How do you promote your SaaS product and find new customers at a cost of $0?
Hello Indiehackers,
I'm Faruk, the founder of monitup.com.
We all go through similar paths: limited money, limited time, limited staff, limited customers...
So far I have tried to come up with a minimum cost and I am looking for some ways to promote my product with a cost of $0.
I've released a new suite for measuring the productivity of freelancers, and last week I launched a Product Hunt for it: https://freelancer.monitup.com
However, I can't say that it was very productive, I got around 180 visitors and I couldn't make any sales.
I don't get many visitors from search engines, so I'm focused on SEO these days.
I'm looking for a sales specialist on LinkedIn who will only give a 15% commission on the sales made, without a fixed salary:
https://www.linkedin.com/hiring/jobs/3318814685/detail/
What do you use to promote your product? What do you recommend?
I am personally using Reddit and although it seems quite intimidating at first, as long as you follow the rules and don't do self-promotion in subreddits where it's not allowed, then it's fine.
A good way to find relevant communities on Reddit is to simply use Google and use search terms such as "site:reddit.com <competitor 1, value proposition, how to X etc.>". You'll find loads of posts and comments this way (that are also probably relevant to you) and you can simply check which subreddits they were posted in.
So for example, your tool is an employee monitoring tool and "site:reddit.com employee monitoring" gives the subreddits:
Although I have to warn you that I think the Reddit crowd will be against monitoring you employees in general (I also hate the idea of it), so not sure how well you will fare. I'm also building a tool that can help with finding leads (a better tactic in your case could be tracking negative comments about competitors for example) - check it out if it sounds interesting 😄
Hey Amos,
this is really valuable information. thank you very much.
Please mention a little about your product, it sounds really interesting :)
I'm new to Reddit and I posted a post yesterday promoting MonitUp. Reddit users have been swearing at me since yesterday :) I think I did something wrong, is Reddit a better place for B2C products?
https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/y7v3he/im_developing_a_tool_that_measures_the/
I think they just hate this type of business (employee monitoring), which I understand completely to be fair 😅
Yes, I can understand them, I think they like to swear :D
Hey Faruk, Great platform!
The best way to spread the word about your SaaS product is through marketing. There are plenty of options to choose from, such as paid ads, social media, email lists, etc. Each option has its pros and cons, so you should carefully consider what kind of promotion would benefit your company the most.
And you should definitely look into lifetime deals as well. Lifetime deals are becoming more common than ever before. They allow businesses to connect with their customers over longer periods of time. The idea behind these types of agreements is to provide value to both parties involved.
Promoting a new SaaS or building a new one is really challenging specially when you have already some great competitors. Like we currently built a lead Generation SaaS https://OptinMagic.io with some great competitors on the market.
But It has an advantage of it, you can follow the competitors path to reach more customers. By this method, I think you get their customers attention as well as the new customers attention.
Also, organically there are some ways to promote a SaaS.
(If you search for lead generation software, you might find our SAAS OptinMagic.io)
I wish you all the best. Thanks.
I am also on the same stage right now with https://copytonotion.com
and I am trying to post on different social media platforms:
later I can compare all the channels and see which one attracts more users so I'll focus more on it at this start.
but the chance I have is that my solution is related to Notion which already has communities all over the web. So for you, I think you could look for your competitors and see where they promote their stuff and how they're doing it maybe it could be useful to you.
Hey Idriss,
Good luck with your StartUp. Reddit user loved your project, they didn't like MonitUp :))
My competitors are big companies for 15 years, it's hard to fight them with a $0 budget, but keep trying :)
I'll look into this suggestion, thank you.
Good luck to you too!
I think for your use case you should try Linkedin and Polywork!
Hey Faruk,
Launching a new B2B product is a bit more trickier than launching a B2C product in my opinion. B2B usually requires more sales led initiatives whereas B2C “usually” is more suitable to pure marketing plays. Talking in very general terms of course. But here’s what I would do:
Hey Johan,
Yes, you're right, selling a B2B product is really harder and it's not a solo founder job, it's a team job. Sales, development, support...
My next product will be B2C and I will sell plug-ins for Spotify or something :)))
It's a little difficult to reach a B2B audience. When you write something here or on Reddit, people respond, but Linkedin is a bit more cumbersome. In order to reach the right target audience on LinkedIn, I send a connection request and send a message one by one. If you know a better method please tell me :)
I will write articles about the product and the problem it solves and share it on Linkedin. Then I try email marketing. Keep trying...
Maybe you could try to involve a sales person, whom can get shares in the company? It needs to be someone willing to do the grindy sales work.
And regarding LinkedIn, you can try to connect with more people, write posts that you publish (I.e. not cold outreach) and I would recommend content that is related to the problem you are solving. Like:
“Should employers allow freelancers work from home?”
“Top 10 time reporting tools”
Etc.
In the end, you have to be the sales person or get someone who will!
These are all some of the great ways to acquire customers for $0 @Faruk_durak. It's the exact same things I've used to scale ruttl in the initial phase from 0 to first 1500 users.
Focusing on SEO early on is a great decision. But, don't expect too much (at least for the next 6 months) because results take time to come in.
You need good content and some decent backlinks to get into the organic SEO growth phase.
Hope this helps you mate!
Hey Harsh,
Your product looks great, good luck.
I've been trying to add MonitUp wherever I can find it. I will also do my best for SEO and wait for it to work.
In the meantime, I can pull out a few great features and appeal to different audiences.
Thanks man!
How is your product faring now in the market? what all steps have you taken since then?
SEO is great - but working one-on-one with a lot of SaaS founders and startups myself - you're going to spin your wheels if you don't have a budget for content and can't write the content yourself.
SEO is great, if you're ready to learn to put the time in to do the content and do it right.
Plus, with minimal authority aka backlinks - you have to get busy actually going out and promoting that content - not just letting it die on the blog.
AI-generated content, third-party content houses and the likes just won't cut it.
And it's not only about the content itself, it's the entire experience of interacting with the content - visuals, and even the basics of formatting like spacing.
So if you're really limited on budget, and want to keep it to practically zero:
In my experience - nothing beats email outreach.
You can run and setup a proper campaign with minimal cost, and really start to generate customers off the back of it fast.
I try to spend my budget very carefully, as a technical guy I will try to write content for SEO. I don't know how successful I can be :)
The email issue has been on my mind for a very long time, I searched a few times to try but gave up every time.
I get a lot of emails selling emails but I have no idea which one is reliable, how can I get reliable emails?
If you're focused on SEO, you have to build content - there's no way around it to grow without building it yourself.
Which, is also a positive, as pretty much any company you try to outsource it to won't have your level of deep expertise - so you can write and leverage that yourself.
Never buy emails, links or anything else that you get outreached with - you'll be wasting your hard-earned $$.
LI Sales Navigator + Lusha or use a solution like Apollo.io to start building a proper list, with verified emails.
Thank you very much for this great information, I will try it.
⛓🚀🏄🏻♂️
🚀🚀
Theres many ways to generate clients while keeping your cost at zero.
Here are the best ways based on your skill:
-Cold calling prospects
-Cold emails
-Podcasting
-offering free trials
-affiliates
This can generate six figures MRR if you focus on one outlet
Actually, I tried many of these, I wanted to try cold email, but I gave up every time.
How to find trusted email?
You mentioned "focused on SEO". I would suggest do check programmatic SEO
I will check programmatic SEO, thank you.
Hey Faruk, Why not try launching a lifetime deal campaign for your product?
Hey Sandhiya,
I had an AppSumo campaign, at first I couldn't sell at all and then I researched and asked why I couldn't sell, I tried different things and finally we have customers in 10 different countries.
But now that AppSumo is over and we're focused on the subscription model, Appsumo isn't lucrative, it's just very useful for validating your opinion, collecting feedback and some cash.
Absolutely, LTDs are great for validation. Hopefully, it worked out for you to increase your MRR
LTD is a treasure trove for new products :) When we first launched the product, it didn't even give anyone a freebie. We asked our friends, we asked our acquaintances, and we did not get any response. LTD users are eager and help to resolve an error when they see it.
There is no MRR yet, so we took the trial version from 15 days to 7 days and required to register a credit card to start the trial.
There are very few sign ups at the moment, but no one has started a trial yet, we are trying.
We are trying to get more right target audience as visitors.
I get you. Totally. When we launch products at SaaS Mantra we get incredible involvement from our community members. Generating MRR can be tricky, which is why we always recommend seeing an LTD campaign as a part complete marketing strategy. It is not a one-shot solution. Have you tried upselling to your LTD buyers?
Hey Sandhiya,
LTD is not a sustainable income model. I was asking $49 for a code with 5 licenses and I got $30 of that.
It's a great way to validate the idea and get feedback, but not enough to grow your business.
LTD customer wants to buy LTD again. After the LTD ended, I had customers who wanted to buy a LTD, I said you should buy a subscription now. They found the codes I sold to others before and bought from them :)
LTD customer absolutely does not want to buy subscriptions.
Hey! I found the guide below very useful. It has 47 tactics on how you can achieve your goal. Highly recommended.
How early-stage startups can get users
Here is another very good one - see here
Hey Tonike,
Thank you, I'll look into those.
Experiment, experiment, experiment
As others said it's all about testing to find you're audiences.
Some ideas that I have for you are:
-Hope I gave some helpful Ideas. There's a great post userbooster.co/blog/get-1000-first-users-startup/ that goes into full detail about getting those initial users.
Good Luck! You'll get there!
Hey,
Thanks for the great information.
I sold Monitup to 10 different countries, collected reviews and developed it on AppSumo.
I made 2 product hunt launches, but I was able to launch as successfully as someone who knows nothing about launching :)
https://www.producthunt.com/products/monitup#monitup
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/monitup-freelancer
I got a lot of swearing on Reddit :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/y7v3he/im_developing_a_tool_that_measures_the/
I haven't tried Hacker News yet, I will.
I will post on Quora and Medium.
I don't prefer to spend money on advertising, I want to spend the money on improving the product. I'll add the link
I see it did pretty well on PH. How many new users did you get from the second launch any paid ones? That's awesome!
Yes, the second launch was more successful than the first, but it was not as good as I expected.
The first launch included the entire product, the 2nd one focused only on the Freelance package and I thought the freelance package was a bit B2B, a bit B2C.
I was hoping to at least make a few sales, but unfortunately I couldn't sell any. I only had 5 new members but none of them started a trial.
180 page views, 125 votes and 90 comments. I couldn't understand why I couldn't sell.
Need to develop your site a bit more. Feels like its from 2005.
haha you are so right, I have a new design in mind but it looks like there is some time for that.
You might also need a strategic narrative to help tell your story your team, investors and to the market-industry.
hmmm i'm a technical guy, my specialty is writing code, managing systems. Telling a strategic narrative is the opposite of that :)
Can you share an example?
I'm sure you're great at code but that's replicable! Coding is now like coffee - its a commodity. So you need to go beyond product functionality.
Having read through this thread (and also your site), I can see you don't have a narrative or even a story because you're not quite sure what to say - hence your open request for ideas. This is a positive approach but it will lead you down too many different rabbit holes.
Strategic narrative is for you to author but for your people to own (teams, VCs, stakeholders, customers) to truly believe.
“The company story is the company strategy." as Ben Horowitz (Partner and Co-founder, Andreessen Horowitz) said of one of the largest VC groups.
But I'd go further than Horowitz and say that people will pay for a story, but people will die for a narrative.
Strategic Narrative gives you:
Alignment with teams - hires, and leaders, get behind what you're doing and are free to actively pursue the narrative with self-determination. This will also help you bring all of your various company assets under a common narrative.
Builds and defines new ways forward (category, visions etc) - you're aiming to service managers who can monitor productivity. Fine. However I think there's an opportunity to expand what this truly means for the future of work - the higher order of things - as an example.
Narratives mobilize - a good story can engage the audience. but a good narrative will mobilize people into action. This is important because they can own it to and move forward together at speed. Your people will want to solve the problem for you because they have ownership.
There's more to it than this but it will make your company clearer, seen as a category leader (or even inventor), and get others to take over your vision and act it - not passively consume it.
Hey Andreessen,
Thank you for your time, this is really valuable.
I don't have a story, yes, it's true, but I think it's too early for the story.
Well; MonitUp is doing something right now, but it's not really focused on anything. Looking for what to focus on...
It monitors employees, collects data, and measures productivity, but it doesn't exactly solve a problem. It doesn't increase efficiency, for example, it just measures it.
For example, I could write a story if we could; With the support of artificial intelligence, MonitUp detects slow points in business processes and increases company efficiency by 30%...
We are on the road right now and in search, trying different things. We plan to spot and focus on something that will solve people's problems. And only then MonitUp and the market will be fit and I will be able to write a story :)
Am I thinking right?
It has been proven that companies/brands without clear purpose fail. I would disagree that you're not trying to solve a problem - you just have not defined it yet. You have not defined the category and why you do what you do. That's why you need a narrative - a psychological framing of what you do so people can then see it in the real world.
When you say "For example, I could write a story if we could; With the support of artificial intelligence, MonitUp detects slow points in business processes and increases company efficiency by 30%..." this is functional - and anybody can say this. I could launch a vaporware company tomorrow with these claims.
I think you have to put it in terms of old world, new world - begin with the category and take it from there otherwise you will be trying to boil the ocean as we say in English - meaning doing the impossible.
PM me if you want to chat futher - happy to help.
I think one way could be is creating a very basic 4-week content calendar and posting and interacting regularly on Linkedin since you're targeting remote managers. Don't just talk about your product - but talk about pain points and benefits that need solving. Your product can chime in later once they move further down the funnel
I will write a blog on my website, for example; on economic problems, inflation and increasing productivity. First I will talk about economic problems and I will talk about how MonitUp contributes to increase productivity.
Then I will share my blog link on LinkedIn. Is not it right?
I've got a few tips for you. I've been using these marketing tips for my SaaS. It's called AI2sql, and it builds SQL query for your database.
Start by thinking about who your customers are and what they need. What's the problem they're trying to solve? What's the pain point they're trying to address? How can your product help them?
Then think about how you can reach those people. Are there some blogs, forums, or other platforms where they hang out? Can you reach out to them on social media? What about reaching out to influencers in the space?
Once you've done that, start sending out emails with offers for free trials and discounts—and then follow up on those offers!
Hey Mustafa,
AI2sql looks like a great product, good luck with your project.
I think on the B2B side, things want a little more physical activity, such as attending events, attending fairs, visiting prospective customers in their offices...
The SEO side seems to be quite competitive, I will try to identify the right keywords and write Blogs on them.
Have the content strategy to drive organic growth to your SaaS product. Create some useful content around your product and share it over social network channels. Then you can attract your potential buyers who are attracted to your valuable contents.
Hey Thamizharasu,
We're too late for this, but yesterday we launched our blog. Now we will start blogging.
https://www.monitup.com/blog/list
What kind of things would it be useful for us to write?
There was an article about competitors in IH, do you think it would be helpful?
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/wrote-this-free-guide-on-how-to-do-seo-as-a-saas-startup-52a2f306a8
Blog will only really help with SEO - but you might find that if you come up with 10 killer articles that dig in deep to your problem and JTBD scenarios that they can become useful.
Thanks for your suggestions, I'll try that.
You need to focus mainly on your core value promise of your product. Yes, you can also cover the competitors but in the context of why you are a better option than your competitors. I would recommend writing some contents about your value promise and how users will get benefited from your product.
So should I write on Medium too? So if I write a blog on my own site and publish it on Medium, will it work? Or should I just write on my own blog? Which would be more efficient?
Write it on your blog and at the same time you can push your content to Medium. Medium is well known platform through which you can redirect users to your blog. Driving traffic to your blog at the early stage is little difficult.
I will do that, thank you very much for your suggestions.
Time is money. We got started out doing targeted replies on Reddit forums for people looking for investment help. This is how we got our first few hundred users. It is slow and time consuming, but it's free!
I'm new to Reddit and I posted a post yesterday promoting MonitUp. Reddit users have been swearing at me since yesterday :) I think I did something wrong, is Reddit a better place for B2C products?
https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/y7v3he/im_developing_a_tool_that_measures_the/
My target audience: CEO, General manager, HR and IT managers.
I don't think you did anything particularly wrong in the post itself- many other founders post similar posts.
I think the reaction is just that they don't like your product. From my experience, I've noticed that the general reddit crowd doesn't like monitoring, are protective about their privacy, and resent self-promotion if that's all you've been doing - which you apparently checked the 3 boxes (hence the strong reaction)!
Reddit is mostly the consumer, the people doing the work, NOT the people with the purchasing power in your case. I would instead try cold messaging or emailing on LinkedIn.
BUT I would take a look at the comments on the end users (the workers and freelancers) you're impacting and consider pivoting or explore ways to address their feedback.
Hey Allison,
Thank you very much for the explanation.
I understand the concerns of the people there, I agree with them. They have the right to dislike MonitUp :)
I try to reach people on Linkedin and there are really interested people, but B2B processes take too long :( they can't decide etc.
I think my next project will be B2C and everyone will love it when I share it on Reddit :))
They gave good advice about Reddit here I will try them all.
I think every body try to start from $0 cost. My product is linkedcamp.com it is LinkedIn Automation Tool we also try from $0 cost.
Thanks Eric
What are you doing to promote your product?
We are working on some channels to promote our content. Working on SEO and some social media stuff.
Good luck Eric.
Do you live near a high-density area, especially one where your potential customers might live/work?
I've been holding a sign downtown for a few hours at a time near walking traffic and seeing good results
It cost me ~$10 at target for foamboard + markets, and I probably could have gone cheaper if I went to the dollar store.
If you don't make any sales, at least you'll have face-to-face conversations with potential users, where you can get their feedback
Hey Jim,
The sign would be really eye-catching :) MonitUp's target audience: CEO, General manager, HR and IT managers.
There was an HR event last month, I was sure I would meet a lot of potential customers there and I wanted to go. However, the fee to attend the event was equal to the minimum wage in my country and I gave up going.
But this event could be really good for MonitUp and I wanted to do something. Then I found the speakers on LinkedIn and told them one by one about MonitUp, and one of them led a lead.
I hope there is a free way to reach big customers :)
The sad reality is you’ve got to experiment (or) copy strategies of similar companies ( in almost all ways).
I’ll give you some pointers ( along with real growth stories, so that you can explore more )
Long term
( https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/12-minute-saas-podcast/id1621014530?i=1000570697527, https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/12-minute-saas-podcast/id1621014530?i=1000580300191 )
Short term
Start doing cold outreach ( almost negligible investment & great ROI if you can nail your proposition )
( https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/12-minute-saas-podcast/id1621014530?i=1000582561787 , https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/12-minute-saas-podcast/id1621014530?i=1000579568501 )
Use your public following on LinkedIn or Twitter
Hey Upendra,
Thank you for sharing the podcasts. I will listen to these.