In this episode, Ryan sits down with Sam Gocher, Head of Content at Rocket SaaS, to make the case for top-of-funnel (TOFU) content: the kind that grows pipeline by reaching the 95% of your market who aren’t ready to buy yet. Ryan credits top-of-funnel content as arguably the single biggest reason Rocket SaaS scaled from $1 million to $7 million ARR in two years, and yet it’s the part of the funnel most businesses under-invest in.

Sam and Ryan break down where to start (your ICP and the problem that keeps them up at night), how to decide what you want to be known for, and how to find your topics by mining your own sales calls. If your growth relies too heavily on the 5% ready-to-buy-today audience, this episode shows you how to widen the top.

Takeaways:

• Top-of-funnel content targets the 95% of your market who aren’t in-market yet, so that when they are ready to buy, they already know you, like you and trust you.

• Ryan credits top-of-funnel content as arguably the biggest driver behind Rocket SaaS scaling to $7 million ARR in two years.

• It all starts with your ICP: if you don’t know who they are and the problems they’re facing, you can’t create content that resonates

• Decide what you want to be known for and tie it back to your offering, without ever pushing your product at the top of the funnel

• Build ‘big rock’ campaigns: one deeply-researched pillar asset and then repurpos it into video, social clips, blogs, events and posts that all link back

• Don’t gate your top-of-funnel content: gating drags it down to bottom-of-funnel. Top of funnel is about giving, not extracting

• Find your topics by mining demand: survey your audience, add top-of-funnel questions to sales calls, then use AI to transcribe and an LLM to surface the common themes

• A podcast is one of the best top-of-funnel investments you can make

• CEOs often resist top-of-funnel because it doesn’t attribute leads immediately, but a wide top of funnel is how you scale pipeline fast