How do you reach first 100 paid customers for SaaS?
Deniz AY
28 replies
Hi everyone,
I am a frontend-developer. I want to build a SaaS product. Can you suggest platforms like PH for reaching customers without a marketing budget?
Thank you for your advice.
Replies
Ansh Sdhana@ansh_sdhana
I'd say first of all get yourself listed on as many SaaS listing and review platforms as possible, and your social media such as LinkedIn along with a Wikipedia page should be up and running. Once you created all of this, you can start with the main thing because people will search about you after that and all this is to make sure they know you're a legitimate company.
The "main thing" I referred to here was cold outreach. Cold emailing is really not given as much credit as it should get, you can go through the web and will find evidence that it is a great strategy almost everywhere. You can use a prospecting tool like Aeroleads to find potential clients in the niche you're addressing with your product and an email sequencing tool like MailChimp to automate the email outreach process, just make sure that your email content is valuable and form a good lead nurturing strategy. My suggestion would be to target people in the age group of 20-35 (if your product concerns this group at all) because this segment is what marketers call something like 'the daredevils' while doing market segmentation because they are not afraid/reluctant to test out new products.
Once start sending thousands of emails every few days, people will automatically start searching for you and the interested ones will definitely use your product.
Share
Depends heavily on your target group. For B2B probably Linkedin & Twitter, for B2C Facebook, Insta, TikTok, as well as Youtube, and for B2D maybe HackerNews and Reddit. With a little bit of budget and a narrow niche you can experiment with Google ads (~$30/month minimum)
@joergrech $30/month ? That seems low
@sven_radavics for my Google Ads Account that is the absolut minimum - you can always go higher. I think it's the minimum is $1 per day.
@joergrech I'm just curious if that gets you anything. I would totally test it out at even $5 / day but I'm of the impression that I might as well not bother that low.
@sven_radavics I think it heavily depends on the niche and keywords you use. I have only mildly success but I have to fight against big players (job boards).
@joergrech @sven_radavics From my experience, at such a low budget, you wont get much impressions and the CPC will be higher, even if the keyword competition is low
You can try BetaList, Owwly, MicroStartups, and also HackerNews.
For the SaaS founder, I would consider launching on SaaS lifetime deals websites, like AppSumo. I know a lot of SaaS founders found success on these websites.
@jakub_piskor Appsumo has made it harder to qualify. Your product must have a wide range of potential customers
@lirian @jakub_piskor You can try PitchGround, StackCommerce, or RocketHub for running LTDs.
@jakub_piskor This recent blog covers a few, but I never tried any of them: https://www.webhostingsecretreve...
You have to know where your target audience is and create awareness about that SaaS product you're building. LinkedIn is one of the most commonly platforms used for B2B.
Regardless where you end up at, you have to build awareness firstly.
Have you thought, after building the product, to do the product launch here?
Good luck with building the product and establishing its user base!
Telegram seems to be great for any Web 3.0 tool marketing - find the public groups and reach out!
All you need are 2 channels. 1 scalable, 1 non-scalalbe
Non-scalable channels:
- Messaging Linkedin users
- Messaging Facebook group member
Scalable channels:
- Twitter
- Seo
- Reddit
- Quora
Launching on Marketplaces and Communities like Indiehackers, App sumo, Betalist, Product Hunt etc..
can try onboarding affiliates ! technicalities can be handled using "first promoter"
Freemium by far seems the best way. But can be problematic if you struggle to convert them later on. Good practice is to cap the overall Product value. And offer it later on when you end up monetising.
To reach users without a huge marketing budget, build in public and use channels like Product Hunt to get feedback and validation.
A marketing budget isn't necessary, because in the beginning stages you are trying to get problem-fit before you get into the product-market fit stages.
It all depends on what kind of SaaS business you have. It happens that cold email works very well, and it happens that twitter helps to find a lot of customers.
@vkhoroshkov Could you tell me more details about how to find a lot of customers on twitter?
There are Free tools to import lists of your ideal prospects/customers and manage messaging outreach at scale to send your offer, via email and on LinkedIn. A good one is Jobin.cloud (free) but there are also others tools not too expensive. Automation will help a lot if you are alone. With a good proposition and good communication, it will be not too difficult to find your first 100 paying customers. Good luck!
Multichannel cold outreach & social presence.
Build a segment aligned to a potential ICP and send personalized emails talking about the problem & not the product. Meanwhile, keep engaging with the audience on LinkedIn, and Twitter, etc.
Understand your personas in the initial where they hangout on the internet so you what channel to try next.
I think platforms like Product Hunt, Capterra, AppSumo are good for it.
Cold outreach, social media (groups etc), listings
Pick up the phone and call the closest people in your network.