here’s what I was starting with

• Messaging + Tone of voice: my approach to marketing - enthusiastically creative but very process-oriented and starting with customer-research was a rarity and our core differentiator

• Target Audience: Profitable or early-launch bootstrapped founders who don’t have a marketing team

• Marketing channels: the knowledge that I sell best on-camera or in-person - workshops, coffee chat calls, presentations, Uber backseat convos -so any marketing channel chosen should capitalize on that

• Proof: 3 years of past client work and relationships

Aight, let’s jump into what this looked like in a year of marketing.

Broken out in chronological order by Marketing Foundations.

Here’s what that year of marketing looked like

Foundations 1 and 2: Getting to know the Customer, Branding: positioning, messaging, copy, visuals

The first 2 months I did a lot of talking to people, a lot more listening, and laying out what to say and how to say it to the people who wanted to buy from me the fastest.

Nov 2024: Asked every possible permutation of “What are your marketing pain points right now?” of our target audience and turned it into a workshop for MicroConf Remote. The process + feedback on it gave me the much needed customer research for copy and updated positioning

Dec 2024: Based on that customer research, created another presentation "5 Do's and Don'ts for Growth in 2025" which laid out our differentiation strategy in this brave new AI world. The feedback on that and questions that came out of it helped me see founders fears

I skipped Foundations 3 (Website) and 4 (CRM) because I already had those two systems setup and they didn’t need a huge overhaul (yet).

Foundations 5: Email

Jan 2025: Launched the Not My Job newsletter (Email), started posting on LinkedIn 2x week and regularly commenting, started the (now discontinued) Unignoreable course to help me stick with both and fix any positioning problems that we had.

Foundations 6-8: Content + Distribution & Marketing Experiments

The next 5 months I spent on writing emails, LinkedIn posts, a crap ton of outreach, and testing new channels (Reddit) and doing the ones I had slacked off on (SEO). It was also incredibly tedious at points, required me to get outside sales help after weeks of proposals that wouldn’t close, and made me hate marketing just a wee bit.

This is the time where you want to throw up your hands and go “This sh*t doesn’t work”. It does, just not fast.

At INM, that looked like:

Feb 2025: Continued with the newsletter, LinkedIn, and experimented with some collabs

March 2025: More marketing experiments, including creating and testing a new micro-offer, kept at the newsletter and LinkedIn posting

April 2025: Started experimenting on Reddit, updated our SEO strategy, kept at the newsletter and LinkedIn posting

May 2025: Went viral on Reddit, found out our sales process was broken and fixed it with help from Brandon, kept at the newsletter and LinkedIn posting

June 2025: Slogged through sales tedium, kept at the newsletter and LinkedIn posting

July 2025: Started publishing pages in line with the SEO strategy, kept at the newsletter and LinkedIn posting (bit less on LI)

THE PAYOFF, BABY

The clouds part, a trumpet sounds, and it starts raining money.

Since August 2025, we have had a new client sign every 4-6 weeks, like clockwork.

There were lots of wins (and losses) between November 2024 and August 2025, but we’ve hit each of those goals I laid out in November 2024.

For reference, this was NINE MONTHS after I had first done my Customer Research, laid out our Marketing Plan and started working through it.

In SaaS-world, the timeframe shorter

(given you are starting from a similar place with similar pacing)

• 3-6 months if your product is $50/mo or less and is for prosumers

• 5-7 months if your product if your product is in the $51-$250ish/mo range or is for consumers

Here’s the thing: none of this is special to me and Ignore No More

I have seen this process play out dozens of times in the last 5 years with clients. I’ve seen it play out in my friends’ companies of all types and stripes, from agencies to dance collectives to tattoo shops.

And if it feels a little repetitive in the middle, that’s because it is.

Continuing to write, record, hit “post”, and answer questions with well-thought answers and a ‘link to chat more’ is not flashy, and doesn’t feel inspired, but it does take you from sales doldrums to open seas.

So if you’re stuck in analysis paralysis wondering whether to start on marketing and whether it will work for you…

here’s an honest answer with where to start, today.

1. Do your customer research.

2. Figure out where your messaging needs to change (and if your positioning and target audience does too).

3. Lay out the marketing channels that you’ve already gotten to work and see where you’re biting yourself in the booty.

Then, bit by bit, post, publish, answer questions, build a system - do the work to make each channel you’ve chose work.

(I know, earthshattering)

But in all seriousness, marketing is like compounding interest on a retirement account. Start small, stay consistent, make sure you’re building on a strong foundation tied to the outcomes you want and the business you’re actually running (not the one you wish you were).

And give it time.

And yourself a break and bit of grace when the doldrums hit.

In less than a year your business will be unrecognizeable. And probably, so will the way you think about it too.

I’ll see you and your inbox next week, when I’ll be talking about mistakes to avoid while you go through your year of marketing.

Cheers!

Sophia 💜👩🏽‍💻

Powered by: Gearing up to dance my feet off at the DC Lindy Hop exchange this weekend, and sobering walks through the National Museum of the American Indian.

Let me know if you’re in the DMV region and would like to grab coffee April 29-30th! I’m in DC all month.

Fun fact: I have never seen The Lion King movie from start to finish. 😄 I did see the touring Broadway musical for Christmas one year with my family (thanks mom 🫶🏽!) and had my mind permanently blown about what was possible on stage. Guess future me will get to enjoy the movie fresh with my kiddos. 🙂 

And the correct Swahili for the first line of The Circle of Life is “Nants ingonyama bagithi baba”.