Our journey from idea to 1,000 users (Now at 9,000 users + $7,300/month)

My SaaS recently hit $7,300/month! Now that we have gotten past the initial challenge of getting our project of the ground, I thought I’d share how we did it with you guys. I know that many struggle with this so I hope that getting some insight into how we did it can be helpful.

So, here’s our journey from idea to 1,000 users:

Starting with the idea:

After months of building failed projects it was time to find a new idea again.
We spent a lot of time looking for ideas everywhere. We explored social media looking at what other people were building, which products were trending, looking at b2b vs b2c alternatives, etc.
Finally we decided the easier approach was just to solve a problem we experienced ourselves.
Our problem was a lack of guidance when building products, which led to wasted time and effort and the building of products no one wanted.
We had a rough idea for a solution that would be valuable to us. We took this idea and fleshed it out into something more comprehensive and presentable.
To make sure putting in effort into the idea would actually be worth it, we validated it with our target audience through a simple Reddit post, link (got us in touch with 8-10 founders).
We got a positive response from Reddit, so we built an MVP to test the solution without investing too much time or resources.

Getting the project off the ground:

Our first 3 users came from sharing the MVP with the same founders who responded to our first Reddit post and doing a launch post on their subreddit.
Then we posted and engaged in founder communities on X and Reddit. These posts included: building in public, giving advice, connecting with other founders, and mentioning our product when it was relevant.

After two weeks of daily posting and engaging, we reached 100 users.

We knew we were onto something by this time because we had never experienced this kind of attention for any of our previous projects.

To continue growing from 100 to 1,000 users:

We had our first 100 users which also meant we received a lot of feedback. We used all this feedback to improve our product and shape it to better fit what the market wanted.
After weeks of product improvements, we launched on Product Hunt.
Our Product Hunt launch went very well and we ended up in #4 place with 500+ upvotes. This led to us getting 475 new users in the first 24h of our launch, and our first paying customers (after 7 months of building products!).
On top of this, we also shared our journey in the Build in Public community on X and in founder related subreddits daily.

A little over a week after the Product Hunt launch, we reached 1,000 users.

Reaching 1,000 users was a crazy experience after coming from months of getting no attention at all for our products.

So that was our journey from idea to 1,000 users quickly summarized for you. I hope that getting some insight into how we did it can be helpful to you on your journey!

For the curious, my SaaS is Buildpad.io

Let me know if you have any questions.