How Organic Marketing helped Funnel Leasing Grow to $50 Million ARR

Every marketing team feels the pressure to hit the number, and the easy move is to throw more money at it: more ads, more outbound, more tools. The CEO and CFO love paid because it’s simple: spend more, get more. But here at Exit Five, we know that “marketing” doesn’t just mean “advertising” – there are other ways to find growth than sending away more money to Meta and Google and LinkedIn.

Alex Howe is SVP of Marketing and Growth at Funnel Leasing – a company in the apartment/leasing space. Think of Funnel Leasing as a super-smart digital assistant for apartment buildings. It helps people find new places to live and makes renting an apartment as easy as buying shoes online.

Alex started in PR (same as me btw), moved to sales, then marketing, and took the company from $3 million to $50 million in revenue with no paid ads and almost no outbound. At one point, Alex joked that the title of this episode could be: “Sales guy turns SVP of marketing and grows the company to $50 million, with no paid ads.”

So how did he do it? What’s the secret? Unfortunately there’s no growth hack here or silver bullet. And that’s exactly why this is a great newsletter for you to follow along with 🙂. Just a handful of timeless plays, done consistently, for a long time. Here are three key takeaways from my conversation with Alex.

1. Any brand can claim “better.” Different is what people remember.

Funnel Leasing’s net revenue retention sits close to 130%. It’s clear Alex and the team have a great product. But Alex doesn’t lead with “better.” He leads with different – a lesson he picked up, funny enough, from dating. His take: you’re always going to be up against someone “better.” But those who dare to be different are the ones that stand out.

One way Funnel Leasing does this is by naming their competitors instead of pretending they don’t exist – in sales conversations and in content. Your buyer is already comparing you to several other options whether you bring it up or not. Why not answer objections and position your brand ahead of competitors, before potential buyers have the opportunity to do it for you?

Funnel Leasing takes the same approach when it comes to visual identity. When the CEO audited every competitor’s brand and found nobody owned pink, that became Funnel Leasing’s color. Loud neon pink, in an industry where everyone else blends into the same sea of blue.

We featured Louis Grenier’s research on How to Make Your B2B Brand Stand Out in 2026 in our recent newsletter, which found the same pattern across 100 B2B companies when it comes to color. All brands obsess over it, and why it falls flat. Everyone’s doing it.

2. Be unforgettable at events, so people remember you long after they leave the booth.

Funnel Leasing turns trends into booth experiences so your brand stays with people. Last year, Apartmentalize (the industry’s largest event) fell the day before Halloween. Funnel Leasing’s booth concept: a haunted house maze, complete with fog and zombies holding “dead leases.” This year they had a World Cup-themed booth, complete with a soccer simulator and AI goalie. Alex doesn’t scan every badge or count booth traffic as pipeline, because the point isn’t the lead in the moment. It’s that someone goes home, remembers “the pink company with the soccer thing,” and it sticks.

The bigger bet is Funnel Leasing’s own user conference, which started three years ago with one rule: no other vendors, no sales pitches, customers running their own unmoderated sessions on what’s really working. Alex says it’s the best source of ROI his team has. You don’t need a bigger budget than your competitors to be memorable. You need an experience people want to talk about.

3. Ungate everything. Treat your buyers like adults, and they’ll come to you.

Almost no brands in property management publicly post pricing. Alex thinks it’s about control. Most companies force you into a sales call before revealing the number. Funnel Leasing does the opposite. Prices are public, and Alex even built self-serve, persona-specific product tours so buyers can shop without talking to a rep. My friend Pranav Piyush who runs Paramark has a line for this: don’t treat people like morons (btw, here’s a conversation we had on this topic). Alex’s version of the same idea: build it and they will come.

The question every marketer asks here: if you’re not gating anything, how do you prove it’s working? Alex doesn’t have a dashboard for it, he has receipts. The strongest one: a customer said, on a public earnings call, that switching to Funnel saved them $4-$5 million a year and made staff 30% more efficient. Nobody trusts a vendor’s own numbers, but a customer saying it on the record to shareholders is a different story. Smaller signals add up too. A prospect walks into a meeting with printed notes on one of Funnel Leasing’s free templates – something they never filled out a form to get. A rep tags Alex in Slack because a customer brought up the podcast on a sales call, completely unprompted.

Alex didn’t have a formal marketing background and wasn’t sure where to start. So he just started at the beginning. Understand your customer, find your company’s actual reason to exist, know where your buyers hang out. Build a strong point of view and a memorable brand around it.

Do that consistently, for long enough, and it works…that can be the whole marketing strategy, and for most of us, that approach is reality vs. chasing viral hits or growth loops some guy on X told you about.

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