The marketing strategy that took us from $0 to $3M (it's not what you think)

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]This is what you might think a marketing funnel looks like. When you start a business, everyone talks about the marketing funnel and a lot of people view their marketing funnel like this.

[00:00:09]Top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, conversion. You guys, we are in 2026.

[00:00:15]This does not exist anymore. Instead, may I present to you the marketing web.

[00:00:22]Let's talk about the marketing web and how we use it at Rella because this is what we need to be thinking about in 2026. Now that I have your attention, I want to talk about why the marketing funnel is dead and I know that that sounds dramatic, but as someone who has been building a company for the past 5 years-ish now, I have seen the marketing funnel go from this source of truth to being obsolete and I don't want you going into 2026 thinking that the marketing funnel is what you need to be looking at because instead, you need to be thinking of marketing as a web, not a funnel. I thought this was a perfect time to film this video because we have been preparing for our biggest launch of Rella yet and we have been really looking into our own marketing web as we launch this new version of Rella. And so I wanted to share with you some tips and tricks from our playbook that you can apply to your business no matter what it is. But I will be sharing our marketing web to give you ideas and inspiration.

[00:01:16]And if you're just nosy, like maybe you don't work in marketing or you don't own a business, like that's fine. I'm nosy, too. So, hopefully this video is helpful. And before we get into this video, I did want to thank Squarespace for sponsoring today's video.

[00:01:27]Squarespace is the number one website builder and as we speak, Natasha is actually updating our website on Squarespace. We just had a call with her this morning and she has been customizing and redoing our entire new website for this product launch. So, it's very fitting that Squarespace sponsors our video because it is truly our number one touchpoint that all of our customers, future customers, everyone that we get from our marketing web goes to our Squarespace website. And if you are a business owner or you work in marketing, you know that you need to have a website, so you need to build it on Squarespace. Squarespace is 100% customizable, which is why I personally love using it and it has the most beautiful templates that you can choose from. So, even if you're not a designer, you don't know graphic design, you don't know how to build a website, that does not matter because you have Squarespace which has a bunch of templates and everything is drag and drop, so you can completely customize it on your own. It also uses AI to help you build your website, so you can just kind of tell it what you want and just pick your color scheme and it will build it for you in a matter of seconds instead of hours or minutes of what it might usually take you. If you need a domain or a website, you can use my coupon code Natalie Barbu or go to squarespace.com/nataliebarbu and get 10% off your first order. Now, let's get back to the video. Let's talk about why the marketing funnel is broken. So, the classic funnel assumes that there is a clear linear journey.

[00:02:41]This looks like someone sees an ad, they click on it, they purchase. Or maybe you've seen in the past, they download your freebie, you collect their email, you send them an email and then they purchase your product. They're in your funnel. That pipeline does not exist anymore and to prove it, I want you to look at your own spending habits. Look at your credit card statement, look at the previous purchases that you've done and tell me why you decided to purchase.

[00:03:02]Was it because you saw an ad? Was it because you are in their email list? Or was it because all of the above plus you saw it on social media a couple times, you saw your favorite influencer post about it, your friend randomly brought it up the other day, you listened to a podcast with the founder of this business and then eventually you decided, "You know what? I'm in need of blank, let me check this out because I've heard about it so many times." That is why the marketing funnel is dead because that is not a linear journey.

[00:03:28]That looks like a marketing web. And the problem with the funnel is that you don't know which touchpoint was the one because let's say they see an ad, they convert, great. How do you know that that ad was the only reason that they decided to convert? You don't, which is why you need to spread your focus as a marketing team, as a business owner into multiple different aspects of marketing versus just one singular funnel. And that's why attribution is broken and that is why last click metrics are lying to you. So, let me show you how we have been building our web at Rella. I was honestly debating, do I share this, do I not? Because I don't know, I don't want to share all of our secrets, someone could copy us, but I love being transparent on here. I love when other business owners share the insights and the tactical things that they are doing at their business and so that is why I wanted to show you what we are doing at Rella. Let's talk about how we built the web. The first part of our web is content creation. The way that I've noticed most brands post content is they're randomly posting a bunch of content and they're hoping that someone notices it or they're jumping on trends, but there's no real strategy behind them. We think about it in three different content pillars, if you will.

[00:04:34]So, what that looks like is we have our traditional, let's say, top of funnel with content. We actually look at our content more as a funnel than marketing as a whole. So, I do still think the marketing funnel is dead, but I do think it's important to look at your content strategy as a funnel where we have our top of funnel as our educational content. So, that is informing new people about Rella. So, people that have never heard about Rella, they're seeing this Instagram post or this TikTok post for the first time. That for us looks like educational content. However, a year ago that looked like skit-style content where we would post funny skits and that's how tons of people discovered us in the beginning and that was our top of funnel. We were explaining Rella in a really comedic way, but we noticed that we overdid that a lot and now it doesn't really work for us anymore, so we've moved on to educational content, which means we're sitting down and we're showing like, "Hey, do you have this pain point? This is how Rella can fix it." Or does this sound like something that you want to do? This is how you do it on Rella. That's actually been our top of funnel metric today, but just so you know, top of funnel for content is going to change every month, every few months, every year. We beat the dead horse until it's sick of us. So, until the algorithm stops sharing that specific style of content. So, that's why the skit-style videos stopped performing well, so we've moved on to something else. But what I recommend for you is finding a style that works for top of funnel and then complete doing that until you find that it's not working anymore. I think too many people try to reinvent reinvent the wheel all the time and they're like, "Oh, well, like maybe I should try this or maybe I should try that." If something is working, keep doing it until it stops working.

[00:06:04]The middle of funnel is for people who already know about Rella, maybe they've used us, maybe they haven't, but they're just trying to learn more. We're showing them new features, product improvements, we're sharing newsletters with them.

[00:06:14]Those are for people who already know who we are and maybe need a push to convert or they need a reason to stay and just to keep our overall customers happy sharing, "Hey, we're not forgetting about you, we're always making improvements, here are those improvements." When we post a new feature, posting about a new feature on Instagram is not going to bring new people in, but it will make our current users happy. And then bottom of the funnel, this is where we really become like a tight-knit community. So, this is where we share about our team, community things that are happening, webinars that are going on. This is for people that are already involved in our community and want to get more involved. So, Rella doesn't feel like a product that they're evaluating, they're already sold on it, they're already in it. I definitely encourage you to build out some content pillars or a content funnel instead of marketing funnel and let me know what yours are. The next portion of our marketing web is where we show up. Too many brands try to show up everywhere at once and then they're kind of fall flat everywhere. What I mean by this is that so many people come to me and they're like, "Oh my gosh, I don't know how to post everywhere. Like, I want to post on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Threads, all of the above and I just feel so overwhelmed and burnt out and I don't know what to do." And when you are feeling that way, I always tell people like, "You're doing too much. You need to stick with one strategy, one social media platform and focus all your energy there until you have the privilege to expand to another area." So, once you feel confident like, "Okay, I got Instagram down or I got TikTok down or I got short-form video down, now I feel confident that I can explore another avenue." For us, our main social media platforms or main marketing channels are Instagram, TikTok, which we repost everything on both, so we're not making unique content for those, LinkedIn and our Facebook group. And again, this hits top, middle and bottom of the funnel. We really don't have a presence on X or Twitter, for example. We don't have that big of a presence on Threads even though that's something that we're looking to expand to and we don't really post, you know, long-form YouTube videos aside from my founder content. We don't have a podcast, which I know some brands do.

[00:08:14]And when we first started Rella, we tried doing everything. I made a Twitter account, we had a podcast, I was on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, everywhere with Rella. And you know what happened?

[00:08:23]Mhm, you guessed it, it didn't work because we didn't have a strategy, we're posting randomly across all content and we just couldn't keep up with everything. And we built a social media scheduler and we could not keep up with everything because it was too overwhelming coming up with a custom strategy for all of these different platforms. So, we made a deliberate decision to not overwhelm ourselves and each platform has its own job. The next branch off of the marketing funnel is founder-led content. Squarespace is a perfect example for me. They've been a long-term partner of mine for so long and so many people have used my Squarespace code because they hear it in so many videos versus if I just did a one-off Squarespace campaign, you probably won't really use the code. So, that repetition is really important and for us, we have chosen to invest in a small group of creators that actually don't have huge followings instead of a bunch of creators that have big followings or even a small amount of creators that have big followings and just doing one-off campaigns with them.

[00:09:16]So, you won't see us sponsoring every influencer's post, but you will see us working with influencers that actually move the needle for us and that actually like Rella because then the sponsorship is so much better. And I'll bring it back to Squarespace, for example. If I didn't truly use Squarespace, I don't know how many of you would trust me to use the Squarespace code versus because I do, I think it builds a lot of trust.

[00:09:37]So, for us when we're working with influencers, we actually choose from our community and from our users because it builds trust because they've already been using Rella and most likely they've talked about us even in passing before.

[00:09:48]And if we are doing one-off campaigns like we have this big Rella release coming out this week, we're doing two posts per influencer, we're working with our community and we're making sure all of the posts go live at the same time.

[00:09:59]So, if you follow a couple of influencers in the campaign, you'll see us multiple times, so you'll fall into that marketing web instead of the funnel. So, everything we do, we really think about it as like one nucleus, which is Rella, and a bunch of spores sticking out of it, where it all goes back into getting you to hear about Rella, getting you to trust Rella, and making you want to be a part of our community. And then for paid ads, we actually don't do all of our paid ads are organic content that has performed well. So, we don't distinguish between paid ads and regular posts. All of our content goes live on both. So, not all organic content becomes a paid ad, but all paid ads stem from organic content.

[00:10:39]Because why would we post something organically that we don't want to amplify? That strategy has worked for us. Our paid ads continue to help us convert users, and we've continued to lower our cost per acquisition as we've gotten better with our paid ads and changing them up. Those are our main marketing web moments. We do have a couple of other ones. However, I wanted to go over like the main ones, and each one of those you can kind of like build off of as well. So, it can just become this true giant web. But, some of the things that we are looking to add because we have seen them work in the past are things like podcasts, where this does again fall under founder-led content, but I would love to be a guest on more podcasts. Event sponsorships, we've dabbled in this, but we would love to just do more intentional real-life activations. And like I said, we've done this before, but we want to make it more of like a core strategy and a core branch. And I would love to do a little bit more guerrilla marketing, where we're more creative, we have more fun with things, and you know, we have a little bit more virality. We're doing a brand trip, where we're bringing some social media managers down to Miami next week, and I feel like that is going to have its marketing moment because what software company does a brand trip to Miami with their own users? Let me know if you've ever heard of one because I haven't. So, as you can see, every time we're thinking about marketing, we're thinking about it as this giant web, not a funnel. That is incredibly intentional, and even though it's not the easiest to attribute every click back to, I think that if you start viewing your business or your marketing engine or your marketing department with this in mind and with how users actually make decisions in 2026, you will see a lot of results. So, if you are not the one in charge of the marketing decisions, and you need to send this to your boss, go ahead. Let them watch this video, but it has transformed Rella.

[00:12:19]It's made us go from $0 to $3 million in about a year and a half. We don't spend that much money on marketing. We've been profitable for over a year now, and we have one of the most lively communities that I personally have ever seen, especially for a software company. So, that is just proof that the marketing web is the future, and the marketing funnel is dead. I hope you enjoyed this video. I just wanted to sit down and film my thoughts on this because it was kind of a hot take when I mentioned this in a webinar one time, but people seem to really resonate and love it, and so I wanted to expand my thoughts on it. But, let me know what you guys think. Are you still following the marketing funnel? Is your boss still following the marketing funnel? Or have you been using the marketing web? Let me know in the comments below. Bye, guys.