Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
When I started working with B2B SaaS clients, I made the same mistake everyone makes. I'd Google "best channels to promote SaaS" and get the usual suspects: Product Hunt, tech directories, paid ads, content marketing. The problem? Everyone else was doing exactly the same thing.
After working with dozens of SaaS startups and seeing most promotion strategies fail spectacularly, I realized something crucial: the question isn't "where to promote your SaaS" - it's "where can you build trust before promoting anything."
This shift in thinking completely changed how I approach SaaS promotion for my clients. Instead of spreading efforts across 10+ channels hoping something sticks, we focus on 2-3 channels where we can actually build relationships and demonstrate expertise.
Here's what you'll learn from my experience promoting SaaS tools:
Why "spray and pray" promotion kills most SaaS launches
The hidden growth driver I discovered that most SaaS founders ignore
My 3-step framework for choosing promotion channels that actually convert
Real results from clients who pivoted their promotion strategy
How to validate channels before investing serious time and money
This isn't another generic list of promotion channels. This is what happens when you stop following playbooks and start building genuine distribution strategies. Let's dive into what actually works in SaaS growth today.
Industry Reality
What every SaaS founder gets told about promotion
The SaaS promotion advice industry has created a dangerous myth: that success comes from being everywhere at once. Every growth blog preaches the same gospel of "omnichannel marketing" and lists the same 20+ channels.
Here's the standard advice you've probably heard:
Launch on Product Hunt for instant visibility
Get featured in startup directories and SaaS galleries
Run LinkedIn and Google ads to drive trial signups
Start content marketing and SEO for long-term growth
Reach out to influencers and industry publications
This advice exists because it's safe and sounds comprehensive. Agencies love it because they can charge for managing multiple channels. Consultants love it because it looks like a complete strategy.
But here's what nobody tells you: Most channels fail not because they don't work, but because you don't have the resources to make them work properly. Each channel requires specific expertise, consistent execution, and significant time investment to see results.
The real problem isn't finding channels - it's that most SaaS founders treat promotion like e-commerce marketing. They think if they get enough eyeballs on their product, people will sign up. But SaaS isn't a impulse purchase. It's a commitment that requires trust, and trust takes time to build.
What you actually need is a strategy that acknowledges this reality and focuses on building relationships in channels where your audience already gathers to solve problems.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I started working with a B2B SaaS client offering project management software, they were already doing everything "right" according to the playbooks. Product Hunt launch? Check. Directory submissions? Check. LinkedIn ads driving traffic to a conversion-optimized landing page? Double check.
The results were depressing. Lots of trial signups, almost no conversions to paid plans. The founder was frustrated because the product was solid - existing customers loved it. But new users would sign up, maybe poke around for a day, then disappear.
Here's where it gets interesting. During our strategy sessions, I noticed something the founder mentioned casually: "The funny thing is, I get way better conversations when I answer questions in those Slack communities I'm part of. People actually seem interested in what we're building."
That throwaway comment changed everything. I dug deeper and discovered that quality leads were actually coming from the founder's personal participation in industry communities - not from any of the "professional" marketing channels we were optimizing.
But here's the problem: this wasn't showing up in any analytics. When someone saw a helpful answer in a Slack community, researched the founder, found the company website, and signed up for a trial, Google Analytics labeled it as "direct traffic." We were optimizing the wrong channels because we were measuring the wrong things.
This pattern repeated across multiple clients. The attribution was broken, but the reality was clear: warm leads from community participation converted at 10x the rate of cold traffic from paid channels.
That's when I realized we needed to completely flip our approach to SaaS promotion.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Instead of starting with channels, I now start with a simple question: "Where do your ideal customers go when they have the problem your SaaS solves?"
For my project management client, the answer was industry-specific Slack communities and niche forums where team leads discussed workflow challenges. Instead of spreading efforts across 10 different promotional channels, we focused entirely on becoming genuinely helpful in these 3 communities.
Here's the exact framework I developed:
Step 1: Community Mapping
We identified every place where target customers discussed problems related to project management. This included Slack communities, Reddit communities, LinkedIn groups, and industry forums. The key was finding communities with active problem-solving discussions, not just promotional spam.
Step 2: Value-First Participation
Instead of promoting the product, we focused on sharing genuinely helpful advice. The founder spent 30 minutes daily answering questions, sharing resources, and building relationships. No product mentions for the first month - just pure value.
Step 3: Strategic Attribution Setup
We created UTM-tagged links and custom landing pages for each community. This way, we could finally track which communities actually drove valuable signups versus vanity metrics.
The results were immediate. Within 60 days, community-driven signups had a 35% conversion rate to paid plans, compared to 3% from paid ads. More importantly, these customers had higher retention rates because they'd already seen the founder's expertise before signing up.
We then applied this same principle to content strategy. Instead of generic SaaS blog posts, we created content that directly answered questions we'd seen in communities. Each piece of content was distributed first in the relevant communities where those questions originated.
This approach completely changed our trial conversion strategy because people weren't arriving as cold traffic anymore.
Community Research
Map 5-10 communities where your ideal customers actively discuss the problems your SaaS solves. Focus on engagement quality over member count.
Value Positioning
Position yourself as a helpful expert, not a vendor. Share knowledge freely without immediate promotional intent.
Attribution Setup
Create trackable links for each community to measure real conversion impact, not just vanity traffic metrics.
Relationship Building
Invest 30 minutes daily in genuine community participation before any promotional activities begin.
The transformation was remarkable. Within 90 days of implementing this community-first approach, we saw:
Trial-to-paid conversion rates jumped from 3% to 35% for community-sourced leads. Customer acquisition cost dropped by 60% compared to paid advertising channels. More importantly, customer lifetime value increased significantly because community-sourced customers understood the product's value before signing up.
But the most surprising result was the compounding effect. Happy customers from communities became advocates, recommending the tool in the same communities where they first discovered it. This created a sustainable growth loop that didn't exist with traditional promotional channels.
The attribution setup revealed that 70% of our highest-value customers had some community touchpoint in their journey, even if it didn't show up in last-click attribution. This insight completely changed how we allocated marketing resources going forward.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons from pivoting away from traditional SaaS promotion:
Distribution beats features every time. A good product with strong community relationships will outperform a great product with no distribution strategy.
Attribution lies constantly. The channels driving your best customers might be invisible in your analytics. Track behavior patterns, not just last-click attribution.
Trust compounds faster than traffic. Building genuine expertise in one community is more valuable than superficial presence across ten channels.
Community participation isn't scalable - and that's the point. The fact that it requires genuine human involvement is exactly what makes it effective and defensible.
Start with problems, not solutions. Find where your ideal customers discuss their challenges, then participate in solving those challenges before promoting your tool.
Value-first positioning works long-term. The patience required to build relationships before promoting eliminates most competitors who want quick wins.
Quality metrics matter more than quantity. One genuinely interested trial user from a community conversation is worth 50 random signups from paid ads.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS companies, focus on:
Identifying 3-5 communities where your ideal customers actively discuss relevant problems
Dedicating 30 minutes daily to genuine community participation before any promotional activities
Setting up proper attribution tracking for community-driven conversions
Creating content that directly answers questions you encounter in communities
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce businesses, adapt this by:
Finding communities where your target customers discuss product recommendations and shopping decisions
Sharing product expertise and styling advice rather than direct product promotion
Building brand recognition through helpful participation in relevant forums and groups
Using community insights to inform product development and inventory decisions