From €4.3M to €16M: Engineering Growth at Cherry Servers
How systematic marketing strategy, team building, and channel engineering drove 3.7x revenue growth at a B2B infrastructure company.
3.7x
Revenue Growth
5:1
LTV/CAC Ratio
30%
YoY Growth
1 → 7
Team Built
The Challenge
Cherry Servers is a B2B infrastructure company providing dedicated and cloud servers to developers, startups, and enterprises worldwide. When I joined, the company was at €4.3M ARR with minimal marketing infrastructure — no documented strategy, no systematic acquisition channels, and no marketing team beyond a single generalist.
The founders knew they had a strong product. Customers who found them stayed. But growth was inconsistent, reliant on word-of-mouth and sporadic paid campaigns. The company needed marketing that worked like engineering — systematic, measurable, and compounding.
The Approach
Year 1-2: Foundation
Direction first. Before building anything, we needed to understand who we served and why they chose us over AWS, DigitalOcean, and Hetzner. Customer interviews, win/loss analysis, and competitive positioning revealed our core differentiator: bare-metal performance with cloud simplicity, backed by hands-on support that hyperscalers couldn’t match.
Analytics infrastructure. Implemented proper attribution tracking, conversion funnels, and revenue dashboards. For the first time, the company could see which channels drove revenue — not just traffic.
Content engine. Built a content strategy targeting developer pain points: performance benchmarks, deployment guides, infrastructure comparisons. SEO as a compounding investment, not a quick win.
Year 3-5: Systems
Team scaling. Grew the marketing team from 1 to 7, hiring specialists in content, paid acquisition, email marketing, and marketing operations. Each hire was supported with documented SOPs and clear KPIs — not thrown in to figure it out.
Channel engineering. Systematically built and optimized five acquisition channels:
- SEO & Content — Grew to €1.2M in attributed revenue. 200+ ranking articles targeting developer and infrastructure keywords.
- Paid Acquisition — Google Ads and programmatic campaigns with systematic creative testing. Achieved consistent positive ROAS while scaling spend.
- Email & Lifecycle — Onboarding sequences, expansion triggers, and win-back campaigns that improved activation and reduced churn.
- Partnerships — Strategic integrations and co-marketing with complementary infrastructure tools.
- Community — Developer-focused content and presence in relevant communities.
AI and automation. Implemented marketing automation across the funnel — lead scoring, behavioral triggers, reporting automation, and competitive monitoring. The team operated at the efficiency of a much larger organization.
Year 6-9: Compounding
The flywheel effect. With systems in place, growth compounded. Each channel reinforced the others: content drove organic traffic, which fed email lists, which improved paid audience targeting, which informed content strategy.
Team independence. By year 7, the marketing team operated autonomously. Clear strategy, documented processes, and a coached marketing lead meant the team made strategic decisions without daily founder involvement.
Measurable outcomes. Every system had clear before/after metrics. No hand-waving about “brand awareness” — we tracked acquisition cost, lifetime value, and channel contribution to revenue.
The Results
Over the engagement period, Cherry Servers grew from €4.3M to €16M ARR — a 3.7x increase driven by systematic marketing:
- 5:1 LTV/CAC ratio — Efficient growth, not growth at all costs
- 30% year-over-year revenue growth — Sustained over multiple years
- €1.2M in SEO-attributed revenue — A single channel contribution
- 7-person marketing team — Built from scratch, operating autonomously
- 15M ARR company — Marketing infrastructure supporting scale
Key Takeaways
1. Strategy Before Tactics
Every channel we built started with clear positioning and audience understanding. Without that foundation, campaigns scatter resources. With it, every investment compounds.
2. Systems Create Leverage
The difference between a €5M company and a €15M company isn’t more effort — it’s better systems. SOPs, automation, and documented processes meant the team’s output scaled faster than headcount.
3. Team Capability Is the Multiplier
Hiring skilled people is necessary but not sufficient. Coaching, clear processes, and psychological safety turned good individuals into a high-performing team. The marketing lead evolved from executing tasks to driving strategy.
4. Measurement Enables Compounding
You can’t compound what you can’t measure. Attribution infrastructure was the single highest-ROI investment. Once we could see what worked, we could systematically do more of it.
5. The Founder Must Step Back
The company’s marketing inflection point came when the founders stopped being the bottleneck. That required trust — which required systems, coaching, and measurable results. Not blind delegation.
This case study reflects 9 years of building marketing infrastructure at Cherry Servers. The systems, processes, and team capabilities described here directly inform the Growth Velocity Framework — the methodology I now apply to help other B2B SaaS founders achieve similar results in a fraction of the time.