Sanity.io: From Seed to $85M in Series C

Tomas helped us grow from Seed to Series C. The system we built generates predictable MQLs sales can close, driving predictable pipeline and revenue.

Pål Fredrik Braaten

Director Demand Generation at Sanity.io

Are you a B2B SaaS marketer drowning in sky-high CPCs and channels that don’t convert?

Sanity felt the same pressure early on. Today, they’re a category leader with a global enterprise customer base.

Part 1: EARLY-STAGE GROWTH

Search was bleeding money. Users didn’t stay. Growth stalled.

The Challenge

Sanity just founded and faced brutal competition: Adobe. Salesforce. Contentful ($95M raised)

Paid search was expensive – and worse, those users churned fast. The math didn’t work. CAC vs LTV? Stomach-dropping.

The Outcome

We built a YouTube engine that delivered high-retention users — better cohorts than search and more profitable.

Instead of fighting in a crowded ad auction, we met developers where they learn.

The Solution

• Used niche dev YouTube channels – to teach Sanity through tutorials and crash courses.
  These videos demonstrated real value and created instant product familiarity.
• Promoted these videos so people chose to watch them – real intent, not forced clicks.
  Using YouTube in-feed ads: Viewers understood the product before visiting the site
• Tested 50+ custom segments – to find the audience that actually converted
  Optimizing based on later visits to our website and tracking signups back to spend, proving the impact.

We got the early traction it needed not by outspending competitors — but by using channel they were weak at.

Part 2: MOVING UP-MARKET

Enterprise buyers didn’t trust us yet. We needed to get into their shortlists.

The Challenge

Developers love Sanity— but enterprise buyers are different. We needed to land multinationals with large buying committees and complex use cases. The problem? Long cycles, big buying committees that had to be influenced early to get even shortlisted.

This is where most SaaS companies get stuck.

The Outcome

We built a LinkedIn influence system that got Sanity into enterprise shortlists, earned trust with VPs and C-suite primarily in North America.

It wasn’t just lead gen — building trust with precision.
The result? Pipeline lift (with avg. 7-month lag), buying committees pre-sold before sales touched them, and a repeatable system that scaled upmarket.

The Solution

• Laser-focused account targeting
  Curated account lists was the key targeting on LinkedIn Ads: getting data from G2 and other third-party data aggregators to prioritize in-market accounts.
• Multi-layer LinkedIn influence program
  Not just lead gen – mix of high-level strategic content for management and technical deep dives for developers. Leveraging retargeting, engagement audiences, company targeting on accounts in pipeline. So Sanity gets into the shortlist, and stay there.
• Conference promotion: Filling the Room (and the Pipeline)
  The highest-impact plays? Promoting Sanity’s flagship conference using LinkedIn Conversation Ads to invite Fortune 500 leaders to SF, London, and Oslo. And getting thousands more streaming online to hear Shopify, or the New York Times share what they built with Sanity.

The LinkedIn Framework

Struggling with long sales cycles and cold committees? This framework could help you get you into the room and shorten the path to close.

Part 3: SCALING TOP-OF-FUNNEL AT ENTERPRISE LEVEL

LinkedIn and Search were maxed out. We needed more demand.

The Pain

Sanity needed more inbound demos but enterprise awareness had to come first.

LinkedIn? Too expensive at this scale.

Meta + YouTube? Cheap reach, but hard to target real category buyers

Most B2B teams can’t even tell if Meta traffic is legit.

The Outcome

We built a custom sales funnel and tracking to predict impact of the channel and how close we are to hit the yearly goals.

YouTube + Meta scaled into five-figure monthly channels crucial too keep up with the growth goals.

More important? Sanity stopped being “just another headless CMS” and became the CMS for content operations.

The Solution (Simple Version)

1. Building a custom sales funnel
   • We combined customer interviews with data analysis: How did customers flow from pain realization to close? And what are early indicators that correlate with buyers — and do not correlate with people just browsing – so we know what is working early on.
2. Traffic validation
   • IP enrichment to identify visiting companies. Detecting visitors on company level helps to validate if they meet our ICP criteria.
3. Populate the custom sales funnel with the account level data
   • This let me see how many companies are in each stage, so I know where to focus budget and which campaigns to run next.
4. Feed this back into ads, so Meta + Google learned which users to chase.
   • Optimizing on the traffic validation conversions significantly improves targeting and overall effectiveness of the channel

Get early signals that can actually predict the results

This unlocked scale without losing quality. Building a top-of-funnel engine powerful enough for category leadership wouldn’t be possible without the proper traffic validation and tracking setup. For more details checkout this article.

Conclusion: A Six+ Year Partnership That Made Rapid Growth More Predictable

From developer adoption → enterprise pipeline → category leadership.

What we built together:

• A predictable acquisition engine across multiple channels
• A repeatable way to reach both developers and enterprise buyers
• Paid media that keeps delivering from Seed → Series C

The lesson? Strategy-first media optimized on early signals beats brute-force spending competitors.

You don’t need an agency.

You need someone who can blend strategy, tracking, experimentation, and ruthless execution.

Tomas is integral part of our businesses. He is proactive source of ideas and operates like he owns it.

Kate Svensson

Senior Demand Generation Manager at Sanity.io