How I’d Get My First 100 SaaS Customers in 2026

Getting your first 100 SaaS customers is rarely about one viral launch, one perfect ad campaign, or one clever growth hack.

In most cases, it is much less glamorous than that.

It is about finding people who already have the problem, making it easy for them to experience value, and showing up repeatedly in the places where they are already looking for answers.

That is how we approached the early growth of Supademo.

I have now scaled two separate products to over $3 million in annual recurring revenue. With Supademo, we went from zero to more than 150,000 users and over $3 million in ARR in about two and a half years. But the early playbook was not complicated.

We did three things consistently:

1. Captured existing demand through search and comparison content.
2. Removed friction by manually creating value for early users.
3. Built distribution density across SEO, communities, word of mouth, and founder-led content.

If I were trying to win the first 100 SaaS customers today, this is the playbook I would use all over again.

Start by capturing the obvious demand first

The first 100 customers do not need to come from a brand-new category, a massive audience, or a completely original distribution strategy.

They usually come from people who are already looking for a solution.

As I shared in my conversation with Patrick Walls on Starter Story, “When it comes to the first 100 customers, capture the low-hanging fruit.”

That sounds simple, but many founders skip it.

They try to educate a market before capturing the people who already know they have a problem. They chase top-of-funnel awareness before owning bottom-of-funnel intent. They spend months building a brand before creating the pages buyers are already searching for.

For Supademo, this meant creating valuable content across the full funnel. That matters because buyers decide earlier than most founders think.

Here's the formula: First 100 customer momentum = existing demand × low-friction value × distribution density.
If any one part is missing, growth becomes harder than it needs to be

6sense’s Report found that 95% of buyers ultimately purchase from a vendor already on their Day One shortlist. If your product is not visible during that early research window, you may never enter the deal at all.

At the bottom of the funnel, we created detailed comparison pages that positioned Supademo against every relevant competitor we could find. Not just the obvious ones. Every competitor in the space.

Why?

Because buyers were already searching those names. They were already asking questions like:

• How does this product compare to that one?
• What are the best alternatives?
• Which tool is better for my use case?
• What does pricing actually look like?
• What are the tradeoffs?

If you are an early-stage SaaS founder, competitor comparison pages can feel uncomfortable. But they are one of the fastest ways to meet high-intent buyers where they already are.

The goal is not to attack competitors. The goal is to help buyers make sense of the category.

A useful version-one comparison page should answer the questions a buyer would ask before booking a demo or starting a trial. That includes positioning, use cases, pricing caveats, feature differences, customer fit, and honest limitations.

Do not wait until the page is perfect. Get the imperfect version live, see what ranks, then improve the pages that start getting traction.

Build free tools around adjacent intent

Bottom-of-funnel content captures buyers who are already comparing solutions.

But not every future customer starts there.

Some are searching for a workflow, not a product. Some are trying to complete a task. Some do not know your category exists yet, but they are experiencing a problem your product can eventually solve.

That is where free tools can become a powerful acquisition channel.

At Supademo, we created dozens of free tools in adjacent spaces. For example, tools around screenshots, SOPs, and tutorials.

The important part was that these tools were not gated. People did not need to create an account, book a call, or start a trial to get value. They could land on the page, use the tool, and experience a useful slice of the product immediately.

That small decision matters.

Early-stage founders often put too much friction between the user and the value. They ask for an email before proving the product is useful. They force signup before giving the user a reason to trust them. They optimize for lead capture before value creation.

Free tools work best when they reverse that order.

Give value first. Then give people a reason to sign up.

Today, these free tools bring in a meaningful share of our traffic and convert a strong percentage of visitors into signups. But the deeper lesson is not “build free tools.” The lesson is to find adjacent intent.

Ask yourself:

• What is my ICP already trying to do?
• What small task happens before they need my product?
• What template, calculator, generator, checklist, converter, or workflow can I give away?
• What can I make ungated so people experience value before they commit?

For a project management SaaS, this might be a free sprint planning template or workload calculator. For an onboarding SaaS, it might be a customer onboarding checklist generator. For a sales tool, it might be a discovery call scorecard or follow-up email builder.

The tool does not need to be huge. It just needs to solve a real task for the same audience you eventually want to convert.

Use programmatic SEO to answer workflow questions

The third part of our search strategy was top-of-funnel programmatic SEO.

We created step-by-step interactive demos for thousands of different workflows and keywords. These were practical pages around searches like how to export Figma to PDF or how to merge cells in Excel.

The bet was simple: if we could answer the user’s question in a more interactive and useful way than a static article, some percentage of those people would also realize Supademo could help them create similar guides for their own product.

This is where many founders misunderstand top-of-funnel content.

Top-of-funnel does not mean vague thought leadership. It does not mean publishing generic posts that are loosely related to your category. It means finding specific questions your audience already asks and answering them better than the alternatives.

For us, that meant putting the product experience directly inside the content.

A reader could land on a workflow page, click through the steps, and immediately understand the value of an interactive demo. The content solved their immediate problem while also showing them the product.

That is a much stronger motion than simply writing about the product.

The more useful the page is on its own, the less it feels like marketing.

Do things that do not scale to remove buyer friction

The second major part of the first 100 customers playbook is doing things manually.

I know that advice is repeated often, but founders still underestimate it because it does not feel scalable. But that is exactly why it works early on.

For Supademo, I personally offered to create free interactive demos for founders on Reddit and Indie Hackers.

The ask was simple: post your product URL, and I will create a Supademo for you.

Then I would record the demo, create the interactive walkthrough, and comment directly on the post with a link to the finished demo. They could sign up, duplicate it, and start using it right away.

That did three things at once:

1. It removed effort for the buyer. They did not need to imagine what Supademo could do for their product. They could see it.
2. It created a public proof loop. Other founders could click the demos, interact with them, and understand the product without a pitch.
3. It gave us fast feedback. By creating demos for real products, we saw where the product worked, where it broke, what people cared about, and what confused them.

This is the part many founders want to skip.

They want automation before learning. They want scale before proof. They want a funnel before enough real customer conversations.

But in the beginning, manual work is not a weakness. It is research, sales, onboarding, positioning, and product development compressed into one motion.

If you can manually create value for 50 or 100 people, you will learn faster than you would from another month of internal planning.

Build distribution density, not a single magic channel

The hardest thing about distribution today is that there is no magic channel anymore.

SEO works, but it is more competitive. Paid acquisition can work, but it is expensive. Communities work, but only if you actually participate. LinkedIn works, but not if every post reads like a launch announcement. AI search is growing, but the playbook is still evolving.

So the question is not, “Which one channel should I bet everything on?”

The better question is, “Where can I build distribution density?”

For us, that meant showing up across multiple channels at the same time:

• SEO and AI search through comparison pages, free tools, and workflow content.
• Communities like Reddit and Indie Hackers through hands-on, founder-led help.
• Word of mouth through users creating and sharing Supademos with others.
• LinkedIn and building in public through product updates, lessons, and founder storytelling.

At the time of the interview, roughly 30 to 40% of our visitors came from SEO and LLM discovery, around 30% came from word of mouth, watermarks, referrals, and product sharing, and around 20% came from building in public on LinkedIn.

The point is not that every SaaS company should copy that exact channel mix.

The point is that growth compounds when channels reinforce each other.

A comparison page helps a buyer discover you. A free tool lets them try something useful. A shared demo creates a product-led loop. A LinkedIn post builds founder trust. A community comment shows you are actually helping people, not just broadcasting.

None of these channels need to be massive on day one. But together, they create repeated surface area.

That is what early-stage SaaS needs.

Launch faster than feels comfortable

When founders ask what early SaaS teams get wrong, the biggest mistake I see is waiting too long.

They keep polishing. They keep comparing. They keep adding features. They keep convincing themselves that one more sprint will make the launch safer.

But the longer you wait, the longer you delay the feedback that actually matters.

“As a founder, the only advantage you have over an incumbent is urgency and speed.”

That does not mean shipping low-quality work. In the AI-first era, customers expect good craftsmanship, even from small teams. The bar for product experience is higher than it used to be.

But there is a difference between craftsmanship and perfectionism.

Craftsmanship means the product is clear, useful, and reliable enough to create value. Perfectionism means you are avoiding the market because feedback might be uncomfortable.

You do not answer those questions in a planning doc. You answer them by putting something in front of real users.

Stop obsessing over competitors and start building

Competition matters, but founders often give it too much emotional weight.

They use competition as a reason to delay. Someone else has more features. Someone else raised more money. Someone else has a bigger team. Someone else already ranks for the keyword.

But most startups do not die because a competitor exists.

They die because they never move fast enough, never focus clearly enough, or never get close enough to the customer.

My advice is simple: stop obsessing over the competition and the idea, and just start building.

The first 100 customers are not about proving you can dominate the category.

They are about proving that a real group of people has a painful problem, understands your value, and is willing to use or pay for what you have built.

Once you have that, you can improve the product. You can sharpen positioning. You can expand channels. You can build systems.

But you need the first proof first.

The first 100 customers playbook

Your first 100 customers come from proof, not polish.

Before you worry about scaling, prove three things: people are already searching for the problem, they can understand your value quickly, and they are willing to take the next step when you remove friction.

That means your job is not to build the perfect funnel. It is to create enough useful pages, tools, demos, and direct conversations to learn what actually moves buyers.

Start there. Capture the demand that already exists, help users experience value earlier, and keep tightening the motion based on real behavior.

If seeing the product is what makes the value click, create a simple interactive demo with Supademo and share it with your next prospect.