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Practical marketing resources to get the first 10/100/1000 users for your SaaS/App/Startup

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Marketing for Founders

TL;DR: This is a collection of practical marketing resources to get the first 10/100/1000 users for your SaaS/App/Startup.


Let’s face it. Marketing is tough, especially if you’re a technical founder moving the first steps with your startup.

While there’s a ton of advice out there, most of the time it's about scaling some VC-funded startup with a big marketing budget to $1,000,000 ARR and 100,000 users.

Inspirational? Sure. Actionable? Not really.

This is why you’ll find here a practical collection of startup resources, tips, and some tools to help you:

  • 🎯 find the first users for your startup
  • 📣 promote your SaaS without a budget
  • 🚀 build your Go-To-Market strategy


Ready to get started? Just pick a topic:

PS. Leave me a star ⭐ or say Hi on X/Twitter if you find this useful!


📣 Places To Launch Your Startup

Launch platforms, software directories, and communities are an easy way to get the first users for your startup and a tiny, steady flow of people to your SaaS. Some of the following may not be relevant for your product, but (hopefully) can give you ideas on what to look for.

Launch platforms:

Software directories:

Lifetime deals platforms & groups:

Subreddits (always check the rules before posting anything):

PS. You can find more websites to launch your startup here (thanks Sandra) and, if you're running an AI startup, here.
PPS. You can find a few tips for writing a great launch post here.




📷 Social Media Marketing

Managing multiple accounts across all social media platforms can be pretty intense (there’s a reason why it’s a full-time job); however, there are a couple of strategies worth trying: building in public and social listening.

Building in Public - it’s the easiest social media marketing tactic. In a nutshell, it’s about using your personal profile to share expertise, product updates, and behind-the-scenes content:

Social listening - tracking and joining online conversations on topics related to your Startup is pretty helpful to get in touch with users and learn more about them:

Other Social Media Marketing Guides:




❄ Sales & Cold Outreach

Most people hate cold outreach and everything connected with direct sales. Yes, depending on your approach, it might be hard to scale and time-intensive, but cold emails and DMs are the most straightforward way to get in touch with potential users, collect precious early-stage feedback and find the first customers for your startup.

So, how can you find people on target? What should you write in your messages? And how can you scale cold outreach? Here are a few ideas to set up your SaaS sales strategy:




📈 SEO

Should you focus on SEO in the early days of your startup? Probably not, SEO takes time (and backlinks), but this doesn’t mean you should neglect it either.

SEO is the foundation for many startups, and it can get you a steady source of traffic without having to spend anything other than the time to do it.

These guides and tips will help you get started:

PS. If you're new to SEO and don't know where/how to start check out LearningSEO and The Complete Guide to Programmatic SEO.
PPS. If you're building iOS apps also check these two ASO guides: Create an App Store listing that ranks and Rank higher on App Store




🤖 LLM SEO, AEO, GEO

How to get recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini is probably the most popular question from founders in 2025. And it’s easy to understand why, you can get mentioned by a citation tomorrow and start showing up immediately, even if you’re an early-stage startup.

So, where can you learn how to get found in AI search?




🦊 Marketing on Reddit

Everyone says Reddit is the go-to platform to get initial traction and the first users for your product. There’s a community for almost every topic, plus more and more people (and LLMs) are using it to bypass SEO garbage and find what real humans actually think.

But Redditors have an almost supernatural ability to detect marketing, and when founders try to sneak in promotional content, it gets downvoted into oblivion (if you’re lucky).

So, how to promote an App/SaaS/Startup on Reddit without getting banned?

PS. If you're looking for a list of subreddits that allow self-promotion go back to Places To Launch Your Startup, and if you're looking to set up your Reddit social listening strategy go back to Social Media Marketing.




💌 Email Marketing

Email marketing can help you with almost anything: onboarding new users, boosting free-to-paid conversions, promoting affiliate/referral programs, and collecting feedback. Plus, it’s often your only option to engage users outside of your product.




🧲 Content Marketing

Just like SEO, content marketing is one of the first growth levers to pull for a startup. This time, instead of creating content to praise search engines, you’ll be sharing it where your audience hangs out and hijacking trends for free exposure:




💸 Ads

Every startup will think about adding a paid channel to their marketing strategy sooner or later and Ads are one of the best ways to accelerate user acquisition.

Here are a few guides to help you avoid burning through your budget before getting any return from your Ad campaign:




👩‍🏫 Influencer Marketing

Going where the audience is is the first rule of marketing. That’s why partnering with content creators and influencers can help you grow your startup and connect directly with customers.

However, online advice on influencer marketing is often bad and outdated, so let’s take a look at a few firsthand experiences:




💑 Affiliates and Referrals

Word-of-mouth is often the main growth driver for bootstrapped startups. Why? Because affiliate and referral programs are easy to set up, cheap (you only pay if the user converts), and build trust and credibility (when users recommend your product, you’re not only getting traffic, but also social proof that it works).




🛠 Free-Tool Marketing

Free mini tools are your best bet on going viral, generating PR coverage and backlinks, and driving a ton of organic traffic. Plus, it doesn’t feel like marketing (that’s the reason why it’s also called Engineering as Marketing).




🎯 Landing Pages, Messaging and Positioning

Most startup websites are ineffective. They fail to tell who the product is for, what the product does, and why it is better. This means confused visitors, poor conversion rates, and wasted marketing $$$.

Here are a few resources to turn your website into a sales and marketing asset:




🎰 Pricing

“Your product delivers the value added to target customers; with pricing, we capture added value back to build a sustainable business.”

Confused? You’re not alone. Pricing and business model are the toughest things to crack for a startup.

Here are a few frameworks to get your price right:




🔥 Conversion Rate Optimization

Little tweaks can have a huge impact on conversions. Here are a few ideas ready for you to A/B test:




💡 Idea Validation

One of the most common and painful mistakes you can make is having an idea and immediately spending all your time building a product without validating demand first.

Some ideas are great, but most aren’t worth your time. So, how can you validate a startup idea?




⚗ User Research

Talk to your customers! They’ll let you know what to build, what to improve, and what to leave alone!

Sure, but when you’re running a SaaS/App, customers sign up by themselves, learn how to use your product on their own, and only reach out if they need help or support.

So, how do you get feedback? Here are a few resources to get you started:




🧨 Other resources




👨‍💻 About

This was inspired by Marketing for Engineers (thanks Lisa & Ahmed!) and is created and maintained by Edoardo Stradella (Twitter/X).
All resources, guides, and tools were done by independent authors and companies. All credentials are included.

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Practical marketing resources to get the first 10/100/1000 users for your SaaS/App/Startup

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