Vladan: Welcome everyone to the Nobel Podcast. We have today Georgi in the studio. This is actually a special edition because Georgi is nominated for the SaaS Awards in the Rising Star category. He started in 2024 at The Growth Syndicate and has now started his own company where he works as co-founder and CEO — called Signalbase. My first question is: how did you actually stumble into the Signalbase opportunity?
Georgi: It’s quite a funny story. Last year The Growth Syndicate had this community that I was leading in its entirety — there’s a whole story behind how the community started but I won’t go into that now. In February, Ferdinand — one of the founders of The Growth Syndicate — said: okay, next to the agency wing and the community wing, we’re going to do a big conference. At first everyone was excited, like we’re going to put our flag on the map and people are going to recognise us. We hadn’t seen anything like it — let’s not do another boring conference, let’s do something that will shake the entire European ecosystem. The format we decided to introduce was roundtables, because we had already proven through our meetups that it’s a format people love. It’s more engaging.
Vladan: Yeah, I loved the event actually. I really miss it. Maybe you guys need to run it back.
Georgi: That being said, everything started from there. At some point the main project owner left the company and all the responsibility came to my shoulders. What happened was that all the founders came to me, grabbed me by the shoulder and said: Georgi, do whatever you do, we cannot fail with this one. I said okay, I’ll stop doing everything around the community and just focus on the conference.
In June we had only 30 ticket sales — people we had been fighting to get throughout the entire year, our community members. Based on that, we needed a proper go-to-market strategy. At that point we were doing normal outreach — messaging heads of marketing in the Netherlands, hammering as much as possible. But that didn’t really work. We received a lot of hate from people calling us spammers. A typical problem when you’re trying to build a go-to-market motion — how are you different from everyone else?
Vladan: How were you doing the outreach — email, calls, LinkedIn?
Georgi: LinkedIn, via Expandi. And based on that, yeah, something just wasn’t working. The only thing that actually worked was when I started running around the office, doing push-ups, jumping around, screaming — making these videos. Maybe you can drop them in here, they were quite fun. I remember one time I was lying on the couch in the office and you just walked in and said: George, are you actually working? What the hell are you doing?
Vladan: Yeah.
Georgi: But I was always working. Those clips actually generated a few sales. And from that we realised the only way to move forward was to make others talk about our conference. So what happened was: every time someone purchased a ticket, I would create a frame — a standardised visual — and together with Daria, the head of paid marketing at TGS, we designed a loop of thought leadership ads running towards the accounts we really wanted. On top of that paid layer, I was monitoring all the ads for engagement. If someone qualified engaged, I’d send them a message instantly saying: hey, I know Vladan is coming — and you know Vladan is a credible person — so why don’t you join him at this event? It’s probably worth it, the speakers are great, there’s nothing like it.
Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t. And then for the next person who bought a ticket, we created another frame, ran another ad. If that same person had now engaged with two different frames, I’d send another message saying: okay, now Vladan and Georgi are both coming — why are you not coming? That’s how the whole funnel started surrounding the conference, and that’s how we managed to build an event for 200 go-to-market leaders in September.
Building a community that actually works
Vladan: A lot of people are talking about community building, and you built one for TGS. What are the secrets — what would you advise someone who’s trying to go the community route?
Georgi: There are so many things. Number one: are you building a community around your product, or are you building a community for people experiencing similar problems where your product isn’t the direct focus? Because if it is your business model, it’s very hard to scale. If it’s not your business model but you only want to talk about your product, it’s also hard to scale. You need to provide value first. And obviously it’s hosted by you — it doesn’t need to punch people in the face about that. You get the ROI eventually, because imagine your prospects are there and you’re talking to them in real time, over a beer, at a cool event where it feels safe. People can actually open up about their problems. You get the full picture and that’s how you close the deals.
But there are a few key things. Number one: why should someone join and who needs to join — just like building any other business. My take is that if you want to introduce a certain level of quality inside the community, you need to be brutal with who you let in. And to that degree, that level of filtering becomes your advantage — everyone wants to join the exclusive one. Of course the volume won’t be there, so you need to find ways to loop in more of those quality people. Essentially, you either bet on volume and kill the quality, or you increase the quality but volume is small — so you need to know how to engage them by bringing in other people they admire.
Vladan: And how do you recruit members?
Georgi: The go-to-market motion was content — really interesting content. I remember we did a hot chicken wings challenge with a head of marketing, kind of like Hot Ones. You take the fundamental go-to-market layer and then start thinking: this is what everyone is used to seeing, how can we take it to the next level? That’s also why I threw a launch party for the Signalbase launch in January, and it turned out really nicely. I met great people, we had fun, and it was way better than a traditional product launch.
How Signalbase came about
Vladan: Let’s talk about Signalbase. How did that come about?
Georgi: When we got to the conference, I realised: the only way to do go-to-market now is with signals. When I looked at the vendors out there, I saw two categories — social signals and signals that help you build your list. I decided not to go after social signals because they’re limited to the power of your brand. There are internal and external signals: internal are the ones you capture around your own company, like intent, and external are broader market signals — someone is hiring, someone got funded, and so on. I wanted to go that direction.
And if you look at how current data vendors like Apollo operate, they buy stale accounts from other companies every 30 days — that’s how their database grows, but they never refresh it. You’ve probably experienced this: reaching out to someone just because they fit your ICP but they’re not even in that role anymore. So what’s the context around the account that you can use to actually stand out in your message? That’s what we’re building with Signalbase — giving you accounts that have a real motion behind them, verified, with the sources shown.
Vladan: And from a more personal perspective — how did you find your co-founders and actually get into this company?
Georgi: They kind of recruited me out of TGS — they kind of stole me. After the conference I really wanted to build a SaaS, and the guys were very supportive. My co-founders had actually been customers of the community, and they had already acquired the previous version of Signalbase. My story is a little different from most founders — my co-founders acquired a company, then recruited me, then we did a full rebrand, changed the infrastructure, and pivoted the product. We’ve pivoted twice so far.
Vladan: But did you find them through the conference?
Georgi: No, they were friends of Ferdinand I think. I met one co-founder through Ferdinand and the other through the network.
Vladan: So your role at TGS you found through SaaStock, and the co-founders through the community. That’s a good tip for listeners — go to the events, go to the communities, meet interesting people and find opportunities.
Georgi: Totally.
Advice for young people who want to become founders
Vladan: What advice would you give to people in a similar position to yours — recently graduated, wanting to become a founder?
Georgi: Definitely do it. Now is the time. Just maybe not in the go-to-market space because it’s so crowded. This week alone I had two major acquisitions that changed the entire game — Apollo acquired Pocus, which is interesting because Apollo is the data layer and Pocus is the signal layer. And Clay changed their pricing, which moves everything. It’s a very dynamic market.
But to answer the question: try solving a problem that is really meaningful. And the advice I’d give is that you might start a company with one mission but very quickly realise that if you want to stay on that journey, you need to embrace changes within your idea. It’s a common piece of advice but: don’t fall in love with your idea, because when it needs to change, you need to go with it.
Also surround yourself with the right people. It really helps me to check in with the guys at TGS from time to time and say: hey, I’m struggling with this, is this normal? And find co-founders who are actually with you for the journey, because my life changed significantly since we started. After the conference it changed massively.
Vladan: In what sense?
Georgi: I realised the people around me were not really the right people for the long term — in a very personal sense. So I said okay, I need to change this. I said goodbye to my previous life and started living the life I think I need to live for my future to be stable. Doing those things and actually daring to make the first move — so many people want to do something but there’s nothing to be afraid of, just go for it. We’re even right now talking to some of our biggest competitors who actually want to use our data. Nothing to fear, just come and say hi.
“Don’t fall in love with your idea, because when it needs to change, you need to go with it.”
Signal-based go-to-market: the framework
Vladan: Back to Signalbase and how to integrate it into your outbound strategy — what would you advise less advanced users who are listening today?
Georgi: The tooling doesn’t matter. The framework behind it does. When you do signal-based go-to-market, there are layers to it. The first layer is knowing your ICP. If you don’t know your ICP, if you don’t have a repeatable process, and if you don’t understand your core offering and the market you want to operate in — no matter how many signals you try, you will fail.
Let’s say you have that sorted. Cool. Then the core question that forms the whole signal-based motion is: at what moment does your buyer start thinking about you? For you guys, for instance, it might be: a company just got funding and now needs to hire executives.
Vladan: It’s slightly different for us — usually it starts with a business problem, like we want to expand into Germany, and the hire is the result of that.
Georgi: Exactly. So your custom signal is: someone is looking to expand. There are three layers to building your signal-based go-to-market engine. Number one: look at your whole market and see who is actually moving right now. A move can be something basic — a job change, they’re hiring, they just received a new funding round — something that strongly indicates this company is about to do something. That’s your first layer.
Then you layer on a custom layer specific to your market. In your case: they raised funding or just hired someone for a new market, so they might be looking to expand. You knock on the door. Then comes the secondary layer: nurture. And this is where 99% of the market goes wrong. People think the first and second layers are the same thing, but they’re not. In the first layer you’re getting context — signals are just information to help you shape your initial list, which is what Signalbase gives you. In the second layer you’re already nurturing: social listening, are they going to events, are they visiting your pricing page? All those small indicators go into the secondary bucket.
Once you move further along, depending on your go-to-market motion — PLG or sales-led — you need to observe CRM signals, customer support signals, product signals. That in essence is how you need to look at it.
Vladan: And in that case you don’t burn your SDRs.
Georgi: Exactly. The problem is that so many people see accounts moving and go after everything. But you burn them out. You need to be selective.
Sales as a founder: 80% of the job
Vladan: In your role as a founder, what role does sales play in your day-to-day?
Georgi: Key. Right now especially as we move into enterprise sales, which is something I never experienced as a marketing-first leader. I’d say 80% of my time goes there right now.
Vladan: 80%.
Georgi: Yeah. So for anyone out there who wants to become a founder — the first step is to get into sales. You need to understand how to sell yourself. But marketing is super important too. You see me talking with you right now — people start associating me with you, so I become more credible. That’s why you need to go out there, talk to other people, do cool content with others. The more people see you alongside others, the more credible you become.
“If you want to succeed, you’ve got to chase your dream hard — because only then can you be talking to people who have seven to eight billion in revenue.”
What’s next for Signalbase
Vladan: What can we expect from you in the future?
Georgi: My vision is to end up feeding OpenAI with our data. I dream very big. When we started I said: everyone is going to feed one agentic data aggregation layer — OpenAI, Anthropic, whoever — and that’s already happening, just six months later. The next step is going to be agents talking to agents, and we already see some of our users plugging our API into Claude Code and agents that manage everything automatically. The further step is that everything moves in-house and people just pull very niche data from specialised vendors for their specific needs.
Vladan: And personally — what can people expect from you?
Georgi: Besides seeing me at SaaS events talking about signals — I’m trying my best to build a really valuable business for the market. Not just saying “get ready to buy leads” but giving the full context around everything. Stepping up my game as a founder. I want to build a really strong dev team. And the goal for the end of the year is simple: become profitable.
Vladan: And finally — what is the number one thing you’re betting on in your own go-to-market motion?
Georgi: Aggression. I’m serious. If you want to get out there, you need to constantly be pushing — like you guys do, which is super inspiring. Aggression towards thinking about who you can collaborate with, aggression towards understanding more profiles, keep following up with the people you actually want to do business with, surrounding yourself with their competitors — that’s an aggressive move too, but it’s a very good play. Too many people are not aggressive enough, a bit too laid-back. Being intense is not bad, especially when you want to build a business. If you want to succeed, you’ve got to chase your dream hard — because only then can you be talking to people who have seven to eight billion in revenue. So aggression across product, sales and marketing — that’s what I’m betting on.
“Aggression. If you want to get out there, you need to constantly be pushing.”
Vladan: That was some great inspiring final words. Thanks a lot for the conversation, I really enjoyed it. And if you’re interested in following Georgi, you can find him on LinkedIn. If you want more of this type of content, make sure to like and follow the podcast. See you next time.
