In this article, I am talking about how to get your first 100 customers for your SaaS product. I am going to be offering up actionable strategies and tactics on how you can get this done.
Finding your first 100 customers starts way before you write that first line of code.
In This Article:
Look for Advantages
The first thing you should do is look for advantages that you have. And you do this when you’re choosing the idea, before you write a line of code, before you choose the idea, before you validate the idea you think about do I have an audience in any space that I could build a product for? Or do I have a network in any space? A bunch of people who know me, who I could call in to help do webinars to co promote, to work that network, to sell your product.
Now, if you don’t have an audience in a particular space, I’m a believer that if you’re building a SaaS product, you don’t need an audience because there are a bunch of traffic channels we’re going to talk about later that work without an audience. And the process of building an audience is actually quite time consuming. If you’re going to sell info products, if you’re going to sell courses, sure, having an audience is the way to go because people buy info products and courses from people they know, like and trust.
However, building and selling a SaaS product, most people that I know who do it, they don’t have an audience when they start. And in fact, they don’t really build an audience as they’re selling it.
If you have an audience, great. If you don’t, I would not invest the time to build an audience before launching a SaaS product.
Build a Network
Now, second, on the network. Whether you have one or not, building a network that knows who you are and respects you as an entrepreneur, it’s a big one. And that’s something that I would start building.
So whether you go to indiehackers.com, whether you go to MicroConf Connect, which is our slack community, whether you go to the dynamite circle, there’s so many online entrepreneur communities that I would be involved in if I didn’t have any connections today and I wanted to start building a network of other like minded founders.
If you find you have one of those two advantages, I would consider building a product in a way that can serve those spaces. And if you don’t, then this is where being a first time entrepreneur is challenging, because you don’t have a network and you don’t have an audience and you just have to plunge in and start marketing before you start coding.
That’s the thing I want you to take away from this article, is if you think that you’re going to go into a basement or you’re going to hire some developers, spend 6 to 12 months building out a product and then go try to market it.
Landing Page
You’re thinking about it backwards because marketing and driving interest or having conversations with folks. When you’re looking at mockups of a SaaS app, it helps you validate whether or not there is need for this product. So I’m a firm believer in having a landing page way before you start writing a line of code.
And what I was trying to do was to validate whether there was interest or whether there was a need. And the way that you do this is you set up this landing page where you’re going to capture emails and you’re going to offer someone either updates on the launch or you offer them, you know, something to opt in, but you basically say, this is what we’re building. It’s if you’re interested in this and you’re interested in the value that it provides, enter your email and we’ll be in touch.
And what this does is allows you to build that email launch list, which not only provides some validation that people are interested in the value that you’re talking about.
Customer Development
Customer development, which is to have conversations as you have an idea about where this product should go. You get 100 people, 500 people on that list, you can email 50 of them and you can say, this is what I’m thinking of building. These are the mock ups.
Does this solve what the problem that I think it solves, does this provide value for you? Would you pay $30, $50, $100 a month for this product? And it allows you to start getting that validation that maybe people are interested to do this. You have to talk about your idea a lot. And you have to talk about your idea before it’s done.
So with the last SaaS app that I built, I got eleven people to tell me, yes, I would pay for this before we broke ground and wrote a line of code. Your mileage may vary on this, but I was talking about my idea in public before we had code written. My take on this is very few people, if any, are gonna steal your idea because ideas just, they don’t tend to be worth that much.
It’s so much more about execution. I would recommend going on social media podcasts if you can, asking people for advice. And you’re trying to get product direction, but you’re also trying to build up that interest list so that the day you launch is an amazing day of revenue.
That it’s not that you launch and then you look for your first customer, it’s that you launch to 10 20 or 30 customers from day one. Because that provides that motivation and a little bit of revenue for you to keep going.
Launch
Let’s say you followed this advice and you do have early interested customers.
You build the product, you get some people into early access and they’re using it, and you think it’s time to launch this thing. So the first thing that I would do is launch to my email list and that is where you give them a heads up two weeks in advance. You’re kind of teasing the product. You’re saying, hey, these are the mock ups. This is what it looks like.
These are some screenshots. Here’s a little cool video of what this product does. And usually you give some type of launch motivation, whether that’s free onboarding, free migration from a prior tool. Maybe you give a discount, although that’s not necessarily my favorite way of doing it. But you let your email list know that they are getting something exclusive for having been on the email list and followed your journey. And the idea is that that email launch list gets you your 1st, 10, 20, 50 customers. And you work out the kinks, you fix the bugs that they encounter. Maybe you build a few features that people are requesting, but you’re basically getting prepared to launch to the world.
And this is what I call scratching and clawing.
Clawing
I think Paul Graham said it better when he said do things that don’t scale because launching to the world is often a one time event. And there’s a lot of things that you can do in the short term that will get you customers. It gets you to that 1st 100 customer mark that won’t take you to 500 or 1000 customers.
So these are things like launching on Product Hunt, launching on Hacker News, doing a Reddit launch, going to Q&A sites like Quora and Stack Exchange. I’ve seen an entrepreneur build a SaaS app to $35,000 a month. So that’s $35k of MRR.
Almost solely using Quora and Stack Exchange. Maybe you do an Appsumo deal, maybe you go on a podcast tour.
These are all things that if you are good at them and you focus the time and you go out and learn how to do them.
Underpricing
Thinking that if I only charge $5 per customer, I’m going to get a lot more customers. The problem is you get 100 customers, $5 a month, you’re only making dollar 500 a month and that’s not enough to do much with.
What if I charged $100 a month? What could I build that’s worth $100 a month? Then by the time you get to that 100 customer mark, you have $10k in MRR and that allows you to, in most places in the world, quit that day job.
Your price point dictates a lot more than you realize early on in your product.
And so if you have $5 a month versus $500 a month, you can barely do anything. You can do some Quora and Reddit and some content and SEO, but you can’t afford to do pay per click ads versus if you have a price point of 100 or $500 a month, you can afford to do a whole swath of marketing approaches. If you followed the advice I’ve given you so far, you may already be at 100 customers.
But if you’re not, then you have to start thinking about how do I build a marketing flywheel how do I find, usually one marketing approach that can get me to that 100 customer mark? And usually this is done through experimentation. You look at the most common B2B SaaS marketing approaches and you pick which one you think is most likely to work, and then you dive into it for a few months and you give it your all.
Conclusion
And whether that’s marketing approach, these are what I call the pillar B2B SaaS marketing approaches. You pick one of these.
Usually it’s SEO, or content, or cold outreach, underpricing , integrations, or pay per click ads.
And those are the most common ones that I see people building into flywheels through all this. Keep in mind, there’s a lot of experimentation and a lot of maybe going with your founder gut to get to the point where you have 100 customers. It’s harder than a lot of people make it out to be online.
And while marketing is a challenge, just getting to that point where you have a product that people don’t churn out of can take 6 months, 12 months, 18 months.
There’s no formula, there’s no direct map to getting from 0 to 100 customers and retaining them.
But hopefully, by implementing the ideas, strategies, and tactics outlined in this article, you’ll be well on your way to achieving your goals and realizing success.