Here are some user acquisition lessons that I gathered from my study of hundreds of SaaS businesses.
Every SaaS business is different and there in no universal way to get your first 100 users. We can't say that "get your users from communities because everyone else is doing that" or "build a audience". It entirely depends on the context.
In my opinion, channel risk is the biggest risk for a SaaS for various reasons- more SaaS companies are coming up many conventional channels are getting crowded up. So success may sometimes come from finding new channels like meetups, branding like "powered by" or "built with", leveraging app stores etc.
Indie businesses don't go for advertisements at an early stage (only 2.38% did). Most find scalable ways to acquire users without using ads, because ads can be a huge drain on your resources if you are not experienced enough.
It was interesting to see that some cool new projects got PR at an early stage (even cracked TechCrunch). So don't put anything off the table.
The founders didn't just stumble upon the right channel. Arriving at the perfect channel and traffic quality fit will require a proper process of channel evaluation and experiments.
The study was much more complex than I earlier thought it to be. So I had to limit the scope to initial user acquisition. In my next study I'll talk about sustainable user acquisition which can be an entirely different approach.
Hope you find this useful!
As a startup founder (https://wildkard.io), I was against paid marketing for no obvious reason other than believing organic growth would flow limitlessly. While we were able to acquire 300 users via referrals, WoM, email outreach, organic channels stopped there. Note: our product gives the user an edge over competition for their sports team - so WoM is tricky. We did a quick $20 experiment with Facebook Ads, and got 3 leads in 30 minutes. Insane!
Paid ads work amazingly well for some businesses and I've implemented it for some of my client who were against paid ads. I strongly believe we should approach growth with an open mind. Would love to chat with you about your experience.
This is great – thanks for sharing. We're at exactly this stage so great to put it in perspective. Currently working on a very focused cold message campaign to our target market to test the initial idea before we go big on Product Hunt etc.
Thanks Rob! I'd love to know how your campaign goes. All the best!
Interesting to know that so few startups use SEO at first. I guess SEO will be much more important when you analyze traffic for older businesses.
Don't you think a consulting agency could break the code? I mean someone somewhere has the talent to match the perfect growth playbook to each different SaaS product after hours / days of process! .. I have talked with one or two folks who had that skill, and reserved it for one of their businesses. One guy I spoke with would buy smaller SaaS products with stagnation, and then apply his playbook to them. After awhile with exceptional growth he would flip the SaaS business.
I don't think there is any code that one can break. Every business is different and needs a unique strategy. Even two competing businesses with similar features will have different user acquisition strategies. Is there a method to discover what's the right strategy? yes. Is there a code that can be applied to any business? seems unlikely.
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Most only work for themselves
Great list of user acquisition methods. It seems Inbound channels are still way ahead in terms of user acquisition but others are also catching up.
That's true. Inbound is still the most poplar way to get users to a product. Probably because there are lots of Inbound channels available currently- different social mediums, blogs, video platforms, infographics, gifs and so on.
But outbound targets those audiences who are not reachable profitably through inbound. That doesn't mean that these audiences are not present in inbound channels. It means they can't be reached in a profitable manner in a short span of time through inbound.