Ep 2 - How to Get Your First 100 Customers by Growth Mapping Podcast

Welcome to the Growth Mapping Podcast with Aaron Agius and Sujan Patel. Today we are going to talk about how to get your first 100 customers for your SaaS business. This is something we both have a lot of experience in. The most powerful tactic to build your first 100 customers is to do marketing and build your audience before you launch. The larger your list is the better chance you have to get people to convert into customers.

Slow down and build your pre-launch marketing. Even if your product is ready.

● Start with blogging and creating content around your industry
● Inbound marketing
● Answer questions on Quora
● Give talks
● Get customer feedback
● Make sure your brand is seen, and capture that audience
● Reaching out to your network - send an email to everyone and let them know what you are doing - if you can’t get 10, 20, 30 purchases, you have done something wrong, like product fit or market fit
● Build marketing into the product, so people can share it from the beginning, it removes friction in beginning sign ups
● Ask people to share
● Have a big launch - Product Hunt - You have to get hunted and then an upvoting system, AMA series, podcast, this can get you a couple hundred customers
● Outbound - Adwords, paid marketing, email scraping and identifying your target audience
● Get your outbound channel figured out
● Partnerships and referrals - Find companies that sell to your target customer and see if you can find alignment to cross promote
● Look for influencers and authorities in your space - reach out to them, offer free work and help and build partnerships
● Influencer marketing is some of the best ROI and scales well
● Networking - if you are solving something in an industry get to know the movers and shakers, make sure they are aware of you