How To Acquire Your first 100 Customers for a SAAS company, selling to Small/Medium Business. Lessons shared from our journey at PushEngage, a platform for web push notifications, with customers in 125+ countries. This was presented at Nasscom Product Conclave Go To Market Summit on 26th Nov 2018, and NPC Pune in March 2019

1. 0 TO 100
CUSTOMERS
RaviTrivedi, Founder, PushEngage
@pushengage, @trivediravi, ravi@pushengage.com

2. Our
Background
3 Billion Notifications/Month
2 Billion Visits/Month Through our Platform
Support All Web and Mobile Browsers
Personalized and Contextual Notifications

3. What Are
You
Hunting
• 0 to 100 Customer journey varies for what are you
hunting
Source: Christoph Janz @ Point Nine Capital.
Annual Ticket Size Number of Customers Type
$100,000 1,000 Enterprise
$10,000 10,000 Medium size
$1,000 100,000 Small Business
$100 1,000,000 Consumers
To Build a $100 Million Annual Revenue Business
• Our session focusses on Small to Medium Business

4. Tactics Vary
as per stage
Source: Close.io

5. 3 STEP
MARKETING
PROCESS

6. 1. Identify
Your Target
Market
• What BusinessYou Are In ? [Twitter 140
char]
• Who are you Marketing to?
– Is ItTargeted Enough?
– Where can you find yourTarget Audience?
• Is your market large, but still targeted?
• The more focused your target market,
the lower the CPA

7. 2. Hone your
Messaging
on Landing
Page
• Why is Messaging Important ?
• Bounce Rate. Good benchmark
• Create Messaging ForTarget Audience
– Broad messaging has poor conversion
• OK to ignore a set of audience, as long as
you reach target audience.
• Don’t create messagingYOU want, create
messaging for what the customers CARE
about.

8. Lessons from 2 landing pages

10. 3. Pick Top
3 Marketing
Tactics &
Test
• List all the places where your target
customers are
– UseTools to analyze competitors dominant
acquisition strategy
• Analyze the 3Tactics/Channel With
Highest Expected ROI &Volume
– Use keyword and other research to get to
expectedVolume/ROI.
– Measure ROI of channels. Remove Channels that
don’t perform
Channel Volume [Clicks] ROI
Adwords 10,000 15%
Email 5,000 25%

11. SimilarWeb – Competitor Analysis
Tool

12. Getting
0 to 10
Customers
 Customer Development Stage Leads
 Pre-launch leads
 Adwords, Facebook ads
 Leverage Personal Network
• Send Email to all your Linkedin network (Holiday outreach)
 Importance of Customer Support
 In Do It Yourself SMB market this is a sales channel, so focus on it
 Learning about customer, their roadblocks in onboarding, product
feedback

13. From 10 – 100
Customers
5 Tactics That
Worked for Us

14. 1. Influencers
/ Affiliates
• Offered Lifetime free to 5 influencers
• FindTop Influencers in marketing field whom we knew
• LaunchedAffiliate Program
– Large Affiliates Drive 90% 0f the sale, so focus on them
– SpecialGiveAways, Coupons for Large Affiliates
– Tracking tool used – Refersion

15. 2. “Powered
by” works
• Free Accounts Have a Powered By PushEngage
enabled.
• This has helped in driving referral.
• Also when someone sends out a notification,the
default UTM value has pushengage their customers
see it.
* For SEO In the room – no linking back

16. 3.Targeted
Advertising
• Google Adwords
– Self Branded – defensive
– Competitor keywords – high ROI [ Check trademark, local laws]
– Remarketing – target who visited your site
• Facebook
– Video ads
– Whitepaper downloads

17. 4. Communities
&
Marketplaces
• Facebook Groups for Your Target Audience
(Ecommerce, Marketers in our case)
9 Marketing groups on FB - https://ahrefs.com/blog/facebook-
marketing-groups/
• Quora
– Effective if answered with intent to help. Don’t spam
• Reddit
• Growthackers.com, Inbound.org
• Product Hunt for launch
• Marketplaces – Wordpress Plugin, Shopify marketplace
etc.
– Once launched get ratings to drive organic installs

18. 5. Content/
Organic
Search /PR
• When we launched, we wrote an article in Marketing
Blog
• Get Guest Post in Leading Marketing Blogs
• Write Regular Content on your own Blog
– What to write – check trending articles in Buzzsumo on your
keywords

19. 5. Content/
Organic
Search/PR
• Conducting RegularWebinars
• Speaking in conferences
• Getting Reviews in Marketplaces – G2Crowd, Capterra
• Whitepapers as lead magnets – then nurture the leads
• SEO
- Avoid technical errors – check Google Search Console regularly
- Load your page faster. If possible, supportAMP

20. AAAR
model
Refer Dave McClure Slide - https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-
long-version
We focused only on Acquisition in this session, but next stage/flywheel of SAAS important

21. Summary of
Tools
• Competitor – BuiltWith, SimilarWeb, SEMRush
• Advertising – SEMRush, SpyFu, Google Keyword
Planner
• Affiliates – Refersion, ShareASale
• Content Research – BuzzSumo, UberSuggest
• SEO – AHRefs, SEOMoz