What are the best ways to market a bootstrapped B2B SaaS startup to the US market?
Bootstrapping a SaaS is certainly a different game than building a business on venture capital. You’ve got to run a profit, or you won’t have anything to reinvest into the business.
Here’s some marketing advice for “doing it bootstrapped”:
Focus on quality leads
Bootstrapping means you’ve got to work with the money you’re bringing in. That means you don’t have a ton of extra cash to spend on branding and stuff.
Therefore, if you’re bootstrapping, you should focus on generating leads.
As Jason Lemkin over at Saastr tends to say: don’t hire a marketer that will just put your company name on pens. That doesn’t get you any new customers (not in this phase of the business, anyway). You don’t have the money to splurge on billboards, TV commercials, online banner campaigns, large events or “sponsored research”.
Instead, focus on figuring out where the people are that are most likely to buy from you in the shortest amount of time.
Net-Results (a bootstrapped SaaS company selling marketing automation software), at first, focused heavily on targeting keywords that involved competitors.
Why? Because they knew people looking for “Marketo alternatives” most likely:
- Already knew what marketing automation was,
- Had already experienced what it was like working with a big competitor,
- Were more likely to try an alternative (like Net-Results, which was and is more focused on providing the best customer experience possible vs company growth).
This put Net-Results front-and-center with leads in the right mindset (“there’s got to be an alternative tool out there that fits our business better”), without having to spend marketing money on long-term educating or nurturing leads extensively.
Focus on customer experience
You know what still sells really well? Raving customers.
Again, using Net-Results as an example. Go check any review website (like G2 Crowd or Capterra) and you’ll see a ton of positive reviews.
If you’re not as big as your competitors (which you’re not, if you’re SaaS bootstrapping) you’ve just got to provide a better experience. That means you’ve got to double down on creating the best possible experience for customers as possible, so that:
- They’ll stick around (recurring revenue!),
- They’ll tell their friends (new revenue!).
Also, it’s a lot more fun to really pamper customers than to constantly tell them something’s not possible (which is what tends to happen in companies purely focused on growth).
Keep doing the math
Every marketing decision you make has to make sense. It’s got pass “the math test”.
Can you expect a reasonable return-on-investment on this thing you’re wanting to do? If not… don’t do it.
If you thought it would be profitable, but it isn’t… stop doing it. Sounds logical, but marketers tend to hatch grand schemes and then not be realistic about when they’re failing.
You can’t do that in a bootstrapped company.
Always do the math: how many leads to we need within a certain amount of time to make this worth our investment?
And: how much sales is coming in and thus how much can we spend on marketing?
Be realistic
All the points above can be aggregated into this statement: be realistic. Bootstrapping is all about taking what you have and turning it into more. But you can’t squander your cash. You don’t have investor capital backing you up. You also can’t go in for a second round of funding if you fail. This is it.
Benefits of bootstrapping for customers
While you can grow fast with venture capital, I feel like oftentimes a focus of growth over customer experience hurts the actual customers themselves.
Some benefits I’ve seen in companies that are bootstrapped:
- Happier customers (they have to be, or you’re dead),
- A “feeling of safety” with customers knowing that the company is owned privately and therefore doesn’t have to deal with investor whims.
- Stability. It’s all organic. It’s all genuine. There’s no “steroids” in the bootstrapping game.
