Friends of SaaS - How to get your first 10 customers ?
Get valuable tips and inspiring insights delivered to your inbox on Tuesday every two weeks ! How to get your first 10 customers ?It's called starting or making money and that's when you really can call yourself a "business owner" !
Welcome to the 143 new subscribers joined this week 🥳. You can connect with us on LinkedIn, where we share our insights on business, SaaS products with our community. IntroductionLet’s say you found your “single good idea” and you were able to validate it after a while. Today we will discuss:
🗣️ How to find your first customer?Running a SaaS company can be approached in two ways:
Newbies are more likely to opt for the first option, whereas SaaS’ers who have done it before, tend more to opt for the second option. Note: If you have validated your idea, then you have already at least 3 prospects, and you can skip this part and jump to the “Systems and Marketing Strategies” part. Getting your first customer is the hardest part, this is why you need to focus intensively on strategies that don’t scale: Here are some potential strategies for you that you can use to approach your target customer:
🎴 Role Play: play Dominatrix with your customerKinky stuff? Really ?! … Sorry, I am from Berlin. Anyway... Qualify your customersInstead of trying to sell to every interested prospect, it's important to qualify your customers. If you already did the outreach and got some clicks on your landing page, try to get e-mail signups and redirect people to a form. In the form itself, you need to ask some questions to qualify the customer.
If you have an MVP or a video about your SaaS, you can use tools to analyze the behavior of the prospects and even chat with them instantly to catch that first qualified customer:
Play Dominatrix with your first customerIf you found your first qualified customer, then you found the bridge between you and the money, and only they will help you cross it. You need to do EVERYTHING to retain them:
🔓 Systems and Marketing StrategiesGrowth hacking is a myth, what you need is consistency, which you can build by creating systems and long-term strategies. ![]() "Systems over hacks.
Patience in the right activity(ies) is what delivers those "quick" wins."
- John bonini Three things that you need to understand after acquiring your first customer: SalesI will explain these 5 concepts of sales with an example from Zendesk : The sales funnel for Company X, a customer support software provider:
So to raise awareness, use inbound marketing like social media or cold calling. Once you catch interested leads, engage with them and answer their questions. During the evaluation, show them how your product meets their needs and be prepared to address any objections. Keep the interaction flowing and maintain the relationship until the customer buys. After the purchase, continue to take care of customer relationships to minimize churn. VisibilityThere are a ton of companies out there offering SaaS. Like, seriously, it's a pretty crowded space. You can check out SaaS 1000 or the MarTech 5000 to get an idea of just how many players are in the game. And if you search for something like "CRM" on a platform like Capterra, you'll find a whopping 770 options to choose from! At this day and age, visibility is everything. To build awareness, you need to reach people that don’t know that they need your product, and unless you are a billionaire and into throwing money, you can’t pay for ads on every platform. Instead, you can harness your social media presence by growing your accounts, either Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, or Instagram. Wherever your audience is at, start by building social media and SEO Strategies and be active in every group. This is something that requires patience: you are creating a strategy and a system of social media, SEO, and building backlinks and can only see the fruit of your labor after six to eight months. All of us are fighting over the user’s attention to make a sale. According to Gartner, buyers these days are bombarded with information, making it a challenge for SaaS marketers to educate their audience without overwhelming them. Find the balance between educating your audience and drowning them in information! But start early... MetricsMetrics are a boring subject, but if you don’t track your metrics, you set yourself up for failure. “Men lie, numbers don’t”. Make this your SaaS Motto. To start with metrics, you need to ask yourself these questions:
Once you know your current numbers, it becomes incredibly easy to see a path forward to acquire new customers. Other metrics that you need to track are:
Examples and Resources:This is how big companies got their first customers: ![]() 5/ You can adjust your sales approach down the road — @zoom_us and @Amplitude_HQ started sales-driven and later became bottom-up. @Box and @newrelic did the reverse.
📑 ConclusionWell, well, well... look at that. Only 22% of startups fail because of a poorly implemented marketing strategy (They didn’t say “Growth Hack, they said STRATEGY). That's such a small percentage, it's practically nothing! Why bother spending time and resources on creating an effective marketing plan when there's a good chance you'll fall into the successful 78% anyway? Who needs a strategy when you can just wing it and hope for the best? In all seriousness, folks, don't be fooled by that seemingly small percentage. A poorly implemented marketing strategy can make or break a startup, and it's not worth the risk. So take the time to create a solid plan and invest in marketing efforts that will help your business thrive. Trust me, it's better than being part of that 22%. …and sorry for the kinky stuff 😔. Ask me questions! Don’t be shy, I am willing to answer and chat, maybe grab some coffee if you are around. Just reply to this email.
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