World’s longest intro
One of those companies that’s always in your feed. Either getting featured by a journalist, or getting mooned over by some graphic designer with an itch for over collecting unique website designs.
So when I saw them launching a new product: their messaging repeatedly hitting my feed before I could refill my cup (Fintech Nexus featured their product release first). I thought the only thing every sane person thinks when they see something like this, “wouldn’t it be nice if we all got featured on Fintech Nexus…”
“How did they get here?” I asked as I fell into another rabbit hole that landed me on their website and eventually, typing out this article with one hand, as the other shamelessly helps my mouth sip something lukewarm.
What’s behind Pipe.com’s marketing is the big question.
An alternative lender that’s using embedded finance to sell capital to SaaS companies, vertical SaaS and small businesses. This article is an attempt to answer that.
PS: As I write this, Forbes Contributor, Jeff Gapusan has since picked up Pipe’s product announcement and spun it into an article about SMB lending. I’ll try to cold-email him to learn how more startups can more easily get journalists to share their stories. (That is, if it wasn’t a paid campaign 🙂
Who do they sell to and why
Pipe’s value proposition: availing capital to SMEs in a way that’s easier and faster than is currently possible using traditional underwriting methods.
Pipe’s ICP: I noticed most of the company’s testimonials feature founders and CEOs. The desire that ties this group to Pipe’s products seems to be business growth—without burning cash reserves.
Here’s what I dug up:
Product
Pipes product is in two parts:
A B2B product targeting individual businesses that need funding. And a B2B2B product targeting companies serving other companies who might need capital. E.g. a vertical software company like PatientPop which sells practice management software to medical practices.
These products are sold through embedded finance where the end user does not know that Pipe is behind the loans. Or through traditional referral partnerships where Pipe interacts with the end-user directly.
Who is Pipe marketing to?
- Growing SaaS companies
- Payment companies serving merchants
- Vertical SaaS companies
Channels
Channel 1: SEO
Pipe.com ranks for 1.3 K keywords and receives 22,157 visits per month according to SEMRush data.
I analysed the company’s site map and saw they've categorised their content into blogs (90 articles), news (PR, company announcements), Deploy (five articles from internal engineering subject matter experts) and an FAQ help section.
Without accounting for news articles and the engineering team’s “Deploy” content series. Pipe has averaged a publishing rate of less than an article a week in the 3 years leading up to 2024.
So even though they've grown fast since launching in 2021, it seems the search engine was intentionally not a major customer acquisition channel. (We'll explore the other channels that might have contributed to the growth ahead.)
However, in 2024, the company tripled its 2023 publishing volume, likely indicating an emphasis on customer education this year.
A closer look at Pipe's 2024 blog topics so far shows a majority of them to be bottom-of-funnel “money keywords” content.
I'm seeing more companies concentrate on bottom-of-funnel content in expectation that AI disruptions on the search engine will make creating top-of-funnel "what is X" type content, fruitless.
Bottom-of-funnel and thought leadership type content is especially valuable in niches like Pipe's—embedded finance — where the ICP might not be aware of the solution enough to search for it.
So Pipe has to resort to educating them on problems/topics close to their product, i.e. merchant cash advances, leveraging existing financial data for loans, SMB short-term finance, etc.
Channel 2: partnerships
Growth through partnerships is inherent in embedded finance where products are sold to a large partner who trickles it down to its small SMB/SaaS clients.
Here’s a list of some of Pipe’s partners:
Pipe has been great at leveraging this model for growth.
Initially partnering with PayFacs (payment facilitators that set up payment processing for merchants so they don't need to establish direct relationships with payment gateways and acquiring banks) and independent software vendors ISVs, to extend loans to these partners’ customers.
This is done via two partnership models. An old-school tech-free referral style where partners send clients in need of capital to work with Pipe directly.
Note: Though Pipe is a fintech, this low-tech option is a great go-to-market decision because it lowers the barrier to entry for partners who might not have strong in-house technological expertise.
API Lending Integration
Think of how you would use Uber and won't recognise how you're only able to do that because the Google Maps API is working overtime in the background. Pipe has adapted this model to lending.
Applying for loans is done within the partner's software through API integrations; the end user not knowing that Pipe is involved.
This model has a higher technical demand, but the upside is that it leverages existing trust between Pipes partners and their users; allowing Pipe to sell loans — a product that requires a truckload of trust between all parties involved — to an audience that might not easily have trusted Pipe if they’d tried dealing directly with them.
I point this out because of a LinkedIn conversation I had with the CEO of Playter (a B2B Buy Now, Pay Later product that allows companies to consume services without going out of pocket).
He was sharing how companies that had ignored his cold emails when his company was unknown, were now reaching out to him because his brand was bigger. I poked him a bit about this and he revealed that in lending, companies don't easily trust start-ups unless they know they will be around for a while.
So by lending through API integrations, Pipe is skipping what Playter experienced.
Though easy to dismiss, Pipe is marketing through Place among the 4Ps of marketing (Price, Place, Promotion, Product), not just Promotion as many of us within internet businesses love to do and forget the other 3Ps.
All in all, these two partnership models work together as a sales funnel.
Old school manual referrals at the top, for companies that have no interest in committing to a technological investment in Pipe, then the API lending integration at the bottom of the funnel once they've had a taste of extra lending revenue, and changed their minds.
Channel 3: Social
LinkedIn is Pipe’s top social channel at 68% of total social discovery. They serve start-up founders and vertical SaaS companies, all who spend time on LinkedIn, so it makes sense why this would be a great channel for them.
What surprises me is the traffic they're getting from YouTube — will dig into this shortly.
Pipes LinkedIn page has 22K followers.
To give me a picture of what that audience looks like, I took a LinkedIn post that talked about their product and analysed the people who engaged with it. The audience seems to be a mix of Pipe employees (they have 313 listed on LinkedIn), founders and CEOs (their ICP), investors and venture capitalists, partners, and other lenders (fintech and traditional).
LinkedIn ads analysis
From analysing multiple ads, here's a summary of what Pipe is trying to communicate to their ICP.
→"Grow revenue and GPV (gross profit volume)
→"Build embedded finance in-house versus with a partner"
→"Embedded lending for merchants"
LinkedIn funnel 1: Webinar
Type: LinkedIn message (InMail) ad
Funnel: message ad → webinar
Ad topic: embedded capital (they're educating their ICP on the category, not the product)
ICP: PayFac & ISOs (independent sales organisations)
Landing page
Funnel 2: bottom of funnel blog post
Type: LinkedIn image ad
Funnel: Image ad→blog post
Ad Topic: customer education on embedded finance
ICP: anybody selling payments to e-commerce merchants
Pipe has great clarity on their ICP; the benefits and the impact of embedded finance on this group. Because of this, they don't waste any words: want to grow gross profit margin? Increase dismal customer engagement.? How about adding a higher margin revenue stream? Yes/no? If yes, here's how…
The funnel then leads to an A-Z article about implementing embedded finance, with a "get started" call to action.
Note: in cold email copywriting, I bold any words describing benefits, impact or pain points to draw attention to them quickly, especially if I suspect the audience is made up of busy people who are likely to skim through. The same approach can work in ads.
YouTube
At first glance, I assumed Pipe was reaching its ICP on YouTube through organic content, but on closer inspection, I only found nine videos on the channel, which couldn't possibly be responsible for 12% of the total traffic it’s getting from social media. So I thought...
I dug deeper and saw that from those nine videos, they had 361 subscribers and 276,471 views between May 2021 and April 2024.
Three videos account for 73% of these views but have very few comments and are about a minute long (organic videos with the same number of views attract more comments and they usually aren’t a minute long). So even though there is no way to tell if Pipe is running YouTube ads, these crumbs of data tell me they are.
The popular videos are all testimonials, with the most successful highlighting a specific result (e.g. grew 80% or get capital), a time for achieving said result (one year, 72 hours) and a "get X without having to do Y" statement.
YouTube has an active audience segment that consumes business/startup content, from e-commerce to SaaS. Pipe has a capital product, which lends itself well to fishing that audience off of YouTube without the audience having to switch topics to learn about the company.
Plus, the way they are structured… these video ads can work both as retargeting or first-time messaging that introduces new people to Pipe in a style that feels like a friend's recommendation. The videos’ calls to action are to visit their website.
Okay, before I get into another rabbit hole, let’s end it there. Off to drink some Kenyan tea…
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