I’m the founder of https://marketontology.com, if you think you can grow this platform to 1,000+ retained paying users then please message me, there is a significant amount of money to be made. Main customer acquisition channels are currently Google search ads (recently became more effective) and organic Reddit posting (has pretty much stopped working).
Want to get some insight on your real experiences and outcomes.
The ones worth your time:
SEO
If someone Googles "best [your service] near me" and you don't show up, you're invisible. This is the one channel that keeps paying you back for years. Slow to start, but the best long term investment by far.
YouTube
Make one good tutorial or explainer video and it works for you while you sleep. People watch, trust you, and buy. A video from 3 years ago can still bring in leads today.
LinkedIn
Only if you sell to other businesses. This is where the managers, founders, and decision makers actually hang out. Think of it as a networking event that runs 24/7.
Facebook
Still works great for local businesses and older demographics (35+). The ads targeting is excellent if you know your customer.
Situational picks:
Quora
Answer questions in your niche, Google indexes those answers, people find you for free. Underrated for experts and consultants.
Reddit
Don't hard sell here, people will roast you. BUT it's a goldmine for market research. Read what your customers complain about and use their exact words in your ads.
Instagram
Only worth it if your product is visual (food, fashion, fitness). Reels are king right now.
Pinterest
Surprisingly strong for lifestyle niches (home decor, recipes, travel, fashion). Content lives forever here.
Twitter/X
Hard to turn followers into customers directly. Better for building a personal brand or networking with other founders.
Medium
Write articles, Google picks them up. Easy way to build authority without running your own blog.
Skip unless you have a very specific reason:
Tumblr
Only useful if you sell to fan communities or artists. Low ROI for almost every other business.
TL;DR
Don't try to be everywhere. Pick 2 to 3 based on where your customers actually are:
B2B → LinkedIn + SEO
Local business → Facebook + SEO
Visual product → Instagram + Pinterest
Want free traffic forever → SEO + YouTube
Want to be seen as an expert → YouTube + Quora + Medium
Happy to answer questions if anyone's trying to figure out which platforms make sense for their specific business.
Using claude's skills late at night for a quick SaaS idea.
Want me to share the TrustMRR link?
One thing that confused me after launching my little SaaS in January: traffic was coming from everywhere but I had zero idea what actually produced customers.
Reddit posts, some SEO pages starting to rank, a bit of Twitter, a random Indie Hackers comment thread. My analytics dashboard looked busy but Stripe had like a handful of payments.
A typical night lately was me refreshing analytics at 12:30am while trying to finish deploying a small bug fix before going to sleep. Lots of visits, cool graphs, still no clue which channel deserved my time.
So a few weeks ago I tried a simple experiment: actually map traffic sources to Stripe payments.
Rough numbers from the last 3 weeks:
Tool wise I tested a few things while doing this. Plausible (really like it) was honestly refreshing compared to GA4. Way cleaner and privacy friendly, and it made it easy to see where traffic came from. But I still couldn't easily answer the question I actually cared about: which visits turned into Stripe payments.
That's what made me try Faurya in the middle of this experiment since it connects traffic data with Stripe revenue. Being able to see something like SEO to landing page to paid plan in one place was the first time the numbers actually made sense.
Still early though. One thing I don't love yet is the Faurya UI is a bit bare compared to something like Fathom or even Plausible. Feels very founder focused but not super polished yet. Also pretty Stripe centered so if you bill another way it probably won't help much.
Big takeaway for me: traffic volume is a terrible proxy for growth in the early days. The channel sending the most people might be the worst one for revenue.
Which channels actually converted for you early on?
Building in public means sharing the real stuff so here it is.
For the first several months of my SaaS organic SEO felt like a tax I was paying on my time without getting much back. Content was going out, traffic was trickling in, revenue from organic was negligible. I kept hearing that SEO was a long game and I kept telling myself that patience was the issue.
Patience wasn't the issue. The system was broken in three specific places and I just hadn't found them yet.
The first broken place was content format. I was writing for Google in the way guides from five years ago told you to. Long posts, keyword frequency, structure designed for crawlers. That content ranked for things occasionally and converted rarely because it wasn't actually a great reading experience. Nobody stays on a page that feels like it was written by someone following a checklist. The format I switched to through this SEO tool was simpler and better. One question per article, direct answer first, plain clear language throughout. Readers stay because they get value immediately. And this format is exactly what AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity look for when generating answers. My content started getting cited in AI responses for relevant queries and that traffic converts better than almost anything else because the person already has context before they land on the page.
The second broken place was indexing. I was naive about this for longer than I want to admit. Publishing content does not mean Google has seen it. For a site without massive authority Google crawls when it wants to and that can mean weeks between visits. This indexing tool automated the process of telling Google and Bing about every new page the moment it went live. Submissions go directly to Google's Indexing API and Bing's IndexNow automatically. The backlog of unindexed content cleared, new content started ranking fast, and the compound effect of that over a few months of consistent publishing was significant.
The third broken place was measurement. I was tracking traffic and making content decisions based on what got visits. That is a reasonable starting point but it is not the right metric to optimize for long term. This analytics tool connected my content performance directly to my Stripe data so I could see which pages were driving paid conversions not just sessions. That visibility changed everything. The content that looked good in analytics and the content that actually made money were different sets of pages and I had been investing effort in the wrong one.
Three broken places, all fixed. Organic is now the channel I'm most confident in.
As a solo founder I get feedback from everywhere.
The problem is none of it lives in the same place. I end up doing a manual copy-paste to Notion every few weeks, and I’m pretty sure I’m missing a lot of signals in between.
I’ve looked at Canny and Productboard but they feel overkill for where I am right now. And they don’t really help with the “feedback that happens in public” part.
Curious how others handle this. Do you have an actual system, or are you mostly winging it?
This is the analytics of my AI career tool, its getting some traffic, but not sure it is a good start or what
I’ve been collecting insights from SaaS founders, CMOs, growth marketers, and content leads about the SEO/content/AI visibility challenges they’re trying to solve this year.
The pattern was pretty clear:
A lot of SaaS teams are no longer focusing on ranking keywords.
They’re asking things like:
One thing that stood out to me is that many teams still have traffic, but they’re struggling with conversion or visibility in AI-assisted research. Some are ranking on Google, but not showing up when buyers ask AI tools for recommendations. Others are getting visits, but the content doesn’t clearly connect the problem to the product.
It feels like SaaS SEO is becoming less about “publish more content” and more about building a system:
intent → content → product clarity → proof → conversion path → authority → AI visibility
The biggest shift, in my opinion, is that generic content is losing value fast. AI can summarize basic informational content easily. What seems to be working better is specific content with real examples, comparisons, product context, customer proof, use cases, and clearer answers.
Curious what others are seeing.
If you work in SaaS, what’s the biggest SEO, content, or AI visibility challenge you’re trying to solve this year?
Hey everyone,
I will keep this short and straight forward.
The hardest part nowadays is finding people that will use your product because it's easier to build than ever. A few days ago with a help of a friend launched a saas product that I could not even explain but I managed to get 3 paying users at $50/month.
The whole idea is to know where to present that product. If you show it to the wrong audience then no one will buy it.
So here are some tips:
I have used Apollo, Hunter, Fonatica, Lemlist, Prosper, Snov and Google maps, the most important part is getting valid emails and lowering your bounce rate. Don't be afraid to pay for tools to double check your emails, there are even open source GitHub repositories with email validators so make sure you check those.
- I assume everyone knows this but still here it is, built your profile to the max even if you have to lie about your career. Just list job experiences that are related to your saas. People buy authority, if they can't trust the product then won't buy it, so build trust and then send connects to potential clients. (You can later automate the whole process with LinkedIn automation tools)
This one is simple, if you don't have an audience then find someone who does and make them work on %. You have tons of people on TikTok and instagram that are posting about AI or IT stuff.
For the first 5-10 users even manual outreach can work, if you can't find at least 2 users for your saas then either your product is bad or you are targeting the wrong audience.
Everyone is spamming with their products trying to make money, be different and be unique.
A bad product with good marketing will make more money than a good product with bad marketing.
Which means marketing is everything.
This was all written raw, without editing and without AI, so I hope that you will get my point.
Peace.
Seen this debate come up a bunch lately and I want to know where people actually land.
Some SaaS products make you drop a credit card before you can even poke around. Others let you in free and hope you eventually upgrade.
I've watched startups add the forced card and see conversions tank. Others did it and revenue actually went up because the only people signing up were the ones who were serious anyway. Seems like it completely depends on the product and the audience.
If you're building a SaaS right now, are you asking for the card upfront or letting people in free? What made you pick one over the other? And for those who've tested both, what actually happened when you switched?
Also as a user, does it instantly make you bounce when a product asks for payment info before you've seen anything? Or do you not care? What say you?
I am looking for best agency which provides services of creating new wikipedia page for b2b saas company.
Seeking suggestions from people who used their services. Thanks!
drop your SaaS below and I’ll give you one scaling bottleneck I notice
Could be:
positioning
conversion
onboarding
AI visibility
distribution
trust
retention
pricing
growth ceiling
No pitch. Just one honest observation
Paste the link only
someone asked in a post how to grow their SaaS and most of the top answers were mostly same around just post consistently
And I think it's not true cause if you do one thing wrong for 100 days you can't get good results cause you didn't change and improve and you will just brag about how consistent you were.
consistent bad content just means you're wrong more often. the founders i've seen actually get traction weren't posting every day. they were posting the right thing to the right person in the right sub at the right time. sometimes that's twice a week. sometimes it's once but it's relevant and good that can get results.
what actually matters before consistency is
do you know where your specific user goes when they're frustrated about the problem you solve.
do you know what words they use to describe that frustration in Like their pain phrases.
I think you have to figure out the room first and how to talk in it properly that can get you results. then show up consistently.
what's the one piece of SaaS marketing advice you wish would be heard first?
Wanted to share this for anyone sitting in the month-9 valley right now, because I was there not that long ago and I know how rough it gets.
Quick context on me. I run marketing at a 50-person B2B SaaS, roughly $5M ARR. I hired a content agency 14 months ago, BOFU-focused, interview-led model, low five-figure monthly retainer.
By month 6 we had 8 articles published and zero demos I could attribute to organic. Month 9 was the cliff for me. My CFO floated cutting it, and honestly, half my marketing-lead peer group had already pulled the plug on theirs. I made the case to hold one more quarter and I'll be real with you, I wasn't sure I was right.
Here's what I underestimated: the BOFU ramp is brutally slow. Articles we published in months 1-3 didn't start ranking until month 8-10. The ones from months 4-6 didn't rank until months 11-14. None of that shows up in your dashboard until the second half of year one, so if you're staring at month 9 numbers and panicking, you're basically looking at a snapshot that's structurally incomplete.
By month 14 I was seeing 2-3 demos a month from organic. Month 18 it's 3-5 and still trending up. Blended CAC is roughly half what I'm paying on Google Ads. The thing that surprised me most: it's a handful of articles from months 2-5 doing almost all the work. Not the breadth, not the volume, just a few that hit.
Curious who else here stuck past month 9 and what your inflection point looked like. And honestly, if you cut yours and regretted it later, I'd love to hear that story too.
Most of the advice I read said: launch consumer first, prove the product, then go upmarket. We did it backwards by accident, and I think it was the right call.
Before we had a landing page, a pricing tier, or even a name for the consumer version, a public sector organization reached out. They had a data sovereignty requirement that nobody in the market was meeting. They needed AI infrastructure that stayed on-premise, with no cloud dependency whatsoever. Not "we promise not to store your data." Architecturally impossible to exfiltrate.
We said yes. We spent weeks inside that procurement process.
Here's what that experience gave us that no amount of beta testing would have:
Public sector procurement is brutal. Every edge case gets filed as a requirement. Audit trails, offline operation, model transparency, data residency. We built all of it because we had to. When we later talked to lawyers, therapists, and consultants about the consumer version, they wanted exactly the same things. We already had them.
We didn't rush the consumer launch. We had runway. That meant we could sit with the product until the onboarding didn't need a manual, until the hard workflows actually worked on modest hardware, until the presets felt like real professional tools and not demo features. You can't do that on zero revenue.
When a prospective buyer asks "but is this actually private?" and your honest answer includes "it's the same architecture deployed for clients with legal data sovereignty obligations," the conversation changes. You're not making a promise. You're pointing at a proof.
The thing I'd push back on in the standard "consumer first" advice: it assumes your product is one where consumer feedback maps cleanly to enterprise requirements. For us it didn't. Our enterprise buyers were more demanding and more specific than our consumer buyers, and everything they forced us to build made the consumer product better.
If your product has any overlap with regulated industries or compliance-heavy buyers, I'd genuinely consider whether going enterprise first, even on a single deal, might be the smarter sequencing.
Curious if anyone else has done it this way or has thoughts on why the B2B consumer-first orthodoxy is so dominant.
I’ve built a dozen-plus small SaaS sites over the years, mostly free tools that solved problems that annoyed me personally.
A couple examples:
Whisper Meter - Anonymous Feedback
Most of these were built because the paid options were too expensive, too bloated, or just didn’t exist in the way I wanted them to. They both have 1000's of active users, but I can't seem to replicate that :/
Now that I’m trying to branch into an actual paid SaaS, and I’m realizing that building the product is the easy part. Getting even basic qualified traffic is where I apparently fall apart.
The product I'm working with is Incident Index. It started as a scratch-your-own-itch tool I built for myself after getting tired of turning messy incident notes into structured RCAs and stakeholder updates by hand.
I’ve since expanded it into a SaaS that helps teams turn incident chaos into clear follow-through: structured RCAs, executive-ready incident reports, corrective actions, and runbooks. The goal is to help teams capture the learning from each incident instead of ending up with scattered notes, half-finished postmortems, and no real operational improvement.
I’ve posted in the obvious places and got a little traffic, but it died off quickly. I’m not looking for a magic bullet, but I would appreciate practical advice from people who have been through this stage.
A few questions:
What worked for you when you were trying to get your first real SaaS users?
Did you have better luck with SEO, cold outreach, Reddit, LinkedIn, paid ads, partnerships, or direct community participation?
How did you figure out whether the issue was traffic, positioning, pricing, or the product itself?
For a niche B2B SaaS like this, would you start with content, direct outreach to the target user, founder-led LinkedIn, paid search, or something else?
I’m happy to share what I’ve tried so far if useful. Mostly looking for grounded strategies from people who have gone from "I built something" to "people are actually finding and using it."
We're expanding into DACH and Nordic markets next quarter and im stuck between these two for our outbound data. Currently running Apollo for US/UK but teh EU coverage is pretty weak.
Has anyone done a proper comparison of prospeo vs cognism for European contacts? Im mostly looking at Germany, Netherlands, and Sweden. Need verified emails but also mobile numbers since our SDRs do both cold calling and email sequences.
From demos, Cognism seems more established but thier pricing is nuts (they quoted us like 18k a year for 3 seats). Prospeo looks much better value for the same team size, but I'm wondering if you get what you pay for? Their data freshness claims seem almost too good. Weekly updates vs Cognism's quarterly refresh.
Main priorities are: GDPR-compliant mobile numbers that actually pick up. Accurate emails that dont bounce (our deliverability is already borderline). API that wont timeout when enriching 5000+ records. Technographic filters for companies using specific martech tools.
Anyone running either of these for European outbound? Whats your actual connect rate on mobiles?
We are a b2b saas business providing recruitment software for large companies. Target geo is India. Our highest daily budget is 2000inr/day. Impr share is at 14%, CTR 4% and conv is at 2.7% in the last 30 days. Compared to previous 30 days, impr are 25% less but impr share had increased.
Have search for recruitment platforms reduced? Google search trends show lower searches in May so that's a possibility. Also is our budget too low for this ICP in general?
I built a YouTube automation tool called AutoTube.
The idea came from my own workflow. I used to do YouTube automation myself, and I had built a small internal tool that helped me generate scripts, images, voiceovers, captions, videos, and upload them to YouTube faster.
At some point I thought:
“Why not turn this into a proper tool for other creators?”
Long story short, I launched it.
The tool is now live, and the response has been encouraging on the surface. I’m getting around 3–4 signups per day, and in roughly two weeks I’ve crossed 120+ signups.
But here’s the problem:
Nobody is buying.
People sign up, check it out, maybe test it, but they don’t convert to paid users.
So I’m looking for honest feedback from people who understand SaaS, creator tools, YouTube automation, AI products, or landing page/product positioning.
I want to know:
Please be brutally honest. I’m not looking for compliments. I want to know why someone would sign up but not buy.
Tool: autotube.org
I’m happy to answer questions about the product, pricing, audience, or what users are doing after signup.
