This document provides tactics for acquiring a software as a service (SAAS) company's first 100 customers. It discusses targeting small and medium businesses and focusing on influencers, affiliates, and targeted advertising to reach 10-100 customers. Specific tactics recommended include launching an influencer program, offering a "powered by" feature for free accounts, running ads on Google and Facebook, engaging communities and marketplaces, and creating content for organic search and public relations. Regular webinars, conferences, and whitepapers are also suggested for lead generation. Tools for tracking competitors, ads, affiliates, and search optimization are listed.

1. Acquiring First 100
Customers for SAAS
Ravi Trivedi
Former Founder, PushEngage
Twitter: @trivediravi

2. 0 to 100 Customers
For SAAS Business, from our experience of building PushEngage
Leading Platform for Web Push Notifications, with
customers in 150+ countries, and sending 9B+
notifications each month.

3. What Are You
Hunting
• 0 to 100 Customer journey varies for what
are you hunting
Source: Christoph Janz @ Point Nine Capital.
Annual Ticket Size Number of Customers Type
$100,000 1,000 Enterprise
$10,000 10,000 Medium size
$1,000 100,000 Small Business
$100 1,000,000 Consumers
To Build a $100 Million Annual Revenue Business
• This session focusses on Small to Medium Business
* No animals were harmed, and the word hunting is notional

4. Tactics Vary as per
stage
Source: Close.io

5. Getting
0 to 10
Customers
We Launched on a Marketing Blog
•Go where your target community is
•Reference: Go To Market Video
Customer Development Stage Leads
•Reached to customers whose inputs we took during building our
product. [ Ecommerce, Affiliates, Blogs]
Pre-launch leads & Launch
Ads – Google Adwords, Facebook, etc
Leverage Personal Network
•Send Email to all your Linkedin network with target profile
Product Let Virality – Powered by works
Importance of Customer Support in Early Stage
•In Do It Yourself SMB market this is a sales channel, so focus on it
•Learning about customer, their roadblocks in onboarding, product
feedback

6. From 10 – 100 Customers
5 Tactics That Worked for Us
or Suggested Ideas

7. 1. Influencers/ Affiliates
• Find Top Influencers in marketing field & built relationships with them
 See below how to find influencers using Buzzsumo. We used tools + our experience of
who is large influencer for Bloggers, or Ecommerce.
• Offered Lifetime free to 5 influencers
• Remember the 80/20 rule
• Launched Affiliate Program
 Large Affiliates Drive 90% 0f the sale, so focus on them
 Special GiveAways, Coupons for Large Affiliates
 Tracking tool used – Refersion

8. 2. “Powered by” helps in virality
• Free Accounts Have a Powered By PushEngage enabled.
• This has helped in driving referral.
• Also when someone sends out a notification,the default UTM value
has pushengage their customers see it.
* For SEO In the room – no linking back

9. 3.Targeted Advertising
• Target where your customers hang out -
• Google Adwords
 Self Branded – defensive
 Competitor keywords – high ROI
 Remarketing – target who visited your site
• Facebook
 Video ads
 Whitepaper downloads

10. 4.
Communities
&
Marketplaces
• Facebook Groups for Your Target Audience
(Ecommerce, Marketers in our case)
9 Marketing groups on FB -
https://ahrefs.com/blog/facebook-marketing-groups/
• Quora
 Effective if answered with intent to help. Don’t spam
• Reddit
• Growthackers.com, Inbound.org
• Product Hunt for launch
• Marketplaces – Wordpress Plugin, Shopify marketplace
etc.
 Once launched get ratings to drive organic installs

11. 5. Content/ Organic Search /PR
• Post launch we wrote regularly on Marketing Blogs
• Write Regular Content on your own Blog & rank well for SEO.
 What to write – check trending articles in Buzzsumo on your keywords
• Host your own Podcast, Webinar and invite guest speakers.

12. 5. Content/
Organic
Search/PR
Conducting Regular Webinars
Speaking in Conferences, Podcasts, Webinars
Getting Reviews in Marketplaces – G2Crowd, Capterra
Whitepapers as lead magnets – then nurture the leads
SEO
- Avoid technical errors – check Google Search Console
regularly
- Load your page faster. If possible support AMP

13. AAAR model
*Reference Dave McClure Slide - https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version

14. Summary of Tools
• Competitor – BuiltWith, SimilarWeb, SEMRush
• Advertising – SEMRush, SpyFu, Google Keyword Planner
• Affiliates – Refersion, ShareASale
• Content Research – BuzzSumo, UberSuggest
• SEO – AHRefs, SEOMoz