# If I Started a SaaS in 2026, I’d Do This (0 to 1,000+ Users)

Channel: Adam Robinson
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r47Q4Cfit5s
Duration: 15 min
Language: English
Words: 2905
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/r47Q4Cfit5s

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[0:00] If I had to start a brand new SAS or AI company from absolute zero today, knowing everything I know from building three software companies to over 35 million in combined ARR, this is exactly what [music] I would do. And I'm not talking about the advice that you hear from VCs or the growth hacking gurus. In this video, I'm breaking down my complete step-by-step system for going from zero users to over a,000 paying customers by creating a foundation

[0:26] that's built to scale. Let's dive in. So, if you ask me why most founders fail, I'd say it's because they fall in love with their idea instead of their customers problems. They build something for 12 to 18 months before talking to anyone. And they confuse building something with building something that people want. 90% of startups don't make it to 1 million ARR. And the reason is because of this phenomenon. They get an idea. They go to a room with their co-founders. They build for a year and a half and then they show up waiting for the world to buy their product. That is not the right way to be successful. The

[1:03] key to not being one of these 90% of founders is the discovery process. Before writing a single line of code, commit to 50 discovery calls minimum. Your only goal is to find people who will pay you for something that you haven't built yet. And I'm talking about actual prepayment, not just Yeah, that sounds interesting. And my favorite story ever about this is the origin story of Barkbox, which is now a publicly traded company. Matt Mer owned a Great Dane and he lived in New York City. All the dog stores in New York City sold tiny toys for tiny dogs. And this was 2010, so it was pre- Amazon

[1:39] Prime and pre- e-commerce. Matt took a Photoshop image of a website, not even a website, about a monthly delivery of five large toys for $29 to Washington Square Park. He showed it to every large dog owner. And when they said they were interested, he literally swiped their card for $29 with a square card reader hooked to the bottom of his phone. He got 50 purchases the first day before he even had a website and the rest is history. So, you're probably wondering

[2:07] how you get those first discovery calls. You start with your personal network on LinkedIn and other social media platforms of people who match your ideal customer profile. This is a message that Andy Muborn uses to get discovery calls for his company, Distribute. He says, "Hi," and then the first name. "I was at outreach.io and now I'm building a high-spot and seismic competitor, three times cheaper and 10 times more userfriendly, and we currently have

[2:32] around 4,000 active users that love us. Would you be open to giving honest feedback about the product I'm building?" Signed, Andy. And here's the key. He compensates them with a $100 gift card for their time. And you're probably asking yourself, does this still work? The answer is yes, it still works. people [music] will still do discovery calls for a gift card. Another strategy that I've used before is to offer paid advisory roles to people who don't make tons of money like director level and below of people who are still in your ICP. You can also go to industry events and pitch your idea with a notepad which I call the Alina

[3:06] Vanderberg approach. Alina is the founder and CEO of Chili Piper and they're now around 40 million ARR but they started like this. Alina would go to a sales meetup and she'd find the most influential people in the room. She'd approach them with a notepad that was a drawing of her product vision. And then she would ask, "Would you buy something like this? And if not, what would we have to change for you to buy it?" And this face-to-face validation is incredibly valuable for early stage ideas. And you might be asking yourself, how do you find the most influential people in the room? What Alina does is

[3:36] she sits there and looks around the room. And the people that are walking towards other people and giving them hugs, the recipient of the hug is the person Alina wants to talk to. Now, you're probably asking yourself, what do you actually say on these calls? I think you lead with your sizzling oneliner. It's the one sentence or elevator pitch

[3:53] that will make people's eyes light up. For example, for RB2B, it was person level website visitor identification. Before us, there was only company level website visitor identification. So, when people heard person level, they got very excited. And then you should ask these specific questions. Number one, do you understand the problem that I'm trying to solve? Number two, do you have the problem that I'm trying to solve? Number three, how are you solving this problem today? Number four, would you pay for the solution I'm describing if I could get it to you tomorrow? And then number five, what else would the solution have

[4:26] to have in order for you to pay for it? And number six, I'm thinking of charging X per month, would you pay that price? And the goal is to understand their pain so deeply that you can solve it better than anyone. Then build the absolute minimum viable product. Only build what's needed to deliver the core value proposition. If it takes more than 4 to 6 weeks, you're probably building too much. And here's the secret. Everything you want to build but could do manually,

[4:52] you should do manually at [music] first. With RB2B, we manually sent spreadsheets over email for five full months before we even put up a website. We could have built automation tools, but we didn't. Staying manual kept us close to customers. Manual processes are your unfair advantage. You stay incredibly close to your customers. You'll learn things you'd never discover with automation, and you can iterate 10 times faster than your competitors that are trying to automate everything. You get to market months earlier and get that real customer feedback. These are three signals that prove that you've got product market fit. Number one, you're getting at least one referral per week

[5:28] from your paying customers. Number two, customers would be genuinely upset if you took the product away. And signal number three is you're seeing organic growth without doing any marketing. If you don't have all three of these, you do not have product market fit yet. And until you have these signals, do not move to phase two. Don't do anything else besides try to get product market

[5:48] fit because nothing you do will work. Product market fit generally equals strong word of mouth. And here's what strong word of mouth actually looks like. People are sharing your product on social without you asking them to. They're bragging about using your product. Prospects are coming to you and saying, "I heard about you from blank." Customers are creating content about your product organically and it's driving signups. And if you did nothing, you would see exponential organic growth on its own. Let's talk about building good inbound velocity. Inbound velocity means you're getting a steady flow of prospects coming to you every day. This isn't required to move forward, but it

[6:25] makes everything easier that comes next. I think the best way to start building this is to post on LinkedIn from day one. Share your building journey in real time. the wins, the failures, and the pivots. This creates awareness so that when you start outreach, people already know who you are. You'll know you have good inbound velocity when people are visiting your website without you reaching out to them. When you're getting inbound connection requests from your ICP, when prospects are DMing you asking about your product with RBDB, I spent months building in public on LinkedIn before we even launched our product. And by the time we launched

[6:57] RB2B, we had a 1,600 person wait list and 300 meetings booked with high-value customers to do discovery. [music] The early content created the foundation that let us hit 1 million ARR in just 6 weeks post launch. Phase two is creating the magic triangle. Now, what is the magic triangle? It's three channels working together. Content, outreach, and retargeting. Each channel feeds the other two and creates a compounding effect. The content drives awareness and generates web traffic. Outreach converts those warm website visitors into customers. And retargeting brings back

[7:31] the people who weren't ready to buy yet. Now, this is not something you do from day one. You should only activate this magic triangle after you have product market fit. You need at least one referral per week from paying customers first. And if you do any of this too early, you'll waste money scaling something that doesn't work. Here's why you need all three channels working together. Content alone is too slow for early stage growth. You can't wait 2 years to build an audience, but you should start building that audience today. Outreach alone has terrible conversion rates. Just cold email alone is essentially dead. And retargeting alone doesn't generate new pipeline. It

[8:06] only works on people who already know you and visited your website. But together, they create a compounding growth engine. Each channel makes the other two more effective. LinkedIn content is the foundation to the magic triangle. Building a personal brand on LinkedIn is the fastest way to grow a startup today. Personal profiles grow 10 times faster than company pages and get exponentially more engagement. Your content creates a humanto human connection at scale and those are free ads. Over time, prospects feel like they know you and will do anything you ask

[8:35] them to as it relates to your products. The founder content strategy is the following. Post at least three times a week on LinkedIn. This isn't optional if you want the magic triangle to work. I like to focus on three content pillars. Mine are building in public which is sharing my journey with real numbers and transparency. Number two is the future of my industry which I have a fairly polarizing stance on where things and go to market are headed. Number three are contrarian takes and for me that's bootstrapping versus VC. I of course am the bootstrapper who always advocates to take as little [music] money as possible

[9:07] along your journey. You need to find yours. Why this works for me is because I'm brutally honest about my journey. Not only do I share my wins, I share my failures. And always remember the three C's. Be incredibly clear about who you are. Be consistent about that identity and constantly reinforce that story. It's more authentic. [music] It's more vulnerable. And the more relatable your message is, the more it's going to cut through. Why is this so effective? It's because big companies just can't do this. They have to talk like corporate brands. [music] This authenticity is your unfair advantage. and I recently made an in-depth course on my entire [music]

[9:44] LinkedIn strategy. So, if you want to go deeper on this one topic, I recommend watching [music] that video. Part two is outreach. The first thing you need to do here is identify who to reach out to. Traditional cold outreach to random lists no longer works. You need to [music] do two types of outreach. One is cold outreach only to people in your ICP, which we use Apollo to come up with a list of founders and marketers at SAS companies from 5 to 200 employees. And importantly, we reach out to three people per company. And the other is we reach out to people who are visiting our

[10:14] website. And that's exactly why I built RB2B. After you install it, it starts identifying your anonymous website visitors at the person level. You'll get their first name, job title, LinkedIn profile, and business email. And now with this channel, instead of cold outreach, you're following up with people who already showed interest. And you can start using RB2B completely free by clicking the first link in [music] the description. Now, with email, to make this work at scale, you need proper infrastructure setup. We use either Instantly or Smartly to manage all of our sending, and we go back and forth between them [music] depending on what's working better at the time. And the key

[10:45] is domain rotation. You'll need hundreds of domains to maintain deliverability. And when I say domains, I'm talking about like tryyouproduct.com or the realyouproduct.com or getyouproduct.com. And here's how the math works. You create two inboxes per domain and send two to 10 emails per day from each inbox. This low volume per inbox is what allows these emails to sneak past spam filters at Gmail and Outlook. And also, we use tools like NeverBounce and Lead Magic to validate every email before adding them to our sequences. This keeps our sender reputation clean and emails landing in primary inboxes. And as far as copy goes, I recommend clear and concise copy that describes the problem

[11:25] you solve and has a clear call to action. Here's what we send at RB2B. Channel two is LinkedIn connect and DM campaigns. Use the same ICP list and list of website visitors from RB2B for LinkedIn outreach. Connect with 10 to 20 of these prospects daily to start. And you can work up to 50 per day, but be careful with automation. I've seen a lot of people on LinkedIn recently posting about how they've had warnings about automation. And I don't know what happens after that. Maybe their account gets shadowbanned. Who knows? But it's not good. Send connection requests with no messages attached. Acceptance rates are really high on requests without

[11:57] messages, and for your website visitor in particular, it's near 100%. Your connect rate goes up even more as your audience grows and people recognize you from your content. The follow-up sequence after they accept is step one, you wait for them to engage with your content. Once they like or comment on something you posted, that's your

[12:13] signal. Send this DM. Hey, first name. Thanks for the like or comment. How are things going at whatever company they're at? The response rate is usually north of 60% because they just engage with you. This is the most effective way to open conversations at scale. Step two, if no engagement happens after 60 days, send a soft touch. Say something like, "Hey, first name. What caught your attention?" [music] and follow up with,

[12:34] "How are things going at company X?" Keep it conversational and not salesy. Do not pitch in the first message. Build the relationship first. The secret about LinkedIn is that you're not actually selling. You're building rapport so that you can get someone on a call to sell. Remember, never sell on LinkedIn. How to automate LinkedIn outreach at scale? Well, you use Hey Reach or Log Growth Machine for automation. These tools automate connection requests and follow-up sequences, but be careful not to exceed LinkedIn's limits. You can get permanently banned. Now, why combining email and LinkedIn is so powerful is because you're hitting the same

[13:08] prospects across two different channels. They get your email, they see your connection request, and they see your LinkedIn content. This [music] creates multiple touch points to build familiarity and trust. Some people are more responsive on email and others are more responsive on LinkedIn. So, by using both, you maximize your chances of starting a conversation. Retargeting is the multiplier for everything else. It keeps you in front of all the leads you're reaching out [music] to. Setting up your retargeting infrastructure is fairly easy. You install pixels from LinkedIn, Meta, Google, and Twitter on your website. Then, you create custom audiences from website visitors to expand even more. You can build lookike

[13:41] audiences from your paying customers and even your prospect lists. You can set up matched audience ads and go directly to your prospect lists. So, for the ad creative, I always use the who, what, why, how framework [music] from Russell Brunson. Who are you? What do you have? Why do they need it? And how can they get it? I just address each of these questions and I try to keep these as authentic as possible. Most of the time, it's me in a selfie video and the stuff that I record on my phone actually performs the best. This retargeting strategy is what makes the magic triangle work, which is what you should

[14:11] be focusing on when you're getting your first thousand customers. Now, if you want to implement this, you can start using RB2B completely free by clicking the first link into the description. We'll identify your anonymous website visitors and send their LinkedIn profiles straight to your Slack so that you can reach out while they're hot. Again, it's the first link below and you

[14:30] can set this up in a couple of minutes. And if you want to see what the best SAS marketing strategies are right now, then watch this video

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