AI & ML

A B2B founder’s guide to generating demand from scratch

A playbook of the timeless fundamentals of demand generation, plus how to adapt them for today's AI-driven market

No one knows your startup (yet). This harsh reality greets many founders launching a new business, especially in a saturated AI market. You might have a groundbreaking solution, but gaining traction can be an uphill battle when you’re an unknown player. The challenge is clear: how do you generate demand and user adoption when starting from zero?

The good news is that even as the world of AI transforms at a breakneck speed, the fundamentals of demand generation are here to stay. Though the core GTM building blocks will remain the same, today’s early stage founder often needs to execute these fundamentals faster—and with an eye on a few key ways to adapt messaging for buyers of AI technology.

In this article, we sat down with Allyson Letteri, Bessemer Operating Advisor, marketing executive, and author of “Standout Startup,” who has advised hundreds of early stage AI startups to hone their ICP and win early customers. If you are building, this is your comprehensive playbook for generating demand in the AI era—from the ground up. First, we’ll get into the fundamentals, but jump here if you want to learn how to adapt your demand generation efforts for the AI era.

Key insights for B2B founders generating early demand

Being precise in your understanding of your ICP is the cornerstone of high-impact demand generation. Identify their pains, gains, shifts, blockers, and motivators.
Adaptive GTM strategies — moving from founder-led and ABM approaches to product-led growth (PLG) and community-led models — are critical for scaling in the AI era.
Building out robust mid-funnel (MOFU) content is usually the missing link for early stage founders. To build a stronger mid-funnel, focus on website messaging, long-form educational content, events, LinkedIn, earned media, engaging in communities, and email.
Experimentation is essential, and successful startups iterate rapidly on messaging and approach, responding to direct feedback from prospects.
Winning AI startups excel by combining strategic channel selection with credible proof points, such as case studies, third-party endorsements, and advisor advocates.
In the AI era, demand generation success requires developing messaging for both executive buyers and end-users, aligning benefits with each audience.
Community-led and influencer-driven approaches can rapidly build trust, especially in verticals where founders lack authority.
The basics remain unchanged: tightly defined ICP, consistent high-quality content, and disciplined, hypothesis-driven experimentation power sustainable growth.

First things first—hone in on your ICP

The single most important factor in successfully selling your AI application is knowing your customer deeply. From this understanding, you can build out what Allyson calls the 3 C’s of a marketing strategy: customer journey, channels, and content. But if your understanding of your customer is murky or unclear, your top priority needs to be understanding exactly who you’re selling to.

So, how do you develop a crisp and clear definition of your ideal customer profile (ICP)? Allyson points to five factors all founders need to identify to really understand their customers.

ICP five-factor guide

Use this quick reference tool to understand and define your ICP:

Factors	Guiding questions
Pains	What pressing problems can your solution solve?
Gains	What goals or desired outcomes drive your customer?
Shifts	What company changes would make your customer open to new solutions?
Blockers	What objections or misconceptions might hinder their adoption?
Motivators	What would urge them to move forward — is it ROI, testimonials, etc.?

The essential five factors to understand about your ICP are:

Pains: What are the most pressing, painful problems they’re facing that your solution can solve?
Gains: What are the main goals or outcomes they’re looking to drive?
Shifts: What's happening at their company that’s making them open to a new solution? (Common shifts include compliance mandates, a crisis or breach, new executives joining the team, or even when the team outgrows old systems.)
Blockers: What objections make your buyers resist your solution? (For example, they may not be fully aware of the problem your solution solves or they may think your competitors’ solutions have more features.)
Motivators: What considerations will influence them to move forward and buy? (This might include hard ROI data or seeing testimonials about real results from their peers.)

Through frequent conversations with customers and prospects, you can build a working model of your buyer personas and iterate over time. Every aspect of a successful demand generation engine will be predicated on a strong grasp of these factors.

Use your ICP to determine your GTM motion

Once you have a solid working definition of your ICP (which of course, will change over time as you learn more through experimentation), you can determine your go-to-market motion, which exists on a spectrum from highly-targeted ABM outbound all the way to a more product-led growth motion.

“You're likely going to either use one of these models or a hybrid of them. The right GTM motion depends on the customer you're trying to reach and how your product works,” says Allyson.

Why do you need to be clear on your GTM motion? This helps you make clearer decisions around:

What channels you’ll use to reach prospects
What types of content you’ll need to create, and the role of each piece
How sales, marketing, and product collaborate to drive growth

Too often, founders and lean teams try to take on too much without focusing on the levers that help them get the most traction in each model. We’ll touch on this more below.

Product-led growth can spark explosive growth

Many B2B AI companies rely on product-led growth (PLG) as an essential piece of their GTM strategy. One reason is because AI products often have to educate the market—users are often skeptical of claims or they may not fully grasp what the product can do until they try it. PLG lets prospects experience the magic of your product firsthand. By offering a self-serve version, you also enable bottom-up adoption within organizations.

Both Fal.ai and Vapi illustrate how AI startups targeting developers and businesses can use PLG and an API-first approach to scale rapidly. With a freemium usage-based model, Fal.ai got widespread adoption (500k+ developers, generating 50 million AI outputs per day) and then monetized usage at enterprise scale. In less than a year, this strategy drove Fal.ai’s revenue run rate to nearly $10 million — evidence that giving developers easy access can pay off once they rely on your infrastructure.

Vapi, a voice AI platform, similarly pivoted to a PLG-friendly model by providing easy tools for developers to build voice agents. Within six months of introducing its self-serve voice AI product, Vapi’s revenue grew to millions of dollars, and it amassed over 100,000 developers on its platform while handling millions of calls per month.

The key takeaway is that B2B AI startups can achieve explosive growth by making their products accessible and valuable to day-to-day users, not just C-suite buyers. (For a deep dive, read our article about the ten principles of PLG.) Once those users are on board, their success with the product will convince managers to officially adopt and pay for advanced features or higher usage limits.

Experimentation is the only way to perfect your GTM

There’s a persistent myth that you need to determine your GTM at the outset and keep it fixed throughout your company’s growth journey. In reality, GTM motion is as iterative as any other part of your GTM strategy. For example, many companies in the Bessemer portfolio—including Twilio, Box, and Dropbox—started with a PLG motion and later layered on enterprise sales once they reached a certain growth threshold.

“In the beginning, almost every software company starts with a product-first, founder-led sales process,” says Twilio’s former VP of Enterprise Sales, Alyson Welch. But as she notes, no true enterprise leader depends on inbound for pipeline consistency, which is why outbounding is necessary in order to penetrate larger organizations systematically.

Though timing this expansion into enterprise sales right is essential. Many bottom-up companies mistakenly believe that they need to sell into enterprise customers early and aggressively to secure market leadership and achieve scale. In reality, it’s often best to listen to and cultivate your best customers so they can develop these references and grow alongside these accounts as their customers scale up.

The AI founder starter pack

When Allyson sits down with an early stage founder, they’ve almost always done a core set of marketing activities that emerge organically out of building a product. For one, they’ve talked to some customers or prospects that fit their ICP, which helped them hone their product and early pitch. Plus, they’re usually using their networks to get warm intros to prospects.

These founders probably have an MVP website that describes their technology. They likely have a sales deck and are often going to live events and conferences where their ICP is gathering. (At this stage, it’s essentially ABM because their conversations are so low volume that they can do their research on each potential account and tailor their messaging to each.)

But eventually, Allyson finds, founders get to a point where they feel they tapped the network or can’t keep having such personalized conversations and they need to scale up. This is where having a map to build an effective demand gen strategy from scratch becomes very useful.

Scale up from the fundamentals

At this point, Allyson Letteri likes to guide founders to think through a marketing strategy that consists of three key phases of the customer journey:

Top of the funnel (TOFU) - What can they do to generate awareness and new leads at the top of the funnel beyond just networking and going to trade shows?
Middle of the funnel (MOFU) - What content and experiences can they create to help prospects evaluate their product and build trust? What information can they provide to nudge prospects towards being ready to have a formal sales conversation?
Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) - What can they do to enable strong sales conversations, increasing the chances of the deal closing and that prospect becoming a customer?

The power of the middle of funnel (MoFu)

After mapping the founder’s early marketing activities to a healthy funnel, Allyson commonly finds the same hitch: Founders have built virtually no middle of the funnel. Other than a website and maybe a handful of posts on LinkedIn, it’s rare to find an early stage founder who’s been able to drum up any press or has created any meaningful MOFU content.

“The obvious opportunity for founders to seize here is to build out their mid-funnel content,” says Allyson. “The other major gap I almost always see at this stage is that founders don't have effective messaging, so often their website and sales deck lag behind what they’re saying to prospects.”

Since the early stages of building a business are necessarily rife with experimentation, founders are constantly refining how they talk about their product positioning and its value in each sales conversation. In other words, their best messaging isn’t codified for the team or visible to prospects.

This lack of consistency (how people sell vs. what’s said on the website, etc.) makes it hard to scale up sales and marketing functions, since new hires don’t have a clear resource on how to talk about the product—that is, its functionality, who it’s for, the outcomes it delivers, and proof points to build credibility.

“Creating effective messaging unlocks the ability to create a really effective home page and a better sales deck,” she says. “Knowing your ideal customer, competitors/alternatives, as well as brand identity set the foundation for creating effective long form content too.”

Why starting in the middle builds the whole funnel fastest

As founders try to move away from purely founder-led sales, they often prioritize figuring out what channels generate new leads and fill the top of the funnel. “Founders often say to me, ‘We want more press to get more leads,’ or ‘I need to post more on LinkedIn to generate pipeline,’” says Allyson. “But I ask ‘are these the best channels to reach and attract their exact ICP’? They also need clear next steps to help prospects who do engage learn more about their product and its value.”

While early stage founders are often fixated on generating new leads, Allyson finds that it's a lack of mid-funnel follow through that stymies their eventual growth. Ironically, when founders slow down and build their mid-funnel they often have an easier time at both the top and bottom of the funnel too.

“Getting clear on your message and content in the mid-funnel can really help fuel lead generation because it gives you a lot of useful material as you're reaching out to prospects,” she says. “That way, when that high intent person at your ICP company does happen to see your LinkedIn post or earned media feature, you've got the right message to hook them and content to help them go deeper.”

Plus, this longer form content is exactly what search engines look forward to prove your company is credible and an authority in your space. This is what feeds traditional organic search results and AI answers. In an AI-first world, more of the mid-funnel evaluation phase is taking place within search results and gen AI platforms (hence the rise of zero click content.) Importantly, mid-funnel content helps you show up there.

The same mid-funnel clarity also helps you at the bottom of the funnel. “It ensures that your sales deck narrative is really strong,” says Allyson. “And when you create the case studies, customer testimonials, and product content to support the mid-funnel, that tends to be really useful when someone's truly evaluating your product in the final stages of a deal.”

Six channels to prioritize at the middle of the funnel

Since the middle of the funnel helps prospects evaluate your product and move towards a sales conversation, Allyson recommends focusing on six core MOFU channels:

1. Website

When working with early stage startups, Allyson usually finds homepage messaging starts off too broad and generic, or technical and feature-focused. Instead, a homepage needs to speak to potential buyers’ most important concerns. “Make sure the website speaks directly to your ideal customer, explaining your product’s value and why it’s better than alternatives," she says. After you’ve built a foundation of clear, persuasive product messaging, it’s essential to reflect this on the website to make a strong digital first impression.

2. Long-form content

Next, Allyson advises founders to focus on building out what she calls a ‘content capsule’ that addresses customer questions at various stages of the buyer journey. Much like a ‘capsule wardrobe,’ this is the essential set of content pieces that can be re-purposed across many channels to accelerate pipeline.

Allyson recommends building two to three pieces in each of the following five categories:

Symptom-related content that helps prospects who may be problem unaware understand the warning signs of a product or the hidden costs of the status quo.
Solution-related content that helps problem-aware folks understand current solutions, learn how to evaluate them, and understand where current products fall short. This thought leadership content builds trust by articulating problems very clearly and showing expertise in how to solve them.
Value proposition content focuses on helping prospects understand your product and its value. It also directly explains why your solution is better than competitors, positioning it as delivering stronger benefits, offering a better feature set and user experience, or both.
Customer stories and data stories share proof points that customers are getting actual results. This is especially effective when these results are quantifiable.
Product content shares more details about how your product actually works, gives a deep dive into functionality and how to use it, and explains specific use cases.

Sample content capsule

Journey	Content example	Format
Symptom awareness	“Signs your data management is broken”	Blog article
Solution education	“AI vs Manual: a 2025 comparison”	Side-by-side comparative guide
Value proposition	“How [X] platform cuts costs 30%”	Explainer page/video
Customer stories	“[X] automates 90% of tasks”	Case study/customer interview
Product deep dive	“[X] workflow automation demo”	Video demo

This content capsule is enough to equip a founder and perhaps a small sales team with fodder to send prospects either before or after a sales conversation to build momentum and trust. Content gives more leverage and credibility than having to share everything in a conversation.

3. Events

Whether this takes the form of sponsoring live events, hosting intimate thought leadership dinners, or offering virtual webinars, creating experiences is an essential way to move conversations forward. These live settings are ideal for folks who are interested in your solution and want to learn but are not yet ready for a formal sales conversation.

4. LinkedIn

It’s common for founders to approach LinkedIn as a place where they need to share their latest thoughts as often as they can for the sake of visibility. Instead, Allyson recommends a more strategic approach grounded in a deep understanding of the things that your audience needs to know to move forward in the sales process.

For example, your prospects need to better understand their symptoms, why current solutions are insufficient, and how your company is solving their problems in a different way using AI. “Being intentional about the message and the narrative you're putting out will give buyers the information they need to actually move forward in the sale process,” she says.

5. Earned media and communities

“One of the most effective things a founder can do is figure out where their ideal customer is already gathering or who they’re listening to, and then appear there,” says Allyson. Earned media and community channels offer baked-in social proof and validation. Often, a fast path to showing up where prospects are already getting information they trust, is contributing content.

This can take many different forms:

Guesting on podcasts your ICP is listening to
Writing and article for trade publications or Substacks
Contributing to associations with newsletters and websites
Speaking in a small group community or conference
Sharing thoughts in an online forums

“It’s rare for earned media to be a reliable top of funnel channel, but it does build awareness and gives you an evergreen asset that builds so much credibility,” says Allyson. These assets become excellent content for the middle of the funnel that you promote on your own channels, such as your website, sales decks, and LinkedIn. The media outlet or host promotes them too, amplifying their impact.

6. Email marketing

Once you’ve captured a pool of prospects into your ‘marketing universe,’ that is—gotten their email addresses in your CRM, it’s time to think about email communication. A monthly newsletter where you share the latest content to keep them engaged can often be a great way to keep your brand top-of-mind. This can also take the form of outbound-style drip sequences.

How to find channel-market fit

While building out the mid-funnel, it’s also time to think about how to build awareness and bring in new leads at the top of the funnel. The GTM motion you choose gives you a strong playbook for the channels you’ll likely use. For instance, if you need to attract C-suite executives, you’ll likely use a more personalized outbound or ABM motion, inviting prospects into more high-touch experiences and curated content. If you’re reaching director-level prospects or mid-level managers, you may focus on developing an inbound motion, posting content on LinkedIn with invitations to join a webinar or download a buying guide.

“I constantly hear founders saying things like, ‘We need to do search ads. We need to post more on LinkedIn. We need to do webinars. We need to use X channel,’” she says. “But for me, the important question to ask is: ‘Why?’” Each component of a demand generation strategy needs to be integrated into a larger strategic framework that always comes back to best reach and deliver the right message to ideal customers at the right time in their journey.

“This may seem obvious, but needs to be said: Don't spend time or money on a channel that's not going to reach your ICP,” says Allyson. “That's a complete waste of your energy. For most B2B companies, for instance, paid ads don't need to be in your mix for a while.”

How (not) to win customers

Allyson worked with one AI SaaS company where the founder and first sales hire were sending cold outbound sales emails that essentially just introduced the product and offered a demo. Needless to say, jumping right to the sales pitch when the prospect had never heard of the startup before was not an effective strategy.

Instead, Allyson helped the team overhaul the website with more effective product messaging that clearly stated who the product is for, what problems it solves, what are the benefits. Then, they created a capsule of content, including some great case studies.

Then, she helped the team develop an effective outreach strategy so they could lead with an understanding of the problems their prospects were facing and a sequence of content that warmed them up to the idea that they needed to think differently about how to solve the problem. This approach eased prospects into a journey that made them want to enter sales conversations. The content built enough trust that prospects wanted to jump on a call with a small and relatively unproven startup.

Allyson implores founders to think of every tactic and channel in terms of a larger strategy and answer questions like:

Who are you targeting?
What actions do you want them to take?
What messages will motivate those actions?
What is the right channel to get their attention?

How founders can build trust with an ICP they’re not embedded in

A pressing challenge facing many of today’s founders is building credibility in a category or industry vertical where they’re not necessarily a thought leader. Perhaps you’re an engineer or product leader who’s worked at a company in a given space, but you don’t have an online presence talking about that industry or function.

It’s a no-regrets move for founders to get more visible on LinkedIn (or the social channel where prospects go most) and share thought leadership and reflections on their market. At first, a founder’s personal account will likely get more traction and reach than a company account. Rather than trying to come up with LinkedIn posts from scratch, share the pieces from your “content capsule” that demonstrate your company’s expertise in the industry, problem, and solution. It’s actually helpful to be repetitive and focus on the same themes that establish you as a credible thought leader in your space.

Allyson has also seen companies build industry trust quickly when they partner with influencers. One startup she worked with was struggling with cold outbound until they teamed up with a podcast influencer in the space they were selling into. The founder guested on his podcasts, contributed content to his newsletter, and co-hosted webinars with this influencer to get visible and build credibility.

This founder was very clear on the content topics she wanted to share and was able to attract new leads through the influencer's community and network. Working with this well-respected voice in the industry helped build brand awareness and generate plenty of content on their website to nurture lead.

The founder reported this podcast partnership made a night-and-day difference in their sales process because they had so many more resources and better information for their ICP to understand why their product was effective and the benefits of adopting it now.

“The other smart thing I'm seeing some AI companies do to build trust is bring in an advisor—someone who's well known in the space—who’s a trusted peer to the people on the buying committee they're trying to influence,” says Allyson. “Bringing this expert to the table during a sales conversation is so effective because they provide built-in social proof.”

“They're speaking your ICP’s language and are well-positioned to say, ‘This is how you’re thinking about the problem today. But you need to consider new perspectives and solutions to avoid poor results or not get left behind,’” she says. “The added benefit is that these advisors are often sharing thoughts that can easily be transformed into formal content pieces you can add to your library.”

The power of community-led growth

Community-led growth (CLG) is another powerful way to gain traction in markets where you don’t have as strong a foothold. A shining example of community-led growth done right by a B2B AI company is DataHub, an open-source data catalog project. Their team invested early in building a community around the open-source metadata platform, including launching a Slack community in 2020, and that community momentum translated directly into adoption at major companies.

By 2021, the founders launched a company to offer an enterprise SaaS commercial version, converting organic community adoption into a scalable commercial business. Engineers at Netflix, Visa, Etsy, and many other firms have been using DataHub via the open-source project and actively participated in discussions. DataHub’s trajectory shows how powerful CLG can be: the product didn't rely on traditional top-down GTM—it grew organically as passionate users championed it within their organizations and across the data practitioner community. (For a deep dive on how to achieve this, read our five laws for community-led growth.) The community’s feedback also shaped the product’s features, which in turn led to higher retention.

To this day, the Slack group, which now has nearly 14,000 members, serves as both a support channel and a funnel for new users who discover DataHub via word-of-mouth in the data practitioner community. The company recently raised its $35 million Series B to further its mission of bringing order to data chaos and unlocking the full potential of AI in the enterprise.

How to adapt your demand generation efforts for the AI era

While the fundamentals of demand generation are largely remaining the same, an AI-first world rewards founders who adapt their strategies in a few subtle but meaningful ways.

1. Expect your messaging iteration to be on turbo speed

Building products in an AI-first world means the speed to market when developing and iterating on new products is mind-blowingly fast. This creates a new challenge for marketing because messaging can get outdated dizzyingly quickly. You still need to keep up with translating features into benefits and providing proof points for that customer. While many AI startups are great at explaining the new features they've built, they have to be even more nimble at correlating these new features with actual tangible value for the end user.

For example, your company might pivot to focusing on a narrower set of customers or a more specific set of customers. You might realize you thought customers wanted a particular outcome, but this new segment actually prioritized something completely different. Or you might choose to create more features around a wedge use case that gets you into new customer accounts with the expectation customers can later take advantage of the whole suite. Each of these situations requires a quick messaging pivot to ensure demand generation efforts stay strong.

2. Get skillful at mastering the messaging double-edged sword

For B2B companies to successfully generate demand in the AI era, they need to get adept at crafting messaging that appeals to both the C-suite and the end user—knowing that these may be radically different messages. Emphasizing AI and productivity might sound great to the high level decision makers, but it can be intimidating to the end user who is being asked to do more with less or faster or is seeing their team resources cut.

“This catches some startups off guard,” says Allyson, “because they assume companies will value productivity at any cost. But you need an enticing wraparound story for how your product affects end users—for example, how it will make users more strategic and less mired in tedious tasks.”

This comes back to messaging hygiene and being really aware of the full set of people involved in not just the buying decision, but ongoing customer retention. “You need to look downstream and realize if your messaging is off-putting to people who are supposed to adopt your product,they may not actually do it,” says Allyson.

3. Resist the temptation to operate without a strong hypothesis about a buyer group

“We're in this really interesting time where companies have unique, just ‘invest in AI’ budget line items,” says Allyson. As a result, Allyson is seeing many companies build something, then hope to find a buyer for it “in a way that wouldn’t fly during the traditional SaaS development process.” She adds, “In classic software development, there tended to be a stronger hypothesis around an unmet need of a customer group and startups would build for that, since it took longer and cost more to build.”

“Some startups are trying to enter multiple verticals to see if this software they've built can solve a problem. They intend to codify their GTM strategy after customers have unlocked value,” says Allyson.

“But the process of finding product-market fit shouldn't change,” she says. “You need to have a strong hypothesis about the unmet need of a buyer group and build for that. Then iterate quickly into something different if you find that doesn't work.”

Allyson predicts that the ‘invest in AI’ budget line items will go away over time and budgets will come from functional budgets or different departments again. “New AI products that win almost always solve an urgent, unmet need. AI is a feature and a means to an end; it’s not a value proposition in and of itself.”

Building a durable demand engine

AI hasn’t rewritten the laws of B2B growth—it’s simply sped everything up. The core elements of successful B2B demand generation—a crisp ICP definition, precise messaging, quality content, and disciplined experimentation—remain the same. Founders who can master this, while being agile enough to keep up with the demands of today's market, will be the ones who successfully build the giants of tomorrow’s AI-driven marketplace.

FAQ: Generating demand in the AI era

What is demand generation in the AI era?

Demand generation for AI includes strategies and tactics used to build awareness, interest, and desire for an AI product in the market, moving potential customers from unfamiliarity to adoption.

Why is defining the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) important?

Knowing your ICP as a B2B founder helps target your marketing, sales, and product messaging precisely, ensuring efforts resonate with the most promising prospects and reducing wasted resources.

What are the five essential ICP factors to consider?

Pains: key problems your solution addresses
Gains: Desire results or outcomes
Shifts: Changes prompting openness to new solutions
Blockers: Objections or frictions to adoptions
Motivators: Drivers that move customers to buy

How can early stage founders scale demand generation?

Founders can scale by moving beyond personalized network outreach to develop multi-channel demand gen strategies, focusing especially on mid-funnel content and a clear GTM motion.

What is a content capsule, and why does it matter?

A content capsule is a core set of versatile, educational content assets that address common buyer questions at different journey stages, supporting sales, marketing, and authority-building across multiple channels.

How does product-led growth (PLG) work for AI startups?

PLG allows prospects to experience the product firsthand, often using self-serve versions or freemium models, sparking bottom-up adoption and scaling quickly through user engagement and referral.

How can founders build trust, especially if not industry insiders?

Engage with influencer partnerships, share thought leadership on social media, and leverage credible advisors to build authority, social proof, and trust with new audiences.

How should founders adapt demand generation for today’s AI era?

Founders should keep messaging concise and relatable to both decision makers and end users, grounded in a clear hypothesis about buyer needs. Emphasize benefits, not just AI features or buzzwords.