Write 100 emails to people you know
It's time for another SaaS marketing tip.
When you're about to launch something new, your first step shouldn't be buying ads, optimizing for SEO, or posting on social media.
One of the highest-leverage marketing activities you can do is this: write a personal email to anybody in your network who might care.
I'm advising a startup right now (I'll tell you more about them in the future). They want me to help them get more beta testers. My first step was to list people I know who might be interested in the product.
As I added names, I started sending out emails/DMS that look like this:
Hey [name of friend],
I just came across something new that I think you should check out.
I'm advising a new startup, and they built me a marketing dashboard that's blowing my mind.
(I think this could be helpful for your company too).
Basically, it tracks █████████ that you're getting from ████.
Here’s a screenshot from my dashboard:
[image]
I couldn't believe that it was showing ████ and ████. I'm already changing my marketing approach based on this data.
Would you be interested in being a part of the beta? They're looking for more testers, and I can put you in touch with them.
I wrote a similar series of emails when Jon and I started working on Transistor:
And I reached out to this list again when we launched on Product Hunt:
Sending personal emails like this is a classic "do things that don't scale" action. This is how we got our first ten customers for Transistor.
If you can't think of anyone to send emails like this, that might be a red flag. Ideally, you've already been investing time in building relationships with the kinds of people who buy products like yours.
If you can't do this, it might indicate that you don't know enough about your product category, industry, or community.
Want to do this?
I've made a "Prospect List" template in Google Sheets that you can copy. To get started, write out 4-5 names of people you know (who are in your market) and start writing emails.
Cheers,
Justin Jackson
Connect with me on:
💼 LinkedIn
🐘 Mastodon
🧵 Threads
🐦 Twitter