In 2023, I joined TRES Finance as the first marketing hire. The company had around $500K in ARR. Two and a half years later, Fireblocks acquired us for $130M.
I'm not going to pretend marketing was the only reason. It wasn't. The product was genuinely excellent. The founders were sharp. The market timing was right. But marketing played a role that was disproportionate to the size of the team or the budget. And I think the way we did it is worth talking about, because it looked nothing like what most people think startup marketing should look like.
No paid ads. Seriously.
We had virtually no paid advertising budget. In crypto B2B, that's actually pretty common, but it forced a discipline that I think more companies should embrace even when they do have the budget.
When you can't buy attention, you have to earn it. And earning attention forces you to be genuinely interesting, not just visible.
Most startup marketing budgets get burned on paid channels that produce vanity metrics. Impressions. Clicks. MQLs that never convert. I've seen companies spend six figures a month on paid and not be able to point to a single deal that originated from it.
We skipped all of that. Not by choice, initially. But it turned out to be one of the smartest constraints we had.
What we actually did
Three things. That's basically it. Three things done consistently over two and a half years.
1. We became the most knowledgeable voice in our niche.
TRES was a crypto data lake for accounting, audit, and reporting. Incredibly niche. The intersection of digital assets and financial operations. Most crypto companies were talking about price action and Web3 hype. We were talking about reconciliation workflows, audit trails, and regulatory reporting.
Boring? To most people, yes. To the CFOs and controllers who were drowning in spreadsheets trying to account for on-chain transactions? It was exactly what they needed to hear.
We didn't try to be interesting to everyone. We tried to be indispensable to someone. Every piece of content, every talk, every conversation was designed to demonstrate that we understood their problem better than anyone else.
2. We showed up where it mattered.
Crypto has a conference circuit. It's expensive and most of it is useless. But the right events, the ones where your actual buyers are, can be transformative for a small company.
We were selective. We didn't sponsor everything. We didn't throw parties. We showed up at the events where institutional finance people were starting to engage with crypto. We spoke on panels. We hosted small dinners. We had real conversations with real prospects.
This isn't scalable in the way that a paid media campaign is scalable. But it compounds. Every conversation builds a relationship. Every relationship builds a referral network. Every referral creates the kind of warm introduction that no amount of cold outreach can replicate.
3. We built trust before we needed it.
The biggest mistake in B2B marketing is treating it as a short-term lead generation exercise. Most startups start marketing when they need pipeline. By then, it's too late.
We started building credibility from day one. Long before most of our prospects were ready to buy. We wanted to be the company they already trusted when the moment came.
That meant being generous with knowledge. Publishing genuinely useful content, not gated garbage designed to capture email addresses. Answering questions in forums and communities. Being the brand that helped, not the brand that sold.
By the time prospects entered a buying cycle, they already knew us. They'd already read our stuff. They'd already seen our team at events. The sales conversation started from a position of trust, not cold outreach.
What I'd do differently
Honestly? Not much. But there are a few things I'd push harder on from the start.
I'd invest in community earlier. We eventually co-founded Finance Leaders Collective, but I wish we'd started building that kind of community infrastructure in year one. Owning the conversation in your market is the most durable advantage a marketing team can create.
I'd be bolder with point of view. We were opinionated, but we could have been more so. In B2B, people are so afraid of alienating potential buyers that they end up saying nothing. The companies that win are the ones willing to take a position and defend it.
I'd hire for taste and judgement over experience. The people who made the biggest impact weren't the ones with the longest CVs. They were the ones who could look at something and know instinctively whether it was right or wrong.
The takeaway
There's no hack here. No secret framework. No "one weird trick" that got us to a $130M exit.
It was simple, boring, consistent work. Understand the market deeply. Show up where it matters. Build trust before you need it. Do that for long enough and the results take care of themselves.
Most companies won't do this because it doesn't feel like enough. It doesn't produce a dashboard full of metrics you can screenshot for the board. It requires patience and conviction that what you're doing is working even when you can't prove it with a spreadsheet.
But it works. I know because I watched it work.