So you made an app or a SaaS and struggling to find your first users. Understandable! The first 100 is the hardest one.
I gathered the tactics of the most notable SaaS companies. Here is the list of concrete actions. Enjoy!
Acquiring early-stage customers is doing things that don't scale. The key error in the beginning is thinking too much about the future. I see it often. Founders want virality and scalability. They want it huge and they want it quick.
But living in a dream distracts from what really matters. In reality, a beginning founder must focus on understanding who is their customer. To do the research you don't need many users, just a few people is enough and it's easier to get the first dozens of users by doing manual actions. By doing things that don't scale.
And now let's finally have a look at the examples of such manual actions.
This tactic helped Suhail to kickstart Mixpanel the analytics tool.
The quote: "earn on own I wrote a Twitter script to follow a person's followers. That person often blogged about the problem we were trying to solve. We found hundreds of customers this way."
Remember that you can follow up to 400 persons per day.
Source: https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1009454402048937986
Start with an email newsletter
The idea is to build a list of people, who like reading your content, and then launch a product using the audience as a ramp. my favorite story of applying this trick. 10 years ago, Rayan Hoover started to send daily email newsletter with interesting startups, he found.
Soon, he made a list of 170 highly engaging people. These people started responding to Rayan and telling them how much they enjoyed his digests. This is how he came up with the idea to build a product.
He launched the notorious Product Hunt. With the help of this small initial audience, the new website quickly took off. Soon it became the coolest social network for startup people.
Paul Graham writes:
"At YC, we use the term Collinson installation for the technique they invented. More diffident founders asked: 'will you try our beta?'. And if the answer is yes, they say 'great! We will send you the link'. But Collinson brothers weren't going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe, we would say 'right then, give me your laptop!'. And set them on the spot."
Source: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html (must read btw)
Zapier is a tool that connects one another. For example, Salesforce with MailChimp. Dropbox with Google Drive, et cetera.
So who is the user of Zapier? Right. It's a user of these apps. And where are you can find users of Salesforce, MailChimp and other apps. On their product forums. And you can imagine the plan now.
Zapier's CEO used to go to the product forums of companies like Dropbox, Salesforce, Evernote, and find posts like: "I love MailChimp! It would be awesome if you had. Wufoo Integration!" Then he just offered his solution, Zapier. He got 10 visits from each of those links, not a lot of traffic, but he knew he was onboarding the right customers 50% of visitors would sign up for the beta. It's a half!
Takeaway: targeted outreach is the way to go. You don't need a thousand customers to get started. You just need the right 10.
Source: https://read.first1000.co/p/zapier
"Content marketing doesn't work nearly as well for a new product. Direct sales killed it." says Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit.
We all hate spam, but I must admit it just works. If done right.
If you do diligent research before reaching a potential client, you will be able to make an offer that way. Compare these two offers. First one.
Hello, dear sir/madam! Your company has a decent website, but it could be better. Please buy my professional website speedometer tool.
And here's the second one:
Hello, Alex. I learned about your company while watching your latest, podcast show with James. You were speaking about the website's performance. a lot. Out of curiosity, I tested your website on my website speedometer tool, and it, only scores, 18 out of 100. Wanna what exactly needs to be improved?
You see the difference, right?
And another one from the founder of ConvertKit. It's called "concierge migrations".
Nathan writes:
"The biggest objection in the sales process for us has always been. 'But it's so much work to switch!'So we did the ultimate thing that doesn't scale and offered to switch them out of their ConvertKit. Totally for free. Yes. It costs us a lot of time and money, but the referrals and ongoing revenue give an incredible ROI."
Great tactic that works for the type of products, that are hard to move from. For example, a website builder (my case 🙂).
Source: https://nathanbarry.com/2015-review/
The next one is pure genius. I am surprised that people are not using it anymore. It's from 2013. The folks from Doordash launched a landing page. They wanted to validate the problem of quick food delivery. But they didn't have resources for marketing.
They decided to target people from Palo Alto, searching for food delivery in Google. Doordash chose the domain name, "PaloAltoDelivery.com" they expected the domain to appear on the top search positions in Google for the keywords "Palo Alto delivery". So the keyword is the domain name. And it worked!
Source: https://read.first1000.co/p/case-study-doordash
I used the strategy too. And it worked for me as well. My side project uigenerator.org brought me over $20,000 of profit since 2022. The traffic mostly comes from Google. You can guess the keyword.
Also, a couple of weeks ago my friend used the same tactic to get free traffic from Google. He made a website allgpts.co which ranks at the top for the "all gpts" keyword.
So yes, the 'keyword in domain" trick is still viable.
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This post was originally an 𝕏 thread which then was flavored with memes and turned into a YouTube video.
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Thought this sounded familiar, as I had watched the video on YouTube just the other day. But.had a question should you employ any of these before building a mvp or basic saas offering?
Hey Pearse! Thanks for watching my YouTube channel 💜
The common practice is to start selling before you build. But in the AI/no-code era when yo can literally generate a working MVP I believe a better way is to have a working MVP of your product before selling. It will make your sales process easier and won't take much time to build.
Thanks! Great advice for the keyword name lol!! I'm definitely on it✍️🏽
Great insights, Alexander! Acquiring the first 100 users is indeed a challenge, and your compilation of tactics from successful SaaS companies is invaluable. The emphasis on manual actions and personalized approaches, such as the "Collinson installation" and direct sales, highlights the importance of building genuine connections with early users. The examples, like Zapier's targeted outreach on product forums and Doordash's clever use of a keyword-rich domain, provide practical strategies for startups to consider. Thanks for sharing these proven tactics to help navigate the initial hurdles of user acquisition. You can like some information here
This is what I need, thankyou!
For a beginner like me, you have greatly enhanced my knowledge. I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post, Alexander, and I will continue to refer back to it.
I'm glad it was useful for you, Faiza!
How is the keyword in domain trick still viable? I've read that the domain name does not Impact Google search results at all anymore.
https://www.siteguru.co/seo-academy/domain-names-and-seo#why-is-your-domain-name-important-if-it-doesnt-affect-your-seo
[E]xact match domains make no difference and they’re not a ranking factor. Google’s John Mueller confirmed as much as far back as 2020.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ranking-factors/domain-name/#close
Thanks for the valuable addition. I know this is very arguable. This is why I gave 2 fresh examples. Turns out it works 🤷
Here is a screenshot of the traffic for my side project https://twitter.com/alexanderisorax/status/1727348655500431513/photo/1
I am skeptical of this. I've been working on a tool https://stringbot.ai/ and after a few weeks it came up first for 'stringbot' searches, over other websites that use the word but don't have it in the domain. Of course I didn't apply this strategy, since I didn't choose a keyword/search term with meaningful traffic. However, for some of the terms that I am going for, "UX" "copy" "ai", the top results all have some of those words in their domain name.
Maybe it doesn't directly enter the calculation but it sure seems like its correlated to help.
Cool easy fast site by the way! I love the easy layout 😊😊
Thanks! I appreciate the comment.
Great post. Organic traffics from good SEO are one in a million.
That's on point
these are all nice tactics and extremely useful but what if you providing a consulting service which one of them you think will work?
I think you should try them all. Consulting is a business too. It is just 1-on-1.
God fucking yeah! Really clever tips. So useful roadmap for every founder!
Very insightful, thanks!
what a hack!
Keywords is pretty important if you want to rank and get better organic traffic. Domain trick is pretty cool one.
If you guys are just starting and want to find a good domain for the keyword, I made a perfect tool for that. This tool will go tru thousands of keywords that related to the market and target customer that you specify and get the best 100 keywords which have the best volume, traffic, trend and difficulty ratio. From that analysis you can see all the data and the graph representing the keywords over time.
From that analysis you can find the best keyword for you domain.
If you guys are interested do checkout decentool.com
The entire process of analysis will take some time so you might need to wait about 5 minutes.
Let me know if the tool have helped you in any form.
Tried it, got the "something went wrong" pop-up😞
Thanks for trying I just fixed the issue would like you to try it again
nice tool!
Hey Alexandra, nice little read. Thanks.
Thanks Karanveer!!!
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
Thanks for the addition, Jack.