Here's how we got the first 1,000 users for our SaaS tool

Getting your first 1,000 users is a lot different from growing your customer base up to 100,000 or even just 10,000. In your startup’s early stages, you don’t need to worry about scalability as much as getting the biggest bang for your buck. That requires getting crafty, which also makes it fun.

Here’s a list of what we did for Codegiant.io to spread a word among our target audience -

1. Launch on Product Hunt

We did a very effective launch on Product Hunt and managed to get good traction and feedback from the launch. We got about 450+ sign ups and some amazing feedback. Here is a story of our PH launch success —Our Product Hunt Launch Story 😻

2. Technology Meetups

It is really important to connect with your target audience and gather important feedback from these users. There are a lot of developer meetups that keep happening in different parts of the world.

We felt that as a part of our launch strategy, we should be a part of one such developer meetup and get better connected to our audience. So, we attended and introduced our product at a React developers meetup in Bangalore — The Silicon Valley of India.

3. Business Tools Directory Listings

Online discovery is really important for SaaS tools. Getting listed on different business tools directory is really important for discovery of SaaS tools.

We listed our website on different business tools directories such as

Capterra

G2Crowd

Crozdesk

FinancesOnline

Siftery

AlternativeTo

We were recognised as a ‘Rising Star’ and a tool with ‘Great User Experience’ by FinancesOnline.

4. Twitter Buzz

Twitter is a brilliant channel to keep your users connected and engaged. We ensured that we were active on Twitter to answer user queries/concerns and also did good engagement that the developers community would love.

5. Blogging (and an evolving content strategy)

Content is king. To say we were “blogging” back then would be a massive overstatement, but we did write a few pieces that got shared quite a bit, and brought us some new users. Funnily enough, the piece that brought in the most new users was about how we had just gotten a whole bunch of users.

Full story here - https://blog.codegiant.io/how-a-saas-startup-got-its-first-1-000-users-de0d719a45fa