We studied how the best SaaS companies grow. Then we built software to run the same playbook.
The pattern behind the winners
We’ve always been SaaS people at heart. Our backgrounds are in digital marketing (SEO, paid search, analytics), but we’ve spent years studying how the best SaaS companies grow. Not just reading about them. Breaking down their search strategies, mapping their content, reverse-engineering what actually drives their growth.
The companies that win have something in common. It isn’t bigger budgets or better content. It’s structure. They cover buyer intent systematically, from people comparing tools right now all the way to people who don’t yet know they have a problem.
HubSpot does this. Ahrefs does this. Intercom, Monday.com, Zapier. They don’t just “do content marketing.” They operate a layered system where each type of buyer intent gets its own strategy, content, channels, and metrics. And the layers compound over time.
We kept seeing this pattern across industries, company sizes, deal cycles. It was consistent enough that we gave it a name: the Intent Stack.
The Intent Stack
The Intent Stack is a five-tier framework that maps how SaaS buyers search, evaluate, and decide:
- Comparison Intent. Buyers with a shortlist, ready to decide. Versus pages, competitor campaigns, migration guides.
- Product Intent. Buyers looking for a solution but not yet committed to a vendor. Category pages, integration pages, feature pages.
- Problem Intent. Buyers trying to solve a business problem, not yet thinking about tools. How-to content, templates, calculators.
- Strategic Intent. Buyers forming views about where a market is heading. Thought leadership, original research, founder content.
- Retention Intent. Existing customers. Onboarding flows, knowledge bases, lifecycle content.
Most SaaS companies cover one or two of these tiers. The best cover all five, building from the bottom up: start where conversion rates are highest, then expand toward longer-term brand building.
The framework isn’t theory. It describes what already works, extracted from years of studying the companies that dominate their categories.
Read the full Intent Stack framework →
Why we built Clickbuddy
Knowing the framework is one thing. Executing it is another.
Running a full Intent Stack requires deep keyword research across every tier, intent-based grouping, content gap analysis, competitor mapping, and campaign structure that ties it all together. Done manually, this is weeks of work. Spreadsheets, Ahrefs exports, Google Ads editor, more spreadsheets.
Most SaaS teams don’t operate from a system. They write a blog post because a competitor did. They run Google Ads on their brand name and a few obvious keywords. They build a landing page, maybe two. It’s reactive, ad hoc, and it covers a fraction of the demand that’s actually out there.
Clickbuddy automates the keyword research, intent classification, content recommendations, and campaign creation that the Intent Stack requires. A team of two can run the same search playbook that built HubSpot.
Our backstory
Our founding team comes from digital marketing. We’re associated with Hopkins, a Helsinki-based agency that achieved 1,460% cumulative growth and ranked 10th in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 Finland in 2021. In 2022, Hopkins reached 306th on the Financial Times FT 1000 list of Europe’s fastest-growing companies.
That experience, serving hundreds of B2B companies across industries, gave us a front-row seat to what works in search marketing. It’s also where we started noticing the pattern that became the Intent Stack.
In early 2023, we started building what we wished existed. By late 2023, we had a working internal demo that saved significant time and outperformed manual setups. In mid-2024, we rebuilt everything from scratch as an AI-native platform. By October 2025, keyword research, SEO, and Google Ads modules reached production-ready status.
The team
Three digital marketing veterans with 17+ years each. 55+ years combined across digital marketing, analytics, and engineering.
We’ve spent our careers inside Google Ads, Ahrefs, GA, and every spreadsheet in between. We know what works because we’ve done it, across industries, for over a decade. Now we’re encoding that experience into software.
What we’re building toward
Every SaaS company should be able to run a structured, intent-based search strategy without months of manual setup.
Our roadmap: expand beyond Google Ads and SEO into LinkedIn, Meta, and Reddit. Build the full stack of tools a SaaS marketing team needs to run the Intent Stack end to end.
The mission is simple. Make expert-level search marketing accessible to every SaaS team, regardless of size or budget.