4 builders who never spoke to each other

Expect the mix to shift off your own audience

The first customers come from people who already follow you, and that source runs out: within a year most new buyers had never heard of the founder and arrived through second hand recommendation. Plan for the handover, and expect the organic phase before it to be slow, single digits of subscribers a day. Being known by strangers rather than knowing people is the asset that eventually produces the inbound.

The method

1. 01

   Expect your first customers to come from your own audience and plan for the mix to shift, because later buyers will not know who you are.

2. 02

   Expect your acquisition to flip from things you personally do to second-hand word of mouth, and plan for the handover.

3. 03

   Word of mouth is not a channel you can choose: it needs a base of customers to work from, and manual selling is what creates that base.

4. 04

   Expect the organic phase to be slow: sharing your own articles and telling friends adds subscribers in single digits per day.

5. 05

   Being known by strangers, not just knowing people, is the asset that produces newsletter signups, retweets and inbound gigs.

What it returned

• 80

  In the first months after launch Rand Fishkin's own collaborations were nearly all of SparkToro's awareness; by the one-year mark he put it at over 80 percent secondary word of mouth.

• $2,400

  Customer.io went from $2,400 MRR in December 2012 to $50,000 a year later and credited word of mouth; ConvertKit had about 30 customers when he heard it

• 1,000

  Reached 1,000 subscribers by the end of July at an average of 5-10 new subscribers per day

• Early Fathom signups were mostly Paul Jarvis's own following; by the time of writing most new customers had never heard of him and came for privacy or simplicity.

Sources

• 2020 Year In Review | Corey HainesCorey Haines · corey.co · What did I learn? · 2021-01-01
• How we grew a local newsletter to 10,000 subscribersNathan Barry · nathanbarry.com · Advertising to scale growth · 2022-03-22
• Direct Sales for Bootstrapped SaaS Startups: from $1,300 to $725,000 MRRNathan Barry · nathanbarry.com · Let’s talk about word-of-mouth · 2017-07-06
• SparkToro's Year One Retrospective - SparkToroRand Fishkin · sparktoro.com · A Look at Marketing & Traffic · undated
• SaaS lessons shared on the Framework podcast - Fathom AnalyticsPaul Jarvis · usefathom.com · The audience for Fathom Analytics isn’t everyone · 2020-07-20