Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Here's what happened when a B2B SaaS client came to me with the classic early-stage question: "How do we find our first 100 users?" They had a solid product, decent funding, and were doing all the "right" things according to startup playbooks.
Six months later, they had 12 users. Twelve.
The problem wasn't their product or their messaging. The problem was that they were obsessing over finding early adopters while completely ignoring the most fundamental truth in SaaS: distribution beats product quality every single time.
Most founders approach early adoption like it's a treasure hunt. "Where are my early adopters hiding?" "Which communities should I join?" "What's the perfect launch strategy?" But here's what I learned after working with dozens of SaaS startups: you're asking the wrong question.
In this playbook, you'll discover:
Why chasing early adopters is often a distraction from real growth
The distribution-first approach that actually builds sustainable user acquisition
How one client discovered their real growth engine wasn't paid ads or product features
The framework for building distribution before you need it
Why your MVP should focus on marketing systems, not product features
If you're tired of the "build it and they will come" approach and ready for a reality check on what actually drives early SaaS growth, keep reading. This isn't another growth hacking listicle—it's what happens when you stop following startup theater and start building real distribution systems.
Industry Reality
What every SaaS founder gets told about early adopters
Walk into any startup accelerator or read any growth blog, and you'll hear the same advice repeated like gospel:
"Find your early adopters first." The conventional wisdom goes something like this:
Identify your ideal customer persona
Find communities where early adopters hang out
Build relationships and get feedback
Launch to this warm audience
Use social proof to attract more users
This sounds logical. Early adopters are supposed to be more forgiving, give better feedback, and become your advocates. Platforms like Product Hunt and communities like Indie Hackers have built entire ecosystems around this premise.
The startup world loves this narrative because it feels controllable. "Just find the right 100 people, deliver amazing value, and growth will follow." VCs repeat it, accelerators teach it, and successful founders retrofit their stories to match it.
But here's where this breaks down in practice: early adopters don't scale. They're called early adopters for a reason—they adopt early, try everything, and move on quickly. They're not your sustainable growth engine; they're your product development team.
The real problem with the early adopter obsession is that it distracts you from building the systems that will actually grow your business. While you're hunting for the perfect beta users in Discord servers and Twitter threads, your competitors are building distribution channels that will dominate the market.
Most SaaS founders spend 90% of their time on product and 10% on distribution. The math should be reversed, especially in the early stages. Yet the advice industry keeps pushing the same "find early adopters" playbook because it's easier to teach than the messy reality of building distribution systems.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When this B2B SaaS client approached me, they had everything that should lead to success. Good product-market fit signals, paying customers (albeit very few), and positive feedback from everyone who actually used their software.
Their challenge was classic early-stage SaaS: they had built something useful but had no sustainable way to get it in front of new users. They'd tried the standard playbook—posting in relevant communities, reaching out to potential customers on LinkedIn, even getting featured on a few smaller startup directories.
The results were exactly what you'd expect from this scattered approach: a trickle of users, mostly other founders and early adopters who tried everything but rarely converted to long-term paying customers.
Here's what we discovered that changed everything:
While analyzing their existing customers, we found something interesting. Their best customers—the ones paying the most and staying the longest—weren't coming from their "early adopter" outreach at all. They were coming from a completely different source that the founders had almost dismissed.
The founder had been sharing insights about the industry on LinkedIn. Not promotional posts about their product, but genuine expertise about the problems they were solving. These posts were getting decent engagement, but more importantly, they were establishing the founder as someone who actually understood the space.
Here's the kicker: when we looked at the attribution data more carefully, we realized that many of their "direct" signups weren't really direct at all. These were people who had been following the founder's content, building trust over time, then typing the URL directly when they were ready to buy.
This was a perfect example of what I call the "dark funnel"—the invisible customer journey that most attribution models completely miss. The founder was accidentally building a distribution system through personal branding, but they had no idea it was their most effective acquisition channel.
Meanwhile, they were spending most of their energy on tactics that felt more "startup-y"—cold outreach, product hunt launches, trying to get into startup directories. All the things you're supposed to do to find early adopters, none of which were actually moving the needle.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Once we identified that the founder's LinkedIn content was their hidden growth engine, we completely restructured their approach. Instead of hunting for early adopters, we focused on building a sustainable distribution system around the founder's expertise.
Step 1: Content as Distribution Infrastructure
We treated the founder's content strategy like product development. Instead of random posts hoping to go viral, we created a systematic approach to sharing industry insights. The goal wasn't to promote their product—it was to become the go-to resource for people dealing with the problems their SaaS solved.
Every piece of content followed a simple framework: identify a real problem the founder had solved, share the behind-the-scenes thinking, and provide actionable insights. No product pitches, no "follow me for more tips." Just genuine expertise shared authentically.
Step 2: Building Trust Before Building Features
This is where most SaaS founders get it backwards. They think they need more features to attract users, when what they actually need is more trust to convert the users they already have access to.
Instead of spending months building new features for hypothetical early adopters, we focused on demonstrating expertise through content. Each post was essentially a mini-case study showing how the founder thought about and solved real business problems.
Step 3: Distribution Before Product
The breakthrough came when we realized that the founder's audience was growing faster than their product feature set. People were following for the insights, not the product announcements. This gave us a direct line to potential customers that didn't depend on paid ads, cold outreach, or hoping someone would discover them organically.
Step 4: Turning Audience into Revenue
Here's the counterintuitive part: we never directly promoted the product in the content. Instead, we made sure that anyone who was interested in the founder's insights would naturally discover the SaaS as a solution to problems they were already thinking about.
The content created demand for the type of solution they were building. The product became the natural next step for people who were already engaged with the founder's thinking about the problem space.
Step 5: Scaling Through Systems
Once we proved this approach worked, we built systems around it. Content calendars, engagement tracking, and most importantly, ways to measure how content engagement translated into business results.
This wasn't about going viral or building a massive following. It was about building a sustainable system that could consistently put their solution in front of people who had a genuine need for it.
Content Strategy
Systematic expertise sharing built consistent pipeline of qualified leads
Trust Building
Demonstrated competence before asking for business - higher conversion rates
Distribution Focus
Built audience before scaling product features - sustainable growth foundation
Attribution Tracking
Discovered hidden customer journeys that traditional analytics missed
The transformation was dramatic, but it didn't happen overnight. Within three months, their monthly recurring revenue had increased by 300%. More importantly, these weren't early adopters who would churn after trying everything—these were genuine customers with real problems who found a solution they wanted to stick with.
The quality of leads improved significantly. Instead of convincing skeptical early adopters to try yet another tool, they were talking to people who already understood the problem space and were actively looking for solutions.
Customer acquisition cost dropped by 60% compared to their previous outreach-heavy approach. When people discover you through valuable content rather than cold pitches, they're much more likely to convert and much less expensive to acquire.
Perhaps most importantly, they built a sustainable competitive advantage. While competitors were still hunting for early adopters in the same communities, this client had direct access to their target market through the founder's growing influence in the space.
The founder's LinkedIn following grew from 2,000 to 15,000, but the real metric was engagement quality. These weren't vanity followers—they were potential customers, partners, and industry connections that provided ongoing business value beyond just user acquisition.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons from shifting focus from early adopter hunting to distribution building:
Distribution beats product quality every time. You can have the perfect solution, but if nobody knows about it, you have no business.
Your audience is often more valuable than your product. A trusted connection to your target market can outlast any individual product or feature.
Attribution is broken in B2B. The customer journeys that matter most are often invisible to traditional tracking. Trust your qualitative insights over dashboard metrics.
Content isn't marketing—it's product development for your distribution. Treat audience building with the same rigor you apply to feature development.
Early adopters are your R&D team, not your growth engine. Use them to validate and improve your product, but don't expect them to scale your business.
Founder-led growth isn't just for early stage. Personal expertise and authentic voice create sustainable competitive advantages that are impossible to replicate.
Building trust is more scalable than building features. Trust compounds over time; features just add complexity.
The biggest mistake most SaaS founders make is treating distribution as something you figure out after you build the product. In reality, your distribution strategy should be your first product.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups, focus on building your distribution engine alongside your product:
Identify your founder's unique expertise and build content strategy around it
Track attribution beyond last-click to understand true customer journeys
Prioritize audience building over feature development in early stages
Create systematic content workflows that demonstrate competence in your problem space
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce businesses, adapt this approach by focusing on product expertise and customer education:
Share behind-the-scenes knowledge about your product category or manufacturing process
Build trust through educational content before promoting products
Use founder story and expertise to differentiate from generic e-commerce brands
Focus on building community around shared interests rather than just transactions