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In this episode of Startup Strategies, Juliana reveals why most founders are losing to competitors they could easily outmaneuver if they just knew where to look. After analyzing competitors for clients across B2B and B2C, she breaks down the exact system she uses to extract competitive intelligence that most founders never find because they don't know what questions to ask the data.
Juliana exposes the five analytical moves that separate founders who scale from founders who stall while their competition quietly captures market share. From traffic mapping that reveals strategic opportunities to platform attribution breakdowns that show you exactly where market leaders are vulnerable, she demonstrates why competitor analysis isn't about copying what's working but finding the gaps nobody else sees.
This conversation reveals why most competitive research is useless vanity metrics and what actually matters when you're trying to build an edge in a crowded market.
Juliana shares:
Links and resources:
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook
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In this episode of Startup Strategies, Juliana sits down with Stefan Bader, the founder who sold his parking data company to Continental, spent three years inside enterprise, then raised $8.3M for Cello after watching product-channel fit collapse across B2B. Stefan was at Continental post-acquisition when he realized he missed the messy zero-to-one chaos, so he co-founded Cello and started tracking something most founders ignore until revenue charts cliff dive.
Stefan reveals the brutal reality that customer acquisition cost payback time has 5x'd in five years - companies now need five years to recover CAC instead of 12-18 months. He's running a bet with the former VP of Sales at Pezono about which channel collapses first, and his money's on cold calling.
This conversation reveals why the next wave of successful founders will design growth loops instead of funnels, own their distribution channels instead of renting them, and diversify before collapse forces their hand.
Stefan shares:
Let’s break down his Startup Strategies.
Links and resources:
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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In this episode of Startup Strategies, Juliana sits down with Ish Jindal, the engineer-turned-entrepreneur who spent four years not knowing what MRR meant while bootstrapping TARS to $1M ARR. After discovering the internet in his second year of college, Ish went from building education websites in cyber cafes to travel hacking conferences across five countries, eventually stumbling into entrepreneurship through sheer curiosity rather than ambition.
When his travel startup Padharo got featured by BBC but he couldn't afford the flight to Delhi for the interview, Ish realized operations-heavy B2C wasn't his path. Meeting technical co-founder Vinit through LinkedIn led to building what they wanted to be "ChatGPT in 2015" - a conversational AI that started as a single WhatsApp number serving 40,000 users manually before evolving into the chatbot platform TARS.
Ish reveals why being completely ignorant of SaaS best practices became an advantage, how they built their early growth entirely through content marketing and 2,000 handmade chatbot templates, and why choosing marketers over support teams as their first customers nearly killed them during COVID when marketing budgets disappeared overnight.
This conversation challenges the venture capital playbook and shows how patience, curiosity, and building something you'd actually use can create sustainable growth over nine years of bootstrapping.
Ish shares:
Links and resources:
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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In this episode of Startup Strategies, Juliana breaks down the brutal truth about social media marketing that most content creators and founders refuse to accept - their content is poor, and that's exactly where they need to start. After scaling her client from zero to $2 million in revenue and 10 million users while generating millions across creators and companies in every niche, she reveals why the people making real money from social media do the exact opposite of what everyone teaches.
Juliana exposes the 5 principles that separate creators who turn social media into revenue engines versus those collecting vanity metrics while their bank accounts stay flat. From her own journey of posting "hideous" content while building her agency across e-commerce, Web3, and now serving clients across all industries, she demonstrates why admitting your content needs work is actually the breakthrough moment most creators avoid.
This conversation reveals why 2020's TikTok revolution created the biggest opportunity in content creation history that most people completely missed, and how understanding algorithmic distribution beats networking every time.
Juliana shares:
Let’s break down his Startup Strategies.
Links and resources:
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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In this episode of Startup Strategies, Juliana sits down with George Munguia, the serial entrepreneur who went from negative $200 in his bank account to raising $2 million for Harmony AI after his manager threatened to fire him for using AI tools. George was grinding through content marketing at a 500-person startup, spending weeks writing single blog posts when he discovered Jasper AI and started cranking out five times more content. His manager's reaction was swift and brutal - she put him on a performance improvement plan and called him "disgraceful" for using AI to do his job.
George quit and built Harmony AI, which connects scattered sales and marketing data to show exactly who's ready to buy and when to call them. He reveals his unconventional fundraising approach where 70% of his round came from cold email, including landing HubSpot and Typeform co-founders as investors.
This conversation reveals why the next wave of successful founders will be those who prepare to surf change instead of waiting for permission, and how connecting data signals beats building separate dashboards.
George shares:
Links and resources:
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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In this episode of Startup Strategies, Juliana sits down with Casey Woo, the reformed Wall Street finance professional who went from corner office overlooking Central Park to building one of Silicon Valley's most exclusive operator communities. After feeling miserable despite having everything Wall Street promised, Casey made the leap to startups and discovered he "loved eating glass" - but Silicon Valley had other plans. When a $100 billion company told him he couldn't get hired for free because he neither coded nor sold, Casey found eight other finance refugees feeling equally lost and started meeting monthly in coffee shops.
That group of nine lonely operators is now the 1,100-member Operators Guild, which has invested in 70+ companies through FOG Ventures with zero salespeople and 100% organic growth. Casey reveals why AI is eating specialists from the bottom while generalists who can orchestrate multiple AI agents across departments are becoming invaluable. He breaks down the operational mistakes that kill companies scaling from $1M to $10M ARR, from the $50 million valuation trap that creates impossible growth pressure to the hiring death spiral where founders burn through runway trying to reach Mars when they just need orbit.
Casey explains why the world is moving toward "multidisciplinary builders" who speak accountant, engineer, narcissist CEO, and marketing fluently - like Jedi mind tricks for business functions. He shares how tech is becoming commoditized while brand, distribution, and trust become the new competitive advantages, and why the future belongs to horizontal thinkers who can see across entire businesses rather than specialists stuck in single departments.
This conversation challenges everything you think you know about hiring, scaling, and building teams in an AI-first world.
Casey shares:
Links and resources:
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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In this episode of Startup Strategies, Juliana sits down with Gaurav Bhattacharya, three-time venture-backed founder and CEO of Jeeva AI, who proves that scrappy execution beats massive funding every time. After getting tired of complex enterprise sales cycles in his previous companies, Gaurav built an AI sales prospecting tool using tactics that sound insane until you see the results: sending two cents through PayPal, getting banned from communities on purpose, and treating legal threats as rebranding opportunities. From aerospace engineer to Forbes 30 under 30, Gaurav shares how a 9-person team generated $5 million ARR competing against Andreessen Horowitz-backed companies spending millions on billboards.
He reveals the psychology behind why "because" is a magic word that bypasses rational thinking, how getting rejected from Slack groups became market validation, and why Disney's lawyers inadvertently helped him build a better company. Gaurav breaks down the exact strategies behind booking 107 meetings in one week, from weaponizing PayPal's notification system to turning freemium users into intelligence assets that led to six-figure enterprise deals.
This conversation challenges everything you think you know about outbound sales, competitive advantages, and building with constraints instead of capital.
Gaurav shares:
Let's break down his Startup Strategies!
Links and resources:
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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In this episode of Startup Strategies, Juliana breaks down the complete system behind scaling apps and software from zero to $200K+ monthly recurring revenue - and why most founders are approaching growth completely backwards. Instead of obsessing over perfect products and feature lists, she reveals the counterintuitive framework that turns downloads into recurring revenue by focusing on what actually makes people share content.
Juliana exposes the critical blind spots plaguing each business model: B2B founders who crush paid advertising but bomb at organic content because they think authority sells when even business buyers want to be surprised. B2C creators who nail viral content but can't figure out how to put budget behind what's already working. And hybrid products sitting on the biggest untapped opportunity because they can tap both emotional triggers and practical benefits - but most founders completely miss this positioning advantage.
Juliana reveals:
Let's break down these Startup Strategies!
Links and resources:
Book a FREE 30-min strategy session: https://calendly.com/juliana-gromedia-y7c_/30min?month=2025-05
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook: https://shop.beacons.ai/juliana_hahn/c3255600-7040-437a-98b6-d216e0e9e10e
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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Are you tired of SaaS marketing feeling like random experiments rather than a coherent, effective strategy? In this episode, Juliana Han of Gro Media breaks down her powerful method for viral SaaS growth - Unique Viral Propositions (UVPs).
Juliana, who has spent nearly a decade scaling startups from zero users to millions, discusses the critical mistakes most founders make, like hiring inexperienced marketers or adopting a spray-and-pray approach that drains budgets and kills momentum. She outlines a crystal-clear framework for engineering virality by pinpointing emotional triggers, crafting attention-demanding content, and maximizing reach on platforms optimized for algorithmic growth.
You'll hear firsthand case studies from successful brands like Custom Use and Blackbox AI, detailing precisely how they converted virality into sustainable customer acquisition and scaled beyond the coveted million ARR milestone.
Tune in now and learn how to turn your SaaS marketing chaos into a predictable user-acquisition powerhouse.
Links and resources:
Book a FREE 30-min strategy session.
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook.
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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In this episode of Startup Strategies, Juliana sits down with 19-year-old Zyad Djouad, co-founder of Lens, who's rewriting the startup playbook from his college dorm room. After spending countless nights editing videos for his 370K subscriber YouTube channel, Zyad discovered a gap that would become his breakthrough - no AI tool existed for prompt-based video editing. What followed defies conventional wisdom: 13,000 organic waitlist signups in one week, Y Combinator partners reaching out after a single Reddit post, and Zyad actively turning down six-figure investment offers.
From reconnecting with childhood gaming partners who built billion-impression Roblox studios to converting passive email subscribers into 2,500 active Discord beta testers, Zyad shares the unconventional strategies behind building what could disrupt Adobe's video editing dominance. He reveals why 10K Twitter views outperform 1M Instagram impressions, his "money amplifies what you already have" investment philosophy, and the pivot moment when enterprise clients showed they'd pay premium for an AI-powered footage organization. This conversation challenges everything you think you know about startup funding, co-founder selection, and building in public.
Zyad shares:
• Why solving your own desperate problem beats market research
• The platform physics that drive real conversion vs vanity metrics
• How childhood friends with pre-built trust outperform MBA co-founders
• The Discord strategy that turns waitlists into product development teams
• Why refusing investor money can be the smartest strategic move
Let’s break down his Startup Strategies!
Links and resources:
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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Aydin is the co-founder of Fellow and he's today's guest on Startup Strategies with Juliana Hahn. From losing everything in the dot-com crash at age 13 to building a $30+ million SaaS platform, Aydin has navigated multiple pivots and a strategic exit that shaped his approach to AI-first product development. In this episode, he reveals how he and his 20-year co-founding team bootstrapped their way to a multi-million dollar SurveyMonkey acquisition, then leveraged that experience to identify the manager productivity gap that became Fellow.
Aydin shares how he:
Let's break down his Startup Strategies.
Links and resources:
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Juliana Hahn is the CEO & founder of Gro Media and Startup Strategies. In this episode, she breaks down the key differences in strategies between B2B Marketing and B2C Marketing. Typically this is overcomplicated unnecessarily. She shares a simple framework for deciding on the most suitable marketing strategies for the two different business models, depending on how long a startup company's sales cycle truly is.
Juliana shares:
Let's break down these Startup Strategies.
Links and resources:
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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Sheida Mirjahani, is the co-founder of Flowjin and she's today's guest on Startup Strategies with Juliana Hahn. Originally from Tehran and now based in Toronto, Sheida built a six-figure ARR video repurposing platform that helps B2B teams turn long-form content like webinars, podcasts, and sales calls into short, shareable clips for marketing and sales enablement. In this episode, she reveals the scrappy validation tactics and SEO strategies that took her from manually serving Twitter Spaces hosts to scaling a bootstrapped SaaS with 900 paying customers.
Sheida shares how:
Let's break down her Startup Strategies.
Links and resources:
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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Grace Beverley and Jake Browne are the co-founders of Retrograde, and we’re finding out more about them on Startup Strategies with Juliana Hahn. Backed by $2M in pre-seed funding, they built Emma, an AI talent agent that’s redefining how creators manage brand deals. In this episode, we break down how their insider experience in the creator economy gave them a strategic edge, how they ignored surface-level user feedback and instead built in a different direction, and why personifying their AI tool was the key to gaining traction.
Grace and Jake share their Startup Strategies on how to:
• Use insider experience to identify and solve real pain points.
• Make your product memorable by giving it a story users want to be part of.
• Create an emotional connection to an AI product through brand personification.
• Leverage founder-product-fit to turn a personal brand into a powerful distribution engine.
Let’s break down their Startup Strategies!
Links and resources:
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook.
Book a FREE 30-min strategy session.
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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Juliana Hahn is the CEO & founder of Gro Media and the host of Startup Strategies.
In this episode, she breaks down the key strategies behind growing SaaS startups from zero to over $1M ARR. From flipping the traditional SaaS funnel, to prioritizing your most aware users first, to engineering growth with stage-specific content that converts.
Learn how to:
Let’s break down these Startup Strategies!
Links and resources:
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook.
Book a FREE 30-min strategy session.
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Juliana Hahn is the CEO & founder of Gro Media and the host of Startup Strategies. In this episode, she breaks down the key strategies behind growing SaaS startups from zero to over $1M in annual recurring revenue (ARR). From marketing a product that wasn't even close to being ready for launch, to building a waitlist, to engineering viral organic growth.
Learn how to:
Let’s break down these Startup Strategies!
Links and resources:
Book a call with us here
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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Mihailo Bozic is the founder of Migrate Mate, and he’s today’s guest on Startup Strategies with Juliana Hahn. What started as a personal struggle to stay in the U.S. became a bootstrapped business doing $500K ARR, all within just 3 months. In this episode, we break down how nearly getting kicked out of the country pushed Mihailo to build a platform helping job seekers find companies that offer visa sponsorship. He combined that mission with sharp growth instincts and years of experience in marketing to build traction fast, without raising a cent.
Mihailo shares his Startup Strategies on how to:
Let’s break down his Startup Strategies!
Links and resources:
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
FREE Goal Tracking Template
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing breakdowns.
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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Julia Enthoven is the founder of Kapwing, and she’s today’s guest on Startup Strategies with Juliana Hahn. She turned a simple meme maker into one of the most-used online video tools for creators and marketing teams, scaling it to over $10M in annual revenue. In this episode, we dive into how Julia spotted the rise of video while working at Google, and how that insight led to building one of the most accessible, creator-friendly video editors.
Julia shares her Startup Strategies on how to:
Let’s break down her Startup Strategies!
Links and resources:
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
FREE Goal Tracking Template
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing tactics
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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Andrew Gazdecki is the founder of Acquire.com, and he’s today's guest on Startup Strategies with Juliana Hahn. He’s building the go-to marketplace for founders looking to sell their startups — and doing it with serious scale. In this episode, we dive into how Andrew used two unconventional startup experiences (including one he exited quickly due to legal gray areas) and the lessons he learned in setting the foundation for a platform that’s helped facilitate over $500M in startup acquisitions.
Andrew shares his Startup Strategies on how to:
Let’s break down his Startup Strategies!
Links and resources:
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
FREE Goal Tracking Template
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing tactics
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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Selin & Karun are the co-founders of Delve. They’re today's guests on Startup Strategies with Juliana Hahn and they are building an AI automated platform that makes compliance effortless. How they’re making regulatory headaches disappear and proving that even the most mind-numbing work can be a growth engine. We chat about how they are scaling through organic word-of-mouth, why in-person meetings helped them close their first deals, the bold marketing stunt that brought in $50K in a single day, and how they’ve helped clients secure $100M contracts with industry giants like OpenAI and PayPal for their customers. Let’s breakdown their Startup Strategies.
Selin & Karun’s Startup Strategies on how to:
Links and resources:
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
FREE Goal Tracking Template
Join the Startup Strategies Newsletter for weekly growth & marketing tactics
Let’s connect:
Need help with growing & marketing your startup? Work with us.
Make sure you hit FOLLOW or the + sign so you don’t miss out on future episodes on everything growth & marketing for your startup.
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