New year, familiar challenges. 

Be it increased competition, access to capital or sustainable growth, SaaS companies face many of the same pressing issues in 2025. But that doesn’t make them any easier to solve. 

Over the past 12 months, I’ve spoken to hundreds of SaaS founders in person and on the podcast about how to overcome their core growth challenges. The standout solution? Differentiation. 

Differentiating your company (and product) and showcasing value to your ideal customer profile (ICP) has been a key growth accelerator in 2024. Here’s five ways SaaS founders have done it successfully.

1. Customer centricity

“If you have an undifferentiated product, the company with the best customer experience wins.” Abakar Saidov, CEO, Beamery

Be it involving customers in product-building or putting customer success at the forefront of your decision-making, embedding a customer-centric mentality enables you to stand out from the crowd and gain a competitive advantage in your market. 

To have the most impact, focus on areas that will add the most value for your customers. And that will be specific to your product, GTM motion, and customer personas etc. 

For example, Beamery always fully implements its talent lifecycle platform to ensure quality (instead of using partners) and sends regular ‘impact memos’ to its customers that explain what’s going on in their business and market, as well as what they’re getting out of the product. The result? An average 85-100 NPS score. 

RevSure and Goldcast also generated growth through customer centricity last year. With its holistic GTM team, RevSure scaled its platform by listening to its customers, building the features they wanted and creating a strong feedback loop. Meanwhile, Goldcast invested heavily in post-sales customer success, building a large hands-on customer experience team and a “very healthy CSM to customer ratio,” which enabled the company to “respond to customers in 30 seconds for everything.

2. Content marketing

“The focus is really just putting out great content and not expecting anything in return.” Taylor Hersom, Founder & CEO, Eden Data

To capture your audience’s attention in 2025, produce content that is specific to your ICP and creates real value for them. This means going far beyond having a topic-led blog or YouTube channel.

For instance, Founder & CEO Taylor Hersom forged Eden Data’s reputation through great marketing material on security compliance. Its secret sauce? Blending customer data on current security threats, info from customer enquiries and intel on the security industry to produce impactful content that its customers didn’t know about. 

Boundless CEO Dee Coakley also levied content marketing to get ahead in the compliance and remote work space. Instead of writing generic short-form blogs, Boundless created in-depth, long-form content specifically for its ICP, such as tax guides for payroll leaders, establishing the company as a thought-leader among its target users (and, importantly, buyers) as a result.

3. True AI first thinking

“AI has to be built-in, not bolted on.” Des Traynor, Co-Founder & CSO, Intercom

To achieve cut-through with AI, you need to embrace true AI-first thinking, according to Intercom Co-Founder and CSO Des Traynor. For example, instead of focusing on software as a service, Intercom used AI to create service as a software. In other words, Intercom’s product Fin doesn’t help humans do customer service, “it does customer service.” 

To ensure AI-first thinking, Des calls on companies to review their product-market fit from an AI perspective, and ask: 

  • Who are you selling to? 
  • What is the actual thing they need done? 
  • What level of it can you do with AI? 
  • What does the feature set need to look like for that to happen?

Meanwhile, Eoin Hinchy, Co-Founder and CEO of Tines, believes the key to AI is building features that add significant value to customers – not just ‘nice-to-have’ add-ons. For example, Tines spent 18 months working on 70+ failed experiments in order to create an AI product that enables its customers to build better workflows simply by just describing what they want.

4. Mission alignment

“You always remain centred on your goals, values, and principles.” Tony Jamous, Founder & CEO, Oyster HR

Whether it’s building a new product, entering a new market, or keeping up with the competition, it’s easy to get pulled in different directions as you scale. But staying true to the problem you solve uniquely well will help you stand out and pull clear of competitors. 

For instance, instead of moving horizontally like its well-backed rivals, Oyster HR focused on becoming the best platform for cross border employment (and subsequently became a SaaS unicorn). According to Founder and CEO Tony Jamous, this ‘simple’ mission gave Oyster a competitive edge in supporting and servicing customers, motivated its people and helped manage setbacks, such as missing a quarter or somebody quitting. 

Des Traynor also agrees on the benefits of alignment. For him, tightening your company’s focus and ensuring everyone is on the same page enables you to create the go-to product for a specific department and “leave your competitors in the dust.”

5. Founder as a channel

“Founder market fit is way more important than product market fit.” Nathan Latka, Founder, GetLatka.com

2024 was a big year for ‘founder as a channel’ with many SaaS companies realising the growth benefits and capital efficiency of founder-led-marketing to differentiate their product.

For example, Nathan Latka wrote a bestseller, published a magazine and even appeared on billboards to help grow GetLatka.com to $150K MRR without a team. Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Chili Piper, Alina Vanderberghe, helps generate interest in Chili Piper by using LinkedIn to help customers succeed beyond using the product, such as sharing industry benchmarks and introducing customers to people that can solve their problems. 

Meanwhile, CEO of Retention.com Adam Robinson believes ‘founder as a channel’ is “the most powerful thing” you can do. He told me that posting 3-4 times a week on LinkedIn has helped spread awareness among his target buyers with very little overheads. His top three tips?

  • Post what your audience wants to hear (i.e. your leadership challenges)
  • Do something that AI can’t do (i.e. talking head videos about your finances)
  • Always be honest (i.e. explain about the bad times)

Standing out in 2025

Whether you’re looking to scale more efficiently or raise your next funding round this year, differentiation is a proven recipe for success. 

Read more about how success SaaS are getting ahead of the competition:

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