How a Niche B2B SaaS Got a 4-Week Ad System It Could Run Itself

This founder sold software to a few thousand people who hate being sold to. That was the whole problem.

He runs a UK SaaS company that builds software for heat-pump installers. Around £1M in ARR, with a target of £4M by the end of 2026. The catch is the market. There are only about 3,000 to 4,000 installers in the entire UK, mostly older men running family businesses, not especially tech-savvy, and allergic to a hard pitch. Get the tone wrong and you don't just lose a sale. You burn trust in a market small enough that word travels.

He'd been using a cheap freelancer and wanted two things that rarely come together: real strategic guidance and execution that actually looked good. So we built him a 4-week Ad System Sprint, designed around exactly how suspicious this audience is, then handed the whole thing over so his team could keep running it after we left.

Here's what the situation demanded, what we built in four weeks, and why the real win was the system he kept.

The situation: a small market that hates being sold to

Most B2B ad playbooks assume a big addressable market and a buyer who expects to be marketed to. Neither was true here. The total market is a few thousand installers, and they're the kind of buyer who tunes out the second something feels like an ad. A polished corporate spot would have been the fastest way to get ignored.

The freelancer route had given him cheap output and no strategy. Nobody was asking who each ad was for, what stage of the decision it spoke to, or why an installer should believe a word of it. For a founder trying to go from £1M to £4M in ARR, that gap matters. You can't quadruple revenue in a tiny market on ads that the market quietly scrolls past.

So the brief wasn't make more ads. It was build ads this specific audience would actually trust, in enough variety to test properly, and leave behind a way to keep making them.

What we built

We ran a focused 4-week Ad System Sprint. Not a one-off batch of clips, a system the founder's team could keep using once we were done. Six parts.

1. We produced 8 to 10 distinct ad concepts with 3 to 4 variations each, which came to 30 to 40 finished video exports ready for Meta. Enough range to test angles properly, not just a single ad nobody could learn from.
2. We mapped every ad to an awareness level: problem-aware, solution-aware, product-aware, and proof or retargeting. The right message reaches the installer at the right stage instead of pitching a product to someone who doesn't yet know they have the problem.
3. We led with testimonial ads featuring real installers, because this audience trusts its own kind far more than a slick pitch. An installer hearing from another installer lands where a brand voice never would.
4. We standardized UK English across every piece of on-screen text. A small detail that signals you know this market and aren't a generic vendor copying American ads at them.
5. We ran a strategy call every Friday, so the work stayed pointed at the founder's actual goal instead of drifting into output for its own sake.
6. We handed over a Notion briefing system so the team could keep producing on their own after the sprint ended. They left owning the engine, not renting it from us.

Two bonus pieces came out of the four weeks as well. A LiDAR launch hero ad for a new feature, and a case-study video. Both built to the same standard as the core library.

The results

Every deliverable shipped on time, and the founder was happy with the quality. The part that mattered most came after the sprint. The Notion handover worked, so his team is now self-sufficient for continued ad production. They don't need us in the room to brief, build, and ship the next batch.

We also stood behind the work with a performance guarantee. If no customer was acquired in the 21-day window after the sprint, given a minimum ad spend, the client got a refund. That's the bet we were willing to make on creative built for this exact audience. The outcome we can report is the one above: the system shipped, the founder was happy, and his team owns the engine.

The point of this one wasn't a viral ad. It was matching the creative to how guarded these installers are, then leaving the founder a system his own team runs toward that £4M target without us.