From 100 to 1,000 SaaS Customers. The Only Marketing Strategy In 2024

You have your first 100 customers. Now we’re going to talk about how to scale your SaaS from 100 TO 1,000 users. In this article, I’ll share my favorite marketing strategy that helped my products and a dozen of our client SaaS businesses get to 1000 users.  And surprise-surprise, it’s not paid ads or any kind of partnerships.

Why? Because paid ads and affiliate marketing have some high entry points, and not every software business can afford it and be profitable. So, in this article lesson, I’ll show you what you need to do to afford the next stage SaaS marketing methods, even if you charge your users a low 5/month subscription. Also, I’ll show you many examples who successfully implemented in its software companies, and I’m pretty sure it’ll work for you, too.

4 Stages of Every SaaS Product Growth

There are 4 stages of growing and marketing your SaaS business:

Stage 1. Getting your first 10 Customers. (Here, you find Initial Traction, validate the need, and learn how to sell your product).

Stage 2. Growing from 10 to 100 Customers (Here, you further nail down your Product-Market fit, Improve your software, and find the core group of your users who are real fans).

Stage 3. Scaling to 1,000 Paying Users (Here, you have to start to educate your audience on a scale. Here, you start making real money and get prepared for the next stage).

Stage 4. Growing past 1,000 And Beyond (This stage is all about full-speed growth and scaling your business).

Each stage has its goals, channels, and methods to get paid users. Each stage is not just about the number of customers. It’s about specific goals you must complete before moving.

If you don’t have 100 users yet, go and watch two of my previous articles on how to get there.

What Marketing Methods You Can Use as a SaaS Founder?

There are basically 5 marketing methods:

• Outbound. Anything where you contact a stranger first.
• Inbound. You publish content out there and let people approach you.
• Paid Ads. All clear here.
• Referrals or Word of Mouth.
• Partnerships & Affiliates. Here, you partner with people who help you sell more in return for some commission.

And that’s it. Those 5 methods can be further broken into 21 sub-methods. But that is not the part of this article.

Now, the interesting part is that not all methods are available to every SaaS founder. Why? Mainly because of your SaaS pricing structure.

How SaaS Pricing Restricts Your Marketing Methods?

For example, if your product is $10 per month per user and you have 1,000 users, it equals 10,000 $ MRR. If your product price is $1,000 per month per user and you have the same 1,000 users, now it’s 1 million dollars in MRR.

At $5 per user per month, you can’t do a direct paid ads campaign for your SaaS product. In most cases, your CAC (Customer Acquisition Costs) will be higher than LTV (Customer Lifetime Value), and you’ll lose money and not make it back. Similarly, you won’t do conferences with booths as it costs tens of thousands per event. Or affiliate marketing. It won’t make sense for you because there is no room in your pricing structure for any substantial fee to share with your affiliates.

Now, with all that information about available marketing methods:

What is the Goal Behind Getting 1,000 SaaS Users?

Now, when you have your first 50, 100, or 300 users and you have found the core group of customers that solve similar problems in similar ways with your software, you’re ready for this 3rd stage of SaaS Growth.

So,

What are the goals behind getting from 100 to 1,000 SaaS users?

First of all, yes, you’ll start making some good profits at this stage. Whohoo! Finally! Second, you need to get your business prepared for the next last stage – growing to multiple thousands of users. Yes, you need to get prepared to use paid ads, affiliate marketing, and other expensive channels that can dramatically boost your marketing.

If you charge your customers more than 500$ per month per subscription, you might be able to afford a profitable paid ads campaign. By skipping this lesson. But if you follow my advice, the ROI, conversions, margin, and profits from paid ads and affiliate marketing will be times higher at stage 4 of the SaaS growth journey. And for those with lower SaaS pricing, following the advice in this article is a must.

Content Marketing for Your SaaS Product?

At this point, when we want to 10x our client base, we can’t rely on the speed of referrals or cold outreach anymore. For this, we need a different, more effective vehicle. We need Inbound Marketing.

Why? Because it’s relatively cheap, it’s relatively scalable, it’s relatively passive, and it’s relatively controllable. It will also prepare you for the next full-speed stage of SaaS growth. Even though it sounds way slower than paid ads, it’ll be more cost-effective and open up doors to podcasts and events as a speaker. So, this is kind of a flywheel in your business.

The best way to create an acquisition model using the incoming method is by creating content and making it public. But please, don’t stop doing cold outreach and referrals. Actually, they will keep happening automatically. You just need to watch them and adjust as you grow. We want our referral system to work regardless of our client base. That’s a sign that our product does something right.

Apart from the fact that content marketing will help you get new users on autopilot, there are 2 more particular reasons why we need to do a lot of Content Marketing at this stage and why I don’t recommend skipping it:

Build Marketing Assets for Your SaaS Product

In the next, last stage of SaaS growth, I’ll talk about Paid Ads, affiliate marketing, and Partnerships. And for anything of this to work, you’ll need a lot of lead magnets, PDFs, marketing videos, articles, graphics, photos, and many different marketing assets.

Imagine hiring an Ads Agency to start paid ads campaigns, but it’s all stuck. Creating all the assets’ll take you and your team weeks and sometimes months of work.

Wouldn’t it be great to have it all as content you already published, and now you can just repurpose it and create whatever you need for your marketers?

With Content Marketing, if you do it for at least a few months, you’ll have a full library of gold nuggets you can re-use for your:

• Product Knowledge Base
• Lead Magnets
• Online Webinars
• Conference Talks
• PDF and Freebies
• Paid Video Course at Udemy
• Free Email Courses

and whatever you need.

With content, you invest once, and it works for you forever. Like YouTube videos, Instagram reels, blog posts on Google Search, or podcasts on Spotify. If you want to grow to thousands of SaaS users, you’ll have to build these assets in your business anyway.  So, why not do it now, when you can use it also as your effective lead-generation channel?

The Necessary Skills to Get 1,000 SaaS Users

These days, the software business is not just about software. It’s more about customer service and personal touch. You need to provide results for your customers – and not just software.

Many years ago, when I was a student building my micro-saas products, it was mainly about software. Unfortunately, these days, SaaS users’ expectations are much higher. Today, you need to educate people and lead them with your hand through the journey to the results they need.

You and your team have to be perceived as experts on the market; you need to create effective educational materials and a product knowledge base. You need to create a good customer service team and motivate them.

In other words, you and your team must teach, educate, and motivate people on a scale. Through digital information, videos, and social networks, from the stage, online, and offline.

And regularly producing content that people love and consume is the best way to acquire all these skills. Once you acquire them, all the next steps in growing your SaaS, like paid ads campaigns, affiliate marketing, and partnerships, will be way easier. And this is why giving so much value to the world for free is so important.

These People Sell SaaS Products with Content & Education

It is hard to find a super-successful SaaS product without a great blog or YouTube channel. These businesses are not only about great technology but also about useful and engaging content. When we were working on our Opesta product with my partner Ethan, we created an online course on paid ads for our audience.

Our client, Brian from Canada, the founder of Buildwise, SaaS for the construction industry, is teaching his audience with great content on his Instagram.

Our other client, a Paris-based school, CoursPi, educates its peer schools on digitalizing their business with the PoupPi software that we build for them.

Our other client, Zak Muro, and his wife, the owners of a beauty saloon network in the US, are providing courses to stylists. Also, they upsell the SaaS product ForwardForms, which my team built for them.

Simon Hoiberg, Zurich-based startupper, teaches his YouTube audience how to launch startups. And I love his video production.

Also, I’m using the AnswerThePublic product for my YouTube keyword research. Its founder, Nail Patel, published much content about online marketing. That’s how he sells its product.

Russel Brunson also sells books, courses, and marketing challenges and then upsells his software ClickFunnels.

Recently, Alex Hormozi partnered with Sam Ovens on his SaaS project Skool, and they’re doing Skool Games to build a community around their product.

I have many more examples of how tech founders leverage content marketing to reach thousands of SaaS users. But I hope by this moment, you’ve got an idea, and I convinced you not to skip this stage.

Content Marketing for SaaS – Checklist

So, now that you understand the why, I want to share the HOW with you. Here, I’ll show the high-level checklist I use for my business. But you know, a detailed content marketing guide requires its own 3-hour video lesson. 

So,

What is My Content Marketing Checklist for SaaS Business?

Step 1. Pick your audience. (It’s usually the same as your SaaS product audience. But it might be a bit wider).

Step 2. Pick your medium and format (Where is your audience located? And what is easier for you to build? Podcast, blog post, or YouTube video. Will that be Instagram, Medium, Spotify, Blog & SEO, or YouTube?)

Step 3. Publish Regularly. (Every week, publish 1 long-form content, like a YouTube video or blog post. Publish small-form content, like an IG reel, a LinkedIn post, or a tweet daily).

Step 4. Promote Your Content (Keep pushing the links to your content into multiple channels, online forums, groups, and as comments under others’ content. To your Email subscribers.  And so on).

Step 5. Convert readers into subs (Put subscribe forms on your social media profiles, blogs, and everywhere you can. Build your email database).

Step 6. Do Weekly Newsletter. (Email your subscribers with helpful content on a weekly basis).

Step 7. Convert Your Audience (Send out an email with a call to action every four weeks or so. Ask them to try your SaaS product trial period or hop on a demo call).

Step 8. Analyse and Adjust (Finally, regularly review each of your steps from top to bottom and adjust where necessary).

Is Creating a Whole Week of Content for My SaaS Product Hard?

If you do it right. No. You don’t need to sped a full week and every day creating content. I, personally spend one day a week with my team. Record one YouTube video. Then, we repurpose this video to multiple places, such as blog posts, Instagram reels, TikTok videos, and even a weekly newsletter.

Also, my assistant shares my content links on different platforms like Reddit and Indiehackers. I have a lenghty instruction in my Google Document on how we create full-week content for our SaaS products in one day per week. If you want it, comment with the word “TEMPLATE” below.

Now

Let’s summarise

If you want to grow to 1,000 SaaS users and then be prepared to successfully leverage paid ads and affiliate marketing in the next 4th stage of SaaS growth, you need to:

• Build a lot of Content Marketing Assets
• And develop a bunch of new skills with your team

And the best way to do that, is to start regularly publishing educational content for free. Teach your audience, and learn more about them. So, sharpen your pencil, get your phone camera out, and put some gold content nuggets for your existing and new SaaS users.

And if you follow my advice from this article, I guarantee you’ll get 1,000 happy users within a few months after your first public blog post or YouTube video.

Also, if you are interested in having my in-house developers build your SaaS product or maybe having me as a mentor? Then follow the link and register for a free introductory call!