How i got my first 100 users in less than 30 days on LinkedIn without spending $1 on ads
I started my 3rd saas about 5 months ago and we hit 100 users in less than 30 days of actually marketing it.
tried a lot of different things before figuring out what worked.
tried meta ads early on. burned through budget fast with no real data to optimize against, you need way more runway than most early stage founders have to make it work.
spent about 3 weeks on X. unless you already have an audience it just takes too long to build from scratch. not worth it at this stage.
The channel that changed everything for us: linkedin
i know a lot of you guys hate on linkedin but honestly it's one of the best acquisition channels out there right now, especially for b2b saas.
the type of content that worked best for us was lead magnets.
posts where you ask people to comment a specific keyword and they receive a value document in return. a guide, a framework, a breakdown, whatever is genuinely useful for your audience.
no product pitch, just value.
people love free useful stuff so the engagement is insane. comments go crazy, algorithm pushes it to way more people, and a chunk of them end up checking out your product on their own.
BUT...
content alone wasn't enough to hit 100 in under 30 days.
what got us there was reaching out to everyone who commented. they already engaged with your content so they're not cold at all.
at first we were doing it manually. the personalization was good but it was taking way too long.
you have to research each person, write something specific, it just doesn't scale when you're a team of two.
so we started looking at options. tested a few things like lemlist and waalaxy but wasn't a big fan of sending generic messages using sequences so we tried a few AI tools like kakiyo and as a small team that was the thing that made it actually doable. ig there are a few other tools doing similar things now but that's the one we tried and it worked for us.
ads are a trap at this stage.
content, especially on linkedin is free and it compounds.
outreach to people who already engaged converts way better than anything cold.
still the main channel we use today. went from 0 to 250 customers in less than 60 days and still growing