I talked to Adam Holmgren, Co-Founder and CEO of Fibbler, and most of what I already knew about him was the promotional side.
Anyone who follows him on LinkedIn has seen the campaign breakdowns, the ad spend numbers, the transparent build-in-public updates.
What I hadn't heard as much about was the earlier story: how a frustrated in-house marketer who couldn't get budget approved for a marketing attribution tool ended up building one himself, and why the decisions he made in that first year still shape how Fibbler runs today.
Adam spent about ten years in-house before founding Fibbler, working as a Head of Demand Gen at a few different startups. He watched marketing teams shrink from 30 people to fewer than 10 at similar-stage companies over just a few years. That shift, and the pressure that came with it, is where this story actually starts.
The problem wasn't measurement; it was who got a say in the budget
When I asked Adam what got hard about being an in-house marketer, he didn't point to a missing feature or a broken dashboard. He pointed to who was in the room. As budgets tightened, people outside the marketing team started sitting in on decisions about where marketing dollars should go, decisions they weren't necessarily equipped to make.
"I feel like in the beginning of my career, it was almost always, like, do first and ask for forgiveness later," he said. "And then it kind of turned into, you know, ask first."
That shift from experimentation to approval-seeking is a version of what a lot of marketers are living through right now. It's harder to justify a weird test to a CFO than to a fellow marketer, and it's much harder to be creative when every dollar needs a defense before it's spent.
Adam described this as the general condition that pushed him toward building something, but not the specific spark. That came later, and it came from something much more mundane than a strategic insight about the state of marketing.
He couldn't afford the tools that already existed
Attribution platforms like Dreamdata and HockeyStack already existed when Adam was working in-house. He knew they were solving a real problem. He just couldn't get approval to buy one, not at that company, not at the one before it, even though both were sizable businesses.
That gap is what he calls the actual aha moment. "There should be something for me at this kind of stage," he told me. Not a worse version of Dreamdata. Not a stripped-down HockeyStack. Something built for the SMB companies that had been educated by years of category-building from the bigger platforms but priced out of actually buying any of them.
This is also where Adam landed on Fibbler's core positioning early, and stuck with it. "Let's never aim to be the best in terms of features or being most advanced, because that way we'll fail," he said. "But we can aim to be the most affordable for what we can do." That's a narrower ambition than most founders set for themselves, and it turned out to be the right one for the market he was actually in.
He proved it manually before he wrote a line of code
Before Adam asked his co-founder to build anything, he built the process by hand. At his day job, he manually pulled lists of companies engaging with LinkedIn ads and stitched them together against CRM data by date, trying to prove that people who never clicked an ad were still influenced by it. He needed to justify LinkedIn spend to people who only trusted first-touch and last-touch numbers from HubSpot.
That manual exercise took a long time, and it's what convinced him the problem was real enough to build for. Only after doing it himself did he go to his co-founder, also named Adam, and tell him it needed to become software. It took the CTO about a year to ship the first MVP, working nights and weekends alongside his own full-time job. Adam estimates that same build would take two weeks today with AI tooling, though he's not sure the extra year of thinking things through was entirely wasted.
The first capability Fibbler shipped wasn't broad. It was LinkedIn-to-HubSpot influence, the hardest channel to prove and the one causing Adam the most personal pain. Everything else came after.
The $100 question that shaped Fibbler's pricing
When it came time to set a price, Adam didn't run a competitive analysis. He DMed people he knew, described what their company did, and asked what they'd be willing to pay without having to get approval from someone above them.
"If it's above $100, I'm going to have to go and get approval," he said, describing what he kept hearing back. "If it's below $100, it's completely fine, and I can try it out." That number became the anchor for Fibbler's earliest plans and still shows up in how the product is packaged today.
As Fibbler added CRMs, ad channels, and an MCP integration, the pricing model evolved in a way Adam didn't originally plan for. Rather than raising the base price, Fibbler started selling add-ons: connect LinkedIn, then decide separately whether you want Google Ads or Meta layered on top. Average contract value has climbed from around $60 to roughly $150 through that modular approach, not through price hikes on the core plan.
Turning down the path to becoming another Dreamdata
Fibbler took early investor meetings, the kind most funded startups go through as a matter of course. Adam walked away from that path because of what it would have required.
"We couldn't do that because we couldn't be the company that had this product-market fit," he said. "We had to become, you know, a Dreamdata, a HockeyStack, a Factors. Which is great, but then we would lose our unique... how are we unique then?" Chasing the feature set of a funded competitor meant giving up the exact thing that made Fibbler work for the customers it already had.
That decision shows up in how the company is staffed. Fibbler brought on its first employee, starting in October, and Adam is thinking in terms of five to ten people total, not fifty. He's seen roughly 600 signups a month, with about 20% converting, and sees an obvious opportunity in reaching out to the 80% who never talk to anyone at the company. Even that expansion, though, sounds like it will stay closer to a sales assistant function than building out a traditional sales org.
I asked him directly about AI, since it's the question every founder gets right now. His answer almost dismissed the premise. "We've been trying to solve a problem from the start," he said. "If it's done through AI, well, that's great. Or if it's done without AI, I think that's equally great." Fibbler's MCP integration got built because customers asked for it, not because it fit a narrative.
Final thoughts
The line from Adam that stuck with me longest wasn't about pricing or product. It was a question he said he'd asked himself in a post a while back: when a founder gets great results from marketing, was the marketing actually great, or did they simply land on a strong enough product-market fit that almost any marketing would have worked?
Fibbler's early growth, by Adam's own account, leaned heavily on the second explanation. He had a network of marketers he'd been building trust with for years, and that network brought in the first 50 customers before word of mouth took over. The promotional machine everyone associates with him now came after the fit was proven, not before.
What Fibbler is building toward next, forecasting instead of just reporting, benchmarking a company's ad approach against the top quartile of similar customers, is a natural extension of that same instinct.
Adam wants to tell an SMB running zero thought leader ads that the top performers in their bracket are running a lot of them, and let that observation do the work instead of another dashboard. Whether that holds the same discipline he applied to pricing and scope so far is the part I'd want to check back in on.
