Understory Unfiltered: From Side Hustle to Scalable SaaS - Fibbler's Journey

TLDR: How Fibbler went from a side-project to 100K ARR

Adam Holmgren, founder of Fibbler, has built his LinkedIn ads attribution platform to 100K ARR while maintaining a full-time marketing role at Rillian. Starting with a 20,000-person LinkedIn audience, Adam grew Fibbler through pure product-led growth with only five demos total since launch.

Listen to this episode to learn how to balance building in public with full-time employment, scale a PLG SaaS with zero traditional sales processes, and implement advanced attribution workflows that de-anonymize LinkedIn ad engagement data for targeted outbound campaigns.

Meet the guest: Adam Holmgren, Fibbler founder

Adam Holmgren is the founder of Fibbler, a LinkedIn ads attribution platform that helps B2B SaaS companies understand and act on ad engagement data. While building Fibbler to 100K ARR, Adam maintains his role as a demand generation leader at Rillian, demonstrating how strategic market separation enables side-hustle success.

With 10 years of experience in tech marketing and a 20,000-person LinkedIn audience built before launch, Adam leveraged expertise-first content marketing to grow Fibbler through pure PLG adoption. His co-founder handles development while Adam focuses on product strategy and customer insights from his full-time demand generation work.

Chapters

[00:34] How Adam runs Fibbler alongside his full-time role at Rillian

[03:17] Why trust and vision matter more than technical skills in co-founder relationships

[05:56] How Adam built Fibbler to 100K ARR with only five demos

[11:50] How we turn anonymous LinkedIn ad clicks into qualified outbound prospects

[16:30] How Adam navigates competitive dynamics while employed full-time

[21:10] Why LinkedIn ad clicks beat complex intent scoring systems

[26:30] How engagement thresholds catch prospects at peak interest

[28:42] When customer requests revealed product blind spots for Fibbler

[31:19] Why actionable data matters more than dashboards

Key Insights

Building alongside full-time employment requires strategic market separation.

Adam runs Fibbler while working at Rillian because their audiences don't overlap. "Rillian sells to a CFO finance office. I mean, completely different than I sell. We sell to marketeers," Adam explains. His employer has zero competitive concerns about his marketing attribution tool, enabling him to maintain both roles while building Fibbler to 100K ARR.

The lesson for side hustles: markets that complement rather than compete with your day job eliminate conflict. Different buyer personas, sales cycles, and channels mean your side project can actually increase your visibility and benefit your employer rather than creating tension.

Product-led growth works when you deliver immediate value upon signup.

Fibbler reached 100K ARR with only five demos total. "We run zero demos at this point. All of our users come in and upgrade naturally," Adam shares. The strategy works because technical marketers can evaluate the tool independently: connect LinkedIn ads and CRM, see attribution data instantly.

The key to PLG success: delivering clear value within minutes of signup. When technical users can understand core functionality without explanation, extensive demos become unnecessary. Products requiring detailed walkthroughs to show value may need simpler onboarding experiences or should reconsider whether PLG fits their market.

Build an audience through expertise-first content, not product promotion.

Adam built a 20,000-person LinkedIn audience before launching Fibbler by sharing demand generation tactics. "I will write about something of value and then I might ship it in for a little bit towards the end about how that could help you," he explains. When followers encounter attribution challenges, Fibbler becomes the obvious solution.

The approach requires long-term investment—Adam spent three years posting tactical insights before launch. Sharing specific tests, results, and frameworks that practitioners can use immediately builds credibility. Mentioning solutions briefly at the end rather than leading with promotion filters audiences to serious prospects who understand the problems being solved.

De-anonymize LinkedIn ad engagement to build hyper-targeted outbound lists.

At Understory, we built a workflow combining Fibbler's engagement data with Clay to identify individuals behind company clicks. As we discuss in the episode, we pull all those companies engaging with our ads into HubSpot, enriching the company level data with ad click counts, then adding all of that into Clay. The system overlays exact job titles from ad targeting against engaging companies, finding LinkedIn profiles for personalized outreach.

The workflow runs on scheduled enrichments in Clay—pulling Fibbler engagement data weekly, matching ad campaign job titles to engaging companies, then pushing qualified prospects to outreach tools like Heyreach. Starting with LinkedIn outreach makes sense since prospects are already engaging there rather than beginning with cold email.

LinkedIn ad clicks outperform complex intent scoring systems.

Unlike traditional intent data that marketers struggle to interpret, LinkedIn ad engagement provides transparent signals. "Someone visited your website. I can understand what it is. Same thing with LinkedIn. They clicked on an ad. I do understand what that means," Adam notes. When someone clicks your ad, you know they're actively interested in your category.

Setting up alerts for companies exceeding engagement thresholds (like 10+ clicks) enables timely follow-up. Sales teams can reference specific ad content in outreach messages, creating natural conversation starters that acknowledge demonstrated interest rather than cold pitching.

Building in public creates stronger defensibility than first-mover advantage.

Adam expects numerous Fibbler competitors as the market grows. "When you're running something that's going well, it's just a time frame when there's gonna pop up a million different SaaS tools," he acknowledges. His defense strategy focuses on transparent communication and customer relationships rather than technical moats. Building in public creates emotional investment from customers who feel part of the journey.

The transparency approach—sharing financial metrics, product roadmap decisions, and even mistakes publicly—resonates with customers who increasingly prefer authentic founders over "black-box enterprise vendors" where they have no visibility into company health or direction.

Track influenced pipeline, not just direct email responses.

As we discuss in the episode, what most companies aren't tracking is the influenced pipeline. Recipients might not respond to outbound emails, but they often go to your website, read more about your product, then get hit with retargeting on LinkedIn ads. Recipients often research companies independently after receiving outreach, converting through other channels.

Evaluating outbound solely by direct response rates misses the bigger picture. Cross-channel attribution that tracks how email recipients later engage with ads, visit websites, or convert through other touchpoints reveals outbound's true value as "super targeted ad campaigns with personalized messaging."

Technical buyers expect products that require zero explanation.

"Most marketeers that I meet are like Ali or myself, typically we can sign up for a product, we can figure out what the product usually does and if we can't then it's a problem with the product," Adam observes. Technical marketing teams evaluate tools independently and expect immediate value without guided demos.

For products targeting technical users, core functionality should be self-explanatory within the first login. When sophisticated buyers need extensive onboarding to understand value propositions, it often signals UX design issues rather than user capability gaps.

Route data through compliant platforms to bypass early-stage compliance costs.

Enterprise customers often require SOC 2 compliance that small SaaS companies can't afford initially. As Alex points out in the episode, integration platforms like Clay that already maintain compliance solve this challenge indirectly. Customers can push Fibbler data through Clay to their CRMs, effectively becoming "SOC 2 compliant" through the integration partner.

The alternative to spending $100K+ on SOC 2 certification early: identifying which integration platforms target customers already trust, then building reliable webhooks and APIs to these partners. Their compliance frameworks can cover data processing while smaller companies focus resources on core product development.

Filter customer feedback through realistic user capabilities, not just vocal requests.

"We also made a lot of mistakes early on. We pushed a lot for the CRM integration, getting data into your CRM as the source of truth, which is great if you have an ops resource that understands it," Adam reflects. Technical users appreciated the capability, but it created friction for marketing leaders without ops support.

The challenge with customer requests: vocal power users often don't represent broader markets. When customers request advanced features, the question becomes whether typical users have resources to implement them. Development focused on in-platform insights and actions serves marketing leaders more effectively than complex integrations requiring ops teams.

Ready to see how LinkedIn ad attribution can transform your demand generation strategy? Listen to the full episode on Spotify | YouTube and subscribe for more insights on SaaS growth strategy and allbound marketing.

Want to explore how allbound coordination can eliminate your specialist management overhead while improving prospect experiences? Book a call with Understory to discuss your SaaS growth challenges.