How we got 100 signups for my SaaS with 0$ spent on promotion? AMA💥

Hey all!

I'm Rishabh, the founder of Checklisty - a gamified onboarding checklist app.

At the beginning of this month, Checklisty celebrated reaching it’s first 100 signups and I'm currently on track to double it in the next month! Thought I’d share how I went along and would love your reviews on what I could be doing more.

How I started

My main goal was to reach at least 100 signups to both, validate my idea and also get some feedback on my work, what improvements could be made and what I should be focusing on when building my product.

First 25 signups

My first step was to reach out to my personal network. My peer group, associates, mentors and everyone I knew in the relevant niche. I was clear on my target audience i.e. SaaS Founders.

I posted about Checklisty on all my social handles and also got some friends to help out with social media shout outs.

Forum sites -

I spent a while researching what young products did for signups on IndieHackers, Reddit, Facebook, Slack and Twitter and accordingly created a separate writeup for each of those platforms.

It is very important to target your audience in the format and language they speak. The real challenge here was to pinpoint what were the real pain points of my audience and what were the terminologies used to refer to them in order to relate better and convey my message right.

25 to 100 users

Where Do Your Users Hang out?

It is very easy to find forums and groups on all social media channels with quick google searches and some research on the site itself.

Evolve your Social Media Strategy - It is key to pinpoint these spaces and carefully figure out what problems are you really solving. These will help you figure out some key search terms which in turn lead you to relevant questions and posts on these platforms, allowing you to share your expertise on the topic, placing you as a leader in the space and hence guiding people to your profile leading them to your website.

Strengthen Your Online Discovery - I had created a landing page using Dorik which was fairly simple since it was just dragging and dropping the key elements I wanted and filling in the content.

I focussed on my website and the content I would write because all my efforts could only lead people to my website, but once they were in, what they saw and read was what would help lead them to a signup.

Cold mailing - Email copy
I curated a list of young startup founders and used my personalised email automation to reach out to them. What I requested from them was some review of my site in exchange for 2 months of free Checklisty subscription.

Positive responses to these mails counted as further signups since they were guaranteed users for my product when it was launched. It also meant I was going to get valuable feedback now as well as when I launched.

Further things I want to try to get me to 250 signups -

Guest-posting
Write a blog
Find some business angels
Attend podcasts
Write about it in my Newsletter

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.