Selling a SaaS based Cloud application is difficult and when you're bootstrapped and new it's even more. Here is our strategy that helped us get our first 100 customers.

1. How to get your SaaS business its first 100 customers?

2. Tap into the known When DeskAway was launched, the old business associates and friends were the first people to be approached to power their businesses with DeskAway.

3. Free We gave out 50 free accounts. While we believe in people actually paying for a product (then they begin to really value it and give you candid feedback).This free strategy helped us spread the word initially.

4. Conference and Events We pitched DeskAway at a prestigious start-up event called Proto to an audience full of entrepreneurs, small business owners, bloggers and VCs. This event helped us build initial credibility and gain traction with early adopters in India.

5. Self-promotion The team scrounged the Web for blogs that discussed/reviewed small business SaaS tools, collaboration etc. We followed it up with comments. People actually clicked on our comments and came to the site to sign up for the app.

6. Build virality We built the Email Marketing Software model into DeskAway .Any personal email reminders going out to an agency’s clients will be powered by DeskAway and will also have a link back to our site.

7. Be your own PR We wrote a quick pitch on why bloggers should review our product. Web Worker Daily liked our pitch and reviewed DeskAway in May 2008 which led to thousands of visitors to our site and sign-ups every minute for the first few days.

8. Writing When people appreciate what you write, they will quickly look up who you are and see what you do. We get a lot of traffic whenever an article written by us is published somewhere. Till date, our CEO writes a lot, not to mention his book ‘The SaaS Edge’ that was published early this year.

9. And then we hit the magical number of 100 DeskAway,www.DeskAway.com