FirstPay: Targeted Outreach for Indie SaaS First Customers

How do you find your first paying customers? What worked for you?

Building is the easy part, marketing is the real boss fight! 🎯 For me, Cold DMs to a very niche target audience on Reddit worked way better than any fancy launch. Don't sell, just solve their problem first.

You need to approach SaaS selling the same as service selling at first. It won't happen passively at first because you're going to run into issues with people 1) not knowing you exist and 2) not trusting you. Service selling lives on client relationship and trust. When you have customers recommending you and reviewing you, people will subscribe on your website. The recommendations and reviews build the trust.  In absence of that, you need to do a lot more work. Direct outreach and conversations give you a chance to do that. It won't scale, but it will help you get your first few paying customers and reviews. Those conversations help you understand more about the problems your customers want you to solve as well. There's your next features and fuel for your next advertising campaign. Ads can solve the visibility problem, but can't solve the trust problem. Offering a free trial or an always free option can resolve that. But you need to be able to sustain the cost of that, and many users will sign up and never do anything. So this often ends up being lead gen for direct outreach prospects at first as well. Switch from trying to sell the SaaS to trying to speak to your idea customer. The first few sales will come through those conversations and then you can use reviews, recommendations to make your next few sales easier until you have a more passive sales process. That's what's always worked for me and the people I work with. Happy to answer questions if you have any.