DemandLoops’ New Chapter

Three days in Portland and here's where things landed...

DemandLoops Is No Longer a Solo Practice

Introducing the team, the new sprint model, and the chapter I’ve been waiting to announce.

DemandLoops has a new chapter, and as of this week, it’s live.

Here’s the part I’ve been waiting to say out loud: I’m no longer running this alone.

I just spent three days in Portland, Maine with Mary Keough and Olivia Wicks at our first-ever DemandLoops off-site. The agenda was intentionally loose. We went up there to talk about what fuels us, what drives us, what we’re continuously curious to explore and deliver against. Big campfire-type questions, the kind you never make time for between client deliverables.

What those conversations actually produced was clarity. On our messaging, our positioning, our offers, the direction of the business. And on something bigger that I’d been circling for months without naming: DemandLoops has outgrown being a solo venture. It’s becoming a proper company. Which is crazy to say out loud.

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👋 Hi, it’s Kaylee Edmondson and welcome to Looped In, my newsletter exploring demand gen and growth frameworks in B2B SaaS. Subscribe to join 2k+ readers who get Looped In delivered to their inbox every Sunday.

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From Solo Venture to Company

If you’ve followed me or DemandLoops for a while, you know this started out as a solo venture in 2023. I built it for myself as a way to find more creative ways to partner with multiple companies at a time instead of holding one in-house seat. I’ve always been a demand gen operator for B2B SaaS, and I’ve spent the last three years doing that work fractionally, embedded inside companies as their demand gen leader without the full-time badge.

The solo chapter was good to me. It sharpened how I think about engagement, scoping, and what clients actually need versus what agencies typically sell them.

But somewhere after the first year really, the work outgrew one person. And the answer to that turned out to be sitting right in front of me.

I am just beside myself that I get to work with two absolute bad*ss women and build DemandLoops 2.0 together.

Meet the Team

Olivia Wicks spent two and a half years inside HubSpot, building the systems most marketers only ever use from the outside. She knows what a marketing engine looks like from the inside of the machine, at a scale most of us only read case studies about.

Mary Keough ran demand gen at CoLab and built a 31k-person audience by writing about the work, in public. She’s the rare operator who can both run the program and articulate exactly why it works.

And me: I owned a $14M demand gen budget at Campaign Monitor, and built 0-1 DG programs for Chili Piper and brightwheel, before going fractional, carrying the pipeline number and answering to the board for it.

That’s the through-line of this team. Every DemandLoops operator has held the in-house seat, accountable to a CMO, a board, and a sales team that wanted to know where the pipeline was. When you work with us, the operator on your account has seen the movie.

What DemandLoops Is Now

Fractional demand gen for B2B SaaS, run in sprints.

You bring us the objective. Land more target accounts. Give us visibility into what’s working/what’s not. Cover a parental leave. Deliver more qualified pipeline. We design a sprint for you, and we run the sprint that gets you there.

Every sprint is scoped to an outcome and has a finish line. You know what you’re getting, when it ships, and what you own at the end. The finish line is the feature: when an engagement has a defined end, the only way we win is by actually finishing.

Why We Rebuilt the Model

Two convictions came out of Portland alongside the team news.

Your first six weeks shouldn’t be a waiting room

The standard agency model charges a full retainer through a 4 to 6 week “onboarding period” where nothing ships. I lived this from the client side at every in-house gig. I sat through the discovery calls and watched six weeks of a six-figure engagement produce a slide titled “Our Understanding of Your Business.” 🤢

So we killed the waiting room. We’re in your systems from the day the contract is signed, auditing and fixing at the same time. Broken lifecycle stages, UTM chaos, paid budget bleeding into already-converted accounts: when we find it, we fix it, and it goes in the report as “found and resolved” rather than “recommended for Phase 2.”

Up to speed in 2 to 4 weeks. Executing against sprint goals immediately after.

We build to leave

Sprints end on purpose. Everything we build ships with documentation, reporting infrastructure that lives in your CRM, and a clear handoff designed for the team that comes in after us.

Most agencies architect for dependency. The dashboards live in their tools, the institutional knowledge lives in their heads, and leaving them means starting over. We’re betting the other way. The best outcome of a DemandLoops engagement is a foundation strong enough that you can hire a full-time leader into it. Build first, hire second has been our philosophy from the start, and the sprint model takes it to its logical end.

How to Work With Us

*Every engagement starts with the first one.

The Foundations Audit. We get access to your systems and run a full analysis across ops, pipeline, paid, and content. And because we audit and fix simultaneously, you get more than a readout: you get the results, the list of changes we already made, and a recommendation for your first sprint.

Sprints. ABM, paid media, marketing ops infrastructure, website, parental leave coverage. Scoped to an outcome, run by an operator who’s done it in-house.

The new site walks through all of it: demandloops.com.

What Changes for Looped In

More material, frankly. Sprints generate tight before-and-after stories: what the attribution looked like on day one, what shipped, what the pipeline did. Expect more teardown-style posts as the first sprints wrap. And now that there are three operators in the practice instead of one, you’ll start seeing patterns from a much wider slice of B2B SaaS than I could ever cover alone.

The Best Part

The model is the news, but this team…this team is the story. 🥺

Three days in a room with Mary and Olivia, no client deliverables due, just the three of us being unreasonably picky about what this company should become. Building alone is fast. Building with people who challenge your assumptions and then out-execute your revised plan is something else entirely. I’d pick these two again every single time.

More soon. ✨

We’re just getting started. Thanks for following along, and if you’ve got questions about the new model, hit reply. I read every one.

See ya next week,
Kaylee ✌