A few months ago, as I finished my MVP for BlogSEO, I discovered a hard truth. Most technical founders believe building their product is the most important part about entrepreneurship. But in reality, building a product is only 30% of the work; 70% is about marketing or sales. (I thought it would be 60/40 for building the product, but turns out I’ve spent most of my time on marketing these days).

So today I want to give away the user acquisition playbook I’ve been using for BlogSEO which allowed me to reach $1,000 in MRR a few weeks ago. If you’re building a product and you’re struggling to get your first users, this blog post will help you for sure. Just make sure you’re solving a real problem and that your offer is clear before using these methods.

Before diving into the subject, I must say that I didn’t come up with all these tactics myself - most of them come from books I’ve read about marketing in the past 2 years. If you’re interested by the actual books, check this blog post: https://vince.beehiiv.com/p/i-read-10-business-books-so-you-don-t-have-to

My Playbook for Customer Acquisition

Here are the 8 tactics I used to reach $1,000 in MRR:

1. One-to-One Warm Outreach: DM'ing

The first thing I did was reaching out to everyone I knew, or had worked with to ask this: "Do you know someone who could be interested by my product?"

This involved ex-colleagues, LinkedIn connections, friends and anyone that seemed remotely connected to me, or knew my face.

I sent them each a DM or an Email saying I had just launched BlogSEO, explaining the problem it solved, and the question above.

The key takeaway here is: by asking "Do you know someone who could be interested" you're not trying to sell to the person directly. This has 2 great benefits:

• If the person is actually interested, then they will say so (in other words, they will answer: "yes I know someone who would be interested: me").

• If they are not interested, they might introduce you to someone they know who could be. So essentially, you also win when you lose.

If you try to sell to the people who know you directly, your chances of getting a recommendation/referral is much lower. If you haven't try this before and don't have your first customers yet, I can guarantee that this will land your first customers, provided your offer is good enough.

One important point I'd like to dwell upon here is: you need to take your leads on calls. Especially your first customers. Don't expect anyone to magically figure out how to use your tool on the first try. Talking to your users will help you gather valuable feedback in the early days.

2. One-to-Many Warm Outreach: Posting content

One of the highest leverage you can have is by doing One-to-Many activities. When you do one-to-one warm outreach, your leverage is low because you send a DM to each individual, and you have to customize the message which takes a lot of time. This process is much less efficient than an email marketing campaign for example. Even if the conversion is lower when doing one-to-many, you can reach thousands of people in a few seconds with content on social media and when sending emails.

So posting content is the one-to-many equivalent of DM'ing people you know: for example, if you post something on Instagram, X, or LinkedIn almost everyone who follow you will see your content. Same thing for emails of people who have given you the authorization to reach out to them.

The bad news is, growing an audience or an emailing list takes a lot of time and requires being consistent by posting regularly, so make sure you don’t give up too early!

I personally focused on LinkedIn where I tried to post 2-3x a week to increase the visibility of my product there. I had multiple people DM'ing me that asked about the product and ended up being customers thanks to the content I posted.

This newsletter is another example of this: by giving away a lot of value to your audience, you make it grow.

3. One-to-One Cold Outreach: Cold Emailing

I used a tool (Lemlist) to do cold emailing and cold DM'ing on Linkedin. Lemlist allows you to automate the inefficient One-to-One process of reaching out to people who don't know you and don't know about your product.

Cold emails usually converts much less, so it's really a number game, that's why automating that part is important. You need to make sure you have a very clear understanding of who you're targeting which is usually done by writing a very clear and detailed description of what's known as your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile).

Once you have your ICP defined, it becomes much easier to target the right people with your outreach sequence, which determines 50% of the success of the campaign.

You also need to have a good email sequence; for this you can find very good ressources online (for example, you can check Lemlist's documentation if you want to start somewhere).

Honestly, cold outreach didn't yield great results for me at first because I had a poor sequence and I was very new to cold emailing. I reworked this sequence later to target Affiliates instead of customers, which had higher leverage (more on this after).

4. Search Engine Optimization

SEO, like growing an audience, is a long term game. It’s also one of the highest ROI acquisition channel after emails when done well. So the sooner you start doing it, the better. My goal with making BlogSEO was to let people like me who don't have the time to take care of SEO still benefit from it.

As I'm making a SEO automation product, it would be a bit weird if I didn't use the tool for my own websites. So as soon BlogSEO was working well, I plugged my website's blog to it so that it generates content every day. I turned on the auto-publish mode so that I really don't have to do anything after setting it up.

After a few days, some of my blog pages got indexed by Google and Bing and I also got some traffic from ChatGPT. I landed a few customers thanks to my SEO Blog.

5. One-to-Many Cold Outreach: Ads

I ran 2 ad campaigns, on Google Search & Instagram. I invested about $200 on each as soon as I got my first sales from other channels because I was confident I could make the money back by getting new customers through these paid channels.

I won't go into the details of how to do setup an ad campaign here, but what you need to understand is that basically, ads are an amplifier for organic traffic. If your offer doesn't already convert from organic sources, or other acquisition channels, it's unlikely it will work on colder traffic coming from ads.

To run ads successfully, you need to make sure:

• You nail your tracking so that Google's & Meta's algorithms learn fast

• You nail your targeting (Meta only) so that you don't have to spend hundreds for the algorithm to just learn it for you (see the ICP definition above)

• Your offer is already converting with other sources, otherwise you risk throwing money out of the window - fast

I had many people coming from ads who signed up but didn't purchase, which allowed me to grow an emailing list. Having a list of email addresses from leads is super valuable, because you can then retarget the people to try and re-activate them with high leverage, one-to-many emails. (More on this below)

6. Referrals & Reviews

This is an important one. Word of mouth is one of the most converting channel because if someone you trust comes to you and tells you how great a product is and how it helped them solve a similar problem to yours, you will seriously consider trying it out.

So once you have your first customers thanks to the first methods in this strategy, try to deliver an incredible experience for them, listen to their feedback and help them reach their goal like your life depends on it. You may think it's not worth it because they pay you only a few dollars per month for example, but in the long term it will have a very high return on investment.

When your users are satisfied, you can ask for referrals & reviews. This gives you social proof, which is one of the most important part of your offer, and it helps you get new customers for free.

If you feel weird about asking for a review, it might be that you're not delivering enough value to your users. But if you do, I can guarantee you that most happy users will gladly refer the product to other users, for free. Think about it: if you have a friend who’s facing a problem, you show them the tool which solves that problem and now they fixed it, can you see how that will make you feel?

To summarize, a satisfied customer is a promoter of your product, which is like having a free sales representative. So make sure you deliver an incredible user experience, and actually ask for referrals & reviews, even if it feels a bit weird.

7. Paid Referrals: Affiliates

If some users will gladly refer other users for free, you can boost the efficiency of the process by proposing an affiliate commission for each referral. On my side, I used Rewardful to setup an affiliate program with 30% commission. But you can also give away product features for free if you prefer. (I don't recommend rewardful to be honest, it's pretty expensive and I discovered some other tools like Affonso that are much cheaper and seem to deliver the same features, if not more).

I also made it very easy to signup to this affiliate program in my web app for my existing users by adding a link in the nav bar. Then, I started trying to find potential affiliates that were not already using the product. Cold outreach didn't seem to give good results, and even if I managed to get answers, this would be a lot of efforts to get just one customer. So instead of reaching out to potential users, I switched my sequence to try and get affiliates, which is higher leverage: when you get one affiliate, you don't get one customer; you get a new stream of customers.

I focused on influencers and people with an audience to propose a win-win deal: they promote the product to their audience, helping them solve their problems, and in exchange they get a commission but didn’t have much success yet.

With better success, I also reached out to people making websites, presenting my solution as a natural upsell for them with the following idea: once business owners have a website, they also want to make it visible online, thus they'll end up looking for a SEO service most of the time. You might as well take a piece of the pie as the person who made the website for them by recommending a tool.

8. Directory Launching

Launching on different directories is a good way to get a big spike in traffic, and can really bring a lot of traffic to your website. But you need to make sure you nail your conversions by focusing on your landing page copywriting and onboarding conversions.

I launched on There’s an AI for That this week, which resulted in a nice spike in traffic, and some free trials. The sad part is, I lost 10 potential users because of a bug during my onboarding, it hit me hard but it’s a good lesson to be surgical about testing these critical flows in the future!

If you have 30 seconds, leaving a review for BlogSEO could be a huge help!:

Next on the list are Uneed, Tinystartups & the one and only ProductHunt!

Bonus: Future directions I’m exploring

Email nurturing

I’ve recently finished setting up a CRM (Attio) which is plugged to all my sources of leads, and I’m currently working on an email sequence to nurture those leads without having to spend a lot of time writing emails.

This is my top priority because the majority of people who sign up to BlogSEO don’t end up paying today. The most likely cause is that they don’t believe the product is right for them or they don’t trust that it will work. In other words, they don’t trust us because we haven’t demonstrated enough value to them yet.

So I have a huge list of leads with their email addresses, yet I’m barely taking advantage of it today. That’s why I’m trying to design a sequence of emails with a lot of value for the potential users, so that I earn their trust and demonstrate value upfront, before they pay.

Hopefully, once I’ve finished writing it, it will work for me and bring back some of the leads that dropped during the onboarding.

Influencer marketing

I know nothing about influencer marketing to be honest. I have a vague idea of how to approach it but it’s still on my ToDo list. Most marketing gurus seem to sell influencer marketing as the new El Dorado for SaaS so I gotta at least try it out. The good part is that if you find micro-influencers that are open to revenue sharing through affiliation, you only pay based on performance so it’s win-win.

I’ve also signed up to Passionfroot to see what the platform is worth. Let’s see!

Action points

If you only have time for three things this week:

1. DM 10 people asking "Do you know someone who..."

2. Set up one affiliate partnership

3. Get one customer review and add it to your landing

The truth is, these tactics might not seem sexy but they give actual results and compound into real revenue. You won’t go viral on Twitter with them. But while everyone else is chasing the next growth hack, you'll be quietly stacking Stripe notifications. 💰

[NEW] Who’s building cool stuff

It’s been a few months since I’ve been running this newsletter, so I took some time to reflect about its content, and how I can give even more value to my readers. I landed on the following idea: sharing my experience can only be so valuable, I should also talk about people I met who inspired me.

So starting today, I’ll try to add this new section at the end of each newsletter called the “Who’s building cool stuff” section (if you have a better name, don’t hesitate to suggest it!).

The goal is to talk about inspiring stories from other people! Let me know what you think about it and if you know anyone I should mention here!

Alexis

For this first edition, I want to talk about Alexis Atfalion (you can go check his LinkedIn here). Alexis is a repeat founder, he co-founded Zealy around three years ago where he grew the product to $2.5M ARR in less than a year. He’s now building Standout, with the ambition to revolutionize the talent acquisition space with the power of AI.

Alexis and I first met at Station F in Paris, after an introduction from VCs of Entrepreneur First. If you’re a non-technical founder, you gotta check out what Alexis is doing. Alexis really impressed me because when I first met him, he was looking for a technical co-founder, but given he puts the bar very high on who he wants to work with, he wasn’t successful in finding someone.

But from what I saw from the conversations we had, Alexis is a builder, not a CEO or a COO, so instead of lamenting himself that he doesn’t have the ability to build his project, he just chose to become a software engineer and built the product he imagined.

So if you have an idea but you’re hesitating because you fear that you won’t have the technical knowledge to execute on it - don’t. Today, AI has made technical requirements for building great apps much lower, and what it cannot help you with you will be able to learn along the way. Alexis proved that you don’t need a CS degree nor 5 years of professional experience to build successful apps. You just need to be able to learn and adapt quickly, and have the willingness to do so.

And the next time you hear someone looking for a job at an early stage startups, talk to them about Standout!

Until next time, keep scaling! 🚀

Vince