Everything I did to get my first paying customer 🥳

Starting a new SaaS can be exciting and overwhelming at the same time. It's exciting to see your vision come to life and the potential for growth and success. But it can also be overwhelming because, in order for your business to succeed, you need customers. And acquiring those first few customers can be a daunting task.

But don't worry, it's not impossible! Inspired by this post, I'm here to share with you how I acquired my first customer for my SaaS, MentionFunnel.

Metrics

Total Reddit posts: 8
Total IH posts: 3
Total IH comments: 20+
Blog posts: 1

Total emails: 47
Opened: 23
Clicked: 14
CTOR: 60.87%

Twitter Followers: 73
Build in public tweets: 24

Total meetings: 0
Total signups: 24
Total paying customers: 1
Total mentions tracked: 2691

Total revenue: $15.00 🤑

Story

First, let me tell you a little bit about MentionFunnel. It's a tool that helps people find new customers by notifying them whenever their keywords are mentioned on social media. Currently it only supports Reddit, but I plan on adding more platforms such as Twitter, IH and Hacker News in the future.

There are quite a few competitors. Other tools that support a lot more platforms, but are also more expensive (and imo missing in UX and other features). My tool is a more focussed, cheaper version that tries to let you reply to people who mention your keywords without any friction. Others have mentioned that competing on price is generally not great, but until I have actually verified this is something people will pay for, I don't mind having a lower price than others.

I chose to focus on posting on Reddit and IH as my typical customer will probably be hanging out there, looking for ways to find their first customers. I'm the same and I've actually written about how to find your first customers on Reddit here, which is the same process that I followed (I also list each subreddit and the results here). As for IH, I simply found posts where I thought I could plug my product w/o coming off as spammy (since it was always somehow related, e.g. it solves a problem someone was complaining about). This resulted in around 70 people joining my waiting list, but I managed to somehow lose 20 of those 😅

I also started posting on Twitter, where I have 73 followers (at the time of writing). It started off much lower on like 30 followers and it only resulted in a couple of sign ups, but I still love it and will continue using it. I mainly focussed on posting screenshots of MentionFunnel's features while building them, which people seemed to like.

I decided to go with freemium instead of trials, as my priority is getting more users, which should hopefully result in more feedback and allow me to improve the product. The launch of the beta was last week (30th of November) and since then I honestly did not do that much (except write this post and post on Twitter) since I was busy with my actual job.

I'm honestly super surprised someone actually started paying already, and while I am super happy about it, I somehow feel like I don't deserve it and they will churn immediately. Can't dwell on that though, so my next steps are to just keep on building 💪