SaaS Startup Tips: How do SaaS companies find customers in 2024?
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How are both B2B SaaS and B2C SaaS companies finding clients?
There's never been a better time than now to start a SaaS startup. Whether you intend to focus on the B2B space or B2C, SaaS companies are experiencing extreme customer success. The sheer amount of companies that existed before the pandemic, compared to now is outsized and growing at an amazing scale. Many companies changed their work model, enabling millions of workers to work from home. In order for this to be successful at scale, requires technology to fundamentally support the many workers and their ever-evolving task lists.
Customer success is the primary ingredient for the success of many SaaS startups in 2024. By helping their clients achieve their business goals, customers have been more likely to stay loyal to their favorite SaaS products as they grow and succeed.
At the core of every SaaS business strategy, 3 key points stand out:
Customer Retention
Customer Engagement
Customer Satisfaction
Harnessing these three areas helps you build a strong and durable customer base.
Customer success at the forefront of your SaaS company
For B2B & B2C SaaS startups, the customer success departments have evolved from simply handling tickets to collecting and analyzing customer feedback in an effort to optimize the customer experience. This doesn't need to be something reserved for the larger players in the space. As an early-stage SaaS you want your customers to spread the word to their friends and colleagues, about their experience, so going above and beyond is a must! Let's put this idea as a fundamental requirement, and the next set of activities will help you to scale your products at lightning speed!
Stop struggling to get initial users for your SaaS product
I [will] make a strong argument that we often cannot see the solution to our problems because we are too close to the problems to see our surroundings in the first place. The more you've optimized and automated your SaaS, the more you realize that there's less to do, up to a certain point. The next thing you typically pivot focus to is growth through marketing or advertising. So you start to post in r/DigitalMarketing, r/socialmedia, and r/marketing for ideas on how to perform outreach, enhance your r/seo, and even dabble in r/PPC. If you're lucky, you'll begin to see that there are issues with basic things, because members of Reddit will happily point them out to you.
If you haven't already seen this post, it's a good thread, and I recommend you check it out. The OP reveals some reasons why their product is struggling to gain traction. The community on Reddit is fantastic for providing insights as to what can be useful. Especially in communities such as r/SaaS, while others sometimes are not so forgiving (cough, cough, r/Entrepreneur).
Most of us SaaS founders don't actually have the luxury of spending time doing this. It's very much a make-it-or-break-it type scenario. Those of you who feel this way will certainly appreciate the next few bullet points that I will provide that should help you to begin generating traffic to your SaaS landing page [immediately].
Find the subreddit or community (Reddit, Linkedin, Facebook, Slack, Quora, X (Twitter) that you think aligns with your product niche.
Answer every question that you believe aligns with your target consumer, such as the "How-to's", or "Why's" that appear in the "Best", "Hot", and "New" tabs. Browse through each and every single tab.
Post only if you think what you have to add is immensely utilitarian, otherwise, spend time engaging through comments, and providing resources, links, and sources to any material you share.
Make sure your profile is optimized, because if you [do] provide any information that stands out, both happy and unhappy users will pounce on your profile to find anything that they can use to their advantage (be ready for the trolls).
Check your analytics. You'd be surprised to realize that some posts (that you don't create) will get thousands of views. A small percentage of viewers will then roll into your website to see what you have to offer, for their own reasons.
If 1,000 people visited your website from this tactic, consider that maybe 50 - 100 of them might actually be your customers, maybe even smaller. The better the offering on your landing page, the more likely you'll even get sign-ups for your SaaS with free trial periods, or free offerings!
Repeat this every day, and you're now generating 10,000 - 20,000 (or more) potential clients to your website daily. Some days will be great, others not so great, but you've found a method that now works, and is proven!
Leveraging social media (organically) to scale your SaaS
I like to break social media platforms into 2 categories:
Literature-driven communities:
Reddit
Quora
Linkedin
X (Twitter)
Slack
Social Media Apps:
Instagram
Tiktok
Pinterest
X (Twitter)
Yes, I purposefully placed "X" in both categories because it had a great mix of both content types, and was originally based on small "tweets", but now it provides a lot more media, and I find myself spending less time reading.
Literature-driven communities are apps that you're potential SaaS customers have to stop and read, to find something interesting, even on mobile. While the "social media apps" are full of videos, and media fighting to hook your attention. This rapid-scrolling behavior is conducive to "doom-scrolling", making it much harder to capture the eye of your potential customers.
I would recommend investing more time into "Literature-driven platforms", as I think you'll get far more engagement without the need to sell your soul for likes, and followers. In fact, I only have about 100 followers on Reddit at this time, yet I still managed to gain 50,000,000+ views on my content in May 2024.
Also, here's another great Reddit Post about finding customers for your B2B SaaS.
Opening up to friends, family, and colleagues as early customers
As you launch your product you're typically stuck in a paradoxical situation of needing to convince new clients with testimonials from previous clients. It's not easy to convert potential users without any data or feedback. It's much easier to do this when you have traction, but that's now always the case for a new SaaS founder.
Here are a few methods you can use to attract clients of your product early, in exchange for much-needed testimonials and referrals:
Offer your product to your "inner circle". This includes friends, family, colleagues, connections on Linkedin, or members of your social club.
Give discounts, and extended trial periods. It may cost you next to nothing to give your product out to testers, but having received a testimony repays you 100-fold!
Run surveys on Survey Monkey, or Usertesting.com - Not only will you get structured feedback from prospective users, but some of these testers might be willing to stay on, and use your product for an extended period.
Offer lifetime deals to early adopters. This may not be very fun, but it's a real opportunity to start bringing in revenue, validating certain functions and capabilities, and again, creating testimonials that you can use to convince new clients that your service works.
Consider this your beta trial (B2B SaaS) period. B2B SaaS founders typically will leverage their existing network at the beginning due to a high likelihood that they have some level of corporate experience (at least I hope!) going into their new venture. To get started, all you need is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which represents the leanest version of your app idea. Customer feedback will significantly add value to the long-term outlook of your product at this stage.
Using analytics to optimize your sales funnel
This next section is dedicated to BareMetrics, who inspired many of the lists that you'll see.
First, let's talk about what a SaaS sales funnel actually is, according to BareMetrics:
"In sales and marketing, the “funnel” refers to the process of qualifying leads and converting them to customers. You pour in leads at the widest part at the top of the sales funnel. As you work on converting them through the sales process, the funnel narrows. The bottom of the funnel is where your hottest qualified leads pour into your business as customers.
The traditional sales funnel is broken down into a few stages as leads engage with your brand:
Awareness: This is where your prospects become aware of your product and your brand. They’re just learning who you are, what you do, and that they have a problem you can solve.
Discovery: This is the phase where prospective leads are doing some initial research, narrowing down the products and services that can help them solve their issue.
Evaluation: In this phase, prospects are conducting more serious evaluations, weighing the pros and cons of making a purchase, as well as comparing you to your competitors.
Intent: This is the final phase of the funnel before a purchase is made. Logic, numbers, and value-driven communication are the keys to making that final persuasive push.
Purchase: This is where leads have ultimately decided that your brand meets their needs. They then join the ranks of your paying customers! Your work isn’t done, though: You still need to help them through the welcome and onboarding phase.
For your SaaS business, you have one key additional stage you need to consider: retention. Unlike other retail businesses, you don’t just want your customers to make a one-time purchase. You have to continue persuading them of your continued value each month. In this phase, you can also use the insights you gather about the customer and their behavior to upsell with features that meet their specific needs (and, in turn, increase your average revenue per user)."
Beautifully written (in my opinion). Retention also deserves much of your focus here as a SaaS entrepreneur. You have to convince customers month-over-month that you're not only maintaining quality, but the product has a roadmap for improvement. The use case that attracts initial customers doesn't necessarily guarantee that they will keep coming back. You're going to have to keep an ear out for what they are saying, and use as many opportunities as you can to understand what their needs are. I did something like this on Reddit within the dating app space.
Learn which metrics you should be tracking to optimize your SaaS sales funnel
Hubspot has a great write-up about 15 metrics that you should be tracking. Here they are (below):
Customer Churn
Revenue Churn
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Acquisition Cost
Months to Recover CAC
CAC: LTV Ratio
Customer Engagement Score
Qualified Marketing Traffic
Leads by Lifecycle Stage
Lead-to-Customer Rate
Customer Health Score
Every SaaS startup is different, and what they use to track overall growth and retention varies from company to company. Generally, most experts can agree that at a minimum, if you're team is focusing on optimization, these items should be reviewed every day, if not weekly within your organization.
What tools you should be using to optimize your SaaS sales funnel
My favorite tools for tracking data throughout your sales funnel are as follows:
Unbounce / LeadPages - Landing page tracking and optimization
Hotjar.com / Inspectlet
Mixpanel.com / Google Analytics
Squarespace.com / Wix / Webflow
Stripe.com / Square / Braintree
Mailchimp.com / Hubspot / Constant Contact
I also included some variants in this list. Notice that I did not include any ad platforms here. I know many marketing agencies would kill me, but it's not a necessary tool. Most of us have been taught to spend money on ads, to start tracking users to your platform, but if you're not generating at least 10,000 monthly visitors to your website organically (today), then you should take the organic route. Here's a resource on how to start getting clients for your SaaS startup. Only when you've exhausted all other ways of generating organic traffic, you should invest in advertising.
For me, it may be worth it to bring in another resource, who can guarantee me organic traffic with proven strategies, than pay for a PPC campaign, full of bot clicks from bot farms!
Create comparison content with competitors
Just recently I found a thread in r/SaaS talking about their journey with SEO. After 6 months of implementation, their strategy now brings in passive sales, due to their commitment to content creation. Many SaaS founders are admitting that creating "comparison content" with competitors is a great way to leverage a larger brand's presence in the SERP space. I highly recommend you invest in creating feature matrices detailing where, why, and how you stand out from other competitors on the market.
What you should do after you've gained thousands of new customers
Let's do a short recap to identify how we've gotten here.
We officially launched our SaaS
We invited our inner circle of friends, family, and colleagues as initial testers of our B2C SaaS, and leveraged our professional network for B2B SaaS.
We offered discounts, trials, or lifetime deals in exchange for feedback and testimonials.
We've highlighted initial success stories as case studies on our SaaS brand website, to help us convince new clients
We've set up a sales funnel (feedback loop) to track conversion success at every core inflection point using top tools like Mixpanel, Unbounce, and Stripe.
We're implementing organic social media strategies that drive 10,000+ visitors to our SaaS landing page every month, which helps us optimize our sales funnel (5).
We've invested in a customer retention strategy, equal to our outreach strategy. Tools such as Mailchimp (newsletters), and SMS marketing (Twilio.com) work well here.
We've exhausted growth, and need to further 10x our user base. Now's a great time to consider influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, or paid ads.
The decision to invest in a team or organic social media assets to continue growth, or take the path of investing in ad campaigns for growth really depends on where you see yourself in 2 - 3 years. Some people want to build a SaaS product that helps them live a simpler life, assisting in an exit from the traditional corporate 9 - 5 pm. Others desire to take the VC route, raise funds, and scale to extraordinary heights, eventually going public through an IPO.
No matter what your decision is, none of this can happen without achieving success in steps 1 - 8. For some SaaS founders, they will achieve every point mentioned within 6 months, while others might take 6 years. A good example of this slow and steady approach is Mailchimp of course!
Getting customers for your SaaS is easier than you think
This article will single-handedly provide you with the links and resources needed to build a customer base within your first 6-months of launch. Within 2 - 3 months you could even exceed the 1,000 user mark. For some 100 customers is also great, it just depends on who you're targeting (B2B vs. B2C). Make sure to focus on customer success, get those testimonials, and establish dominance by giving your loyal clients a bespoke experience!
If you found this article helpful and are ready to continue executing, feel free to grab a copy of our book The Growth Checklist. It's the only book around that guarantees growth within 30 days, or we'll fully refund you the value of the book. If you've already purchased a copy, and are struggling to execute upon any strategies, you can simply book a meeting with me here.
