How to Find Your FIRST 10 SaaS Customers (6 PROVEN Strategies)

0:00starting a SAS business can absolutely change your life but it all starts with your first customers and there's so many people out there who want to be Founders but they never get to hear that magical cha-ching announcing their first stripe payment so in this video I'm going to cover it the keys to getting your first 10 customers for your startup and if you stick around till the end I'm going to tell you an early stage secret used by so many successful entrepreneurs including me that almost no one talks about you might watch videos on YouTube that talk about building an audience going on social media and trying to find

0:34your first customers there if you've watched many of my videos or listen to my podcast you know that I hate relying on luck I like processes for starting companies that are repeatable that are predictable and that don't rely on getting lucky when you get lucky starting a startup you don't get better over time cuz you don't learn it's like buying a lottery ticket and winning does that make you better at anything it doesn't and so the approach I talk about in this video is something that is repeat that is predictable and that is an approach that allows you to learn over time the thing that I'm going to talk

1:06about is to start marketing before you start coding and marketing is different than building in public the way I differentiate between these two is that marketing is talking to potential customers rather than other Indie hacker SAS entrepreneurs that are on social media of the 191 Investments I've made in B2B SAS companies less than 5% of them had any kind of audience and this includes social media podcast audience YouTube audience if you're going to build a SAS startup build your network not your audience learn how to Market don't build an audience I don't know how to say this any better but learning marketing as a skill is so much more important than

1:46audience building so what is marketing well it's creating content that people want to consume it's search engine optimization it can be paper click ads it can be Integrations in Partnerships cold Outreach inperson events appearing on podcast there's all types of ways to do it I actually list all 20 of the B2B SAS marketing approaches that I know exist in my book The SAS Playbook so if you're going after your first 10 customers there's a couple fundamental things that I would put in place the first is to set up a basic landing page and start building an early access list and this is whether I'm going to have a

2:16high touch funnel where I'm going to do demos and do sales or a low touch funnel in this process I'm going to pick an ideal customer profile or an ICP maybe I'll pick two but if you think that your product can be used by anyone on the internet and your ICP is everyone in the world good luck you're in for a real tough time as bootstrapped entrepreneurs it is so much more important to pick an ICP and we've often talk about going vertical right going into niches and picking out owners of construction firms or people who run gyms and martial arts dojos but it doesn't have to be that it

2:52can be a title at a specific company right it can be an HR Director it can be a director of software development or it can be an engineer at a company but an I see CP who is most likely to need want and buy this so you have your landing page you have an H1 you have an ideal customer profile this is where you want to get into conversations with folks who might need or want your product there's several different approaches I'm going to talk through three or four here of how to get in touch with those people so the first is talk to other Founders who

3:22have sold into the same space who have sold to the same ideal customer profiles people who' both succeeded and failed and get their perspectives you can talk to sales and marketing Specialists from slightly larger companies not huge companies but let's say you're just starting out and you know there's a SAS company doing 50 Grand a month in the same space or selling to the same customer type look someone up on LinkedIn reach out to them say hey trying to do this need some advice see who you can talk to to learn more about the space the second approach is to utilize your existing Network this is

3:52where I say build your network not your audience so if you know people in the industry reach out to them for insights and ask them to connect you with folks who might want to use the product and if you don't know people in the industry you've made a mistake you should be building your network in the space that you are going to be selling into the third approach is to find an online audience to get in front of note I didn't say build your own audience cuz that will take years but finding an audience that you can get in front of is super important whether that means going

4:21on podcast having someone again in your network who is willing to tweet it out or to otherwise share you and your idea and your thought Thoughts with the audience you're trying to get into conversations one of the bigger mistakes that I see aspiring an early stage entrepreneurs making is thinking that X Twitter is a marketing strategy that building a social media following is going to help you be a successful SAS founder it's just not there's a handful of people in the world who have made that work and there are tens of thousands who are trying it or who have tried it it's a lottery mentality and

4:53it's kind of like saying I want to play in the NBA or I want to be Taylor Swift good luck not saying no one will do it there's obviously a few hundred people in the MBA and there is one Taylor Swift and there are a handful of people who are making a living selling software to other Indie hackers but realistically learning the blocking and tackling of marketing and learning how to do that in a repeatable way will allow you to not only be successful with this product but with all the products that you start after this the next approach is to lurk in online community so join relevant

5:24Facebook groups subreddits slack channels and other forums and observe the discussion to identify common problems and complaints people have with other Solutions in your space and this is a big note at this point another mistake that I see a lot of Founders make is they get a landing page up and they have in their head exactly what they want to build they're makers so they're going to make realistically you're going to be getting a bunch of feedback as you have these conversations whether these conversations are on Reddit whether they are on Zoom whether they are via email you're going to be getting feedback some of which is going

5:55to reinforce the vision you have and other feedback that's going to say you're heading in the wrong direction can you add this can you pivot to this can you support my use case and this is a skill you have to develop if you want to be a successful entrepreneur long term is to learn to take feedback in from potential customers and not potential customers learn who to listen to learn how to adapt your vision of your product and to change it and roll with the market poll cuz if you don't do that the odds of you being successful from the start with the initial idea you

6:23had are very very very low the fifth approach I want to call out is Outreach warm and cold Outreach so this is email LinkedIn Twitter DMS this is something that I don't see a lot of aspiring Founders do they think it's again all about driving traffic inbound and that can work that's actually the approach I've tended to take cuz I am more of a developer turned marketer but if you listen to the story of tally you may have heard of T.O and Maria one of the co-founders came on my podcast episode 717 she did cold Outreach to thousands of people to get off the ground and

6:57that's the headline that a lot of aspiring founders don't want to talk about they want to cargo cult and say oh what made them successful is they have a free plan so I'm going to have a free plan no that's not what made them successful what made them successful is they have a free plan in a very large space with a very low cost to serve their customers and they hustled and they put in a ton of hard work and did stuff like cold Outreach that probably made them uncomfortable and it'll make you uncomfortable too but that's okay this is one of the five tactics I'm

7:26listing here to try to find those initial 10 customers customers that can give you feedback and help you develop the product so what's the goal of all this is it to make sales is it to build a launch list is it to learn to figure out how to Pivot the product what to build exactly how to refine it well it's all of the above and again the big oversight that I see with first-time Founders is not knowing which feedback to listen to and how to adjust your marketing copy your vision of the product to align with what the market is asking you for so you have to figure out

7:54do I want to find a unique position and compete in an existing Market if you're choosing a unique position you have to start validating that with customers early on to find out does this unique position matter to anyone in addition to everything I've talked about which is building a landing page and trying to get into conversations is as folks come in and sign up for your email list you not only have this asset of a launch list an interest list in what you're building but you also have an asset that you can now survey you can send surveys asking what do you want the product to

8:23have hey here's a screenshot of what I'm building or the value prop I'm thinking about pivoting into what do you think you can also just have a survey when people arrive at the landing page maybe you just want Anonymous feedback after they give you the feedback you can ask for the email address it's a pretty Advanced approach to start thinking about integrating short surveys into the flow but it's something that I see successful entrepreneurs doing you might be wondering what if I can't find people online well how did you decide to build the app in the first place if you can't find people online maybe you need to

8:54figure out how to do offline marketing which is going to be a grind right it's going to be a lot of of cold calling and iners events or you might need to start over and find a space that has people looking for it online the bottom line is you do need to talk with people even if you think you are going to use a low touch funnel you need to know what you're building and where the Market's going to pull you to there's only so much I can cover in a YouTube video like this but I've put together an extensive video course 27 modules almost 10 hours

9:23of video content all of the learnings from the thousands of startups that I've observed and work with over the last 20 years head to SAS launch pad. to learn more about it and get on my Early Access list so there's a sixth tactic to getting into these early conversations and finding early adopters who are really interested in becoming one of your first 10 customers and that is running ads Facebook ads LinkedIn ads Google AdWords you're not actually trying to have a positive return on investment with these you're trying to get people into the funnel and trying to find interested folks who might be a good fit for your product this doesn't

10:01work for everyone you do need to have some budget you do need to learn how to run ads there's plenty of free resources or inexpensive video courses online to learn how to do this but this is where you're scratching and clawing to try to find those first 10 highly interested people who might want to be your first 10 customers obviously you can't stop once you found your first 10 customers you're going to need to find a marketing strategy that will help bring in new customers on a regular basis in this next video video I lay out what might be the best marketing strategy I've ever seen for SAS businesses make sure you

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