How Air Cut 90% of Marketing Spend and Tripled Revenue in 18 Months

Lerer Hippeau
Lerer Hippeau

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By Emily Libresco, Lerer Hippeau’s Senior Director, Marketing & Communications

Everyone knows SaaS start-ups move at thrilling, breakneck speeds (for legal purposes, I’ll note that I mean this cheekily), and it can be easy for companies to accept the conventional thinking that the only way to scale these businesses requires ever-increasing marketing budgets and complicated ad funnel strategies. Employing these strategies today is simply too expensive to make sense for most businesses. But what if the opposite could be true? What if a B2B business could thrive by slashing its marketing budget and go all in on creative, zany approaches to spreading the word? Can SaaS businesses succeed by departing from the classic playbook of (sometimes) awkward webinars and endless Facebook ads?

That’s precisely what Air, an early stage B2B SaaS company in our portfolio, has done over the past 18 months. With more than 2,200 paying customers and 100,000+ users, Air is demonstrating how center-of-culture campaigns and content-led marketing can both drive revenue and maximize efficiency. Read on for a case study in masterclass marketing.

Status quo: Endless ads, stagnant growth

In 2022, Air was grappling with an age-old dilemma: their marketing team was burning through a significant budget on paid media and PPC campaigns. Despite the spend, conversions weren’t keeping pace with expenditure.

After reviewing their approach to marketing, Air CEO Shane Hegde identified the principal issue: the team was pouring money into strategies that lacked focus, and, moreover, didn’t really speak to the brand Hegde wanted to build. “We were throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck,” he recalls. “We weren’t being efficient and the reality was that while we were growing, it wasn’t nearly quickly or cheaply enough. It was simply unsustainable. It was also, frankly, a bit dull.”

Pivot: All in on creative

Instead of doubling down on their existing marketing approach, Air took a more radical turn. They decided to cut 90% of their marketing budget, and instead focus on building a moat around the one aspect of their marketing that couldn’t be replicated: creativity.

Head of Content Ariel Rubin puts it this way:

“Everything we do in our marketing efforts at Air has to answer two simple questions. If the answer is no to either, it’s a non-starter:

1. Does it make us look bigger than we are?

2. Would I watch/share/like it if I weren’t being paid to watch/share/like it?

Our ICP are Creative Directors and their colleagues. We know that to reach them, we need to earn them. We will not be able to wrestle them into submission with an endless barrage of Meta ads and Google search terms. Yes, paid has its place. But early stage companies all too often go all in there while neglecting brand entirely. If brand people are our audience — so went our reasoning — shouldn’t we be leaning toward them as our first priority?”

Taking notice of original marketing tactics from CPG brands like Liquid Death and Oatly, Air’s content team began developing a strategy that could effectively reach an outsized audience of their ICP — in ways that didn’t require breaking the bank to pay for the privilege. In a recent interview, Liquid Death VP of Creative Andy Pearson described Air’s similar thinking perfectly:

“We don’t really buy media, relatively speaking. If you turn on a basketball or football game, you’ll see the same ad like three times because they’re buying media against it to make sure you do that. We’d rather make something hilarious. We want to be the best thing someone sees that day, and then you can go on about your day.”

Well-said, Pearson. So as Air built out their content marketing strategy, they used three key questions as a guide:

  • Can we take that same ethos from CPG and bring it to SaaS?
  • Can we find ways to make those top-of-funnel campaigns serve as pull further into the funnel?
  • In an increasingly chaotic media landscape, can awareness also become activation?

The answer — they continued to see, as campaigns grew in size and following — was yes.

Vision: Content-market fit

Air’s first major campaign within this new approach consisted of a subversive short film made in conjunction with Cash Studios, which set the stage for the company’s wider effort. The result was an AdAge Editor’s Pick and a Vimeo Staff Pick, alongside features in both Little Black Book and AdWeek. A series of bold campaigns followed, with highlights including:

  • A sustained stunt spanning months in which Air collaborated with social media influencer Kareem Rahma to be their Chief Imagination Officer. Air released a series of (fake) podcast clips making incendiary and ridiculous points about creative work. Air then abruptly “fired” him, and then “rehired” him and produced a 20-minute mockumentary where he went Borat-style undercover at a Creative Operations conference in London.
  • Air staged a protest of elderly people decrying Dropbox because it takes too damn long to find creative files and they don’t have unlimited time. The protest garnered earned media and went organically viral.
  • Air also took a more serious, thoughtful look at the business of creativity and entrepreneurship with Out to Lunch, a two-season series sponsored by JP Morgan that brought Air CEO Shane Hegde face to face with some of the most exciting brandbuilders and CMOs in New York City. The series received hundreds of thousands of views and earned a 2024 Webby.

Content is the tentpole by which we surround our entire marketing strategy at Air,” notes Hegde. “These campaigns we produce on a monthly basis are the lighthouse. Everything we do — SEO, paid, lifecycle — waterfalls from that. Everyone talks about product-market fit, and that customers pull you into the market because of success. At Air, we believe that content-market fit is equally important. As growth guru Brian Balfour puts it, “Products are built to fit with channels. Channels do not mold to products.”

Results: CAC down, margins up

By mid 2024, Air began to see results. Here’s a snapshot:

  • 90% Reduction in Marketing Spend: By cutting out ineffective channels and focusing on existing customers, Air was able to focus on what worked, saving substantial resources in the process.
  • Tripled Revenue: Through word-of-mouth, increased awareness, and customer expansion, Air was able to triple its revenue.
  • 83% Gross Margin: A pared down marketing team with heightened focus on enterprise offerings helped drive up gross margin.

What Other Founders Can Learn

Air’s experience serves as a powerful reminder that successful growth doesn’t necessarily come from spending more — sharpening focus while spending with discretion can achieve extraordinary results. Here are a few additional key takeaways for early stage founders as they think about their marketing approach:

  1. Creative serves as a moat: Especially if your ICP are marketers and creatives, speaking to them where they are with memorable campaigns can supercharge your awareness.
  2. Be data-driven: Use social media analytics to guide your campaign development and marketing strategies. Understand where your audience is. Just because something goes viral, it doesn’t mean your customer saw it.
  3. Show up big: The internet is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter if you’re Charlie XCX or a cloud storage company — you have the same opportunity to make yourself known on the world’s biggest stage. Don’t waste it.
  4. Spend on what you believe in: Cutting down cost doesn’t mean cutting out cost. Develop a hypothesis and spend (carefully and cautiously) to see if you can prove it out.
  5. Get weird: It’s easy to do the same thing as other people in your space, but the reality is you’re not competing with everyone else in X or Y category — you’re competing with everyone else on every platform at all times. Act accordingly.

Conclusion: Efficient (but make it actually good)

Air’s story challenges the prevailing idea that more spending equals better results. By focusing on big creative swings and leveraging their existing networks, Hegde and his team managed to transform their business model and achieve remarkable growth.

In an industry where brand all-too-often takes a back seat to funnel focus, Air’s campaign-driven approach reminds us that sometimes the best strategy is to go all in on creative and let things get a little weird (if the brand ethos calls for it). As the B2B SaaS landscape continues to evolve and budgets tighten, this approach can, when done right, yield deeply exciting results.

Air’s head of content, Ari, and LH’s head of marketing and communications, Emily, backstage at “Out to Lunch” filming

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Lerer Hippeau
Lerer Hippeau

Published in Lerer Hippeau

Lerer Hippeau is an early-stage venture capital fund founded and operated in New York City. We invest in good people with great ideas who redefine categories — and create new ones entirely.

Lerer Hippeau
Lerer Hippeau

Written by Lerer Hippeau

Lerer Hippeau is the most active early-stage venture capital fund in New York.

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