By Nick Skomor, founder of Skomor.com
Three months ago I took over marketing at a company that was close to invisible. A young crypto infrastructure firm, competing against names that have been building authority since 2017. One person doing the marketing, no brand recognition, no funding announcements, no famous founder.
In those three months, the website’s search visibility grew nearly 10x. Search impressions went from around 250 per week to over 2,200, and the company went from ranking for a handful of keywords to competing on hundreds. The budget behind that was smaller than what most projects spend on a single press release.
I want to walk through what actually worked, because most of it contradicts the playbook startups are usually sold.
The thing most founders refuse to believe
There are tons of free opportunities sitting around every startup. Not a few. Tons. Most marketers and founders either do not see them or do not believe they are real, because everything they hear about marketing arrives with a price tag attached.
Partners who would link to you if anyone asked. Authors who would quote you if you gave them something worth quoting. Questions your whole industry refuses to answer in public. Communities where your buyers already talk every day. None of these cost money. All of them cost time and effort, which is exactly what an early startup has instead of budget.
So the sequence I now believe in: spend time first, money later. Work the free opportunities until you can see which funnel actually produces results for your business. Then put budget behind the one that is already working, starting small, and increase only when the ROI stays positive. Budget should accelerate a proven funnel. It is a terrible tool for finding one.
A hiring note for founders, because this is the fastest test I know. If you hire your first marketing person and the first thing they ask about is budget, be careful with this person. A real marketer knows how to work without budget. Budget is a way to scale what already works, and someone who needs it before showing anything works is planning to spend their way past the thinking.
Master one or two funnels before touching the rest
Chris Walker makes a point I fully agree with: be focused on one or two working funnels. Not forget the others exist. Be a master somewhere.
If most of your customers find you through search, go deep on SEO, link building and media placements until you are genuinely strong there. If they come through email, master email. Which funnel it is depends entirely on your business and your customer’s route. The point is the depth: be the best in your one or two main funnels first, and only then scale into the others with the same focus.
The alternative is what most early startups actually do, which is run six channels at 15% effort each. Six mediocre funnels lose to one excellent funnel every time, and the mediocre six also cost more, because nothing ever compounds.
AI is now part of every funnel, whether you build for it or not
One more thing that changed the game recently: for most startups, AI visibility is now the main new front door.
When your potential customer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity who the top providers in your category are, the answer comes back assembled from whatever public sources describe your category. If you are not present in those sources, you do not exist in the answer. No ad budget fixes that, because there is no ad slot inside the answer.
The practical work is unglamorous: publish real numbers AI can quote, answer the questions your buyers actually ask in plain extractable language, and make sure the pages describing your category include you. The startups treating AI answers as a channel today are buying position at prices that will look absurd in two years.
Before any of it: know how your customer actually behaves
One thing has to come before channels, content, or spending, and it is the step I see skipped most often. You have to know how your specific customer moves.
B2C and B2B are completely different games, with different strategies, budgets and targets. But it goes deeper than that. Even inside B2B alone, the funnel and the customer’s route change completely depending on the business. A founder choosing an infrastructure provider researches for weeks, asks peers, compares options, and arrives at a call already half-decided. A team buying a $50 tool clicks an ad and decides in ten minutes. Same “B2B” label, nothing else in common.
Map the route your buyer actually takes before they reach you. In our case it broke down into three moments: they discover the category, they verify that a company is real and credible, and they remember it later when the need becomes urgent. Discovery, verification, memory. Every hour and every dollar should map to one of those moments. When I rebuilt our plan this way, about half of what we were doing served no moment at all. We stopped doing it and nothing bad happened.
Audit before you buy. It takes an afternoon.
Take this as a working assumption: a large share of the marketing services sold to startups exist to be sold. In my experience auditing what is on offer, somewhere between six and eight out of ten offers were built around closing the deal, with your project’s actual success left optional. The seller wins at the invoice. Whether you win was never part of the product.
That is not a reason to buy nothing. It is a reason to check everything, and checking is cheap.
Before spending anything on PR, I pulled every placement from several crypto press release campaigns through Ahrefs. Campaigns that had “hit” the biggest names in crypto media.
Two products, one price tag
What I learned is that media placements are really two different products, usually sold as one.
The first product is brand coverage. Your name in a serious outlet, something a prospect finds when they check you out. This serves the verification moment, and it has real value even when the links are marked nofollow or sponsored, which at reputable outlets they usually are, because that is how serious publications label commercial content.
The second product is SEO value: links that pass authority, on pages that real people actually visit. This is a different thing, it is much rarer, and it is priced completely differently.
The problem is the packaging. Wire-style campaigns sold me “tier-1 visibility” where the articles sat in sections with zero organic traffic. Not low. Zero. One reseller offered a $900 placement on a page their own catalog marked as not indexed by Google. That is not brand coverage and not SEO value. It is neither product, priced as both.
So the check before buying any placement is not “is it dofollow.” It is: which of the two products am I buying, and is the price the price of that product? Ask where the article will live, whether that section gets real readers, and how the links are marked, so you know what you are paying for. Fifteen minutes per offer. It saved us five figures, and it also made me comfortable paying for good coverage, because I finally knew what I was getting.
Give authors material, and mentions follow
When a founder needs an infrastructure provider, an auditor, or an agency, they rarely start on anyone’s website. They search the category, ask peers, and increasingly ask an AI. Discovery happens on surfaces you do not own.
The way onto those surfaces surprised me: most of the people writing about your category need material more than they need money. The method that worked was reading a target article properly, finding a genuine gap in it, and offering the author real information to fill it. First-hand data, an honest expert take, a number nobody else would publish. Material first. The mention is the author’s decision, and offering value instead of asking for a favor is what makes them decide in your favor.
The company I market for is now cited alongside the biggest names in its category on pages we never paid for. Cash spent: zero. Time spent: real. That trade is available to any startup whose team actually knows something first-hand, which is every startup.
Publish the numbers your industry hides
Our single most effective content decision was publishing real pricing ranges in an industry where every competitor answers pricing questions with a call booking.
Search volume data said this was a mistake. Almost nobody googles what the service costs. Classic SEO logic says skip it.
Classic SEO logic missed where the questions went. Cost questions moved to AI chats and to the first sales call. The founder asking ChatGPT about pricing gets an answer assembled from whoever published one. The founder on a first call trusts the company that already showed its numbers. Our pricing article became the piece our outreach leads with and the page other sites ask to cite.
Whatever your industry treats as secret is your biggest content opportunity. The discomfort is the moat.
Impressions before clicks. Know which stage you are in.
Here is the proof behind the visibility number, and the part of it that looks wrong.
When our article cluster got indexed, weekly search impressions grew from roughly 290 to over 2,200 in three weeks. Clicks barely moved. And our average search position got four times worse.
Every one of those facts is good news, and a standard dashboard reads it as disaster. We went from ranking for a handful of terms to ranking for hundreds, most of them at positions 20 to 60. New rankings enter low. The average collapsed because we started competing in places we previously did not exist.
Early-stage SEO has stages: first you get indexed, then impressions arrive, then positions climb, then clicks follow. Judging month two by clicks is like judging a seed round by revenue. Track keyword count and impressions early, positions in the middle, clicks and leads late. Report it that way to your founders too, or a good month will look like a failure.
The same logic applies to conversion work. Do not start optimizing conversion when your website gets 500 visits a month. There is nothing to optimize yet, and every test you run will be noise. First build the stream: impressions, visibility, a real flow of people arriving. Once the volume exists, conversion work has material to work with and every improvement multiplies something. Sequence matters more than effort here.
Ask for the link nobody asks for
The cheapest authority available to a B2B startup is sitting with its existing clients and partners. When I mapped where our established competitors’ referral traffic actually comes from, the biggest source was not media. It was client logo walls: partners pages on their clients’ own sites, linking back.
Almost nobody manages this deliberately. The ask costs one sentence at deal close: we would love to make the partnership visible, could you add our logo and a link on your partners page. Warm relationship, zero cost, permanent link. We converted several of these in a month, and each one is worth more than a paid placement that dies in a week.
If you do only one thing from this article, do this one. It gets harder the longer you wait, because asking a client for a link six months after signing is a much colder conversation than asking at the signature.
What I would tell a founder starting from zero
Learn your customer’s route first, because everything else depends on it. Work the free opportunities before touching budget: partner links, expert quotes, author relationships, the questions your industry hides from. Watch which funnel produces, then fund that one, small first, more only when the ROI holds. Audit anything anyone tries to sell you, because in a market with no price transparency, an afternoon of checking is the highest-paid work you will ever do.
None of this needs a big budget. All of it needs consistency, which is the actual scarce resource. The startups that win the marketing game early are rarely the ones that spend the most. They are the ones that put their effort where their buyers actually look.
Nick Skomor is the founder of SKOMOR, a GTM and SEO agency for startups, and currently leads marketing at a crypto market making firm operating across 90+ exchanges. He writes about marketing experiments with real numbers on LinkedIn and X.
