35 Examples of SaaS Companies Using Print Magazines to Scale

In this article, you will discover how top SaaS CEOs use the “Magazine” growth tactic to build a loyal audience, feed their entire marketing funnel, and drive millions in new revenue, complete with real-world examples from founders who have mastered this playbook. By creating a high-value, periodical publication—whether a digital magazine, a comprehensive annual report, or a data-rich industry study—these leaders have built powerful content engines that establish authority and generate a consistent stream of qualified leads. This strategy has been a cornerstone for companies looking to move beyond traditional content marketing and forge a direct, meaningful relationship with their audience.

You’ll get the 5-step system to launch your own brand magazine, packed with inspiration from dozens of case studies. These examples are from top Founders like Anthony Kennada at AudiencePlus, Joe Hyrkin at Issuu, and Rytis Lauris at Omnisend, collected directly from keynotes at Founderpath events.

The 5-Step System to Launch Your Own Brand Magazine

1. Define Your Niche and Audience: The foundation of a successful brand magazine is a deep understanding of a specific audience’s problems and interests. Instead of trying to appeal to everyone, focus on a well-defined niche where you can become the go-to authority. Anthony Kennada, while at Gainsight, didn’t just build software for Customer Success Managers; he built a media company and community to serve them, understanding their hunger for belonging and thought leadership before the market was fully mature. This focus allows you to create highly relevant content that builds a loyal following.
2. Build a Cornerstone Content Asset (The “Magazine”): Your magazine should be the central pillar of your content strategy. This isn’t just a blog; it’s a substantial, curated, and often beautifully designed publication that provides immense value. Rytis Lauris’s team at Omnisend executes this by publishing major annual research reports on email marketing and e-commerce trends. These data-rich reports become cornerstone assets that generate high-authority backlinks from outlets like Bloomberg and Forbes, functioning like a special edition of a trade magazine.
3. Focus on Quality, Curation, and Design: A magazine stands apart from the noise through superior quality. This means investing in excellent writing, thoughtful curation of topics, and professional design. Platforms like Issuu exist specifically to help brands transform static documents like catalogs and brochures into engaging, well-designed digital publications. Joe Hyrkin, CEO of Issuu, emphasizes turning marketing materials into a range of beautifully designed digital assets that enhance the reader experience and reflect brand quality.
4. Create a Multi-Channel Distribution & Repurposing Plan: A magazine is a content engine, not a final product. The core content should be sliced, diced, and repurposed into dozens of smaller assets for distribution across all your channels—social media snippets, blog posts, email newsletters, and video clips. Anthony Kennada of AudiencePlus champions this “media company” mindset, where the goal is to build an owned audience by distributing valuable content across various formats, rather than relying solely on rented channels like social media algorithms.
5. Foster Community and Build an Owned Audience: The ultimate goal is to build a direct relationship with your audience, turning followers into fans. Your magazine should be a catalyst for community, sparking conversations and providing a gathering point for like-minded professionals. Media strategy expert Elizabeth Osder highlights the success of publications like Skift, which built a thriving conference and research business by first creating a free, high-value content service for the travel industry, effectively surrounding their daily journalism with paid products that brought the community closer to the brand.

40+ Examples of the Magazine Tactic in Action

• Anthony Kennada, founder of AudiencePlus, shared how he built a media company within Gainsight, generating 85% of every deal through their content and event brand, Pulse, which acted as the company’s central publication and community hub.
• Omnisend’s CEO, Rytis Lauris, detailed their strategy of publishing large-scale, data-backed industry reports that function as periodical “state of the industry” magazines, earning them backlinks from major publications like Bloomberg and Forbes and driving their growth to over $50M ARR.
• Media consultant Elizabeth Osder explained how B2B publication Skift successfully used their daily content as a funnel for a larger media ecosystem, including conferences and research, proving the “magazine” can be the core of a multi-million dollar business model.
• Issuu’s CEO, Joe Hyrkin, explained how their platform enables companies to transform marketing collateral into digital magazines and e-books, a strategy he used himself to author a publication on achieving profitable growth. His company helps others execute this tactic at scale, reaching over $30M in ARR.
• Nathan Latka of Founderpath discussed how he launched a physical magazine mailed to 10,000 SaaS CEOs, using it as a high-value, tangible content piece to build relationships and drive sales for his data products.
• John Doherty, founder of Getcredo, published a comprehensive industry pricing guide, a data-rich asset that acted like a special-edition report, generating significant authority and over $300,000 in revenue from a single mention.
• Sophie Buonassisi of GTMfund explained their flywheel model where “Media” is a core component, using content to amplify thought leadership and provide meaningful distribution for portfolio companies, proving the publication strategy is vital for growth.
• Eric Siu of Single Grain described his strategy of building attention first through content assets like his “Marketing School” podcast, which functions as an audio magazine, before figuring out the monetization model, a key principle of the magazine tactic.
• Zest.is CEO Yam Regev defined his company as a “knowledge building platform” that acts like a curated digital magazine for marketing professionals, attracting over 100,000 users by providing high-quality, relevant content.
• Raffi Salama of Passion Fruit advised investing in “brilliant white paper articles” that can be surfaced time and again, a strategy that treats high-value content like evergreen magazine features to deliver perpetual value.
• Kyle Poyar from OpenView discussed how his high-value weekly newsletter, “Growth Unhinged,” kickstarted a community and grew to over 20,000 readers organically, demonstrating how a newsletter can function as a digital magazine to build an audience.
• Stefan Smulders of Expandi shared his tactic of creating detailed “playbooks” and guides on LinkedIn growth hacks. These in-depth guides serve the same function as a special “how-to” issue of a magazine, helping him grow to a $7 million run rate.
• Amit Bendov, CEO of Gong, emphasized their focus on creating highly valuable, easily consumable, and immediately applicable content. This content philosophy is the bedrock of any successful brand magazine and has fueled Gong’s hyper-growth to a multi-billion dollar valuation.
• Jim Larrison of Dynamic Signal noted that large corporations still use traditional print magazines and glossy newsletters for internal communications, showing the enduring power of the format to engage a defined audience.
• Josh Aharonoff, the “Your CFO Guy,” uses visually rich infographics and “cheat sheets” on LinkedIn, which act like valuable pull-outs or single-page features from a financial magazine, to educate his audience and build a following of nearly 400,000.
• Martijn De Kuijper, CEO of Revue, built a platform specifically to help individuals create and distribute personal newsletters, a format that serves as a lightweight digital magazine for thought leaders.
• Chris Ingham Brooke of Pub Ocean runs a portfolio of digital publications as his core business, demonstrating the financial viability of creating engaging, ad-supported content that reaches millions of readers monthly. His owned-and-operated sites generate $25 million in gross revenue.
• Trusted CMO’s Alison Murdock advocates for doubling down on content marketing, such as blogs and thought leadership articles, as a foundational strategy to amplify a founder’s voice and create a market.
• Armando Biondi of Breadcrumbs highlighted the power of content with unique data points and a counter-intuitive perspective to drive growth, a core tenet of creating compelling magazine-style features. His previous company, AdEspresso, grew to over 750,000 monthly unique visitors using this approach.
• Nikhil Aitharaju of UseTopic centers his growth strategy on creating high-quality, comprehensive content that is optimized for search, a foundational element for any digital publication aiming to build an organic audience.
• Factors.ai co-founder Sri Swaminathan leverages podcasts and LinkedIn Lives, which they then transcribe into blogs and other assets. This repurposing strategy is a key part of the magazine model, turning one piece of cornerstone content into many.
• Expandi’s Stefan Smulders created detailed playbooks on LinkedIn tactics, distributing them through communities to attract users. These playbooks served as high-value, niche publications that helped drive the company to $1 million in revenue within six months.
• Kyle Wong of Pixlee described their content-driven approach to attract their ideal customer profile, creating valuable resources that build relationships and drive inbound leads for their enterprise visual marketing platform, now at an $18M run rate.
• Guillaume de Cugnac of Scoop.it built his company around content curation, starting with a free tool that attracted 4 million users. The data from this user base fuels their AI and provides insights for their B2B enterprise offering, which passed a $2.4M run rate.
• Brandon Kelly from Kraft CMS uses content marketing by sponsoring niche design and content strategy conferences to build word-of-mouth for his on-premise software, reaching $1.5M in annual revenue by targeting a developer-focused community.
• Bohumil Pokstefl of Kontentino takes a 360-degree approach to content, focusing on performance marketing and SEO to drive growth for his bootstrapped social media tool, which has broken the $1.5M ARR mark.
• Mark Kilens, with experience at HubSpot and Drift, emphasized the importance of integrated campaigns where messaging and content are aligned across all channels, a strategy essential for distributing a brand magazine’s core themes.
• Irina Novoselsky, CEO of Hootsuite, pointed out that modern buyers consume over 13 pieces of content before talking to sales, underscoring the need for a rich, authoritative content hub like a brand magazine to influence their journey. Hootsuite is approaching $400M in revenue.
• Mark Michael of DevHub explained their use of outbound email blasts, which, while not a publication, rely on targeted content to engage potential customers and drive growth for their enterprise platform, which is doing over $1.5M in ARR.
• Jared Kleinert of Offsite uses his LinkedIn presence as a primary channel for thought leadership, generating over 10.5 million impressions and multiple six-figure deals by consistently publishing valuable content for his target audience.
• Olin Hyde, CEO of LeadCrunch, uses content marketing as part of a multi-channel approach to engage prospects identified through their look-alike platform, helping them grow past a $20M run rate.
• Guillaume Bardet of Testimonial.to uses a combination of blog content and building in public on social media to share his company’s journey, a tactic that grew the business to over $350,000 in ARR primarily from Twitter.
• Steve Benson from Verblio runs a content creation marketplace that produces over 100,000 unique pieces of content a year, demonstrating the operational scale required to execute a magazine-level content strategy. His company is on track for over $12M in revenue.
• Doug Breaker, CEO of Scripted, is transitioning his company to a managed content marketing service, acting as an outsourced publisher for brands that want to leverage content for growth. His company is doing over $3M in ARR.
• Scott Rogerson of UpContent spun his content curation tool out of a service-based agency, using content to build trust and demonstrate expertise, a strategy that has grown the new SaaS business to over $9,000 in MRR.
• Michael Cooney of WhatConverts used insights from paid Google Ads to inform his organic content strategy, creating a feedback loop that helped him build a more effective content engine and grow his bootstrapped company to over $3.6M ARR.
• Madhav Bhandari of Storylane used “demo-led SEO” to grow from 25k to over 150k monthly visitors in just three months, using interactive demos as a new form of high-value content that out-ranked traditional blogs.
• Randy Frisch of Uberflip coined the term “content experience” and built a platform around it, emphasizing the need to create engaging journeys for buyers. His company passed $10M in ARR by helping marketers think like publishers.
• Showpad’s co-founder, Louis Jonckheere, built a sales enablement platform focused on helping marketers deliver the right content to salespeople, solving the internal distribution problem for brands. His company passed a $20M run rate by focusing on the content lifecycle.
• Mark Michael from DevHub, with a platform doing over $1.5M in ARR, stressed that while they are private-labeled, their core function is enabling brands to manage massive amounts of digital content and web experiences at scale.
• Chad Brown of Orangedox built his business by providing document tracking, but pivoted to focus on how sales teams use content in account-based marketing, turning documents into engaging microsites of content for prospects.

Conclusion

You’ve just learned how dozens of top SaaS founders leverage the “Magazine” tactic to transform their content marketing from a simple lead generation tool into a powerful engine for building an owned audience, establishing deep authority, and driving sustainable revenue growth. By creating a cornerstone content asset and repurposing it across multiple channels, these leaders prove that investing in high-quality, curated content is one of the most effective ways to stand out in a crowded market. To put these strategies into action and track your own growth, use Founderpath to get free, real-time insights into your key SaaS metrics.

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