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Category: Business Growth Strategies
Tags: Content MarketingMarketing StrategiesReferral ProgramsSaaS GrowthUser Acquisition
Entities: FacebookGoogle AdsInstagramSaaSTikTok
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this product makes almost a million dollar a year and it's completely bootstrapped this product makes almost a million dollar a month and it's only 2 years old and this product and this product and this product and this product they're all killing it but what do they have in common are they just all
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Superior Products they are great products but the reason they're exceptional is because they figured out how to blow up their user base and how to keep up momentum and growth continuously month after month this is not just luck this is science and fortunately if we break down what these
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startups do well we can reproduce it and Achieve explosive results too in this video I will give you a road map containing three simple but Mighty strategies for getting more users at every stage of your SAS Journey we'll take a look at how to get the first 100 users and how to get the next 500 to
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1,000 users and finally we'll discover how successful SAS platforms use these strategies to blow up and continue to grow their user base to New Heights OH okay okay but let's just come back down to earth how about we start by getting the first five and probably most
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important users on board in order to get there we need to get a basic understanding of what it actually means to acquire a user a user acquisition simply means the act of gaining a new user for an app a platform or an online service every user acquisition has the
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following a method a channel and the cost and depending on the type of Acquisitions we're going for we need to plan these out and as you can imagine combining different forms of these three elements turns into a whole lot of different ways we can acquire a user
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ranging from completely free Acquisitions to paying a whole lot just to get one new user and ways that require a ton of work and doesn't scale and other ways that scale almost automatically without any additional effort and this is exactly why we need a road map tailored to the different
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stages of your SAS Journey cuz some of these methods work really well in the very beginning and others are excellent for putting your s g into growth mode or even automation mode where users just keep coming in but before we can get users we need to use these elements to
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design a user acquisition model and while these two elements are highly variable at least we can put the method into four different types let's have a look essentially all the different online marketing channels you can imagine fall into either one of these four methods incoming this means that
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the user reaches out to you they become aware of your product and they serve them El to sign up or makes a request to your team to get in contact with them so they can get on board outgoing this means that you reach out to the user the initial contact is on your side you
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initiate the conversation you make a sale and you convert them into a paid user referrals this happens when your current users will bring in new users who will in turn bring in more new users advertising this one is similar to the incoming method but what's specific with
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advertisement is that you pay to get in front of the user and make them aware of your product that way all right let's get busy we need to design two acquisition models that we want to use for the first stage of our road map we want to get our first five early users on board followed by getting the first
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100 real users for the first five users we're going to design a model that looks something like this for the method we're going to use outgoing which means that we will reach out to the first batch of users and hopefully get five of them on board the channel we'll be using is email or DMS on whatever message app
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you're using and the cost is $0 since we're going to do this ourselves manually one by one the idea here is pretty simple you're going to use your close Network family friends colleagues Partners people you know personally who you believe would benefit from your
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product you will tell them that you're launching a product and that you have an MVP ready and that you're looking for the first few users to get on board you will offer them a completely free account for live and all you will ask for in return is their feedback of of course not all users will naturally be a
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good fit but if your product solves an actual problem for some of these early users it should definitely be possible to get five of them on board once you have these first five users in place make sure to include them all in a small community either a Discord group a Facebook group a WhatsApp group or
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whatever works for you before going on to the next step you want to spend a bit of time with this handful of new users listen to their feedback fix bugs Implement some features according to their wishes and smoothing out some of the rough edges make sure to serve these users well let them have a big say in
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how the platform should work and which direction you should take remember how I said that these users are the most important ones it'll be clear why in a moment cuz what we're trying to do here is to make these users more than just users we're turning them into Advocates and this is crucial for the next acquisition model we're going to design
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this model will take us from five up to 100 users for the method we're going to use referrals and the channel we're going to be using is referral links that are current early users can use the cost of this model depends you could offer your first users a cut of the revenue
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for every new users they refer but in most cases I actually don't think this is necessary if you truly did a great job of serving your first five early adopters really well and really make them feel like they're part of this project chances are they'll be happy to help refer new users without getting paid so I would Design This model with
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zero cost but instead offer the new users a big discount for joining early and for making both your Advocates and the new users feel a bit special for being part of something up and cominging this also greatly helps your Advocates bring in new users since they now have a really good offer on their hand most
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early users would love to help all right time to get serious we're now entering stage two of the road map at this stage we want to acquire 500 to 1,000 new users none of our current acquisition model will work for this it
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would be very hard to do zeroc cost Cod emails and DMS at this scale to realistically get 500 to to 1,000 users on board we also can expect to keep incentivizing new users to yet again refer new users at this scale we need a completely new model for this let's
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design it for the method we're going to use incoming which means that we will have users reach out to us or to sign up themselves by going to a website in order for this to work at scale we need to create awareness and I know and probably you know that what I'm about to
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say is going to make me sound like a completely broken record cuz I've said this in so many of my videos already the best way to create an acquisition model using the incoming method is by creating content and building in public the channels we're going to use are social media and search engines create long
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form video content to show up on YouTube search create blog post to show up on Google create Tik toks reals and YouTube shorts to catch people's attentions on the flight share updates on LinkedIn your highs and lows new discoveries new Milestones share your lessons on Hacker
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News and Indie hackers and most importantly keep doing it this stage is long and hard you're not going to see results very fast but you need to keep going this also means that this acquisition model is going to come with cost you must expect to invest in good
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content and how much you're willing to pay for an acquisition entirely depends on the RPO or average revenue per user your SAS is generating there's going to be long stretches where your content won't get much engagement let alone result in conversions so you need to closely Monitor and optimize on this
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part but I guarantee you this acquisition model works it just takes time so keep going let the revenue from existing users pay for acquiring new users until you hit at least 500 users this way and finally we're ready for the last
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stage at stage three we're going to take our user base from a th users and aim at continuously growing it this doesn't mean that stage two is now over you should definitely keep the incoming acquisition model going and you should keep creating content stage three is a
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bit special because there are multiple directions you can take you can aim to grow your SS as fast and big as you can which requires reinvesting every dime into the next acquisition model we're going to look at or you can choose to start taking some profit for your hard work and instead aim to automate
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Acquisitions and have new users come in on autopilot in both cases there are two acquisition models that are perfectly suited for this stage let's design them in the first one we're going to use the advertisement method this means that we're going to take some of all the content that has proven to work well
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during stage two and turn them into paid ads that we can scale and use to reach a whole new level of awareness of course this also includes crafting testing and scaling new ad creatives and trying out new strategies for the channels I recommend Google ads for search ads and
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video ads on YouTube MAA for image ads and video ads on Facebook and Instagram and Tik Tok for video ads on Tik Tok again the cost of this acquisition model depends on the average revenue per user your s is generating and how big of a return on ad spend you wish if you're in
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growth mode you might not care much about a return at all and instead just max out the revenue to pay for new acquisitions if you want to build up a profit you might aim for a 3:1 return on ad spend which means that for each $1 you spend on acquiring a new user that new user earns your SAS $3 then you put
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one of those dollars into acquiring yet a new user and you keep $1 as a profit in the second acquisition model we're once again going to use the referal method but this time we're not just going to ask a handful of users to refer new users we're going to offer an affiliate program where new users can
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sign up create referral links and start spreading the word in order for it to work at this scale you definitely need to offer your affiliate Partners a proper compensation I've seen some affiliate programs offer 10 20 even a 50% share of all recurring Revenue that
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new referrals generate and once again how much you're willing to offer your affiliate Partners entirely depends on your direction if you're in growth mode you might want to share a big chunk of Revenue to keep everyone highly motivated and if you're in automation mode you can go as low as gift cards or
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unlocking new features or increasing usage limitations for your affiliate partners and obviously this road map can take many forms you can start by running ads from the very early stages and you can scale cold Outreach in the later stages too so this particular road map
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isn't the only one but it is the one that I have used to build and scale three products and it is the one that I would use again for my next SS now this whole video obviously assumes that you already have a product if you need to take a step even further back I highly
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recommend watching this video next if you got value from this video please give it a like and consider subscribing to my channel for more content like this I will see you soon for another video