Tom Whatley is Founder and CEO of Grizzle, the London-headquartered B2B content, SEO, and GEO agency he has run since 2016. He built the firm by pivoting from a productized digital PR offer into end-to-end editorial and organic growth for SaaS brands, and he writes and speaks openly about how agencies expand services without losing the engine that pays the bills.
Starting Grizzle as a PR Test
In a CXL essay on agency value propositions, Whatley describes reading Jake Knapp's Sprint and deciding to validate a productized digital PR offer with restraint: a one-page site, a list of about 100 marketing leaders, and cold outreach. He closed a first client in under two weeks, then more within 45 days, using an old domain name and skills he already had.
The origin story he has also told on agency podcasts is that Grizzle was never meant to be a mobile-game company that stuck; the B2B SaaS content shop is what survived. Early work focused on getting martech companies featured in marketing blogs, which funded the first months of monthly recurring revenue while he was still a solo founder.
Pivoting Grizzle to Blog Content
About 18 months in, high churn on digital PR as a "nice to have" forced a change. Whatley called existing clients and asked what else they were struggling with. Consistent high-quality blog content came up immediately, and in one discovery call a client upsold themselves. In his words on CXL, Grizzle pivoted "from a productized digital PR service to an SEO-focused content marketing agency" in about 30 minutes of conversation.
The firm then built end-to-end editorial operations so polishing and delivery sat inside Grizzle rather than with the client. Jenna St John now runs content and operations after joining as a copyeditor in 2021, and Martha Vassallo is Lead Editor.
Grizzle's Organic Growth Systems
Grizzle today markets organic growth systems for B2B and SaaS brands across Google, LLMs, YouTube, and related surfaces, with clients named in Whatley's public materials including Semrush, Pipedrive, ConnectWise, Tide, Nextiva, PandaDoc, and Brandfolder. He has also written about "un-pivoting" when a late-2019 push into ecommerce and consumer tech lacked track record and buyer motivation fit, then returning to the B2B lane where logos and results already compounded.
A ZenPilot operations case study quotes him on ClickUp implementation as building "the engine of your business."