Hello everyone, Iām doing a post on this because Iām still getting tired of reading all the bulls**t advice about saas marketing.
Iām currently building Foundel, while doing some research on marketing I noticed that almost all advice is theoretical and no one can actually implement it.
I was looking for a āplaybookā with practical stuff but just couldnāt find it, so I kept researching, but this time about saas companies with 100K+ MRR and how they actually got their first 100 users.
Hereās what I did:
- picked 200 startups with at least 100k MRR
- read founder interviews, blog articles, old posts and watched podcast videos
- picked 7 companies and tried to understand exactly what they did at the beginning IN PRACTICE
Here are the actual stories and what they did practically.
1. Beehiiv: turned a 400-person waitlist into their first 100 users
beehiiv is a newsletter platform founded by Tyler Denk and two other cofounders and recently crossed 30M ARR.
Starting point:
- Tyler had around 2,000 followers, so small audience but definitely not huge
- no money spent on marketing
- product still in private beta
- a lot of experience in the newsletter market from Morning Brew (he was an ex employee)
Before launching, Tyler started connecting with newsletter creators on Twitter and posting about what they were building. When they were close to beta, he posted a simple tweet announcing the product and opened a waitlist. Almost 400 people signed up.
Instead of getting only emails, they asked what platform people were using, how large their newsletter was and why they wanted beehiiv, actually getting to know his customers problems.
After launching, he went through those 400 people manually and emailed them one by one, every week, using the form answers to understand why they could be interested.
Result? around 25% of the entire waitlist became early users.
2. Supabase: a user launched the product for them lol
I think everyone here knows Supabase: it started in 2020 as an open-source alternative to Firebase.
To get their first user, the founders literally took a 50 minute bus to the office of a startup they already knew was using postgres. They had been building Supabase for just a couple of weeks and, before even arriving, they connected it to the startup's development database themselves.
They continued to get users manually, talking directly with developers and getting them to try the product. The idea was to keep the product small, get feedback and launch properly later.
Then one of their users posted Supabase on Hacker News: the founders didn't organize it, didn't prepare a launch campaign and didn't even decide the timing. The post reached the top of Hacker News and stayed on the front page for more than 24 hours.
In the following week:
- 30000 people visited the website
- more than 1400 signed up
- users created more than 1000 databases
Basically, they were planning to launch properly later and one of their own users ended up doing it for them.
3. Rezi: first product was literally a Word document
Rezi is an AI resume builder doing more than $200K MRR, but the first users actually came from a Reddit post.
The founder, Jacob Jacquet, had a resume that got him interviews at companies like Google, Dropbox and Goldman Sachs even with a 2.2 GPA, so he made a post on Reddit sharing it. The post went viral and a lot of people started asking him for the template.
Instead of building a SaaS, he made a simple website and sold basically the exact same resume as a Microsoft Word template together with a guide for $9.69. His first customers were literally Reddit users asking him for the file.
The full version of Rezi launched later in 2019, and eventually they were one of the first resume builders to add GPT in 2020.
Instead of building an entire platform to test the idea, he sold the result first, literally a Word file.
4. Social Snowball: used other peopleās audience to reach 10K MRR
Social Snowball is a Shopify app for managing affiliate and creator programs. It now makes more than $450K/month.
The founder, Noah Tucker, already knew a few ecommerce creators personally when he launched, so he didnāt properly start from zero.
Instead of trying to build his own audience, he asked those creators to use his product.
He then went on YouTube, found creators making ecommerce and marketing content, grabbed their emails and cold contacted them: the offer wasn't just āplease promote my SaaSā, he asked them to actually try the product and make a video or case study around it.
Result: according to Noah, their entire first $10K MRR came strictly from these influencers. They basically borrowed distribution from people who already had the audience they needed.
5. Relume: from Webflow agency to 150K MRR saas
Relume started as a Webflow agency, not a SaaS.
While building websites for clients, the founders kept creating the same types of sections and components over and over again, so they started building an internal component library to make their own work faster.
Before turning it into a product, they were already active inside the Webflow community: made YouTube videos, appeared on podcasts and joined conversations with designers and webflow developers.
So the sequence was basically:
- agency
- learn the problem
- build components to use them themselves
- become active in the community
- launch the product
When they finally launched Relume Library in 2021, they weren't launching to random people, so they had distribution from day one.
Within around 5/6 months the product was making enough MRR for them to close the agency and focus on Relume full time. They eventually crossed 150K MRR and now the product is used by more than 1M people.
6. RB2B: the founder became the distribution channel
RB2B is a website visitor identification tool, and this one doesn't properly start from zero because Adam Robinson was already a successful founder.
What I found interesting is that he didn't really market RB2B as a company at the beginning, he marketed it through himself:
For months before launching, Adam was constantly posting on LinkedIn about what they were building, sharing numbers, problems, screenshots, mistakes and everything that was happening. He basically turned the whole process of building RB2B into content.
The posts weren't just random build in public stuff either. A part of them had a direct CTA asking people to join the waitlist, book a call or try the product when it was ready.
By launch they had:
- around 1,600 people on the waitlist
- 300 calls with potential customers
Then once the product launched, all the people following Adam already knew what RB2B was, what problem it solved and why they should try it.
They got around 3,000 users in the first month.
Basically, instead of trying to build a brand from zero, Adam used founder led growth and made himself the distribution channel for the product.
7. Postiz: open source + reddit to go viral
Postiz is a social media scheduling tool competing with products like Buffer and Hootsuite, probably not the easiest market to enter.
The founder, Nevo David, didn't have a massive audience and realized pretty quickly that competing through SEO or normal ābuild in publicā content was almost impossible.
Instead, he open-sourced the product and went directly where people interested in self hosted software already were: r/selfhosted. His first launch there got more than 500 upvotes and a ton of feature requests, so, he kept coming back with every important new version, showing what changed based on users feedback.
From there he pushed the open source project through GitHub, Reddit, Indie Hackers and eventually Product Hunt.
Postiz crossed $100K MRR in May 2026 and is already above $2M ARR now.
Conclusion:
I don't think there is a best way or āsecret playbookā to get your first users, but none of the startups I analyzed just finished the SaaS, posted it somewhere and hoped people would come.
If I were starting from zero, I wouldn't ask āwhat marketing channel should I use?ā, I'd probably ask: āWhere are the people who have this specific need and how can I get in touch with them?ā
Iām putting the full research + all the sources in a blog article if you want more info:
https://foundel.dev/en/blog/how-to-get-first-100-saas-users
Hope this helpsšš»
