One problem I have bootstrapping my SaaS is that I have no money to market. I can tweet and do direct marketing but that is slow and time consuming. Any recommendations from the crew on HN with how I can market to a large audience without needing a huge budget to spend on Adwords and things like that?
> Once we hit about $20,000 MRR (through direct sales and word-of-mouth) we added an affiliate program. That worked exceptionally well because bloggers — our target market — are used to using affiliate programs to generate revenue. Also, if a small business owner loves your product they might tell 2-3 friends. But if a blogger loves your product, they'll tell 20,000 readers! So we had a very natural distribution path built in.
> We decided to pay a 30% recurring commission each month, rather than a large upfront commission, mainly because we didn't have any cash and couldn't cashflow anything up front. That turned out to be a great decision since many bloggers want a predictable, recurring income source.
> Later on we started doing webinars with our affiliate partners as a way to help them drive more sales. This not only grew our email list significantly (up to 50,000 subscribers in a year), but also drove a ton of new revenue. Today we pay out just over 10% of our revenue each month to our affiliates."
> "Once we hit about $20,000 MRR"
Interesting. I wonder why the $20k MRR... I have $50 MRR (dollars... not thousands). But I don't see anything about affiliate marketing that would prohibit starting early.
For some $N MRR (magic point where you look for scalable channels), N should be large enough that you have a product that your market wants and will pay for, and the market is large enough that you were able to manually scale it to N.
The heuristic is something like "if you can get big enough doing low-efficiency/manual marketing, you've likely gotten close enough to the important things* and can move on to testing scalability".
* things like product/market fit, market size, clear communication, well defined value prop, etc.
It's not so nice because it can screw consumers over a bit (e.g. try and find a non-biased review of an affiliate marketed product such as convertkit)
If you're looking for a free source of relatively fresh ideas, try https://www.julian.com/learn/growth
Do you do content marketing (blogging) to an email list?
You could also start writing about your market, to gain a following who could become your initial users but that usually takes a long time to ramp up.