- Okay. So you've got a SaaS business,
you've got some revenues
and now you wanna get to a hundred thousand users,
but you don't have a billion dollars
in VC money to spend on ads.
What do you do?
So on this episode, I'm gonna walk you
through the exact growth hack that I use
to amass a hundred thousand users
for my last SaaS business ToutApp
with not a lot of marketing spin Intro.
(upbeat music)
What's up everybody, welcome to Unstoppable I'm TK.
And on this channel,
I help SaaS founders like you navigate the path
to the next stage of growth navigate the path
to product market fit and beyond.
So if you're new to this channel,
I drop an episode every single Sunday, Wednesday and Friday,
be sure to hit the Subscribe button and the bell icon
so that you get notified every single time I drop an episode
with the TK energy.
Also, if you're already part of our channel,
if you're part of my SaaS go to market program,
welcome back it's really great to see you here.
Now, here's the thing. If you're a SaaS business,
if you're just a venture back start period,
one of the studies show
that 40 cents of every venture dollar,
actually gets deployed towards advertising.
That means that 40 cents out of every dollar
they're venture capital deployed in new a startup
gets spent on either Facebook ads or Google ads,
or Amazon ads, you name it.
Which is kind of crazy, so the question is,
if you don't have a huge amount of money
to deploy in your ads,
if you don't wanna build that kind of business,
where it's just really, really expensive advertising,
that drives and as soon as you turn it off,
you no longer have any more users.
If you just don't even have that kind of cash to deploy,
what do you do?
What do you do to get to a hundred thousand users?
Now I use this very specific growth strategy
inside of ToutApp and I've seen it used
in other SaaS businesses very well, very effectively.
So I'm gonna walk you through this exact strategy
on how we got to a hundred thousand users at ToutApp
without a lot of marketing spent.
Super excited dig in I'm gonna walk you
through the exact principles,
quit and smash that Like button for that YouTube algorithm
and let's dig into principle number one.
So principle number one, the first thing you need to do,
and don't hate me for this I was like, Oh my God,
they're gonna be like, what the hell, trust me with this.
The first principle is, who is my ideal customer?
I know I constantly talk about
building ideal customer profiles.
If you don't have an ideal customer profile,
be sure to check out this video
about building an ideal customer profile,
three things you didn't know about what you need
in your ideal customer profile.
I know I keep talking about it.
It's so important, but this is important, trust me.
You need to get super specific about
who is your ideal customer.
You get super specific about who are they?
Where do they hang out?
What did they use?
What's their profession?
You need to niche down as much as possible
because the rest of these principles build on top of this.
If you are really wide in your ICP,
this strategy will not work.
The narrow you are the more specific you are,
the more effective you will be in this strategy.
This is why I wanted to start with this.
I know that like I keep talking about ICP,
but honestly like it really is principle number one
in a lot of things for growth.
So principle number one,
who is your ICP super specific.
I'll link to that video below.
You can check it out after this if you haven't seen it yet.
The second question you wanna ask,
now you'll know why principle number one is important.
The second question you wanna ask to employ this strategy
is you wanna ask, who is already selling to my ICP?
and must be something complimentary
to what you are selling.
I'll give you an example.
So when I started ToutApp and I was figuring this out,
I was selling software to salespeople.
I helped salespeople be more effective over email
and then over phone and then over social.
So I was like, okay, who's already selling to salespeople
and they're selling something
that's complimentary to what I'm doing.
Meaning it's not a competitor.
And it was easy for me because I got so specific.
I was like, Oh cool, CRM vendors.
And it wasn't just Salesforce, there was Highrise,
and there was honestly a whole long tail of CRM companies
that I used this strategy on.
It was brilliant on how it all came together.
So the second question is,
who is already selling to my ICP.
This is why you have to get super specific on this.
The broader you are, the more water down this will be.
So you wanna get super specific on
who is my ICP and who is selling to my ICP.
Once you have this on remember, it has to be complimentary.
Which means that if that company sells on this thing,
there are some gaps that they have now,
they're like, "Oh, you don't know how to do this last piece
that our software doesn't do, but yours does."
It has to be complimentary,
so you make a list of that.
Then once you have those two things,
then it's principle number three.
Principle number three is you need
to employ Host-Parasite marketing.
Host-Parasite marketing is an old school strategy,
it's a bunch of old school marketing books.
I read it in a marketing book that I'm reading right now
by Jay Abraham amazing marketing genius.
Host-Parasite marketing is what you're gonna use
to actually drive to a hundred thousand users
with these two elements.
Now, if I dig into principle number three,
I have some details on exactly what you need to do
and what I did the toutapp.
Let me just pause here for a second.
Have you started seeing the difference here?
The difference here is that you're not just going out
to Facebook and Google, and you're not just saying,
"Hey, give me some people that might be interested in this."
What you're doing is you're trying to figure out
what are other companies that are already spending money
to acquire these customers,
that would also be my customer.
What are they selling?
It has to be something complimentary.
who are these people?
Because you're gonna go and they're gonna be the host,
and you're gonna be the parasite
and I'll teach you how to be the parasite.
Are you see the difference?
Are you seeing the difference here?
If you are gonna smash that Like button
for the YouTube algorithm if you haven't already,
also hit me with a Yes in the comments below
if you are brave enough.
I love hearing from you guys also share your comments
if you'd like to, if you have some questions,
put it down there, and then let's dig into
how to actually implement principle number three,
Host-Parasite marketing.
There's three ways that you can actually deploy this.
All right especially in software,
this is an old school principle,
but the rules are slightly different in software.
I'm gonna teach you how to do it.
So the first thing that you can do is,
you can do an API integration.
Now, normally before back in the days,
let's just say you have a brick and mortar company
and you wanted to do a partnership with another company.
You have to go meet with them.
You have to draw up a contract.
You'd have to get special permission.
Now that has been completely eliminated
for the base layer of partnerships
for every SaaS business.
Do you wanna know why? APIs.
APIs are like the defacto open standard
for doing a BizDev relationship.
People don't quite think about it this way but
when you great into a complimentary company,
complimentary piece of software,
you're essentially entering into some form
of a partnership with them and you're adding value
to both to your mutual customers.
So the easiest way to get started on this is figure out
who are these companies that are already selling
to your ideal customers and figure out
how to actually do API integrations into them.
I did this on day three of ToutApp.
I figured out, okay, Highrise,
which was then owned by 37 signals
that they own the CRM product
at the time it was Highrise.
And I'm like, okay,
Highrise has a lot of people that would use ToutApp
because they're the CRM they don't have
any email capable as I do.
So I integrated with them.
I did a little Chrome Extension
where you would insert a button inside of Highrise,
and I said, "Hey, here's an email, a tout button."
And now they have special capabilities
for emailing right out of their CRM.
And I would log the data back in.
And I essentially did that integration
and I built it all out and I created a little video
explaining what it does.
And I emailed it to 37 signals I kid you not.
This is a real story.
I emailed there was something going on inside,
"Hey, I integrated into you guys,
here's the exact value that we provide.
It'd be awesome if you can just promote this to your list."
At that point they didn't have a marketplace
or anything so they had a mailing list.
So they said, "Totally."
I think they had like 250,000 people in their mailing list.
So literally on their next mailing list all
at the bottom, they said,
"Hey, ToutApp integrates with Highrise,
you can now email right out of high rise
and early activities will be logged automatically
and you can track what's going on.
And boom, just like that toutapp got exposure
to nearly 250,000 people
because I basically hooked into their open API.
I figured out that they were complimentary.
I figured out that they had a gap
that they will never gonna fail but I did.
And I emailed them saying, "Hey, we did this integration.
Here's a video would you mind promoting it?"
And boom, just like that,
we got exposure to 250,000 salespeople.
And that obviously led to a huge number of signups
and conversions for our product.
The first one is API integrations,
the second one is going into the company
and hooking up into their ecosystem or marketplace
and forging some sort of partnership.
This is how we did this at ToutApp,
again was massive for us.
We realized that there was gonna be two big marketplaces
that we really wanted to hook into
where salespeople would be around.
The first one was obvious it was Salesforce.
Salesforce had app exchange,
which is a giant ecosystem and so we knew
that, okay, we need to go hook into that ecosystem
because a lot of our buyers are gonna be there.
Salesforce doesn't have these capabilities,
and when we get listed on that marketplace
and we need to make sure that we integrate into Salesforce
and that way from that marketplace people would discover us
and then sign up.
That one is easy.
That one was obvious.
Other one was we had a Chrome Extension
that hooked into Gmail.
And so what we did was we got listed
in the Chrome Web Store.
On the Chrome Web Store we knew
that salespeople were looking for certain things.
So we optimize the SEO so they would find us
and boom that Chrome Web Store ended up
becoming one of our biggest generators of users
that allowed us to get to 100K.
Are you starting to get this?
So the power in this is you got afford some partnerships
and hook into ecosystems that these companies have
and make sure you get listed in their marketplaces.
And I'm gonna tell you this,
all it takes is one strong marketplace.
If you find one strong marketplace
where your ideal customer, your ICP,
this is where you get to get super specific about it.
If you can find that one marketplace
where they're already hanging out, already buying solutions,
you can optimize on that listing.
That alone could be the growth engine
that gets you to 100,000 users or more
that's the power in Host-Parasite marketing.
And by the way, like I got to see the other side of this.
Eventually, like once we sold toutapp,
I joined Marketo and Marketo as part
of my SVP of strategy role I was also as VP of alliances
and I owned like the Marketo ecosystem,
which was one of the largest and Martech rolled up to me.
So launch point was ecosystem.
There's this guy named Shai that ran it.
He reported into me it was an incredible ecosystem.
And I saw on our site what it was like to partner
with all these smaller companies.
And it was amazing for me to see how many vendors in Martech
really worked the partnership and the relationship
and how many of them just didn't bother
and how big of a difference it makes.
Trust me in this, there are people
in these other companies that are paid
to make sure that people enter
into a Host-Parasite relationship.
They want more software vendors in their ecosystem,
and they want their customers to get more value.
And sometimes they'll wanna cut of that revenue,
but still they wanna extend
and make sure the customer stay in our happy,
because that's the strategic mode.
So there are people that are paid to make sure you enter
into a Host-Parasite relationship with them,
which is why the partnership
plus ecosystem plate is super powerful.
And then finally, the last piece of Host-Parasite marketing
that you can employ is, and this builds on each other
is co-marketing and co-selling.
Co-marketing and co-selling, this is
when you can actually go into some of these companies
and say, "Hey, listen, you have 100 salespeople
and you're selling the customer product data which you owe.
Now I'll tell you why, product B, which I own
is actually super valuable.
And if you sell it to them, though,
the customer will get more value and they'll stick
around more and you actually can make some money,
I'll give you 10% of revenues that you generate.
You just have your marketing team
and sales team include our product when you sell it,
or you include as part of some sort
of post sale process."
And believe me, these kinds of arrangements
do exist and are incredible when they went work.
Because what that means is that you don't have
to build out your sales team,
your product gets sold by the sales team
that's owned by that company.
And that company is more than and happy to do it
because they know if their customer is happier,
they'll stick out longer
and they get a copy of your revenue,
which will still be cheaper than you building
out your own sales team.
Are you guys starting to get this?
So these all build on each other.
The basic thing is build an API integration.
The second thing is hook into their ecosystem
and their marketplaces.
All it takes is one marketplace.
And the third one is looking to co-marketing
and co-selling relationships.
Now at ToutApp, we did API integrations,
we hooked into marketplaces,
and then we also entered into co-marketing and co-selling
with other companies as well.
The biggest spend that we ended up doing
was Dreamforce for Salesforce.
We went in and that was essentially co-marketing.
We went in into their trade shows, we had our boots,
we invested in their marketing programs
and they got our word out there along with their brand,
which was super powerful.
There was one point where we were like
a seven person company,
and we had essentially negotiated a deal
where we had two boots.
Two boots seven person company, people thought we were huge.
Like it was kind of crazy.
We were just hitting them 1 million ARR.
We hadn't even raised our series A yet,
but it was so powerful.
And that brand presence was so powerful.
We, our revenues grew even faster.
We got an acquisition offer during Dreamforce.
We actually got a series they offer during Dreamforce.
So all of these things work really well.
So in conclusion, if you wanna get to 100K here's
how I did it with ToutApp do Host-Parasite marketing.
This is like an amazing strategy.
It's a real growth hack that you can use
to be successful the way you do it
is you get super specific with your ICP,
figure out what are the other companies
that are selling to that ICP already
that's complimentary to you,
and then start with API integrations assets to promote you,
then do a partnership and enter their marketplace.
And then co-marketing and co-selling.
This is the last art of BizDev truly.
We get so obsessed with giving 40 cents of every dollar
to Facebook and Amazon and Google,
We forget that there are other companies
that would love a smaller revenue cut,
and when we can actually get predictive ways of selling
to the customers that they already own,
that would love our product as well,
because it's complimentary.
And that's what I have for you today.
I hope you got value from that.
Now look, if you are building out your SaaS business
and you're driving to that next stage of growth,
and you want more principles like this
to build out a differentiate go to market machine,
be sure to check out
my 5-Point Startup Growth Strategy Guide.
In it, I go into much more depth into other principals,
that aren't building a differential go-market engine
and driving growth for your SAS business.
All you need to do is GETUNSTOPPABLE.COM/STRATEGY
or just follow the link below.
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Lastly remember, everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business,
but when you are with us, yours,
it's gonna be unstoppable. I'm TK.
I'll see you in the next episode.
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