Acquisition SaaS
You built a SaaS. Now get the users.
I'm a technical founder, and the question that used to paralyze me was simple: where do my first customers actually come from?
So I pulled the public CAC benchmarks for SaaS, channel by channel, and lined them up.
The spread is bigger than I expected:
Referral: ~$157 per customer
Email marketing: ~$469
Webinars: ~$555
SEO / thought leadership: ~$595
Paid search: ~$738
LinkedIn Ads: ~$903
Content marketing: ~$1,154
Outbound SDR: ~$1,822
ABM: ~$4,291
That's 27x between the cheapest and the most expensive channel.
The trap is thinking "great, I'll just do referral and email."
Those are cheap because they recycle an asset you already need to own.
Referral does almost nothing with 10 customers.
Email needs a list you built elsewhere, usually via a pricier channel.
SEO is brilliant long-term but rarely pays before 6 to 12 months.
Meanwhile CAC across all channels rose 40 to 60% between 2023 and 2025. So picking the wrong channel is more expensive than ever.
What actually helped me:
Your acceptable CAC comes from your LTV, not a market average. Aim for at least 3:1 LTV:CAC.
Before PMF, buy speed (paid / outbound) to get signal. After PMF, compound (SEO / content / referral) to lower your average CAC.
Two channels done seriously beat five done halfway.
I ended up turning this into a free diagnostic that maps your ICP, your best channels, and a 60-day plan (Acquisition SaaS, linked on my profile). Happy to share the full channel data and sources if it's useful.
Genuinely curious: what channel got you your first 10 customers, and what did it actually cost?
1 Comment
The comparison is useful, but one thing I'd add is that channels aren't just acquisition mechanisms—they're evidence.
Before PMF, I'd care less about finding the cheapest CAC and more about finding the channel that consistently reaches people who immediately recognize the problem you're solving. Once you've found that, optimizing CAC becomes much more meaningful because you're improving a system that's already proven to work.