Launching a SaaS business is exhilarating, but the journey from zero to your first 100 customers can be daunting. In this article I’m going to show you how to get your 1st - 100 SaaS customers. I’m going to break it down to take you from 0 to the first 10 users, then 11 to 50 and then 51 up to 100.
Get ready to transform your innovative idea into a thriving SaaS venture!
In This Article:
How Do You Go From 0 To 10 Users?
When you’ve got absolutely nothing and very little budget? The way to do that is to give it away for free. And I don’t mean giving it away on a free trial. I mean creating a beta program and handpicking some people that you want to invite to that program where you give it to them with unlimited access.
There’s many benefits of this. One is that you’re going to get a load of test users who are going to give you really valuable feedback to improve the product. They’re also going to be your first potential paying customers and you’re going to get great case studies and testimonials that will help you get to the higher numbers, which we’ll go through in a minute.
So to get your first ten paying customers, I would aim to give the product away to 20 people with a goal that 50% of them are going to sign up to become paid users. Now, you don’t just want to give this to anyone like your grandma or your next door neighbor. You need to give it to people who are going to fit into your ideal customer profile. So you obviously want to define your target audience in terms of their job titles, their location, their industry and the company size.
You also want to pick people that have got a good audience so that hopefully they’ll like the product and then they’ll share it with their audience and their network. That’s how you’re really going to ramp up to big numbers early on.
How Do You Find Your Ideal Customers?
So how do you find these 20 people to give it away to? You should probably know a few.
If you’ve already worked in the industry, speak to some of your developers, the rest of the team. If you can’t get to that 1st 20 from your own network, I suggest you use LinkedIn sales navigator. You can use those filters in sales Navigator to find the exact people, send them a message on LinkedIn and say, hey, I’m creating a beta program for exactly the sort of problems that you’re trying to solve. Would you be up for joining? You could also incentivize people by potentially giving them a voucher, something like that. If you’re really struggling to get those beta numbers happening. So if you’ve got a great product and you’ve got 20 beta customers using it for free after the first month or so, you should easily be able to get at least 50% of people to sign up to become paid customers.
So there you have it. There’s your first ten customers.
How We Go From 10 Customers Up To 50?
Let’s continue to leverage those first 20 beta users that you had. I suggest you create a referral program.
You can use online tools like Rewardful, Tapfiliate or Tolt, all-in-one affiliate management software for SaaS, and they’ll give you an affiliate link for each of your 20 beta users.
And you can say to your beta users, if you share this among your friends, colleagues, partners and get them to sign up to our platform, you’ll earn cash in return. So if you pick the right 20 beta users that have a great network, this referral scheme can really blow up and you can really grow your user base like this.
Another way that you can leverage those first 20 beta users is to piggyback off of their network. The problem that you’ve got, because you’ve recently started your business is you don’t have any followers, you don’t have much of an email list, you don’t have any leads, so you’re kind of pumping content out there to nobody. But your existing customers will have a network.
They will have email lists, they’ll have contacts, they’ll have customers. So if you can piggyback off of their network, you can get your brand seen by all of their followers. The way to do that is to try and do campaigns together. So you want to reach out to your customers and say, hey, you’ve got a great network going on here. How about we do a webinar together? We do a webinar where we talk about this problem. We teach your audience how to solve it.
And I’m sure lots of your customers will say, yes, I’d love to do a webinar because everybody’s trying to create more content, or they should be anyway. You’ve also got podcasts, so check if any of your customers are currently running podcasts and say, hey, would it be okay if I was a guest on your podcast? I’ve got loads of interesting things to say about this problem that you solve, and that’s obviously a great way to get in front of that audience. And the final way to leverage that initial audience is to get case studies and testimonials from them.
Get Case Studies & Testimonials
Remember when you first reached out to them, you had an agreement, I’ll give you this free beta program in exchange for a testimonial. So now it’s time to cash in on that. Hopefully they’ve got really great results from your platform and they’re loving using it, so they’d be happy to give you a testimonial. And even better than that would be a case study.
So you want to write a case study by starting with what was the problem that this company had before they started using your solution. Then what was the solution that you offered? What features, what benefits did it bring? And then finally the results, facts and stats work really, really well. So this company was in this position. They started using our software. Now they’re right up here.
And now you want to distribute these case studies and testimonials to as many other people in the market as possible. Now, you probably still don’t have a big marketing budget yet, so I recommend you use low cost channels. Cold email is a very low cost channel, as is LinkedIn DM’s. So you want to be taking those results, those testimonials, those awesome case studies, finding other people who are your ideal customer profile and sending them outreach messages to say, hey, we work with a very similar company to you. They had this problem, they’ve now got this result. Here’s a link to a case study.
If you want to learn more, if you’re getting great results and you can showcase this in case studies and testimonials, other people will want to work with you. If you combine all that together, you’re easily going to go from 10 to 50 users.
How We Go From 50 Customers Up To 100?
Now let’s talk about that final push to take you from 50 to 100 users.
The great thing about getting your first 50 users is that one, you’ve clearly got a great product that people are getting value from, and two, you’ve got revenue, meaning you’ve got money to start spending to really grow your market. So that’s why my first bit of advice to go from 50 to 100 users is to start investing in paid advertising.
Paid ads are the number one way for any B2B SaaS brand to bring on users quickly.
But the reason why we didn’t do this at the beginning to get the first set of users is because you potentially didn’t have any revenue. You also didn’t have any case studies and you maybe even didn’t have a proven product. But now you’ve got to 50 users.
Now is the time to start investing more heavily to really ramp things up. So you’ve got two main channels for doing ads. One is Google Ads and Bing ads. They’re the ads for people that have got intent, people that are actually looking for your solution. Now, not every SaaS business falls into this, so be careful with this one. If you’ve got something very innovative, something that people have never heard of before, they’re not actually going to be searching for it.
But if there is intent, then Google, Bing ads is an absolute definite. The other type of ads that every B2B SaaS business should be using is social media ads. So the main players are LinkedIn and meta ads.
Create Retargeting Ads
Now, there’s a whole load of detail I can go into about ads that I will do in other articles, but my main overall piece of advice would be to create retargeting ads. You don’t just want to create one set of ads saying, hey, book a demo today. That’s just not going to work.
You want to create a multi layered retargeting approach. So the first set of ads that you show people is not even introducing or trying to sell your solution. The first set of ads is introducing the problem that they’re suffering from and teaching them how to solve that problem. It could be a quick video, it could be a blog article, could be an ebook. That’s the way you’re going to get the most engagement. Then people that engage with that ad, the next time they come onto their LinkedIn or their meta, they’re then going to start seeing the introduction to your business.
So the beauty of retargeting is that, you know, you’re only showing those ads about your business to the people that have engaged with the previous set of problem ads. So you’re not wasting your budget by showing your ad to so many people, you’re only showing it to people that you know are interested in solving that problem. You previously mentioned the third layer of retargeting is social proof ads. So somebody’s seen the problem and, they’ve seen the solution ad, so they’re definitely interested in you. Now you want to hammer them home by showing them case studies and testimonial ads.
Create a Community
Another piece of advice to go from 50 to 100 users is to create a community.
So let’s say you’ve already got those 1st 50 customers. It’s quite likely that they’re going to be similar type people. They’re going to have similar job titles, work in similar industries, similar geographical location potentially, and work for a similar company size.
So they’re probably quite similar people, meaning if you created a community, they probably quite enjoy that and get value from each other. So I’d recommend creating a Slack channel. And I would give that Slack channel a different brand. I wouldn’t call it like your company name, Slack Channel because that appears like some sort of customer support thing. I create a different brand that was all about giving value. So you say to your community, oh, I’m starting this Slack channel.
Would you be interested in joining? We’re going to be doing weekly Q and A sessions about these problems that you’ve got in the industry. We’re going to be sharing our latest articles and insights. There’s going to be webinars, podcasts, and you can also meet each other and you can collaborate, and you can talk about the latest issues in the industry, the latest technology, the latest AI. You can bounce ideas, make friends. And it’s going to be an awesome community that we’re creating. And the power of community is awesome.
So imagine you’ve got your 50 customers in there. Then they’re going to start referring you to other people. They’re going to start saying, oh, we’re in this awesome slack channel. You should join. It’s great. And obviously you can naturally sell to all of those people that are joining the channel.
Start Your Own Webinar, Podcast or Newsletter
My final piece of advice to push you to that 100 user limit is to start your own webinar series and or podcast. And the best way to turn that into customers quickly is to invite other influencers onto that podcast.
You can use Castos, RiversideFM or Podcastle, these powerhouse platforms offer everything you need to create, polish, and publish your show like a pro.
So again, look at the network you’ve got. Look at those original 20 beta users and push it out even further than that. Who are the biggest speakers in your space? Who are the biggest speakers that are helping other people solve those problems and try and invite them onto the show. And the beauty of that is that when they’re about to appear on the show, they can promote it to their network. They’re going to say, hey everybody, I’m about to appear on this webinar. You should register here and you just piggyback again off of that audience, which is just a great way to build momentum. So there you have it.
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That’s how you go from zero to 100 SaaS customers.
Conclusion
Growing your SaaS from scratch to 100 customers is a challenging but rewarding journey. By focusing on product-market fit, leveraging the right marketing channels, and prioritizing customer success, you can build a solid foundation for sustainable growth.
Remember, persistence and adaptability are key. Keep refining your strategies, listen to your customers, and stay committed to delivering value. With dedication and the right approach, you’ll not only reach your first 100 customers but set the stage for exponential growth beyond.