Early-stage SaaS marketing: how to find your first customers

Executive overview

Early-stage marketing is fundamentally different from later-stage marketing. When you have no customers, every variable is unknown — pricing, positioning, copy, channels, onboarding. Most marketing advice assumes product-market fit already exists.

Three mental frameworks cut through the noise: manage the product/marketing pendulum, do things that don't scale while hunting for things that do, and start from your innermost circle of reach before going cold.

Build from your existing network outward — cold audiences scale, but they're the last resort, not the first.

Why early-stage marketing is harder

• Pre-PMF: nearly every variable is unknown at once (pricing, copy, channels, onboarding, referrals)
• Post-PMF: most variables are settled; the main open question is where to find new customers
• The complexity gap between these two stages is the reason generic marketing advice fails founders early on

The product/marketing pendulum

• Single founders constantly alternate between building features and finding customers
• Going into "build mode" for too long kills momentum — six months is the absolute ceiling before launch
• Launch is the starting line, not the finish line
• As the business matures, the swing becomes a steady rhythm rather than a frantic alternation

Do things that don't scale — while looking for things that do

• One-time tactics (AppSumo, Product Hunt) create revenue spikes but plateau without recurring foundations
• Long-term tactics (SEO, partnerships) take too long to generate early survival revenue
• The right move: use non-scalable tactics to stay alive while building scalable channels in parallel
• SaaS makes non-scalable launches more valuable: a spike in signups turns into recurring MRR, not a one-time sale

Concentric circle marketing

Start at the center and work outward. Each ring is harder to convert but larger in reach:

1. Your audience — podcast listeners, email subscribers, social followers. Communicate value without a hard pitch; be transparent or educational.
2. Your network — people you can email directly. Identify who might want early access or who has influence over your target market.
3. Your network's audience — ask trusted contacts if you can appear on their podcast or contribute to their community. Lead with education, not promotion.
4. Cold audiences — organic search, paid ads, webinars. Highest scale, lowest conversion, hardest to make work early.

Focus on rings 1–3 before investing heavily in ring 4.

Sessions at MicroConf Remote 2.0

• AppSumo: Ruben Gomez (DocSketch) — numbers, support load, and whether your app is a good fit
• Product Hunt: Derek Reimer (SavvyCal) — launch tactics and MRR results from a recent launch
• Q&A sites (Quora, Stack Overflow): Mike Ritchie (Sequel) — specific threads and approach used early on
• SEO for documentation: Natalie Luneva — ranking help docs for questions your customers are already searching
• Partnerships: Leo (LexGo) — how they secured accelerator partnerships to reach their target market