How I built my first SaaS business to $10,000 per month without paying a dime for advertising (so you can do the same for your freelance practice, agency, or SaaS):

I created my B2B prospecting tool, UpLead, roughly 5 years ago. At the time, my marketing budget was close to $0. Paid ads were off the table, and attracting leads with content was too slow. Here’s what we did to find users quickly and affordably…

1. Generated Leads The crucial question I asked myself at first was “who would get value out of using my SaaS?” The answer was sales teams who already use a similar tool, so I scraped their info with UpLead and put it all on a list.

2. Thought Of An Angle Now, people who are already using another company aren’t going to switch for no reason. So, I had to come up with an angle. That angle was real-time verification of leads, which most tools didn’t have in 2017 (many still don’t).

3. Came Up With A Sweetener That angle was solid on its own, but I needed to sweeten the deal a bit. So, I offered some leads for free so they could get a taste of the tool without paying. This led to an extremely high conversion rate.

4. Sent Cold Emails With leads, an angle, and a sweetener, it was time to start sending cold emails. I wrote a short but persuasive template that used the angle and sweetener, then started sending it out to the list of leads.

5. A/B Tested To Optimization My first version was decent, but it wasn’t perfect. After gathering open rate, reply, and click-through data, I made edits, A/B tested constantly, and kept going until my series of emails was converting. Then I did the same for my landing pages.

6. Hit $10/mo & Reinvested Scraping leads was free for me, and for you, it would be affordable. Same for sending, testing, and optimizing. After that, I invested my MRR into SEO and ads. Now we have thousands of users and a variety of sales channels.

Adapt this plan to your offer, then start optimizing. Scrape, create angle, contact, optimize, reinvest. Simple.

That's everything. If you liked this thread: 1. RT the tweet below 2. Follow me @Will Cannon 3. Try my software tools (links in bio) Thanks for reading