Ludus operates a zero-cost ticketing platform for performing arts organizations, monetizing through patron convenience fees while transferring full ticket face value to venues. What began as a freshman year project for a high school theater director evolved into a company processing millions annually across thousands of customers. After surviving COVID-19’s 95% revenue elimination and competitor market exits, Ludus captured displaced customers and achieved their growth inflection point. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, CEO and Co-Founder Zachary Collins detailed the execution mechanics behind customer advocacy generation, human-differentiated scaling, and market expansion through systematic word-of-mouth amplification. Topics Discussed: - Monetization alignment between platform and venues through patron-paid fee structures - Crisis survival mechanics: reducing to two employees while maintaining core product functionality - Systematic customer advocacy through documented attribution and public recognition programs - Counter-positioning against AI-first competitors through human-guaranteed support availability - Strategic capital deployment: transitioning from profitable bootstrapping to venture-accelerated expansion - Geographic and vertical expansion from high school theater to community venues and concert halls GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: - Deploy bottom-up penetration to bypass procurement friction and generate authentic adoption signals: Collins chose theater director sales over superintendent-level contracts despite longer individual deal cycles. This approach avoided forced adoption resistance while creating measurable engagement data from actual product usage rather than mandate compliance. The strategic insight: bottom-up sales generate higher-quality expansion opportunities because satisfied end users become internal advocates who influence broader organizational adoption. Implementation requires identifying decision-makers with both budget authority and day-to-day pain points, then optimizing for usage depth over initial contract size. - Transform support incidents into systematic advocacy generation through zero-effort resolution protocols: When database corruption lost customer registration data, Ludus manually contacted every affected parent, reconstructed missing information, and delivered complete solutions in organized spreadsheets. This zero-customer-effort approach generates 97-99% satisfaction scores while creating advocacy moments from potential churn situations. The tactical framework: establish incident response that eliminates customer work entirely, document extraordinary efforts taken, and follow up to ensure complete satisfaction. This converts support costs from pure overhead into measurable advocacy generation with direct attribution to pipeline growth. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don’t Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM