How to get your first 100 users as a Saas startup founder?
You've got to start somewhere right. You've got your landing page and maybe even an MVP, but no one is visiting your website! How do you actually get those first 100 users? I've been there myself with my startup, and I would have loved to read such an article when I got started, so here it is! In honour of my past self and to help all fellow startup founders!
Get started
Here are a few basic tips you should get started with. They will pay off in the coming months.
Start with SEO
SEO will not get you users overnight, but it's an amazing long term investment. Do it.
Obviously, don't try to rank for super general keywords, instead, focus on niche keywords your audience is interested in. Here are a few examples from our own startup:
- Which contacts am I losing touch with? Find out now
- What is a Gmail Metadata integration and why you should use it
- How I created an Automated Relationship Management tool using Coda & Zapier
- Top 6 Best Personal CRM apps
*Like passive income, those articles are generating a steady (albeit small) traffic to our app. But what's powerful about this traffic is that its super high-quality people. Only passionate people will find your articles, and when they do, they'll check out your app as well. *
Quora & Twitter: Answer to questions
Create a company account and start replying to questions related to what you're doing. Twitter has a really good advanced search feature and Quora will suggest you more than enough questions you can reply to. If you spend a few hours each week generating good content on those platforms, you'll get a steady stream of clicks to your landing page as well.
Pioneer.app
Pioneer is an online accelerator that you can join for free. Every week, you submit a progress update and other users will give you feedback. This is a free way to get a few clicks to your app from startup founders.
Get listed on 10words & Betalist
10words and BetaList are like a small Product Hunts. They are much smaller, you can expect around 50 clicks to your website for each. Still worth something!
### List your startup on Indie Hacker & Makerlog
Those are two cool communities. If you're active, you'll definitely get some attention and users!
Product Hunt Ship
Product Hunt has a place for upcoming apps called ** Ship **, I've not found it to be very useful, but it can get you a few additional users.
Growth hacks
That's where stuff gets exciting. Use these growth hacks with moderation, there is a fine line between marketing and spamming.
Product Hunt + PhantomBuster + Twitter
If there are already a few apps on ProductHunt that are similar to what you're building, consider using this growth hack. I've used it extensively myself.
Buy targeted email lists
I've built a tool myself that lets me scrape email addresses from founders on Indie Hacker. What's powerful is that you can filter by every filter available on Indie Hacker (revenue, location, business model, ...). You can use it to buy an email list here and use a tool like Gmass or Streak to reach out. Buy a list here.
I don't recommend just sending the same email to everyone as this will impact your reputation. Instead, send personalized mass emails. It does take a bit longer, but it's worth every second considering the impact it will have on response rate and trust.
Buy a related chrome extension
There are many chrome extensions out there that have tons of users but that are not maintained anymore. You can buy one for very cheap that is related to what you do and advertise your business on there. I bought Google Contacts Opener and it's been generating significant traffic to our website ever since.
What you should not be doing
Advertising
It will cost you too much. Just don't think about it. In the early days, ads are not the way to go.
Launch on Product Hunt
You've got only one shot at this, it better be big. You don't want to launch on Product Hunt before having built a mature product. Product Hunt is not for the launching phase, it's for the growth phase. BetaList is a better place to start.
My startup's traffic
Here is a breakdown of who visited our website recently. This will give you a better idea of what you should focus on.
Good list. One thing worth doing before any of the channel work, because every channel you open pours into the same page.
Check where your primary action actually sits on the page you send people to. On a long landing page the real button drifts downward as sections get added, until the only action that takes money sits near the bottom and nothing above it converts. Paste this in the console at phone width:
[...document.querySelectorAll('a,button')].filter(e=>/start|try|buy|get|sign ?up|free/i.test(e.textContent)).map(e=>[e.textContent.trim().slice(0,25), +((e.getBoundingClientRect().top+scrollY)/document.body.scrollHeight).toFixed(2)]).sort((a,b)=>a[1]-b[1])
The second number is how far down the page each action sits, 0 at the top and 1 at the bottom. Anything past roughly 0.6 is a door most visitors never reach. The usual result is that everything above the fold turns out to be navigation (see how it works, read the guide, watch the demo) and the actual signup first appears after the reader has already decided.
The fix is dull and it works: put the primary action and one secondary action as a pair above the fold, and make every later repeat identical to that pair, same label and same destination. A reader who scrolls back up should find the same door where they left it.
On the channel side, the cheapest honest read before committing time is contentmation.com/score, which scores SEO, social, content, technical, directory and email in about thirty seconds, free and with no login. Useful mainly because it tells you which of the six is actually your gap instead of starting with whichever channel you already like.
Great writeup, thanks! I'm curious to hear more about buying a Chrome extension. Like how did you find the right extension to buy? How did you buy it and how much did it cost? How have you been promoting with it? And how much traffic have you gotten from it? A lot of questions, I know, but I think this could make a good Growth Bite.
Sure!
So I did search related chrome extensions basically. Just search. We integrate with Google Contacts, so I thought that GContacts super users would be a great fit.
I reached out to 10 extensions, got 4 replies, 2 interested and bought one. Can't disclose the price but it was less than 1k usd.
We haven't changed the extension much yet, we've promoted our own app through adding a call to action in the app's description and in the app itself.
The extension page get's around 1k daily visitors, and the app has around 1k DAU as well. So we're generating around 150 website hits per week :)
One of our paying customers found us through this :)
How did you find out how many hits the chrome extension page was getting?
Google Analytics + internal analytics (every time a user clicks on the extension, it triggers an api call so that we can record it. It's anonymous, we just count the click).
right, I guess I wanted to know if there was a way to measure how many clicks the page gets before you reach out to extensions
No, and you actually will need to implement this manually. It's not provided by default :)
Awesome, thanks @Webbiger!