Getting to your first 10 customers can be a daunting task if you're building your first SaaS company.

In this post, we suggest two underrated ways to get to this milestone.

Join a Paid Group or Community

Subscribe to a group or forum in your niche that charges a reasonable membership fee.

Because members paid to be in the group, you know they're willing to spend money to grow their business or improve their personal life.

In your profile, write a decent description of your background and interests so people get a sense of your investment in the community.

Take part in discussions, whether by asking questions or giving advice. Avoid promoting your product unless it benefits others. Mention it when it's a natural part of a conversation, perhaps when it can solve a problem the community is talking about.

Over time, members will recognize you as a trustworthy contributor and wonder what you sell. They may check your profile and notice your SaaS offering. If enough of them do this, odds are some of them will convert. In no time at all, you'll have your first 10 customers!

Leveraging the principle of reciprocation is key here. By giving so much helpful advice, solving problems, or even just boosting your colleagues' spirits and confidence, they'll feel indebted to you. Consuming your sage wisdom without so much as a peek at your profile or free trial signup would feel like ripping you off.

One example of a paid community is The Fastlane Insiders Forum. Members are dedicated entrepreneurs looking to help each other build and scale their businesses. Some are SaaS developers. All members have at least one business that may benefit from your product. Signing up allows you to promote your SaaS product to the nearly 100,000 monthly visitors.

Get Your SaaS Discovered with High Volume Short-Term Blogging

We're not talking about long, well-researched blog posts published once a week. Nope. That's a great long-term strategy, but we can't afford to take years to get our first 10 customers.

The faster way is to publish multiple short blog posts each day. When you post multiple high-quality articles in a day, versus only once a day, it produces far more in organic search results for the same period.

At least that's what content marketer Bill Belew found in his 2014 case study, where he had students do just that. Article lengths were roughly 250-400 words [1], heresy in this era of 2,000-word blog posts. Students saw an average of 4,000 - 5,000 unique monthly visitors after 4 months.

That's a rather old study and things have changed, but could it still work?

Indie Hacker Hieu Nguyen argues that short, concise posts target a specific reader. Namely, those looking for a quick answer to a specific question and don't want to wade through long articles.

Only one way to find out: experiment. We're publishing 2 posts per day here at Pathwooded. We'll report back on our traffic results in 3-5 months [2].

Of course, the target should be conversions. Our desired conversion is a signup to our newsletter for book summary takeaways via the form at the bottom of each page. Your ideal conversion might be signups to a paid plan or a free trial.

Still, getting lots of traffic is a start, and the "multiple daily blog posts" method might do the trick.

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[1] Belew gave this figure in a YouTube interview or talk, which I'll have to dig up.

[2] My theory is that although short posts rarely rank, so long as visitors find your site through some means, they'll stay if you have a strong internal linking structure, the content answers specific questions, etc. This causes search engines to bring some of your content to at least the 2nd page, which captures the odd surfer who digs deeper. Over time, this compounds. "Some means" could be the infrequent long article, the occasional social media share, a backlink from an appreciative website whose problem you solved with your piercing intellect, etc.

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