Marketing on a Budget: Promoting Your Micro-SaaS without Breaking the Bank
Effective Marketing Strategies for Micro-SaaS and small businesses
In this issue, I will be sharing some thoughts about marketing your lifestyle business (or bootstrapped micro-SaaS) on a budget. Together, we will explore a few ways to bring customers and raise brand awareness without depleting your bank account.
In my mind, I idealistically imagine you are reading this on a lovely morning while sitting in a comfortable chair in your semi-boring-looking pajamas, soon after waking up with the sunrise. So, grab a coffee, buckle up, and let's go.
In a previous issue, we discussed the rise of no-code tools and how these aim to democratize building websites and apps. My point was that the best use case for a no-code builder is creating an MVP faster and cheaper, allowing us to quickly prove Product-Makret-Fit or fail without spending many resources.
While I believe this is still the case, there's a category of ventures where no-code builders can get you all the way. I am talking about micro-SaaS companies, which have also gained tremendous popularity alongside no-code.
What is micro-SaaS?
We all know SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) companies are amongst the most profitable ones, and most budding founders want to build the next huge SaaS player. Scalability is the primary point about SaaS that makes those ventures so appealing. In oversimplified terms, you build the software once and then sell access to it infinite times. Sounds pretty good, right?
Micro-SaaS has the same appeal, with the most significant difference being the scope of the software you are providing. Contrary to regular SaaS offerings, micro-SaaS services usually focus on solving a particular niche problem. This means significantly less market size but also much shorter and cheaper development. Micro-SaaS companies are usually lifestyle companies, where 1-2 people bootstrap a tool and grow it to $10-$20k MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), which allows them to quit their jobs, work less, and support a nice lifestyle.
Marketing a micro-SaaS offering
Now that we know what micro-SaaS companies are, it's pretty obvious they can't afford the substantial marketing budgets regular SaaS companies spend on customer acquisition and brand image building.
Founders bootstrapping a micro-SaaS app have to be much more creative as to where and how they spend their limited resources (mostly their time) to achieve the maximum in terms of acquiring new clients and building brand awareness.
Now, let's look at some marketing options available to bootstrapped founders.
Content Marketing
Producing relevant content is one way to raise brand awareness and market your micro-SaaS or other small businesses. This can take on many forms. For example, for my FP&A startup, I started writing blog articles before we even started developing the product itself. The great part about content marketing is that it's highly reusable and essentially free. Focusing on the niche, where your service/product lives, means you would probably have the knowledge and experience to produce content independently without hiring help. The downside to this is that while cheap, it ends up costing you in terms of time.
Content marketing is one of my favorite forms, especially when there's no budget to run ads. As I mentioned, the best part is that it's very reusable.
What I would do is research and write a blog post. Make it relevant to your niche and offerings, and ensure it provides tons of free value to the readers. This serves two purposes. First, it establishes you as an authority within the space, reflecting positively on the business you are running. Second, it shows Google you know what you're talking about and helps you rank higher and build more domain authority.
Always publish the blog post on your website first. Make sure Google knows where the content originated. In a week or so, you can publish on Medium or other similar platforms and link to the original post.
My go-to method for reusing blog posts is turning them into YouTube videos, especially if they are more technical. For example, most of my FP&A articles involved a lot of screenshots and explanations on how to do things in Excel, so recording these instructions as videos made much sense.
After creating a long-form video, you can extract significant points from it and turn them into Shorts/Reels/TikTok.
Important statements can be shared on Twitter (sorry, X) or as Instagram/YouTube Community posts.
Overall, content marketing is a fantastic way to raise awareness about your business and gives you many opportunities to reuse content.
Social Media
What I mean by social media here is not posting, although that's extremely important. However, we pretty much covered it in the last section about content marketing.
Another very impactful thing you can do is join groups on social media that fall within your niche. Start engaging with people there, respond to answers, and take any opportunity to provide value and grow your influence within the group as an authority on the subject matter. This will also help you down the line when you start marketing your product. Additionally, such groups are a tremendous resource for feature ideas and early feedback.
Email Marketing
This one was neglected for some time, but I see people gradually returning to it over the past few years. Email is a fantastic marketing channel that many people skip for some reason.
As soon as you start posting content, you should find a way to get people's emails. Usually, offering something for free for signing up works pretty well. I typically offer a short eBook or an Excel template within the niche I am targeting. I use this as a lead magnet to get as many people on my email list as possible. This will be a fantastic resource when looking for early adopters and clients.
Building a list of people already interested in our niche and cultivating a relationship with regular (not more often than weekly or bi-weekly, IMHO) newsletters filled with value is one of the best ways to ensure brand awareness and a strong launch day, with the potential to sign quite a few customers.
Having existing customers be part of a regular cadence of newsletters also gives us a great way to offer upselling promotions. For example, we can send a newsletter campaign only to Tier 1 customers and offer them a discount to switch to Tier 2.
Referrals
I honestly didn't know if I should leave this one in. Thanks to the wonders of IM and a plethora of shitty landing pages promoting shitty products, using referral networks can be a double-edged sword.
I generally avoid this, but if you decide to work with referrals, I would suggest setting up a referral program on your own instead of using a network. It helps you differentiate yourself better from all the crappy products that make it on those websites.
SEO Optimization
I won't spend much time here, as this point is closely related to the Content Marketing one above, but I still thought it warranted a place on this list. One of the best (and cheapest) options to market our products and services to a large audience is organic traffic through search engines (a.k.a. Google).
Making sure our website is SEO optimized (not going into details here; there's enough information on the internet written by much more knowledgeable people than me) is a must for ranking higher on Google and bringing in a ton of free traffic from people searching for something within our niche.
This is where a blog also shines, allowing us to generate domain authority with Google and start pulling in more people. Writing valuable articles on topics within our niche, primarily written tutorials on how to solve problems with our service can be a real game-changer for our business.
Collaborations
This one won't apply to every scenario, but it works more often than you might think.
If you can find people in the same niche or a similar space who talk about similar topics, it's a great idea to reach out to such people and try to think of a collaboration. This works exceptionally well if you post videos as part of your marketing efforts. Collaborating with other creators and solopreneurs allows you both to tap into each other's audiences and increase your brand awareness.
Another collaboration option is to find popular services and products where your offering is complementary. For example, while working on our FP&A startup, we talked with another startup building a cloud HR solution for SMEs. They were further along and targeting a similar user base, so it made sense for us to offer their customers an extended trial (e.g., 6 months).
And before you say, there's no way a successful business would do that for you for free, stop and think about it. Yes, you are getting free exposure and access to their email list. On the other hand, their customers are getting a perk only available to them, which is perceived as additional value they get from being a customer of your partner-to-be. So, it's a win-win. In our case, we never collaborated due to other reasons, but that's a story for another time.
Building a Community
At the end of the day, the most important thing when marketing your business is building a solid community around it. There's nothing more powerful (and cheaper) than having people who are not only customers but also become true fans of your business. These are the ones that will arguably bring in more new customers than any of the other channels we have discussed above.
Product evangelists love your product and are ready to preach about it to their colleagues, friends, and family at any opportunity. Word-of-mouth marketing is extremely powerful and is what we all strive for, especially when starting out.
It might not seem as much, but imagine just one active person on social media fell in love with your product and started regularly blasting to their followers about our business. Now, wouldn't that be awesome?
Building a great community around your business is essential and can significantly boost your marketing efforts. Another great benefit of a strong community is that many people are invested in our success. We can draw many pointers for the direction of our company and product development from such people's comments and ideas.
If I have to summarize (and I guess I do), now more than ever, we have a plethora of options to market and promote our micro-SaaS (or other small) businesses. For most people I've talked to, this comes down to generating valuable content on a platform or two. My preferred combo is writing articles on a self-hosted blog (including posting those on platforms like Medium) and creating YouTube videos alongside the articles.
That's all for this issue. Let me know if I missed some of your preferred ways to introduce more flexibility into Excel models. I'm always on the lookout for new knowledge!
Thank you for sticking to the end, and extra brownie points for those who share this newsletter with a few friends. 🍪
Best,
D.