For early-stage companies, one useful growth question is how much new business customers and partners can generate before a dedicated sales team becomes necessary.
In fact, 73% of business decision-makers trust peer recommendations.
This figure comes from a 2026 SurveyMonkey and Reddit study of 1,202 U.S. business leaders.
In episode No. 150 of the DesignRush Podcast, I spoke with Aditude Founder and CEO Jared Siegal about the decisions behind the company’s growth, from software and pricing to referrals, revenue measurement, and team structure.
“From the time we actually launched our SaaS product to the time we hit five million was eighteen months. And no sales. We had four employees, me and three engineers,” Siegal tells DesignRush.
What stands out in Siegal’s story is how much of Aditude’s later growth was shaped while the company was still small. The choices made early on continued to influence what came next as the business expanded.
Watch the full episode now on YouTube or listen on Spotify.
Who Is Jared Siegal?
Jared Siegal is the CEO of Aditude, an ad-tech company helping website and app publishers increase ad revenue and control monetization. He started the company as a one-person services business, later moved into SaaS, and grew Aditude to 50+ employees after raising a $15 million Series A in 2023.
How to Convert Client Services Into a Scalable SaaS Product
For roughly Aditude’s first year and a half, Siegal was the entire company, charging publishers by the hour and working between clients and their technology vendors.
“Shoot, I'm doing the exact same thing again, right? Like I'm working my butt off, and I am making other tech companies a lot of money instead of taking control myself,” Siegal says.
An early client gave him access to an engineer for six weeks.
“So me and this guy in Macedonia, I haven't talked to him in many years, but (we) built the original version of what we call our cloud wrapper and tested it on this client and crushed it.
“(We) made so much money for this guy, and I was like, this is awesome. This is now what my business is going to be,” Siegal adds.
The test showed that the same work could support a software product. Siegal also saw publishers as an overlooked customer group in an industry focused heavily on advertisers.
That gave Aditude a clearer place in the market: software for publishers that other vendors were largely overlooking.
For founders moving from services into software, this DesignRush B2B SaaS marketing guide looks at positioning, customer acquisition, and recurring revenue.
How to Prove SaaS Value Before Raising Prices
Aditude gave 30 consulting clients six months of free access to its software. When it was time to charge, all 30 became paying customers.
“The proof is in the pudding, right? So if we're gonna give away tech for free and then suddenly start charging for it? I mean, all of our clients, their bills, a lot of them like doubled, tripled, quadrupled; they started paying me a lot of money.
“I had to prove that the value uplift was gonna be there,” Siegal says.
Before introducing the SaaS fee, Aditude rewrote the original product, hired a CTO, and improved its performance. The new version was then tested against the technology that clients were already using.
“We AB tested against ourselves to prove that the more expensive version (...) was still going to make them more money. And so we had that trust. We proved it in the data.
“And frankly, from a cost perspective, we were still 95% cheaper than the next best option,” Siegal adds.
How to Grow Through Customer Referrals Without a Sales Team
Siegal relied on client and partner referrals to bring in new business while the company had no sales team.
“Having a friend recommend a plumber or a dentist, you're way more likely to take their recommendation versus something that you just find on the internet. And so, we heavily rely on referrals.
“I had a very simple strategy. Early on, we were charging by the hour for our consultancy. And so it was: refer me to a new client that converts, (and) you get 10 hours free of my work,” Siegal says.
Some customers referred 20 to 30 clients, and prospects often arrived already familiar with Aditude’s offer.
The network extended to advertising platforms that sent publishers to Aditude even when they lacked the technology to integrate.
“I had secretly 30 or 40 people out there selling for my company early on,” Siegal says.
Those referrals gave Aditude access to qualified prospects without first having to build a traditional sales operation.
This DesignRush client acquisition guide looks at how referrals and partnerships can support customer acquisition as a company grows.
How to Choose the Right Team as Your Business Scales
As Aditude grew, Siegal had to reassess whether some of the people who helped the company early on were still right for what came next.
“The thing that most CEOs are too scared to admit is that the people who help you grow from zero to one, or one to two, may not be the people that help you grow from two to ten, or ten to twenty, or twenty to thirty,” Siegal says.
Loyalty made those decisions harder.
“There were some people that really shouldn't have been in my company anymore that took me four to five years to finally make that decision on. But it was a breath of fresh air afterwards for everyone involved,” Siegal adds.
The same can be true of CEOs themselves, since different phases of a company can require different leadership skills.
Recognizing when a role no longer fits the company became one of the harder leadership decisions Aditude’s growth required.
What Aditude’s $5M Growth Story Shows
Aditude reached $5 million in annual subscription revenue without a sales team.
It turned client work into software, proving that customers could make more money with the paid product.
After that, referral incentives brought new business directly to Siegal.
Those decisions worked together. Aditude:
- Gave customers a product with clear financial value
- Created a reason for them to recommend it
- Kept reassessing what the company needed as it grew
Siegal’s experience shows how customer value can become a source of growth when the product proves its worth and the company stays willing to make difficult decisions as it grows.
Founders planning a software product can compare software development companies evaluated by DesignRush based on expertise, client reviews, and project capabilities.
