Dreamdata’s Counterintuitive Path: Why Three Product & Marketing Founders Chose Not to Hire Sales Teams

When founding teams pitch investors, conventional wisdom suggests having a balanced mix of technical, product, and sales expertise. But in a recent Category Visionaries episode, Dreamdata CEO Lars Grønnegaard revealed how their unconventional founding team structure – two product leaders and a marketing expert – shaped a different kind of B2B growth story.

The Product-Marketing DNA

“Our go to market is like, at one end, we’re very much a marketing led approach,” Lars explains. “With three co-founders, two came from product, one came from marketing, and Stefan, who is the marketing guy, he is a very strong marketer… So no sales guy.”

This founding DNA wasn’t accidental. Coming from Trustpilot, where Lars and one co-founder served as head of product and head of engineering respectively, they understood the power of product-driven growth. But they also recognized that in the B2B attribution space, traditional product-led growth alone wouldn’t suffice.

A Hybrid Approach Emerges

Instead of following either the pure PLG or sales-led playbook, Dreamdata developed what Lars calls a “product assisted sales motion.” He explains, “We do a lot of organic social, we also do some paid, of course, and then, yeah, we’re product people. We can sort of escape that. So we have, I wouldn’t call it product led growth, but it’s very much product assisted sales motion.”

This approach manifests in multiple ways: “Everybody will go through a trial. We also have a free product. So we do sort of have people entering, doing either the free product or free trial and upgrading.” However, Lars is quick to note they’re “not miro or some of the real, like, true PLG companies.”

Marketing to Marketers: A Different Game

Their target audience – B2B marketers – required a unique approach. “If you’re marketing to marketers, I think you need to try things, whatever you do, but especially marketing to marketers, you can’t just do what everybody else does. You need some creativity in what you do. You need to be bold,” Lars emphasizes.

This led to innovative approaches like their LinkedIn strategy. “We sell to marketers – B2B marketers, they love LinkedIn and they live their life there. So it’s a very good place for us to exist and be like, we connect with the market there,” Lars notes. Their LinkedIn Lives sometimes reach the platform’s maximum capacity of 600 viewers, demonstrating the effectiveness of meeting their audience where they already spend time.

The Enterprise Challenge

Without a traditional sales team, moving upmarket presented unique challenges. Their first attempt at enterprise sales came too early: “Initially, after like five customers or something, we actually landed two companies I define as enterprise. And I can say that wasn’t a good idea because at that stage, the product was not even a product, I would say it was more like a prototype and a ton of duct tape and lots of PowerPoints.”

This experience taught them to build proper foundations before targeting larger companies. Their second attempt came with “much more of a product” and “enterprise readiness capabilities… single sign on, some answers to infosec, a lot of the things that are required in that space.”

The Future of Marketing-Led Growth

Looking ahead, Dreamdata sees their approach as part of a broader shift in B2B marketing. “The big picture for us is this automation angle,” Lars shares. “You’ve seen automation in B2C go to market for the last 20 years, and you’re definitely seeing it now in the B2B space as well.”

Their bet is that the future of B2B marketing will be less about traditional sales teams and more about automated, data-driven optimization. By combining product expertise with marketing automation, they’re building what Lars describes as “something that enables B2B companies to run automated go to market at scale.”

For B2B founders questioning traditional GTM wisdom, Dreamdata’s journey suggests that success doesn’t always require following the standard playbook. Sometimes, leaning into your founding team’s unique strengths and building a GTM motion around them might be the better path to growth.