Using a marketing agency for SaaS product?
Who’s using or knows of someone using an agency for their bootstrapped SaaS product to launch at 0 customers pre-rev?
I don’t buy the ‘do it yourself for the first X customers until you’ve got X monthly rev and growth’ - I know it’s well intentioned ‘listen to your customers’ type advice, but I am bad at that side of things and I also don’t know people who can help me out in those areas. More importantly - I don’t feel I need to co-ordinate every aspect of an initial product rollout to get a feel for what potential customers want or need.
Context: I have a dev agency, we have an internal product we’ve been using on customer sites for quite a while now, I’d like to give it a general public release.
It’s (no-surprise) a product for agencies and developers and I really just want to test if there’s interest before I dedicate more time to moving further into launching it as SaaS. Looking for an agency partner who can help me launch, acquire first 10-20 customers.
- Would love to find someone/some people to help me do this
- (Most importantly) surely this is a valid approach? I’m doubtful that ‘serial’ entrepreneurs are running the Google Ads, directly choosing what creative needs to be done, contacting other potential partners all on their own.
Let me know if I’m stupid or not lol.
Hey there!
Personally, I've done both the "do it yourself for the first X customers until you've got X rev and growth" and "ran google ads, choosing what creatives need to be done".
The reason I've done that is because hiring anyone to do that work for you is very expensive. You also learn how to properly articulate what your product does.
Ads on any platform are really expensive and honestly if you're starting up I strongly advise against them.
Partnering with an agency so they sell your product to their clients is a very good idea, I'm doing that as well at the moment and it's one of my best sales strategies. Not sure what your product does, but ideally it's something that improves their lives and their clients' lives. To make the partnership more interesting give them a nice cut, salespeople cost money and these people will be doing the essential leg work for you anyway.
One thing I would suggest is that you stay involved in every step, do the demos with the clients, get the feedback (because many people won't end up buying your product, and that's normal, just make sure you understand why).
Those are my thoughts :) Good luck!