I made over $350 from a SaaS that's not launched yet. Here's how I did it:

This is a case study on how I am growing uibun.dev from zero with no experience, and the product is not launched yet!

TL;DR: Build a landing page and put the idea in front of as many users as possible before actually launching.

My background:

I am a maker with barely any social connections and I get about 20 views and 2 likes (if lucky) on my Twitter posts. So, I have to try very hard to promote my products.

My strategy to acquire users:

Put the product idea in front of as many users as possible. Publishing posts on IH, engaging in online communities, and sharing code snippets on GitHub were my primary ways of user acquisition.

Here are the step-by-step tactics I used to get my first 7 pre-orders:

1. Build a good looking landing page with information about the product

Experienced makers always suggest that you pre-sell your idea before actually building it. So, I decided to take the advice and built a landing page before building the actual product. Make sure to include a CTA button to pre-order the product at a discounted price.

The first versions of UIBun only contained the hero section with one CTA to pre-order the product.

2. Share the landing page in Indie Hackers, Twitter, and Reddit

IH is very active and it is very likely that the users here would be your first customers or provide you with very valuable feedback. The feedback here personally helped me modify certain parts of uibun.dev landing page that eventually drove more sales. For example, one of the valuable feedback was to add content so that people felt confident to pay.

Tip: Make sure that the title of your post is catchy and gathers attention. Here's an example.

3. Create a short demo for the product that you're building, and add it to Landing page

Try to hack a demo or create a very basic video about how the product could look like and operates. This helps the users understand the product better and gives them confidence.

This also enables you to share your idea in public channels and #buildinginpublic communities.

I created only the UI for my SaaS and created a video and shared it on social media as well as embedded it on the landing page.

4. Keep posting regularly

Here's a screenshot of users for my landing page, can you guess which 3 weeks I didn't post about UiBun?

5. Talk to your connections, colleagues, and friends

Yes, you'll be surprised how much your connections know. I got connected with head of marketing and head of growth at multiple companies, and they were kind enough to provide advice and actions to take.

For UIBun, the best advice I got was a tip to post on reddit without getting banned, and that drove thousands of users to my landing page.

6. Write blog posts, share code, etc.

Share your knowledge (or code) on blogs, GitHub, npm etc and keep a backlink to your SaaS. This gives you more shareable content as well as help the community. I created a npm package, provided regular updates on twitter and created posts on IndieHackers sharing my learnings.
Examples:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/realtime-mouses (Added link in README)

7. Create FOMO

Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) is an important factor that drives users to purchase before missing out on the deal. For UiBun, I created various tactics such as providing lifetime access only for pre-orders and a progressbar when the deal ends resulting in driving more sales.

And not just stop here, I shared the learnings from FOMO on IH too and got about a hundred unique visitors to the website. The golden learning is thatmore visitors to your website gives you more chances of making a sale.

This way, I secured over $350 in pre-sales without launching the actual product.

The one BIG lesson that I learned here is that there is a direct co-relation between the number of sales and the number of unique visitors to the landing page. If you are just starting to build a SaaS like me, focus on finding ways to share your product with my people via different channels as much as possible. Write new blogs, share code snippets, engage in communities. Everything helps. And remember, users will pay if your product is useful to them.

If you reached the end of this post, please check out uibun.dev and give me some tips to reach more users. I am very new to marketing and I appreciate all the help to grow my product.