From $3M to $50M ARR Without Paid Ads with Alex Howe (SVP Marketing & Growth at Funnel Leasing)

**Dave Gerhardt** (0:00)
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All right, this company grew from 3 million to 50 million in ARR without doing any paid ads. That's what my guest pulled off at Funnel Leasing. His name is Alex Howe, and he's the SVP of Marketing and Growth at Funnel Leasing, a company north of 50 million that builds renter-focused leasing and communication tools for property management companies. A great example of a B2B business that's really interesting to you if you work in marketing. And here's what I love about Alex's story. He started off in PR and comms, then jumped into sales and found it brutal. And he actually inherited a marketing team of one and built the whole thing from scratch with no traditional marketing background. We got into how that path shaped the way he runs marketing today. And the lessons in this one are really good and it's all about the timeless stuff. If you're a little bit burnt out on all AI this and AI that, I think you're going to really enjoy this episode. It's all about being different instead of just being better. How they grew to 50 million without spending money on ads, using events to stand out, building their own user conference, heck, even making the brand be pink to stand out. I really enjoyed this episode with Alex, a nice little refreshing grounding episode about the life of a B2B marketing leader. Here's my conversation with Alex Howe. All right, so you're Alex Howe. What do you do for work, sir?

**Alex Howe** (3:36)
My title is the SVP of Marketing and Growth at a company called Funnel Leasing. So we are, think of the entire resident renter life cycle from initial inquiry when you're looking at an apartment online through getting screened and you apply and your tour gets scheduled and rescheduled. You ultimately move in, you pay your rent, you submit a mains request when the toilet breaks, all of that is handled within our platform. So we basically sell to super large apartment owners and managers. It's a true B2B to see, right? We don't have millions of customers. We have a set number of concentrated big guys, but they have billions of customers.

**Dave Gerhardt** (4:17)
Yeah. That's a perfect example of like, I was just, my folks are up this weekend, we're having a little cookout here and for 15 years, I've been trying to explain to them what B2B marketing is.