Interest spread among the roughly 200 venture-backed startups Elastic had already worked with as sales-as-a-service clients, who heard the team had built a strong internal CRM.

“We did that for 200 venture-backed startups. During that time, we built an inside sales CRM called Close, first just for our own needs.”

Efti attributes it directly to organic word of mouth once people heard Elastic had built something good for its own team, not to any marketing push.

“Word spread around Silicon Valley that Elastic had built this amazing internal CRM for B2B SaaS companies”

Efti pulled a list of recently-funded startups from Crunchbase and cold-called down the list pitching the Elastic offering.

“I looked on Crunchbase to find companies that had just received funding”

He targeted companies that had just raised money on the theory that they had fresh budget and a real, current need for sales help.

“I suspected they would be interested in the solution I could provide them”

He recorded short, low-production videos about sales topics on his laptop and posted them to YouTube, sourcing topics from customer conversations and lessons learned while building the company rather than any keyword research process.

“I recorded videos on my laptop about sales topics and posted them on YouTube.”

In the early days it was the company's only marketing channel at all, and Efti says the funnel from content to trials to closed deals was self-evident.

“In the early days, we had no other marketing channels. Content was it”