How I Got First 10 Customers for My SaaS Product in 1 Week? No Paid Ads (2024)

How do you get from 0 to the first 10 paying users for your SaaS Product?  Why is this first stage the most important part of the lifecycle of your software business? What are the methods you can use to get the first 10 customers? Why should you charge your first 10 customers, and why do you have to avoid so-called “Hard Customers” at first?

In this article, you’ll get answers to all of these questions and much more. I’ll show you how we got our first 10 users for our own products, SocialInsight and Opesta.

By the end of this article, you’ll fully understand how to get your first 10 SaaS customers.  Plus, you’ll understand the true goals behind this initial stage of your SaaS, which are, surprise, not profit and not growing your business.

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. And in this article, I’ll focus on the first stage – Getting your first 10 paying users.

What is the Goal behind getting your First 10 SaaS Customers?

When trying to grow past 100 or 1000 customers for your SaaS product, your goals are more revenue, higher profit margins, scalability, automation, and maybe even brand awareness. But when you just start with zero users, the goal of this stage is completely different. It’s not about making money or profits. It’s all about idea validation and finding your initial product market fit.

You want to understand if there is a market for your product and whether it solves a real problem for this market. This is the first stage of every SaaS product, and I’d say it’s one of the most challenging. It will determine whether your product will survive.

Ideally, you start working on this stage before you start building your product. You also keep working on validating your idea during the MVP development and after its public release.

Apart from Market Demand, there is a second big goal behind getting your first 10 SaaS Customers.

It’s a learning process. All the tools and methods you’ll use to get your first 10 users will be mostly 1:1 conversations. This way, you’ll have direct access to your customers, so there will be a faster feedback loop. You’ll also be in an Accelerated learning mode.

By the moment you get your first 10 paying users, you’ll learn much more than you’ll learn by getting from 10 to 100 users/ That’s how it worked for me with my products.

At this stage, you start from scratch. No knowledge, no brand, no testimonials, nothing. So, you’ll learn how to change your product roadmap, how to sell, how to make your users happy and so on.

How are the first 10 Customers different from growing to 100 and 1000 paying SaaS Users?

There are many differences. But I’ll emphasize one major difference that you need to accept.

As Paul Graham said many years ago:  “You have to do things that don’t scale.”

So, what will be those things? You need to take three steps to get your first 10 users for your SaaS product. And they don’t scale, lol

Step №1. Leverage Your Phone Book

Step №1 to get your first 10 SaaS Users is to Leverage Your Phone Book and personal network.

These are the people around you, people you know already, your friends, family members, colleagues, business partners, clients, and vendors. These people probably gave you this startup idea in the first place.

Now, when you have the product to show, you must approach them again and sell it to them. On 1:1 conversations, of course. For example, back in 2017, when we were trying to get our first couple of users to SocialInsight, an IG analytics platform, we invited our friends, business owners, who were trying to grow on IG at that time.

The other good example: in our agency; we recently released BuildWise, a construction management SaaS for our client from Canada. He didn’t start putting up paid ads or doing content marketing.

Instead, he showed his newly built software to his coaching clients construction company owners. And now, we’re scaling the platform because it can not keep up with user growth.

Step №2. 1:1 Cold Outreach

The second step to get your first 10 SaaS Users is 1:1 Cold Outreach. After you maxed out your network and onboarded all your well-known people into your software, it’s time for this second step. Now, you have to try talking to people you don’t know who might be a good fit for your SaaS product. It includes cold emails, LinkedIn messages, social media directs, cold calls, etc.

Your conversations with those strangers will be similar to Step 1. You will demo the product and try to determine whether it can solve their problem. If you have never done it and don’t have enough sales experience, I highly recommend reading Neil Rackham’s book – SPIN Sales.

About a year ago, we built and launched an online marketplace for parents for our agency client in New York. They started by onboarding all of their friends with kids and as a next step, they started going door to door, visiting local businesses that sell different activities for children.

Now, with those 2 steps, these guys onboarded almost 200 users. They never did any paid ads, or any other mass-market strategies.

Step №3 to get your first 10 SaaS users is to leverage Targeted Communities and Groups.

If the previous 2 steps are insufficient, I usually suggest to my personal mentorship clients, to further expand their business network. Sales are best done in 1:1 conversations. However, network development and marketing are best done in groups.

So here is my formula for you:

1. Find online and offline groups and communities, meetups, conferences, business clubs, and other events that gather the people you need
2. Start being active there, get to know people, and add value to those communities
3. Finally, start 1:1 conversations with people from these communities who might fit your SaaS well.

When we beta-launched our product Opesta, we spread the news about it across multiple FB Groups with our competitors and partners. Opesta was like a ManyChat chatbot platform but niched for Shopify owners only. So, we started to pull first users from ManyChat and Shopify-related online groups and communities.

I’m pretty sure, a similar approach will work for your SaaS too. Now, I want to share a few very important things while getting your first 10 software customers. Because without it my three steps will not work for you.

Avoid Hard-To-Get Customers

There is no benefit in making your first SaaS customers Hard to Get Customers. It’s true for your SaaS at any stage but is especially crucial for the early stages.

You should be looking for customers:

1. That intensively having a problem that your SaaS is trying to solve
2. Willing to work with early-stage startup
3. And willing to pay to solve that problem

Don’t get your mom’s business to use your software unless she really needs it. Otherwise, you’ll be very disappointed once you start talking to strangers.

SaaS Pricing to Get Your First 10 Customers

One more thing that I strongly recommend when you are trying to grow from zero to 10 paying SaaS users is to put a price on your product. Don’t offer it for free. 

Yes, it’ll make your life a bit harder at the beginning. It’s always easier for somebody to say, “Yes, I’ll try it” if it’s free and low-commitment. But it’ll play a bad game with you later on when you need to get more users onboard.

As I mentioned, getting the first 10 users is not about money; it’s about validating your product and market demand. Putting a price tag on your SaaS will help you qualify your users and ensure that people are saying “Yes” to you only because they really need your product to solve their problems. It’s okay to underprice it at first. But charge your first users at least something.

That will also help you implement my previous advice: Avoid Hard-to-Get Customers.

Grow With Your High-Value SaaS Customers

This is the final thing that helped our product Opesta get its first 10 users and then 200 paying users. When you start getting your first customers, watch closely who they are and how they use your software. And whenever they need something custom, a one-off request, don’t be afraid to do things that don’t scale.

One or a few of your customers will help you shape your SaaS product so that it is useful for your future users. When we launched our FB messenger automation platform Opesta, we didn’t make it for any particular business niche. It was a generic chatbot tool for any business that needs to automate customer support on its FB Public Page.

But then we realised that many of our early users were Shopify store owners, and they used our software in a very specific way— to send automated reminders to abandoned shopping carts via FB messenger.

Thus, we pivoted to a chatbot platform for Shopify owners, and within the first 2 months after the MVP release, we grew Opesta to 200 paying users.

Let’s summarise.

To successfully complete the first stage of the SaaS growth process and attract your first 10 paying users, you must validate your product and market demand.

For this you,

• Leverage Your Network
• Do 1:1 Cold Outreach
• And if necessary, participate in Targeted Groups & Communities

And while doing this, it’s important to:

• Avoid Hard-to-Get Customers
• Charge Your First 10 Customers (no free pricing tiers)
• and Grow with Your High-Value Customers

And if you follow all my advice from this article, I guarantee you’ll get your first 10 happy users within a couple of weeks after initial release.

So, 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!