Cold Emails for SaaS

The learning curve is painful

Sure.

So the reason I steered away from talking about the gym space is that it's (hopefully for you) very different to the massage industry.

For gym membership software, you're (almost certainly) not just talking software, but hardware too.

So the risks/work involved with switching to a new system are very, very high. After all, it's the backbone of their business.

Then you'd have to consider the other advantages of their current provider (lock-in via long contracts, integrations with machines, discounts on other vendors etc etc).

Add all of that up, and the only reason you'd switch as a gym is if

1. You're an order of magnitude cheaper (unlikely)
2. You're an order of magnitude better (very unlikely)
3. They know you/someone you know and owe you a massive favour (ridiculously unlikely)

So basically, there are only 3 options as a founder in that space...

1. build a different product they need, slowly increase scope until you can replace their current membership system
2. Raise loads of money and offer your membership product way cheaper
3. Sell to new gyms without a system in place yet

None of those are easy.

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Back to massage studios...

It's easy to find massage studios on Google/Yelp/Facebook etc.

It's easy to get their managers (the decision maker) to talk to you.

It's very difficult to convince them to switch membership systems.

It's impossible to get them to commit to switching if you don't have it built and working yet.

What approach would I take?

First, I'd work out if you're going to be an order of magnitude cheaper, more valuable, or better at selling to 'new' studios.

If it's the latter, then obviously you don't need any sales advice from me ;)

if you're going to be cheaper/more valuable though, referrals/warm intros from existing, satisfied customers is how you will scale medium-term. Long-term, you can create valuable content for massage studio owners to turn this into more of an inbound funnel.

For those first 20-50 customers, I think the thing to do is just start visiting studios and chatting to the manager about their current systems.

Get them invested now (by asking for advice) and show how you're developing exactly what they've asked for.

Within a few months they'll trust you enough to try using it.

Looks like you're based in the UK. If that's the case, I'd forget email completely and go straight to cold calling. If you pitch yourself as someone looking for advice, you'll get a decent success rate of meetings booked.

Hope you find some of this useful - what you're trying to do will be very, very hard and you probably won't get to $10k MRR for a year or so.