B2B case study examples
Real B2B growth case studies from my own swipe file, from Notion and Stripe to Snowflake and Supabase, and what good customer case studies have in common.
TLDR
- There are two kinds of “case study” people search for: growth breakdowns of how a company won (Notion, Stripe, Snowflake), and customer case studies on your own site. Both are worth a swipe file.
- The growth breakdowns below are all real, from the Case Studies folder in my own Savepad.
- Good customer case studies share four things: a named customer, the problem in their words, a number, and a quote that sounds human.
Growth breakdowns from my swipe file
These live in my public Savepad, in a folder called Case Studies. A few I’ve reread more than once:
- How Notion Built A $2B SaaS Startup Through Community & Templates (Foundation). Templates as a growth loop, explained properly.
- How Notion Grows. A different angle on the same company, more product.
- Stripe’s model of product-led, developer-centric growth by Will Larson. Short and sharp.
- How Stripe Scaled, Tomasz Tunguz’s notes from Claire Hughes Johnson.
- From PPC to IPO: How Snowflake Did It. Proof that paid search can carry a company very far.
- How Shopify Grows from How They Grow.
- How Airtable’s Long Tail SEO Strategy Is Helping Build Their Moat.
- How Microsoft crushed Slack from Platformer. A case study in losing, which is rarer and more useful.
- Grubhub’s link building strategy on Marketing Examples. Three minutes, one idea.
And for developer marketing specifically:
- How we launch at Supabase. Launch weeks, explained by the people who made them a thing.
- From Open-Source to Enterprise: How Vercel Built a Product-Led Motion on top of NextJS.
- How Novu grew to 20k GitHub stars.
What good customer case studies have in common
Now the other kind, the one on your own site. Having read (and written, and approved) more of these than I’d like to admit, the good ones:
- Put the result in the headline. “How Lumen cut onboarding time from 9 days to 2” beats “Lumen x YourCompany: a partnership”.
- Open with the problem, in the customer’s words. A quote from the person who had the problem, not a paragraph about their company history.
- Have one number that matters. Not seven. One that the reader would care about.
- Name the person. A real name, title, and photo. “A leading fintech” is a confession.
- Show the thing. Screenshots of the product in their setup, not stock photos of a handshake.
- End with what the reader should do next. Usually a demo, sometimes a template.
Keep them where you can find them
Case studies are the definition of “I read a great one about this once”. I keep mine in a folder with a note on each about what the trick was (“templates as distribution”, “launch week format”), so when someone asks how Notion grew, I search “templates” and it’s there. Savepad also keeps a copy of each page as it was, which matters because growth breakdowns love to go behind a paywall. The marketing resources post has more of what’s in there, and swipe file examples shows other people’s.
FAQ
What makes a good B2B case study?
A specific customer, a specific problem in their words, a number that changed, and a quote that sounds like a person. Skip the company history and get to the problem in the first paragraph.
How long should a case study be?
As long as the story needs and no longer. Most good customer case studies on a SaaS site are 600 to 1,200 words, with the result in the headline and a summary box up top.
Where can I find good case study examples?
Growth breakdowns like How They Grow, Foundation's lab, and Kyle Poyar's newsletter, and the customer stories pages of companies like Stripe, Vercel, and Supabase.