<< Back to Chapter 4: From Idea to Building a Minimum Viable Product
Getting your first customers can be really challenging. I’ve spoken to a lot of entrepreneurs who thought of and built a first version of a SaaS product that seemed like a great solution for a certain niche, but they just couldn’t get that initial traction with customers.
From my research I have found a few common strategies that have worked. Most fall into the category of things that don’t scale. Some require that you do many months of preparatory work before you build the app.
In Chapter 2 I point out that knowing how will you find your first 25 customers is part of finding a good business idea. If you truly have no idea, you probably shouldn’t build the product. However you may also find it makes sense to work backwards from a group of customers to a business idea.
For example you might find that roofing companies are extremely easy to find: they advertise their contact info in business directories and you could easily meet 10 roofers per day just by hanging out in the right section of a hardware store. Now you know that if you had a SaaS product for them, it would be very easy to find the first 25 customers and beyond.
Keep working from both directions to refine or reject ideas, both working backwards from target markets of customers and working to find customers for certain ideas that otherwise seem valid.
In my experience, successful Micro-SaaS businesses consistently use one of the following strategies for acquiring their first customers.
Storemapper’s first five customers came from a single email blast. Over nine months of freelancing for e-commerce clients I kept a spreadsheet of every client email, even for gigs that I didn’t end up winning. On launch day I emailed the list of about 30-40 targeted people and within two days there were five paying customers.
Consulting for e-commerce businesses was a fantastic way to learn about exactly what kind of products they needed, their willingness to pay for solutions and where the pain points where strongest. The real upside that you are getting paid the whole time. If you find yourself getting hired repeatedly for a similar job, you may be able to just “refactor” that job into a SaaS app that can scale.
Consulting-first also necessarily forces you to focus on a lucrative target market. If the businesses aren’t hiring consultants or freelancers to solve problems, odds are they will be tough customers for SaaS.
Consulting in e-commerce gave me a big advantage in generating business ideas but it didn’t prove that many actual customers.
The immediate next phase for Storemapper was to find places where e-commerce merchants were looking for answers to stuff. Most of the big e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Bigcommerce, Volusion and WooCommerce have forums. So I searched the forums and tried to be helpful. Of course I jumped to the few topics specifically around store locators, but I also looked for popular threads on topics with lots of activity from merchants just setting up a new site (or migrating from another platform) — prime timing to choose a store locator app — and just added helpful comments. I would let my forum “signature” with a link to Storemapper do the marketing.
The generalized tactic is to find where your target market clusters and be there. This could be online in forums or the comments sections of an industry blog or in real life at meetups or conferences.
Hopefully your target market congregates somewhere online. If it’s software for developers, then you’re looking at Hackers News, Product Hunt and Reddit. Maybe there are niche blogs that cover the topic. Become a member, be helpful and without spamming folks, politely point them towards your app when it’s a relevant solution. If you’re knowledgeable on the broader topic, it can be helpful to invest some time answering questions not directly tied to your app to build credibility and not come off as a spammer.
Several successful Micro-SaaS businesses have been started by “blowing up” on certain popular sites. But it wasn’t just pure luck that they hit number one on hackernews or reddit. They had often spent years being helpful and cultivating the respect of the community that then responded when they finally launched a product.