TL;DR

• B2B SaaS startups struggle early because strong products alone don’t guarantee traction. Without clear GTM strategies, even technically brilliant tools fail.

• Growth levers in SaaS and B2B are data-driven strategies such as SEO, GitHub marketing, community engagement, and PLG that drive adoption and retention.

• 11 growth levers for early-stage SaaS and B2B startups and consistent execution of these growth levers will build long-term success.

• They are systematic engines, not quick hacks, that compound over time, making them essential in the competitive B2B SaaS market.

• Examples: Startups like Supabase, Daytona.ai, and Grafana Labs show how open-source engagement, SEO, and events can accelerate growth.

SaaS and B2B have become a driving force in the software industry, reshaping the modern business landscape.

According to Statista, the global SaaS market is growing at an impressive annual rate of 9.80%, with its value projected to surge from $390.50 billion in 2025 to $793.10 billion by 2029.

Success in this space, however, is far from formulaic as there’s no single blueprint that works for every startup. Strategies are important for growth, and growth strategies will be different for early-stage B2B SaaS startups like Vercel, Lovabl,e or CardinalHQ and late-stage startups like Netflix or Google.

In this article, we’ll explore 11 growth levers behind Pre-Seeded B2B SaaS companies. Your startup can carve out a sustainable path to success in the competitive B2B SaaS market! But before jumping straight into the growth levers, let us first understand why SaaS and b2b startups fail in the early stages.

Why B2B SaaS Startups Fail in the Early Stage?

Many assume that a strong product or service alone guarantees traction, but the reality of the B2B SaaS market proves otherwise. Even the most technically brilliant platforms, built by former FAANG engineers or top-tier infra talent, struggle without distribution, visibility, and deliberate growth strategies.

In our work with Seed to Pre-Seed infra/DevTools startups, we see the same story play out again and again:

• Stage: Early-stage teams still refining product–market fit and searching for a scalable GTM.
• Location: Primarily US/EU-based, with engineering-heavy teams.
• Problem: They’ve built a world-class product, but lack the content distribution muscle to get it seen. Domain authority (DA) is low, SEO traffic is negligible, and presence outside of GitHub repos is minimal.
• Buyer Persona: The typical founder here is highly technical, balancing code with the challenge of figuring out GTM for startups.

This is why many B2B SaaS Startups struggle in their early years, without deliberate growth levers, even the best products remain invisible to their market.

Example: Delite, a B2B SaaS platform for wholesale orders, failed to address real customer pain points, resulting in product-market misalignment and early shutdowns

What are Growth Levers For B2B SaaS Company?

If your early-stage SaaS and B2B startup is struggling to grow, then it is time for you to adopt growth levers for success. Growth levers are strategies that can drive growth for your b2b SaaS company. These can include a wide range of activities such as improving customer retention, increasing the number of customers, or understanding your methods on a deeper level.

Growth levers are based on data and analytics and are typically designed to identify opportunities for growth and capitalize on them.

Emerging companies that are b2b SaaS often face the same challenge - a great product but not so great growth. Want some help? At Infrasity, we are more than happy to see your SaaS and B2B startup grow! We are built specifically for early-stage B2B SaaS and DevTools startups in areas like observability, infrastructure, and developer tooling

For instance, A recent project with Daytona.ai, a B2B SaaS startup that provides cloud-based developer workspaces, illustrates this approach. To amplify Daytona.ai’s reach and make its product’s value tangible, we built a series of public use case examples hosted on GitHub.

Snapshot of Daytona SDK Examples

• Each folder demonstrates a real-world sample app built using Daytona’s product.

• We showcased how easy it is to provision and use cloud workspaces for development.

• The repos included step-by-step flows, architecture diagrams, and explanations, lowering the barrier for new developers to adopt.

By turning GitHub into a content distribution hub, this initiative achieved multiple growth outcomes:

• Gave Daytona.ai a library of hands-on tutorials developers could try immediately.

• Drove SEO and discoverability, repos themselves rank in Google for specific dev queries.

• Positioned Daytona.ai as a developer-first brand by speaking their language, code and examples.

Why Is Growth Lever for Early-Stage B2B SaaS Important?

Growth levers are not just growth hacks but are systematic engines that compound over time, like SEO, content marketing, and community engagement, including developer engagement on GitHub. For any B2B SaaS startups, these growth levers matter because:

1. The B2B SaaS market is competitive: Thousands of SaaS and B2B tools compete for the same budgets, in the same market, and without differentiation in distribution, even outstanding products drown in noise.

2. Technical founders undervalue GTM for startups: Many engineers believe “the product will sell itself.” In reality, buyers need education, validation, and trust.

3. Levers compound: A comparison blog today drives leads for months; an early presence on Hacker News creates credibility that lasts years.

On GitHub, growth can be measured with clear community-driven signals such as:

• Number of stars (visibility & social proof).

• Number of contributors (how many people actively build with you).

• Active contributions and issue resolution speed (shows product maturity).

• How many people clone or fork the repo (actual adoption & usage).

• Overall development activity (how alive and trusted the project feels).

Early-stage B2B SaaS growth depends less on adding features and more on activating the right levers consistently—and GitHub metrics are a direct reflection of that consistency.

11 Growth Levers for Success in Early-Stage B2B SaaS Startups

Let’s understand the growth levers and what action steps you can take to turn the tables.

1. Deep Market and Audience Understanding

Early-stage B2B SaaS companies like Cardinal often build for themselves, but lasting growth comes from knowing and understanding your audience inside out. By investing time in structured market research and persona validation, SaaS and B2B startups can avoid building in isolation and ensure the roadmap aligns with real demand.

Action step:

• Identify 2-3 forums where your target personas are active.
• Share practical use cases, open-source learnings, engineering lessons, or detailed benchmarks.

Avoid: Overly promotional content. These communities punish “spammy” or “too promotional” behavior quickly.

Example: Supabase is a perfect case. By being active on Hacker News and openly sharing new releases, benchmarks, and milestones, they caught attention and built early adoption loops that scaled into a strong open-source movement.

2. GitHub as a Marketing Channel

GitHub can be a powerful growth lever when treated as a distribution and engagement channel, not just a code repository. For XYZ, maintaining the GitHub org as a content hub means turning repos into discoverable tutorials and integration examples (e.g., OTEL to S3 exporter, Prometheus to S3, ELK to S3, DaemonSet to JSON/Parquet). Each repo should have a README that works as a mini landing page with badges, demo GIFs, blog links, and a “Try it now” CTA.

Using GitHub Discussions allows lightweight community Q&A (“What’s your biggest observability pain point?”) while also collecting feedback for roadmap decisions.

Action steps:

• README = Landing Page - Badges, demo GIFs, links to docs/blogs, clear CTA.

• Examples Repo - cardinalhq/examples with tutorials like “Deploy LakeRunner on AWS in 10 minutes”.

• Tutorial Repos - Small, single-purpose repos for integrations (OTEL to S3, Kubernetes exporter)

• Micro-Content per Release - Changelogs, sample configs, demos.

• GitHub Discussions - Open Q&A threads to capture community pain points.

• Cross-Linking - Push blog links/docs in README and repos to improve SEO + engagement.

3. Cover All Buyer Personas

In B2B SaaS, the decision-making process is layered. Developers may push adoption, but CTOs or tech leads approve budgets. The content and messaging must speak to all these personas differently.

Action step:

• Create custom assets docs for devs, ROI cases for CTOs.

• Keep a balance between technical depth with business outcomes.

• Enable your sales teams with persona-specific messaging.

4. Build Technical SEO Foundations

SEO isn’t a quick fix, but laying the groundwork early pays compounding dividends, and it takes time to actually give you results, but it is long-term. Technical SEO ensures your website is crawlable, fast, and authoritative. At the same time, content-driven SEO blogs, docs, and tutorials build trust while ranking for queries your target audience is actively searching.

Action step:

• Conduct an audit of technical SEO for the site speed, crawlability, and indexing.

• Invest in developer documentation, long-tail keywords, and DA building.

• Leverage backlinks from engineering blogs and community mentions.

  How Infrasity set up SEO content effectively:

To make SEO practical and outcome-driven, we build a structured content playbook:

Educational / Explainers

• What is Observability in 2025?

• How to Set up LakeRunner and Chip

• Integrating OpenTelemetry into your stack

• Tuning collectors and managing high-cardinality data

• A public demo environment hosted by XYZ, where users can send sample telemetry and explore LakeRunner/Chip via Grafana.

How-to / Tutorials

• Step-by-step guide: Integrating [tool/product] with your stack

• Debugging performance bottlenecks in production environments

Comparison / Alternatives

• XYZ vs [Competitor] - Which one should you choose?

• Top 5 observability tools for cloud-native teams

Industry Insights / Trend Analysis

• Observability trends in 2025

5. Monitor Industry Trends

B2B SaaS is fast-moving and continuously monitoring industry trends, such as new frameworks, regulations, or competitor moves, is a must. This will help you stay ahead. Adapting early often becomes a differentiator.

Action step:

• Track newsletters, analyst reports, and competitor updates.

• Create an internal “trend log” to inform product and marketing.

• Engage thought leaders on emerging conversations.

Example: Vercel capitalized on the Jamstack trend early, positioning itself as the frontrunner in frontend hosting. Their timing and messaging gave them outsized mindshare.

6. Create Distribution Channels

For early-stage B2B SaaS startups, distribution is often harder than product development. Many engineering-heavy teams underestimate how much community can amplify growth.

Communities act as distribution networks, whether that’s developer forums, open-source ecosystems, Medium, Slack, Reddit, Discord groups, or industry newsletters. A well-engaged community spreads awareness and, most importantly, drives adoption through peer recommendations, which are far more trusted than ads.

The goal isn’t to “own” the community but to participate authentically and add value. Feel free to share your product journey, contribute code, sponsor open-source projects, or even host office hours where engineers can ask questions.

Action step:

• Identify 2–3 communities where your ICP, such as CTOs, DevOps engineers, tech leads, already hang out. Example: You can join primary subreddits: r/devops, r/kubernetes, r/cloudcomputing, or secondary subreddits: r/sre, r/sysadmin, r/SoftwareEngineering

• Engage with value and answer questions, share benchmarks, and contribute open-source fixes.

• Build micro-communities and consider launching a Slack or Discord group for your early adopters.

• Use distribution multipliers and partner with newsletters, podcasts, or GitHub to expand the reach.

Example: Open-source SaaS tools like Prisma and PostHog built strong developer communities on GitHub and Slack, turning users into evangelists. Instead of cold outreach, their distribution scaled organically through community-led conversations.

7. Streamline Pricing & Product-Led Growth (PLG)

Pricing is not “set it and forget it.” Early-stage B2B SaaS startups should test different tiers, value metrics, and bundles to see what resonates with their audience. The goal is not just revenue maximization but also aligning pricing with perceived value.

Action step:

• Start with simple tiers, then test value-based iterations.

• Experiment with free trials, freemium vs. paid entry points, and add-ons.

• Analyze and churn triggers and customer willingness to pay.

Example: Zendesk iterated on pricing multiple times as it grew. By introducing enterprise pricing, it unlocked a whole new customer segment that drove ARR past $1 billion.

8. Build Social Media Presence

Social media may feel crowded, but for an early-stage startup, it’s about consistency and authenticity, not follower count.

LinkedIn and Twitter (X) are the primary channels for B2B engagement. Sharing product updates, customer wins, and even the struggles of building SaaS makes your brand relatable and memorable.

Action step:

• Commit to 2–3 posts weekly on your primary channel.

• You may focus on founder-led storytelling, use cases, change logs, release notes and product progress.

• Engage with relevant hashtags, trending conversations, and community leaders such as Jyoti Bansal, a serial tech entrepreneur, founder of AppDynamics, and current CEO of Harness and Traceable AI; Sam Altman, Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.

9. Develop a Clear Roadmap and Communicate It

A transparent roadmap shared through public boards, blogs, or community updates on different channels builds trust and creates anticipation for future features.

Action step:

• Use tools like Trello or Notion to share roadmaps.

• Communicate and learn what’s shipping soon, what’s in research, and what’s planned. Stay up-to-date.

• Engage or invite users to vote or provide feedback on roadmap priorities.

Publishing your roadmap or sharing product updates publicly does 3 things:

• Attracts early adopters
• Signals confidence
• Helps you stand out

Snapshot of a content calendar

10. Leverage Offline & Online Events

Events are a powerful growth lever for B2B SaaS startups, especially when targeting technical buyers. From sponsoring booths to speaking engagements, events like KubeCon, AWS re:Invent, and niche meetups can create direct connections with high-intent prospects.

• Action step: Start small with community meetups or webinars.

• Scale to: industry conferences as the budget grows.

• Post-event: follow up with tailored nurture campaigns.

Example: Grafana Labs consistently leveraged KubeCon to showcase new integrations, securing enterprise adoption by directly engaging the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Note: For early-stage SaaS, events accelerate trust-building and shorten sales cycles

11. Act on Customer Feedback

Customer feedback loops are the engine of SaaS iteration. Early adopters want to feel heard, and their feedback often uncovers product gaps you wouldn’t see internally. Creating systems for structured feedback accelerates product-market fit.

• Action step: Build in-app feedback loops, surveys, and interviews.

• Prioritize: recurring requests and pain points.

• Close the loop: notify users when their suggestion is shipped.

Conclusion

Early-stage SaaS and B2B startups operate in a crowded and competitive market where technical brilliance alone doesn’t guarantee growth. The companies that succeed are those that activate the right growth levers. By applying the growth levers shared in this blog, your B2B SaaS company can move from invisibility to recognition and achieve a sustainable growth engine in the B2B SaaS market.

FAQ

1. What are growth levers and how to find them

   Growth levers are strategies or repeatable activities that drive sustainable growth in SaaS and B2B startups. They can include technical SEO, GitHub marketing, content-driven distribution, pricing experiments, community engagement, and many more, which you can learn from this blog. To find them, analyze customer journeys, track metrics like activation rates and retention, and identify where small improvements can create compounding impact in your B2B SaaS company.

2. How does GTM for startups connect with growth levers?

   A GTM strategy sets the framework for how a SaaS and B2B company reaches its target audience. Growth levers like content distribution, events, and PLG plug into this GTM strategy. This amplifies the reach and adoption, and without deliberate GTM planning, even strong growth levers won’t deliver sustainable results.

3. Why is community important for SaaS and B2B growth?

   Communities act as distribution multipliers for B2B SaaS startups. Platforms like GitHub, Reddit (e.g., r/devops, r/kubernetes, r/cloudcomputing), and Discord amplify reach by turning early adopters into evangelists. For companies that are B2B, this word-of-mouth and peer validation is more trusted than ads, making the community a critical growth lever. Read this blog to learn more.