Marketing Tactics for SaaS

“Coding is easy. Marketing is hard.”

As someone who tried to learn code and failed time and time again, I couldn’t actually believe people would say such things. Surely, marketing is the easy part, no?

Now that I’m doing it, I would say marketing is not necessarily easy — but I wouldn’t it say it’s hard, either.

Marketing is just slow. Especially when you’re trying to do it for free.

And it’s experimental.

You probably won’t find the perfect acquisition channel on your first try. Or your fifth. But if you stay at it, you’ll eventually hit.

I’ve decided to publicly document every marketing tactic I’ve tried to grow Fantastic Forms. It’s a good way to track my progress, help other SaaS founders with marketing ideas, as well as stay accountable and not get complacent.

I’ll obviously add to it as I try new things, so for now this is an incomplete list of everything I’ve attempted:

1. Bulk directory inclusion

Cost: $99-297

Using a service like SR Booster or SubmitJuice, you can have your startup listed in all the well known directories such as PitchWall, MicroLaunch, TinyLaunch, Uneed etc. You can certainly do manual submissions yourself, but these services can help save you a ton of time and submit to hundreds of directories in a matter of a few days.

2. Social listening

Cost: $0

If you want to organically include your app in online conversations via Reddit, you need a social listening tool. There are many out there; I personally use F5Bot to monitor what people are saying about specific topics such as competitors or form building tools in general. This gives me an opportunity to promote Fantastic Forms in a helpful way without getting banned or considered spam.

3. Niche community

Cost: $0-500

Not every community is created equal. Regardless, connecting with other humans in some capacity is always a good idea if you want to organically grow your following, reach and influence. It’s obviously not a sprint, and you don’t want to immediately promote your project on day one, but organically mentioning it at appropriate times can be of immense value. And always try to gauge just how active the community is before joining; the last thing you want to do is drop a few hundred dollars to join a dead channel.

4. Forum signature link

Cost: $0

Forums are not dead. There are many out there extremely relevant to your industry who are waiting for someone like you to join their ranks. As mentioned, you don’t want to spam your solution all over the boards, but be an active and helpful member of the forum. In exchange, most allow you to add a signature link which will appear at the bottom of all your posts. In other words, if you have posted 500 times on that forum, your link will appear 500 times in those specific threads. It’s a great method to promote your startup in a scalable and sustainable way. For example, I've been a member of DigitalPoint, WickedFire and WarriorForum for 20+ years, so it's a no brainer for me to ensure my signature for all of them links to Fantastic Forms.

5. WordPress plugin

Cost: $0

Plugging your app into a large ecosystem is always a good idea. This isn't going to work for every type of project, but hopefully yours can be compatible for some type of marketplace such as Shopify, Salesforce, Airtable etc. It’s a great way to get discovered and you don’t have to do much extra coding to make it eligible (most of the time.) It's one of the most effective and high-leverage tactics you can employ.

6. Affiliate program

Cost: $0-100

Affiliate programs are fairly common these days: promote someone else’s product and collect a commission if you convert users. Having others promote your product in the hope of a sale is a wonderful strategy both from a conversion and SEO perspective. When search engines notice you are being cited and hyperlinked more often, they are more likely to recommend and rank you higher in their algorithm which, in turn, promotes your site and your affiliate program by default, resulting in more affiliates being recruited and your site being promoted further. It’s an amazing snowball effect that takes some traction to get going, but once it does, can become your main acquisition channel.

7. Programmatic SEO

Cost: $0

The idea behind programmatic SEO is to create thousands of pages at scale, targeting unique and relevant keywords that search engines like Google can display when a user queries them. Fantastic Forms has ~500 templates that were created for this purpose - to rank for unique terms like “intake form template” and “incident report form template” in Google for traffic and users. That’s the goal, anyway. Programmatic SEO is only as powerful as the amount of link building you do alongside it. There’s no point in developing 10,000 pages if none of them are being indexed and served by Google, so consider it a long-term strategy and not a quick win.

8. Free tools

Cost: $0

Creating free tools is great away to gain traction and traffic. If your tool is valuable enough, word will spread and links will begin to flow, offering subsequent SEO benefits to your main app. I’ve created a handful of free tools for users, but which I also use quite often myself, so it’s not a total loss even if this tactic doesn’t take off.

9. Mentorship

Cost: $50-5000

I don’t think I need to espouse the value of a mentor, but I believe it’s important to note that not all mentors are created equal. That should be common sense, but sometimes we just align with people we like or are drawn to, as opposed to connecting with people who’ve actually been where we want to go. This is one of those tactics that are hard to quantify and rationalize with a hard ROI, but using a platform like Clarity or MentorCruise allows you to browse through a list of willing and available candidates who can potentially help you grow to the next level. Be thoughtful and willing to speak to multiple mentors before settling on one.

10. X Premium

Cost: $50-80

As a solopreneur, you need to be on X. I've been actively posting since 2022 and lurking a lot longer than than, but with a special yearly promo for $50, I thought "why not?" and took the gamble. I don't have any set expectations and know it will probably not be something I renew next year for the regular $80 price tag, but I might be pleasantly surprised by any extra views I get from posts, which will inadvertently promote Fantastic Forms (I have it linked in my bio.) For $50, getting even an extra 500 clicks would be worth the investment. So with that in mind, I think it's going to be a no-lose bet and I would recommend you try it for at least a year and see what happens.

11. Targeted follows

Cost: $0

I decided to follow my ideal customer on different social networks to encourage some interaction and/or curiosity to see if they’d be responsive to the follow with a mutual follow or visit to the website. What’s the worst that could happen?

There was some movement, but after a few days I was suspended on one platform. A month later, I was suspended on another. The other platform didn’t have enough users and I simply ran out of people to follow. Overall, not a tactic I would recommend.

12. Minisites

Cost: $0

While Fantastic Forms is the main thing, I do have some smaller sites where I can naturally promote the app by using it as my default contact form and keeping the 'made by Fantastic Forms' branding link which is visible on every form footer.

I own a directory, Chrome extension, browser-based video game (poker) and real estate blog. All of them feature Fantastic Forms, which means I have 4 extra sites promoting it for me without any extra work to do on my end. Even though they receive little traffic, every bit helps.

I hope this was helpful. More tactics will be added, along with updates on existing ones in the near future. Stay tuned!

— Sebastian