How To Go From First 10 to 100 Customers for Your SaaS Product? (2024 Guide)

In this article, I’ll share my 2 marketing strategies for growing your SaaS product from 10 to 100 paying users. If you start from scratch and haven’t got your first 10 users yet, here is my previous article on how to do this. Go and read it first.

Now, when you have your first few paying and happy customers, you’re ready to level up your game and enter the second stage of growing the SaaS business. Now, we need to teach you how to further improve your product based on customer feedback and multiply all the things you’ve been doing to attract your first 10 users.

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

Stage 2. Growing from 10 to 100 Customers

Stage 3. Scaling to 1000 Paying Users

Stage 4. Growing past 1000 Users w/o any limits

Each stage has its own 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 on to the next stage.

And in this article, I’ll focus on the second stage – getting from 10 to 100 paying users.

What is the Goal between the First 10 and 100 SaaS Customers?

When you start from scratch and get your first 10 users, your main goals are to build some traction, test market demand, and start to find Product-Market fit. It’s not about making profits. Again, the second stage of growing a SaaS business is not about money, scaling, or profits — not yet.

The main goal of this second stage is to further nail down your Product Market fit. For example, with our second product, Opesta – an FB messenger marketing automation chatbot, we crossed 50 paying users but still couldn’t completely understand who our ideal customer is.

Some of them were e-commerce business owners, others were marketers from big enterprises, and others were freelancers. They have used our product in different ways, solving slightly different problems. And in about 3 months after MVP release, we found that the most significant part of our customer base is e-commerce owners. And most of them are using Shopify as their e-commerce platform.

We started to focus only on them, and all further improvements, changes, and fixes were to make Shopify owner’s life easier. And before we had 100 paying users, our product finally found a strong Product Market Fit. After that, things like product development, sales, marketing, and customer support became much easier.

I can’t even imagine how difficult it would be to promote and scale our product without identifying a specific customer niche. So, as a result of better product market fit, our software started to mature and be more stable and reliable for our people.

Also, with the continuous flow of requests, bug reports, and questions to our customer support team, which, at that time, was me and my partner Ethan, we quickly put together a good knowledge base with instructions, templates, and documentation so that most of the customer support went on autopilot.

This second stage of SaaS growth is not about revenue and profits.

Yes, you can get some, and you can even become profitable while reaching your first 100 users, but that’s not the goal, and it might not happen. And that’s fine.

The main goal is to prepare your product for the scaling phase and put it on autopilot. Because the following stages will require a lot of your focus and attention. So, find your main user group, make their lives super easy with your SaaS, and put your customer support on autopilot.

Now that you know the goals, what are my 2 top marketing methods for increasing the number of paying SaaS users from 10 to 100?

Method №1. Scale Your Cold Outreach to Grow to 100 Users

In my previous article post about getting your first 10 users, I recommended using 1:1 Cold Outreach right after you max out your phone book. Hopefully, after onboarding your first 10 SaaS users, you’ve mastered your cold outreach game. Because in this second stage of SaaS growth, you’ll need it.

Approaching and asking people to check out your product is the fastest go-to-market strategy. That simple. You can not avoid it. So, now that you’ve nailed your outbound marketing strategy, let’s keep using it to grow to 100 users! But now, you don’t want to do it manually 1:1.

First of all, you know what to write, you know whom to approach, and you probably already have some templates. Having these templates and specific audience groups, it is now very easy to scale and automate your outreach campaign using services like Prospectify or Octopus.

You set it up once and it does all the job for you. After acquiring 10 users with manual cold prospecting (emails, phone calls, or LinkedIn), it’ll be even easier to automate everything and multiply by 10 to get to 100.

Method №2. Referrals

This one is my favorite. Why?

Because it’s free, it naturally improves your product, and it creates a sales flywheel in your business. Also, it’s not a simple one.  But it is worth trying. Companies like Dropbox, DigitalOcean, AirBnb, Uber, Evernote, Paypal, Shopify, Trello, Canva, and Freshbooks all grow their businesses for free.

Just because they successfully implemented a Referral program within their products. Also, before trying paid ads or other marketing methods to scale, you must ensure your product is ready for many new users. And what is the best way to know that people love your product?

It’s by seeing them recommending your software to their friends. That’s the best proof that you’re doing something right. So, how do you make your existing customers bring new customers to your SaaS business?

First of all, you need to ask them about this. The easiest way is to put the Refer a Friend button somewhere inside your user cabinet. You can give a gift or bonus in return, or you might not. It’s up to you. That’s something you need to figure out on your own.

But you need to keep improving your product so that it gives a “Wow” effect to your newly onboarded users. So they are motivated to share your product with their friends, even w/o any extra incentive.

Yes, it’s easier to say than implement.  In my agency, we have a dedicated workshop for our SaaS clients where we build a User Referral strategy. It’s a bit of science and a bit of psychology.

Yes, you can skip the Referral program and use other methods at this point to get to 100 users. For example, automated cold outreach might help you easily cross this second stage of SaaS growth.

But if you really want to grow to thousands of users and make it easier, having a proper Referral strategy implemented in your SaaS business is a must.

Now

Let’s  summarise.

To successfully complete this second stage of the SaaS growth process and attract your first 100 paying users, you must further nail down Product Market Fit and improve your product a lot.

For this you,

• Scale and Automate Cold Outreach You’ve been doing at the beginning
• And implement an effective User Referral Strategy

And while doing this, it’s important to Grow with Your High-Value Customers. And if you follow all my advice from this article, I guarantee you’ll get your first 100 happy users within a couple of months after initial release. 

Also, if you are interested in having my in-house developers build your SaaS product or maybe having me as a mentor? Then follow this link to contact me!