How to get the First 100 customers for your startup - Case Study of how 7 Successful Founders did it!

I am learning SaaS marketing, and so I combed through the internet to find specific advice that helped founders reach 100 users and not random Google answers.

Here’s what I found:

1. Llama Life by Marie

Marie founder of Llama Life, a productivity app ($51.4K+ revenue) got her first 100 users using Snowballing effect. She shared great advice that I want to add here verbatim,

“Need to think about what you have that you can leverage based on your current situation. eg..When you have no customers, think about where you can post to get the 1st customer eg Product Hunt.

If you do well on PH, say you get #3 product of the day, then you post somewhere else saying ‘I got #3 product of the day’.. to get your next few customers. Maybe that post is on reddit with some learnings that you found.

If the reddit post does well, then you might post it on Twitter, saying reddit did well and what learnings you got from that etc. or even if it doesn’t do well you can still post about it.”

Another tip she shared is to build related products that get more viral than the product itself.

These are small stand-alone sites that would appeal to the same target audience, but by nature, are more shareable.

On these sites, you can mention your startup like: ‘brought to you by Llama Life’ and then provide a link to the main website if someone is interested. If one of those gets viral or ranks on Google, you’ll have a passive traffic source.

2. Scraping bee by Pierre

Pierre, founder of Scraping Bee, a web scraping tool has now reached $1.5M ARR.

Pierre and his cofounder Kevin started with 10 Free Beta Users in 2019, and after 6 months asked them to take a paid subscription if they wanted to continue using the product.

That’s how they got their first user within 50 minutes of that email.

Then they listed it on dozens of startup directories but their core strategy was writing the best possible content for their target audience — Developers.

3 very successful pieces of content that worked were :

• A small tutorial on how to scrape single-page application
• An extensive general guide about web scraping without getting blocked
• A complete introduction to web scraping with Python

They didn’t do content marketing for the sake of content marketing but deep-dived into the value they were providing their customer.

One of these got 70K visits, and all this together got them to over 100 users.

3. WePay by Bill Clerico

Bill Clerico left his cushy corporate job to build WePay which was then acquired for $400M got his first users by using his app.

He got his first users by using his app!

The app was for group payments. So he hosted a Poker tournament at his house and collected payments only with his app.

Then they hosted a barbecue for fraternity treasurers at San Jose State & helped them do their annual dues collection.

Good old word-of-mouth marketing, that however, started with an event where they used what they made!

4. RealWorld by Genevieve

Genevieve — Founder and CEO of Realworld stands by the old-school advice of value giving.

RealWorld is an app that helps GenZ navigate adulthood.

So, before launching their direct-to-consumer platform, they had an educational course that they sold to college career centers and students. They already had a pipeline of adults who turned to Realworld for their adulting challenges.

From there, she gained her first 100 followers.

5. Saner dot ai by Austin

Austin got 100 users from Reddit for his startup Saner.ai. Reddit hates advertising, and so his tips to market your startup on Reddit is to

• Write value-driven posts on your niche.
• Instead of writing posts, find posts where people are looking for solutions
• DM people facing problems that your SaaS solves. But instead of selling, ask about their problem to see if your product is a good fit
• Heartfelt posts about why you built it, aren’t gonna cut it
• To find posts and people, search Reddit with relevant keywords and join all the subreddits

6. A Stock Portfolio Newsletter

A financial investor got his first 100 paid newsletter subscribers for his stock portfolio newsletter.

His tips :

• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Work what’s already working. He saw a company making $500M+ from stock picking newsletter, so decided to try that.
• Find the gaps in “already working” and leverage them. That newsletter did not have portfolios of advisors writing them. That was his USP. He added his own portfolio to his newsletter.
• Now to 100 users, he partnered with a guy running an investing website and getting good traffic. That guy got a cut of his revenue, in exchange.

That one simple step got him to 100 users.

7. Hypefury by Yannick and Samy

Yannick and Samy from Hypefury, Twitter and Social Media Automation tool got their first beta testers and users from a paid community.

They launched Hypefury there and asked if someone wanted to try it.

A couple of people tried it and gave feedback.

Samy conducted user interviews and product demos for them, And shared the reviews on Twitter.

That alone, along with word-of-mouth marketing on Twitter got them their first 100 users.

To conclude:

1. Don’t reinvent the wheel, try what’s working.
2. Find the gaps in what’s working, and leverage that.
3. Instead of thinking about millions of customers, think about the first 10. Then first 100.
4. Leverage what you have. Get the first 10 customers, then talk about this to get the next 100.
5. Use your app. Find ways, events, and opportunities to use your app in front of people. And get them to use it.
6. Write content not only for SEO but also to help people. It won’t work tomorrow, but it will work for years after it picks up.
7. Leverage other sources of traffic by partnering up!
8. Do things that don’t scale.

If you liked this, I’d appreciate a clap so it reaches more founders.

I’m also doing SaaS marketing deep dives over 30 pieces of content, so follow along if you loved it :)

Cheers! (1/30)