How I Got My First 100 SaaS Customers (Zero Ad Spend)

Do Things That Don't Scale

Paul Graham was right. For the first 10 customers, I manually onboarded them. I jumped on Zoom calls. I set up their accounts myself. I acted like a concierge service, not a software company.

Channel 1: Cold DMs

I searched Twitter for "Shopify help" and "WhatsApp business". I found people complaining about existing solutions. I DM'd them: "I'm building a tool to fix exactly this. Want to try it for free?"
**Conversion Rate: 15%**

Channel 2: Reddit & Communities

I didn't spam links. I wrote detailed guides (like "How to use WhatsApp API properly") in r/marketing and r/eccommerce. At the very end, I mentioned: "I built a tool to automate this."
**Traffic: 2,000 visitors. Customers: 40.**

Lessons Learned

You don't need Facebook Ads. You need to be helpful, present, and persistent. Go where your customers are hanging out and solving their problems.