How to Get Your First 100 SaaS Customers —What I Learned As A SaaS Copywriter

Everything here is based on my experience as a SaaS Copywriter building and scaling products for Solo Founders and Startups.

The Complete 4500+ word Article Is Available on The StartUp

Over the past few years —well, 3 years to be exact, I’ve had the opportunity of working on different SaaS products.

From the good, bad, all down to the ugly, yeah, I’ve seen it all.

With every solo founder, there’s a new approach or idea to a problem that he/she sees and others don’t.

With startups, there’s the strive to “be different”, and set new standards.

But the one thing I’ve been able to piece together as the main problem for solo founders and startups is “Customer Acquisition”, and it looks like this:

Now, when you look at that, you see it’s a lot of stages before the actual purchase.

And any fall-off before the purchase means you didn’t convert that customer.

Without customers, you’ve got a problem.

As a new product in the market, you’re literally competing with thousands of others coming out every single day.

To get an idea, take a look at products listed daily on Product Hunt and Owwly for a start.

And oh, that’s only on those two websites alone.

Which begs the question, why should your consumers choose you instead of others?

I’ll answer that for you.

For your product to stand out, you need to have identified a Unique Value Proposition (UVP).

With this, you’re telling your audience that you’ve identified a problem they are facing, and now you have a solution.

CXL Founder, Peep Laja defined UVP and its importance this way:

“A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered. It’s the primary reason a prospect should buy from you.
It’s also the #1 thing that determines whether people will bother reading more about your product or hit the back button.
On your site, your value proposition is the main thing you need to test — if you get it right, it will be a huge boost.”

To be able to compete in the market, your UVP matters.

But in order to get that, there's a need to bridge the gap between you and your potential customers.

And to do that, creating a buyer persona is your first step.

1. Build Your Buyer Persona

Before developing your product, you need to have a mental image of your preferred customer.

When working with clients, I tell them their buyer persona should be someone they’d be comfortable sitting across the table with, listening to their problems, and showing how they can help.

For a demo, you can have a friend or colleague stand/sit with or across you so it’s more of a conversation… Trust me, it helps

Take for instance, you're building a buyer persona for an Instagram Hashtag Analytics tool.

On paper, it looks like this:

When you're making it relatable to a customer, it looks like this:

-Hi everyone, meet Janet McCarlson.

-She’s a Model and Hair Stylist.

-When she’s not busy at work, she likes taking photos of street fashion and posting on Instagram.

-Janet wants to be a full-time Instagram content creator and influencer in the fashion niche.

-She follows some of the popular influencers in the niche and wishes to be like them someday.

-Even with her busy schedule, she tries uploading content at least 3 times a week.

-After a while, she noticed that she wasn’t getting enough engagement on her content.

-But no matter what she tried — whether it’s using hashtags, asking for shout-outs, or joining follows trains, none was working for her.

-One day she was looking up ways which she could use to improve her engagement and found an Instagram hashtag analytics tool.

-The tool promises to help increase her engagement, visibility, and reach by giving her proper hashtags for each of her posts.

-At first, she wasn’t sure the tool would help because she felt she had tried everything.

-But then she went through their content and felt they understood her problem.

-Janet signed up for the free one-month trial.

-After a week of using <product name>, her engagements increased by 75.4%.

-By the end of the trial, she had increased her overall reach, engagement, and visibility by 432%.

Now Janet loves <your product name>, confident about it, and is willing to pay for it because it solves her problem.

2. Create an Effective Customer Journey Roadmap

Take this as a detailed breakdown of your customer acquisition funnel.
And here’s how I define it:

“Your customer journey or experience is series of interactions a potential customer has with your product at every level of the customer’s journey to understand the unique value proposition it offers.”

As a new product in the market with no recognition or audience, here’s a simple process to help you out:

-Talk to your audience
-Understand their needs
-Map out your journey according to your buyer persona
-Align your goals with your customer journey
-Set up improvement plans
-Set milestones and use quantitative metrics to measure your results.

When you piece it all together, you should have a framework like this:

3. Begin promotion

Using your customer journey roadmap, you’d already have an idea of where your ideal customer hangs out.

And there’s where your promotion should start.

When you think about it, it makes just so much sense to talk to people who will listen to you —rather than convincing those who wouldn’t.

In promoting your product, you can either use a free or paid form of advertising.

Free method — blog, guest post, and cold email outreach work well but takes time.

However, I’d recommend using a paid form of advertising on the platform(s) your potential customers are most active on.

Paid advertising —if done well— helps you get the traction you want quicker and easier especially in your first year.

4. Follow up with a free trial

There’s a big debate now between opting for free trials or demos. Arguably, both sides have convincing points.

But I prefer free trials compared to demos.

A new product in the market doesn’t have the audience or traction. It’s expected for the audience to be skeptical about it —and that’s fine.

The concept of free trials is to remove the risk barrier most prospective customers face before buying a product.

With risk out of the question, customers can make informed decisions.

5. Convert Free Users to Paid

One major barrier in converting free users to paid ones is “product's ease-of-use”.

Sure, your prospects know they have a problem and you have the solution — but how can they use your solution to solve their problems?

Typically, content works best in solving this, and that’s why big guys like Hubspot invest so much in it.

Taking things up a notch, pairing your free trials with your content at every stage of onboarding the customer is a hidden gem.

The onboarding process is more like your customer’s tour guide —but online.

In every step of the onboarding, make sure there are at least 2-3 blog posts that cover some of your key features extensively.

After this, you should have an indoctrination sequence that spans 30 days or your preferred trial length.

This Indoctrination sequence is more like your onboarding process, but longer and specific.

With this, you send your trial users an email every day for 30 days, explaining and showing examples of how to use your product to get their desired results.

This way, they are solving their problems and understanding how to make the best use of your product.

After they are done with the trial, they ideally have results at this point that’s enough to convert them into a paying customer.

And there you have it —your customer!

So, do you get the idea?

It’s more about making your users understand your product and how to use it to solve their problems.

---

Also, there's a common notion in SaaS —one I've seen to be quite popular especially among new founders.

It goes like this:

"You need to beat down the price of your product much lower than your competitors because you're a new product."

No, it doesn't work that way.

Although, that might attract users at first, if what they get can’t match up to what they had, they won’t mind going back to your competitors.

And like the evergreen legend, David Ogilvy said,

"The customer is not a moron, she's your wife"

You have to know that, no matter how low your SaaS product cost, if it’s not benefitting enough, people won’t mind paying a higher price for a better one.

And there you have it, all I’ve learned as a SaaS copywriter about getting your first 100 SaaS customers.

If you have any questions, please feel free to drop them in the comments and I'll be sure to help you out to the best of my knowledge.