Marketing for SaaS founders

SaaS marketing advice is overwhelmingly written for companies that already work — that have a funnel to optimise, a cohort to retain, a CAC to bring down. If you have forty users and no paying customers, none of it applies, and following it is how founders lose their first six months.

Early-stage SaaS has its own sequence. It looks like this.

Stage one: get ten customers by hand

Not through a channel. By hand — finding individual people with the problem and talking to them, in threads they started, in replies to their complaints, in emails that aren’t templated.

This feels wrong to engineers because it doesn’t scale, and we’re trained to distrust things that don’t scale. But you don’t need scale yet. You need ten.

If you can’t get ten customers by hand, a channel won’t get you a hundred. Channels multiply what already works.

There’s a full version of this in how to get your first SaaS customers.

Stage two: steal your positioning from those ten

The single highest-leverage marketing asset you will ever have is a sentence your customer said out loud, used verbatim on your homepage.

Ask each of the ten one question: “What were you doing about this before?” Their answer tells you what you actually replaced. For most early SaaS it isn’t a competitor — it’s a spreadsheet, a group chat, a person doing it manually on a Sunday night, or nobody bothering.

That answer is worth more than a competitive analysis, because it tells you what the customer was willing to change a habit for.

The trigger matters more than the persona

“Backend engineers at Series A companies” tells you nothing about when to show up. A trigger does:

• “We broke prod with another migration.”
• “The person who used to do this has left.”
• “Our spreadsheet stopped coping at eighty rows.”
• “I’ve just taken over organising this.”

Each of those is a moment when somebody goes looking. Write down three for your product. If you can’t, that’s your finding for the week, and it means more conversations rather than more promotion.

Stage three: one channel, understood properly

The instinct at this point is to test five channels for a month each. Don’t. Ten channels tested badly are worse than one channel understood properly — you end up with five inconclusive results and no idea which failure was the channel and which was the execution.

Pick the one where your trigger is most visible. Do it fifteen times. Then look at what it produced. That’s a real result; a month of “trying LinkedIn” isn’t.

Pricing is marketing, and most early SaaS gets it backwards

Hidden pricing costs you more early-stage customers than a high price does. A founder evaluating your product at 11pm will not book a call to find out what it costs; they’ll close the tab.

The same goes for plan count. Four tiers before anyone understands the product is a decision you’ve outsourced to someone with no basis for making it.

What to ignore until you have paying customers

• Content calendars and programmatic SEO
• A launch on any platform
• Paid acquisition
• Referral programmes
• Anything described as a growth loop
• Rebuilding the landing page for the fourth time

All of those multiply something. Get the something first.

Then measure, or none of this compounds

The reason most founders never get good at marketing isn’t effort — it’s that nothing tells them whether last week worked, so they never develop instincts. Write down what you did and what happened, even when what happened is nothing. Especially then.

Six entries in, you have something no marketing article can give you: evidence about your own business rather than advice about businesses in general.