

Ask HN: How would you grow a new SaaS product without Ads? - mindgap

I&#x27;ve found that many fast-growing saas companies do NOT use ads for their growth.
Digitalocean is one of them, do you think that it&#x27;s all thanks to word-of-mounth?
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patio11
DigitalOcean makes pretty extensive use of ads for retargetting & etc. Try
going to their site then browsing Youtube or Twitter, for example. I've seen
enough of the "You've been coding like a beast..." video to last me several
lifetimes.

Content marketing into emailed drip campaigns and/or retargetting is a pretty
powerful formula in many SaaS businesses. Scalable content creation can be a
pretty powerful force multiplier at lots of businesses, including SaaS
businesses.

A service which is remarkable enough to mention to friends, or which
intrinsically gets mentioned to other people in the course of typical use
(e.g. Basecamp), is a nice asset to have, too, but many SaaS companies grow
without those advantages.

~~~
mindgap
I agree with you about content marketing and remarkable service.

Anyway, I guess, retargeting is something powerful if you are able to bring a
user on your site at least one time.

Are you suggesting that their growth is caused by "only" content marketing +
retargeting + remarkable product?

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RealGeek
It all comes down to what your application does, your target market and where
your customers hangout. Here is a technique that can fit almost any product,
you can even use this for validation before building your product.

1) Identify several use cases and features for your application (preferably
more than 10). Examples for a project management SaaS app:

\- Project Management

\- Time Tracking

\- Increase Productivity

\- Team Collaboration Tools

2) Build a keywords list, you want to get 3 to 5 keywords for every use case.

3) Create landing pages targeting every use case and feature. Use the keywords
you previously identified in the page title. You should have good and useful
content on these pages and it should focus on converting visitors into
customers.

4) Build inbound links for your homepage and every landing page. Analyze
backlinks of your competitors and related products using
[http://www.ranksignals.com](http://www.ranksignals.com) (disclosure: I built
RankSignals). This should get you an idea of how to get links and how many
links you need.

5) Reach out to as many blogs as possible and pitch your product. Don't just
focus on most popular tech blogs, every single link helps; even a local mom
blog.

With in few days or weeks (depending upon your competition and execution), you
could start ranking on search engines for most of the keywords you are
targeting, and it will start driving a growing stream of organic SEO traffic
to your product. Industry influencers and bloggers will also start noticing
your product and write about it. This will drive even more traffic and links.

This will build an organic marketing flywheel which will bring new customers
and continue to grow every single month. You can scale this by creating more
landing pages and useful content like guides and tutorials. DigitalOcean does
this very well, their community content portal
([https://www.digitalocean.com/community/](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/))
drives majority of their organic traffic.

~~~
rk17
Nice analysis/strategy description. I just want to add that one of the primary
reasons why saas companies increase in size, is because they provide
convenience. It seems that the SEO strategy increases convenience by having a
relevant guide/tutorial for each use case. Which makes it easier for the
short-in-time managers making the decisions whether or not to use this or that
saas company's services.

