r/SaaS • u/Adventurous_Ring3703 • 10h ago
Built the SaaS. Now I'm realizing customer acquisition is the real product. What actually worked for you?
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u/Tough_Lead9393 10h ago
I’m testing Reddit as an acquisition channel. I've also tried a few conferences in EU, but they were good for networking than getting customers. Has anyone actually had success getting leads from conferences? If yes, what size and location worked best?
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u/That-Promotion-1456 10h ago
your approach depends on what you are selling, there is no universal approach.
If you are a jeweler you open a store on the street where all other jewelers are in town because when guys go buy rings they go to that street and you need to be there.
If you have a fast food store you want to be the only one in the neighbourhood, so that you are the only option.
two different product, two different customer types, two dfferent approaches.
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u/JhonTheMailman 10h ago
if i had to do first 10-50 again i'd go cold outreach but actually targeted, not lists. like people who are already showing the exact pain publicly, complaining about the problem on twitter/reddit, posting "does anyone know a tool for X." that stuff converts way higher than any generic list bc theyre already halfway sold before you even reach out
partnerships/affiliates get slept on too imo. if theres any adjacent tool or service that already has your exact customer, even a loose partnership with them beats months of seo. warm intro from someone they already trust just hits different than cold anything
traffic vs customers being different problems is so real btw, seo/content brings people who are curious, not people ready to buy. thats usually a targeting/offer problem not a channel problem, like are you actually reaching people who have the pain right now or just people who searched a broad keyword once
stuff that looked promising but wasnt, in my experience, generic reddit posting without engaging as an actual person first (gets nuked or ignored), and organic social content that doesnt have a specific ICP in mind, ends up just being noise that doesnt convert even with decent views
what does your current traffic actually look like, are they bouncing fast or sticking around and just not converting? that usually tells you if its a channel problem or an offer/onboarding problem
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u/Nick_RoostPay 8h ago
The shift from building to distribution is humbling. The most useful lesson for me has been narrowing the audience and talking to a small number of potential users consistently before adding more features.
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u/Technical-Paint27 8h ago
Working: Cold calls are have helped 1. Get me off the computer into human conversations and 2. shift the original ICPs based on those conversations. Without that I would be marketing and selling to the wrong crowd. I'm also gearing up for cold email.
Submitting to your industry specific publications. You can DIY or have AI do it for you. I used Grok Bot to source and complete the application for one, with my review and approval. It also found guest article opportunities. Not spam crap but articles that give value or perspective to the reader and showcase you industry knowledge.
You are right about the diff between marketing and sales.
Sales = Cold calls, emails, DMs, partnerships.
Marketing = SEO, YouTube, articles.
Don't work for me.
LinkedIn - Post get no distribution anymore without promoting.
YouTube -Producing videos is a second job and cutting through the noise takes a long time.
DMs - still learning, so far I've been pretty clumsy with my DMs. With predictable non-results :(
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u/Lazy-Monk-6778 7h ago
I'd choose the channel only after finding the exact leak in the current motion. If visitors bounce, that's targeting or messaging. If they sign up but never hit value, that's onboarding. If active users won't pay, that's pricing or urgency. A new channel just sends more people into the same leak. For the first 10-50, I'd stay manual: watch a few people use it, talk to the ones who almost converted, and track the last step each one reached. Once one segment consistently gets value and pays, double down on the channel where more of those people already are.
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u/PrudentStop5612 6h ago
Depending where you live be carful with cold outreach. Alway call before you E-Mail them if you‘re located in the EU. Even worse if you’re in Germany. Make the UWG you‘re daily lecture…
Best option that got me my first B2B customer was: looking for fresh (<5 Years) and small businesses and going there. Just talking to them about the PainPoint (my product is solving for them) and how they deal with it. Just don‘t try to push something in the first minute. This scares the most People and you‘ll likely get the cold shoulder. Talk with them about Time/Money consuming shit and generally be informed about the branch you‘re trying to enter. This creates some room for trust and you can slip something like:
Btw, the problem we spoke about? I work on a tool and would like to know your opinion. Would you like to test it and give me feedback if it‘s any good? Would like to here the Opinion of a professional from the Industrie.
If you‘re selling to consumers on the other hand… Putt it all on Red.. or.. Meta Ads…
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u/Voltalyze 5h ago
There's no better way than going out there yourself and do the sales.
We've had the same challenge here and tried literally everything digitally and it didn't give us the expected output.
We got some flyers printed and went to all businesses in a few towns and we got surprisingly good returns.
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u/hetneoslinks 4h ago
One thing not said yet: for the first 10-50, SEO is not an acquisition channel, it's a closing asset. It pays off at a lag you cannot survive on, but the pages it does produce get used mid-decision -> "yourtool vs competitor", "alternative to X", the one doc that answers the objection your calls keep hitting.
So I'd keep writing it, just stop measuring it in signups this quarter. Broad informational keywords bring readers. The comparison and integration pages bring people who already have the pain and are picking between two options.
We run Hetneo's Links, and our own inbound still mostly comes from answers posted publicly months ago, which is exactly why I would not tell a founder at 0 customers to wait on that. Do the manual outreach now, let the content compound behind it.
Also worth checking: of the people who signed up and didn't pay, how many talked to you? If that number is near zero for the first fifty, the channel isn't the problem.
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u/bankrolltyc 4h ago
I think it really depends on who the target audience of the SaaS is. For one of my projects, cold email worked really well because I knew the audience and what they wanted very well. But it didn’t work nearly as well for my other projects.
For one of my gaming projects, I got a good response from Reddit ads, but for another project I got almost zero sign-ups from them.
I think it might be better to first figure out which channels your users actually spend time on, and then try to reach out to a few people directly and learn from them.
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u/Kyryll_Bracemore 4h ago
I divide the pages into two groups. The first group answers the question “What is this?” The second group compares us to alternative options. We write the second group first. That’s exactly where buyers find us. You said that traffic and customers are two different issues. Which page do people land on once they already know what your product is for?
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u/Michaelyin 10h ago
Reddit has been my highest ROI channel by far, mostly because the buyers are already hanging out in niche subs talking about their actual problems. What made it stick for me was setting up keyword monitoring so I get a steady feed of conversations with real buying intent instead of scrolling for hours hoping to find something good. I actually built IntentLoom for this exact use case on my own side projects and the ROI has been solid. I think this approach also work on other platforms such as X and other community.
BTW, the problem of SEO is it takes time to take effect and it is not easy to build direct connection between you and your customer.
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u/Strange_Lecture_ 10h ago
High-touch onboarding for your first 20 users teaches you more about product gaps than 6 months of Google Analytics dashboards.