5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Aditude’s Evolution: From Hourly Consulting to Enterprise SaaS

When a VC firm offered to acquire Jared Siegal‘s consulting business for what he considered a low amount, they delivered a wake-up call: “You’re a consultancy, you’re not a tech company.” That conversation sparked a transformation that would reshape Aditude’s entire go-to-market strategy. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jared shared the key lessons from that journey.

1. Build Technology While Still in Service Mode Rather than making an abrupt pivot to SaaS, Aditude created a bridge by building technology while still operating as a consultancy. “We’re offering our tech for free for upwards of maybe twelve months and continuing to charge by the hour for all of the support and maintenance of that tech,” Jared explained. This approach allowed them to develop and refine their product with paying customers while maintaining cash flow.
2. Turn Community Participation into Sales Pipeline Instead of traditional outbound sales, Aditude found success through authentic community engagement. “There’s a tremendous amount of slack communities. I’m proud part of like six or seven really large groups where people are asking all types of very specific questions every day,” Jared noted. The key is contributing value without selling: “I never actually pitch act. I will, in fact, sometimes go out of my way to answer questions that make it so they don’t need to use us.”
3. Reimagine Traditional Enterprise Events Breaking away from conventional conference formats, Aditude is investing $200,000 in experiential events. Their approach? Taking “45 or so publishers… down to Disney World, three days at the hotel, tons of parks, golf, dinners at famous restaurants.” This strategy creates deeper relationships than traditional conference room presentations ever could.
4. Focus on Enterprise-Scale Impact Rather than pursuing volume with smaller clients, Aditude targets publishers doing “hundreds of millions, if not billions of impressions a month.” This focus shapes their entire go-to-market approach. As Jared explains, “The way that our business model works, it’s not the most cost effective for the long tail of publishers. It becomes more increasingly cost effective the bigger you are as a publisher.”
5. Make Client Success Personal Perhaps most importantly, Aditude has built its growth on taking client relationships personally. “We become very ingrained with these clients day to day businesses and we become almost members of their team as well,” Jared shared. This isn’t just rhetoric – some clients have literally written Aditude into their wills. “Every time we sign a new client, that’s another giant set of families that we’re responsible for. I don’t take that lightly.”

The results speak for themselves. In an industry where relationships often remain transactional, Aditude has created such deep trust that Jared notes, “I’m written into some of our publishers wills, we’re friends with their families, we spend time with them outside of work.”

For B2B founders, particularly those considering a pivot from services to SaaS, Aditude’s journey offers a valuable template. The key is to “be the nice company in the space, right. Not a company that’s just out for yourself. Be a company that is trying to protect and fight for the publishers and make money that way.”

This approach requires more investment in relationships than traditional enterprise sales models. But as Jared explains, even spending “20 minutes a day answering random questions on these different slack channels, that’s a good use of my time.” The payoff comes in the form of trust capital that technical capabilities alone can’t match.

The lesson? In enterprise SaaS, product excellence is table stakes. The real differentiator is becoming so deeply embedded in your clients’ success that they see you as an extension of their team rather than just another vendor.