Impressions Are For Creators; Clicks Are for SaaS Products

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:02]Hi everyone. I just want to talk a little bit about the difference between being a creator on X and being a SaaS founder with a product that you're trying to get users for.

[00:00:15]Stay tuned. So, it's a little bit of a ranty rant, but if you've been around and seen any of my videos, you know kind of how I roll.

[00:00:24]So, if I were doing Twitter, right? X.

[00:00:29]If I was on X to get a share of the revenue, I would have the premium account, maybe the next level account. I wouldn't care about who follows me necessarily.

[00:00:40]Um I wouldn't have to do that one-to-one follow-back ratio to grow my account organically.

[00:00:46]I would say whatever the bleep I wanted to without considering who I may offend, um alienating people, um possibly even my marketing base.

[00:01:02]I It wouldn't matter to me, right? So, because you would be using X like people use Reddit.

[00:01:09]Just anonymously, but not anona- anonymous, anonymously saying shitposting, talking trash, um saying all these wild, crazy things, being super political, whether it's in actual United States politics or in software or marketing or whatever.

[00:01:33]You would talk about how much revenue you're earning. It would be a campaign of yeah, you could be like me. This is my lifestyle.

[00:01:42]I am tweeting from uh raft in Bali right now. You too could have made uh $4,300 with your AI agents doing blah, blah, blah, blah blah while I was sleeping.

[00:02:01]You know, it's kind of that much easy mode. I'm better than you, but I know you want to be like me kind of a vibe if I were for as a woman, I am a woman, but as a woman, I'd be like zipping my thing down smaller, taking different selfies, doing the bathing suit feet thing. Like, do you want to be a model or do you want to sell your SaaS software?

[00:02:29]That's the truth. So, I see all these people founders who are like, "Oh, I did the building market a building public playbook." Did you though? Because when I originally wrote my book, How to Market Your Plugin, now this was specific to WordPress, this this is the playbook. No one else has written this book, and it tells you exactly what to do, including um a three-year framework for your marketing. This is based on how we built Give WP, which has been acquired, split, it's now part of Liquid Web. It has no no branding of its own. It's it's been private equity'd. Okay?

[00:03:17]But, if you want to get users for your software as a service, then you want to build trust, loyalty, the brand equity on a brand account, not on your own account, the account of the product. And so, this is my lane. This is what I specialize in. This is what I've been doing for 15 years. Um if you count construction, it's going to be 20, right? So, building those relationships requires a totally different set of strategy philosophy mindset, tactics, and probably even outsourcing to your favorite vendor.

[00:04:05]So, when it comes to being a a creator, those impressions matter.

[00:04:12]But, when you're a SaaS founder, what matters are clicks. What matters are they look they're looking at your bio.

[00:04:20]They're clicking that link. They're signing up for the demo. They're replying to you, right? And that's where you want to get get to. You want those users to demo your product, sign up, tell their friends, maybe become an affiliate, not churn, right? This is how you grow. But, Build in Public has now become the place where everybody kind of like quietly positions themselves as a creator who's part of the creator economy. Now, let me give you a case in point, cuz I'm not really trying to offend you. But, I am trying to educate you to help you position your product in the most effective way.

[00:05:04]Let's take the Holderness family. Now, during COVID, they like many other people made a bunch of ridiculous parody videos that we all love, all of us, including me. Super funny.

[00:05:17]Uh we're all watching that during COVID.

[00:05:20]And they're great, and they got money probably from all of the platforms, right? Um meta TikTok YouTube right? So, now you see the Holderness guy, I don't even know his first name, okay? But, now he's doing ClickUp comedy, right? So, they're doing all these parodies for tech, for marketing, and again, they're super funny, and we all love them, including me.

[00:05:54]But, ask me if I'm using ClickUp.

[00:05:59]Ask me if I would choose ClickUp if I even wanted a project management software tool.

[00:06:09]The answer is no.

[00:06:11]No, I do not like ClickUp. Yes, I have used ClickUp. I think it's super complicated, overly complicated. I would use Trello all day long if I needed a project management software, but I don't because I'm a boutique agency on purpose, and I really don't have uh that much proj- that many projects to manage, right? I use Google Sheets.

[00:06:38]Um I'm as a person who writes articles for my clients, they have their own project management software, but even if I decided to be a writing agency and farm all these projects out, and I decided to use a project management software, ask me if I would use ClickUp.

[00:06:59]No, I wouldn't because I would think they've spent all this money trying to entertain people like they're an insurance company with Flo from Progressive, instead of listening to their users, um improving their product, making their product less expensive.

[00:07:20]Okay? So, this is what I want you to think about as a SaaS founder.

[00:07:26]What are your goals? Do you really want a share of X revenue? Do you really want to say just whatever it takes so that you get 5 million impressions over 3 months, 200 verified followers, and are also a verified person? That's just all money. That's all money you can spend.

[00:07:45]And most of those people are just feeding AI. So, like AI slop is is all here to automate creator revenue and a share of revenue for people who are not your customers and may never be. The building public community is everybody supporting each other, which is a valuable thing.

[00:08:09]Building public on uh you know, Twitter got rid of their communities, but on Reddit, that's fine. You you'll probably need to talk to your peers about some of these things for support, for ideas, for engagement. But, think about who's really supporting you. Now, so, okay, Bridget. I I get what you're saying. I get what you're saying. X is really valuable. Listen, I'm I am modeling the behavior. If you literally studied my Twitter account or had your LLM study my Twitter account, you would see that I am doing what I'm telling you to do. I'm not selling a course. I'm not trying to get you to sign up for my mastermind or uh get into my private Substack or whatever, right? I I don't need you to subscribe to my beehive. Why? Because I have clients. Ask me where I get my clients.

[00:09:11]You are correct, sir, madam. I get my clients from X. I just got one last month, not even a month ago, from X. And I ask my clients where they come from, where they've heard of me. I get referrals from people on X. The client I got before that, I got on X, who I've never met in person. The client I got before that, I got on X.

[00:09:36]The client I got before that is somebody I know from Twitter, I mean from my own personal life 100 years ago, who has a product company and he saw me on LinkedIn doing the same thing because X and LinkedIn are where you need to be. Why?

[00:09:53]The decision-makers on who will purchase, try out, demo, book a call with you, want you to call them, those people are on LinkedIn and X. And let me tell you about LinkedIn. So, LinkedIn is super sensitive to DM spam and all that kind of thing. But, if you engage in my 321 method, you could just Google Bridget's 321 method and hint, it's not the barbecue ribs recipe, okay? It's responding to three posts a day. No, sorry. Following three people a day, so Twitter or X, X or LinkedIn. This is the B2B playbook.

[00:10:37]Follow three people a day, list them if it's appropriate, respond to two people's posts, not comments on your post.

[00:10:45]Outreach.

[00:10:47]Finding other people who are in your parallel universe, your possible clients, and commenting on their on their material, right? To get that exposure, to get the follow, to get the awareness because you built something that nobody knows about yet, so they don't know to look for you. So, keywords are way, way a year later. Keywords are 100 users and a year later. Okay, so let's keep going.

[00:11:15]And then so three Follow three people, comment on two people's posts, and one original post every day. You can do this in 5 minutes.

[00:11:24]You don't need to program an AI. In fact, I would suggest not programming an AI because you don't know your market as well as you think you do. When you Listen, I I'm not going to lie. If you want to book a paid consultation with me, I will take your money. You will be happier and you'll be on the right track. But that's not what I'm trying to do here.

[00:11:48]Um if you want to be a client of mine, I can take maybe two clients and then I'm tapped out cuz I am like busy.

[00:11:58]But I really care about you. I see what you're doing. I read your posts where you're struggling. I'm thinking about quitting the WordPress directory. I think about shutting down my product.

[00:12:09]I'm thinking about um What else did I read this week? Oh, the building public community isn't really there for me. That's cuz it's broken.

[00:12:17]That's a whole 'nother rant. But again, you could buy my book, you can purchase time with me, you could watch this video in entirety.

[00:12:27]You could watch what I'm doing on X.

[00:12:32]Watch what I'm doing and you will learn.

[00:12:35]You don't need to pay for a course. You don't need to waste your money on all this advertising and all these other things. And you don't need to behave like a creator. You're not trying to get attention for attention's sake. You're trying to get awareness so that you could get more purchasers of your SaaS product, book demos, and downloads. If you have any more questions, you can reach out to me at [email protected].

[00:13:07]I'm Bridget M. Willard on X, Bridget Willard on LinkedIn, and my website is bridgetwillard.com.

[00:13:14]You can find me on YouTube. You can find me on almost anywhere. Just Google me. Ask ChatGPT, "Who is a great SaaS marketer?"

[00:13:25]For um Maybe they'll say my name. Who knows? I don't think they really rank that way.

[00:13:32]But you're it would be a fun experiment to try. Anyway, it's Bridget. I'm sorry I haven't done videos a couple weeks. I was under the weather. I am back. And I please please don't give up. You thought of this idea. It's super great. I believe in you.

[00:13:48]And I will uh talk to you later. Bye.