I've spent four years and £1.5 million building a SaaS, and almost nobody knows it exists.
That sentence took me longer to admit than it should have.
I'm Axel. I founded circle.cloud in 2015, a UK telecoms company that grew to over 100 people without outside investment. I now run We UC as CEO, the unified communications SaaS we've spent four years building. I've shipped software before. I've sold software before. I just hadn't, until now, sold software the way software actually needs to be sold in 2026.
Here's what I got wrong, and the plan I'm running to fix it.
I built circle.cloud one phone call at a time.
In 2015 I was working out of a spare bedroom with a desk phone, a laptop, and a CRM full of cold leads. Two hundred calls a day. I'd ring through the list until someone agreed to a meeting. Drive out. In-person demo. Close. Install. Repeat.
Over the next few years I hired people to run the same process at scale. By the time we started building We UC in 2021, we had around 25 people on the phones, nine field salespeople sitting demos every day, and nine engineers installing phone systems on site. A conveyor belt with humans at every stage.
That model works. It still works for us today. circle.cloud is heading toward 100 installs a month right now using the same playbook.
It works because the unit economics support it. The average telecoms deal is big enough to pay for the cold call, the travel, the demo, the install, the engineer, the account manager. The customer wants someone holding their hand. They want a face in the room. They want an engineer on site in their comms cupboard.
High-touch distribution isn't outdated. It's the right tool for the right unit economics.
We UC is a different animal.
It's a SaaS. The plan is to sell it to founders, operators, IT directors, COOs, CTOs - the kind of tech-savvy operator who scrolls through the internet at two in the morning, finds a product that looks well made, signs up there and then, and onboards their team without ever talking to a salesperson.
A SaaS product priced like a meal out can't pay for a cold call. It can't pay for travel. It can't pay for an engineer on site. The maths just don't work.
So it needs a completely different motion. Different process, different team, different metrics, different content, different acquisition channels.
The traditional advice for a new founder is to validate the market first. Build a landing page. Run some ads. Pull together a small audience. Sign up a waitlist. Then, if the interest is real, build the product.
I did it the other way around. Four years and £1.5M of investment into the build before I had a landing page worth driving traffic to. No waitlist. No email list. No audience.
I'm not proud of that. But I want to be honest about it, because there's a specific reason it happened.
I knew how to build software. I had a 20-person dev team and a decade of muscle memory running a business that ships things. Building was the part I knew how to do, so I kept doing it. Marketing, especially the modern AI-augmented kind, was new. New is uncomfortable. The natural pull is to retreat into the thing you already know.
That's the trap. Building feels like progress. Building is comfortable. And when you're a founder who's good at building, the work that actually changes the trajectory of the business gets postponed.
What broke me out of it was sitting back and asking why the engine that built circle.cloud doesn't fit a SaaS. Once that became clear, the work I'd been avoiding became unavoidable.
Five years ago, if you'd asked me how to launch a software product, I'd have said hire telemarketers if the unit economics allow it, and run a heavy SEO play if they don't. That was the orthodoxy.
It isn't anymore.
The people I look at now run a different motion entirely. Jordan Crawford and his Blueprint GTM team are the cleanest example. Audience-first. Content-led. AI-augmented. They aren't optimising for cold outreach. They're building media properties around the product, and the product gets shipped into the audience that's already paying attention.
Another company that puts this into focus for me is Kinzo (kinzo.ai). Two founders with a big exit behind them, now building an AI inbox assistant. Roughly 60% of their team is content and marketing. The other 40% is engineering and go-to-market. That ratio used to be the inverse for any sane software company. It isn't anymore.
At We UC today, the split is roughly 99% product and 1% marketing. That has to change.
Here's how I'm thinking about it. Four layers, with the first one as the foundation everything else sits on.
Layer One: Personal Brand.
The thing you're reading right now. I started writing in public and showing up on YouTube and LinkedIn in November 2024. I'm six months in. Growth is slow. Engagement is slow. Some days it feels like nobody's listening.
I'm doing it anyway because people buy from people. If a founder or operator finds me through this content and trusts how I think, the product gets to skip the hardest part of a cold sale: building trust from zero. The personal brand isn't the marketing. It's the foundation underneath the marketing.
Layer Two: Product and Company Content.
Once the SaaS is publicly live, we run a content engine for the product itself. Blog posts at volume. LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram. Product demos. Carousels and visual artefacts created with AI tools like Claude Design. A mountain of content, AI-assisted but with a high quality bar set by humans.
The plan is funnel-shaped. Top-of-funnel content is informational, educational, broad. Mid-funnel content is product-led: what the product does, why we built it the way we did, what changes for the buyer. Bottom-of-funnel content is the call to action: start a trial, join the waitlist, talk to us.
Layer Three: Paid Media.
Take the best-performing organic content and sponsor it. Run paid social experiments. Use Google for the high-intent searches. Paid is amplification, not replacement. We only put money behind content that's already proving itself organically.
Layer Four: PR.
A structured PR push around launch. Embargoed press releases sent to around 150 publications, trade press, business press, telecoms press. We'll either engage a PR agency or run it ourselves to keep costs down. The press releases go out under embargo so the coverage all lands on launch day. A second wave later in the year, with a circle.cloud customer who's selected We UC as their communications platform.
Personal brand first. Product content second. Paid amplification third. PR around the launch moments.
There is one thing I have that most SaaS founders don't.
circle.cloud has around 2,500 customers on the existing phone system, supporting over 10,000 users. We're now migrating them onto We UC. So far we've moved three customers across, and about 150 users are now live on the new platform. Each migration gives us real feedback from real businesses paying real money.
Most SaaS launches don't have that. They go live with hope and a waitlist. We go live with a product that's already been battle-tested by paying UK businesses.
That's the edge on the product side. The SaaS will be hardened before it's publicly available.
What I don't have is an audience for the SaaS itself. That, I'm building from zero.
There's one detail I haven't mentioned. We UC isn't the name we'll launch the SaaS under.
"UC" stands for unified communications. Inside the telecoms industry, that's table-stakes vocabulary. Outside it, nobody knows what it means. Buyers guess "universal communications" or assume it's part of the company name. Every first impression starts with a small piece of confusion. The label also undersells the product, because what we're building is a modern, AI-augmented, keyboard-first communications platform, not a category-standard UC tool.
So the parent company stays as We UC Ltd. The product gets a new name, marketed direct to operators.
The criteria are tight. Six letters or fewer. Communications at its root, ideally implying voice or conversation without saying it literally. International, not English-bound. Friendly to the ear, no hard Xs. Available, meaning trademark-clearable and domain-buyable. And distinctive enough that we don't sound like the rest of the category.
Every name we've liked has been trademarked. Every name that clears the legal check doesn't quite sound right. It's harder than I expected. We'll land on it, and the moment we do I'll show the rebrand and the new website here.
If you've got an idea, I'm taking suggestions. Drop them in the comments under the video.
Underneath all of this is a transition I'm still working through.
For ten years I've been the founder of a services business. The mental model for growth is staffing the conveyor belt: more callers, more field reps, more engineers, more installs. Capacity scales linearly with headcount. Revenue scales with capacity. You optimise the funnel.
A product business doesn't grow that way. You don't scale a SaaS by hiring more salespeople, because the unit economics don't carry the cost. You scale it by building an audience, shipping the product into that audience, and compounding both at the same time.
That's an entirely different game. New muscles. New ratios. New ways of measuring whether the week was a good one.
I'm excited about it, even though I'm new at it. I've always found my way through a thing once I've decided to obsess over it. This is the latest obsession.
If you're building a SaaS in 2026, this is the order I'd run it in. Audience first, then product, then paid amplification of what works. Money doesn't get you organic growth. The list compounds slowly. You can't buy it.
It's the work I'm doing now, in public.
Watch the video:
If running a software business in the AI era is on your plate, I wrote The CEO's Operating System, the free framework I use to run circle.cloud and build We UC. axelmolist.com/ceo-os
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