How Do I Find More Customers?

There’s a harmful myth among aspiring founders that you can build a great company simply by building a great product. Do that, and it will “sell itself.”

This myth is perpetuated by successful companies—think of Apple or Basecamp—where it appears their products do sell themselves. But really, they are so good at marketing that it’s invisible to most people. Think about it. Many of us tune into Apple’s product announcement live streams, which are essentially hour-long commercials.

Yes, you can get lucky with early adopters and word of mouth. Some people do. But the vast majority of the time, if you’re going to be successful, you have to build a good product and market it well.

And if you’re going to grow your SaaS business to seven figures, you have to figure out how to spread the word without pouring millions of venture capital dollars into glossy launch parties and billboard ad campaigns.

As a founder with a technical background, I understand the tendency to shy away from marketing and sales, hoping the business will catch on based solely on the virtues of the product.

I did that for years until I realized the only way to reliably build a business was to get good at marketing.

I know for a fact marketing is a huge area of concern for most SaaS startups because when we ask in the TinySeed application what a company’s biggest hurdle is, the vast majority say they need more customers.

Many people can write code. But creating a product people want and actually selling it is relatively hard. To build a seven- or eight-figure SaaS business, you need to develop your marketing tool belt.

At some point, you’ll reach the stage where you have enough revenue to hire a marketer. But you’ll still need to learn marketing well enough to get to that place.

Marketing strategy is hard (and expensive) to hire out, and you’ll need to know enough about marketing to understand whether or not the marketer you hired is doing anything useful. Marketing strategy is all about deciding which approaches to try in which order, tracking the return on investment (ROI) of those approaches, and building on them to grow the business. It’s a difficult role to outsource.

Once you have a marketing strategy, it’s possible to hire someone to implement each piece of it. You can hire a freelancer or agency that specializes in pay-per-click (PPC) or SEO. You can hire copywriters, social media managers, and graphic designers.

But at a minimum, founders need to learn SaaS marketing strategy or risk losing control of and visibility into a crucial part of their business.

Let’s take a quick look at the basics, then talk about scaling from there