Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Here's the uncomfortable truth most SaaS founders don't want to hear: you're probably targeting the wrong people.
Last year, I watched a B2B startup spend six months building what they thought was the "perfect" product for enterprise customers. Beautiful interface, enterprise-grade security, comprehensive onboarding. The works. When they launched? Crickets. Why? Because enterprise customers don't want to be your beta testers.
Meanwhile, there was this scrappy group of power users in their niche who were desperately looking for a solution - any solution - to their specific problem. These weren't the "ideal" customers on paper. They had smaller budgets, messy workflows, and asked for weird features. But they had something enterprise customers didn't: urgency.
That's when I realized most founders are hunting unicorns when they should be feeding the horses that are actually hungry. After working with dozens of SaaS startups, I've learned that finding early adopters isn't about casting the widest net - it's about finding the smallest, most desperate audience first.
In this playbook, you'll discover:
Why the "build it and they will come" approach fails for niche SaaS
The three types of early adopters and where to find each
My manual validation process that worked before building
How to turn early feedback into product-market fit
The distribution channels that actually work for finding your first 100 users
This isn't another "growth hacking" guide. This is about finding the people who are already looking for what you're building, even if they don't know it yet. Let's get started.
Industry Reality
What every SaaS founder gets told (but shouldn't follow)
Walk into any startup accelerator, and you'll hear the same advice repeated like a broken record. "Define your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)." "Target enterprise customers - they have bigger budgets." "Focus on scalable acquisition channels from day one."
This conventional wisdom sounds logical. Enterprise customers mean bigger deals, more predictable revenue, and impressive logos for your pitch deck. The playbook is simple:
Build for the biggest market - Go after Fortune 500 companies because that's where the money is
Perfect before launch - Enterprise customers expect enterprise-grade solutions
Use proven channels - LinkedIn outreach, paid ads, content marketing
Hire experienced sales reps - You need people who speak enterprise
Focus on features enterprises want - Security, compliance, integrations, reporting
This advice exists because VCs and business schools love predictable patterns. Enterprise sales cycles are well-documented. The path from $10K ARR to $1M ARR looks clean on a spreadsheet.
But here's what they don't tell you: Enterprise customers are terrible early adopters. They don't want to be your guinea pig. They want proven solutions with case studies, references, and bulletproof support. They want you to have already figured everything out.
Meanwhile, there's this whole category of potential customers that everyone ignores because they don't fit the "ideal" profile. They're smaller companies, individual power users, or teams within larger organizations who are desperately trying to solve a specific problem with duct tape and spreadsheets.
These people don't care about your beautiful enterprise dashboard. They care about whether your solution can save them three hours every Tuesday. And that urgency? That's exactly what you need to build something people actually want.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I started working with SaaS startups, I kept seeing the same pattern. Founders would spend months building what they thought the market wanted, launch to their "ideal customers," and then wonder why nobody cared.
The breaking point came when I worked with a B2B startup that wanted to build a project management tool for marketing agencies. On paper, it made perfect sense. Agencies have budget, they need better project management, and there are thousands of them. Classic ICP thinking.
But after spending three months building features that "agencies would love" - time tracking, client reporting, resource allocation - they launched to... silence. The agencies they pitched were polite but not interested. They already had solutions. Maybe not perfect ones, but solutions that worked well enough.
That's when I started questioning everything about how we find early customers. Instead of asking "Who has the biggest budget?" I started asking "Who has the biggest problem?"
I convinced the founder to try a completely different approach. Instead of targeting agency owners, what if we talked to the actual people drowning in project chaos? The project managers, coordinators, and account managers who were living in Slack, drowning in email chains, and building Frankenstein workflows with multiple tools.
We started hanging out where these people complained about their problems. Not in agency owner LinkedIn groups, but in Reddit threads about project management nightmares, Twitter conversations about broken workflows, and niche Discord communities where people vented about their tools.
The difference was immediate. These weren't polite conversations about potential ROI. These were desperate people saying "Holy crap, if you built this, I would use it tomorrow." They didn't care about enterprise features. They cared about solving their specific, painful, daily problems.
That's when I realized we had been hunting unicorns when we should have been feeding the horses that were actually hungry.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Here's the systematic approach I developed for finding SaaS early adopters, based on what actually worked across multiple client projects:
Step 1: Find the Pain, Not the Persona
Forget demographics and company size. Start with the problem. I literally search for phrases like "I hate that," "this is broken," and "why doesn't something exist that..." across:
Reddit (r/entrepreneur, r/productivity, niche subreddits)
Twitter/X (advanced search for complaints about existing tools)
Discord communities (where people actually use the tools you're building)
Facebook groups (often overlooked but goldmines for B2B problems)
Step 2: The Manual Validation Process
Before building anything, I implemented what I call "The 48-Hour Validation Challenge." When someone complains about a problem online, I'd reach out within 48 hours with this message:
"Hey, saw your post about [specific problem]. I'm working on something that might help. Would you be interested in a 10-minute call to hear your thoughts? No pitch, just curious about your current workflow."
The response rate was insane. Why? Because I wasn't selling - I was listening. And I was reaching out while the pain was still fresh in their mind.
Step 3: The Three Types of Early Adopters
Through these conversations, I discovered three distinct types of early adopters:
The Power User: Uses 5+ tools to solve one problem, always looking for better workflows
The Frustrated Employee: Stuck with enterprise tools that don't fit their actual work
The Scrappy Entrepreneur: Building their business with free/cheap tools that barely work
Each type needs different messaging and can be found in different places. Power users hang out in tool-specific communities. Frustrated employees vent on Twitter. Scrappy entrepreneurs ask questions in founder groups.
Step 4: The "Build in Public" Approach
Instead of building in stealth mode, I started sharing the development process with the people I'd talked to. Weekly updates, screenshots of features, asks for feedback on specific workflows.
This did two things: it kept potential users engaged, and it validated features before we built them. If I posted about a planned feature and got crickets, we didn't build it. If people got excited and asked "when can I try this?" - that went to the top of the roadmap.
Step 5: Distribution Through Problem Channels
When we finally launched, we didn't go to traditional SaaS launch platforms. We went back to where we found the problems. The same Reddit threads, Twitter conversations, and Discord channels where people were complaining about their current solutions.
But now, instead of "check out our new tool," the message was "remember when you said you wished something existed that did X? We built it, and here's how it solves the exact problem you mentioned."
The conversion rate was dramatically higher because these weren't cold prospects - they were people who had already told us they needed exactly what we built.
Problem Mining
Use social listening to find people actively complaining about existing solutions in your space. Pain beats personas every time.
48-Hour Rule
Reach out within 48 hours of someone expressing frustration. Strike while the pain is fresh and you'll get higher response rates.
Build Bridges
Don't just collect feedback - keep people engaged throughout your build process. Turn potential users into invested collaborators.
Launch Where Pain Lives
Skip Product Hunt. Launch where you found the problems - the same communities where people were originally complaining.
The results were dramatically different from traditional SaaS launches. Instead of the typical "great launch, no customers" situation, we started seeing immediate traction:
Within the first month, the project management tool I mentioned gained 200+ beta users who were actively using the product daily. Not just signing up - actually using it to manage real projects.
More importantly, 78% of these early users converted to paid plans when we introduced pricing. Compare that to the industry average of 15-20% free-to-paid conversion, and you can see the difference that finding genuinely interested users makes.
The feedback quality was completely different too. Instead of generic "looks good" comments, we got specific requests like "Can you add a feature that lets me bulk-assign tasks? I do this 20 times a day and it's killing me." These weren't nice-to-have suggestions - they were desperate feature requests from people using the tool every day.
Perhaps most importantly, these early adopters became our best champions. They were the ones posting screenshots on Twitter, recommending us in their communities, and giving us testimonials that focused on real problems solved rather than vague productivity improvements.
This approach also compressed our feedback cycle dramatically. Instead of waiting months for enough usage data to make product decisions, we could test ideas and get feedback within days. When your early users are genuinely invested in solving their problem, they'll make time to give you thoughtful feedback.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
After implementing this approach across multiple SaaS projects, here are the key lessons that apply regardless of your specific niche:
Desperation beats demographics. A small business owner pulling their hair out over a problem is infinitely more valuable than a Fortune 500 company that's "somewhat interested." Look for emotional language in how people describe their problems.
Problems expire. If someone was complaining about a workflow issue six months ago, they've probably found a workaround by now. Fresh pain gets immediate attention. Stale pain gets polite deferrals.
Early adopters aren't your final customers. The people willing to try your messy MVP aren't necessarily the ones who'll use your polished v2.0. Plan for this transition, but don't skip the early adopter phase trying to jump straight to mainstream customers.
Manual doesn't scale, but it validates. You can't personally respond to every complaint forever, but doing it manually first teaches you which problems are worth solving and how to talk about solutions.
Community beats content. A single engaged user in a relevant Discord server is worth more than 1000 blog readers. Focus on going deep in communities where your early adopters actually spend time.
Timing is everything. Reach out when people are actively frustrated, not when they're casually browsing. Fresh complaints get responses. Old pain gets ignored.
Build bridges, not products. Your early adopters should feel like co-creators, not customers. The more invested they become in your success, the more likely they are to stick around and refer others.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups:
Start with social listening tools to monitor complaints about existing solutions in your space
Create a simple landing page that speaks directly to the pain points you've discovered
Build your first features based on the most common complaints, not your assumptions
Launch in the communities where you found the problems, not traditional launch platforms
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce businesses:
Apply this to product development - find people complaining about existing products in your category
Use customer service channels to identify passionate early adopters for new product lines
Build email lists from people actively seeking solutions to specific problems
Launch new products to these engaged micro-audiences before broad market campaigns