Growth Hacking Strategy for SaaS Startups (How to Acquire 100K Users)

Nearly every week I run into someone in my sphere, in my space that was like, oh, I used to use ToutApp. ToutApp was my last company. We pioneered the sales engagement space. And I always thought it was a little weird that I run into so many people so often. And then I did the math. It turned out ToutApp amassed nearly 100,000 salespeople using the product. So it's not coincidence that I constantly run into people where they're like, oh, I used to use that product. I loved it. So here's the big question though. How did I actually amass 100,000 users? And this wasn't just random people using some random product. This was salespeople who are very specific and targeted. So in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through the exact growth hacking strategy, the exact go-to-market machine I built at ToutApp to amass 100,000 users. I'm gonna distill it down to three concrete, specific principles that you can adopt. And when you follow these principles, you're gonna be able to know exactly how you can apply it to your SaaS business to accelerate your path to that next stage of growth. And by the way, if you're thinking, well, that was ToutApp. Does it still work? Well, guess what? These are the same exact principles I use for my company, Unstoppable, today. And now we're at 46,000 subscribers in this channel and over 250 SaaS founders we work with directly as customers. So they still work and they're timeless. Intro. What's up, everybody? Welcome to Unstoppable. I'm TK. And on this channel, I help SaaS founders like you grow your SaaS business faster with an unstoppable strategy. Now, if you're new to this channel, welcome. I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches on how to grow your SaaS business faster. So be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon so you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode with the TK energy. Now, if you're already part of this community, this fast-growing community of 46,000 subscribers and SaaS founders, if you're part of my SaaS go-to-market coaching programs, my people, welcome back. It's really awesome to see you over here. My last company, ToutApp, pioneered the sales engagement space and we amassed nearly 100,000 users. My current company, Unstoppable, we are now at 46,000 subscribers on this channel and we have over 250 customers in our go-to-market programs. This begs the question, how did I do it and how do I do it again? Well, it turns out it's nothing crazy. The principles that I use to build these kinds of companies, the principles that I teach inside of my SaaS go-to-market coaching program, principles I talk about in this channel, they're all timeless. They're all the same core principles. So in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through the three specific principles I applied to amass 100,000 users for ToutApp. If you're excited to dig in, smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm and let's dig right into it. Principle number one with ToutApp. Well, now for context, for those of you that don't know, ToutApp was a solution and a SaaS platform where it helps salespeople generate more pipeline, be more productive, track their emails, use templates, all those things. And we were one of the first in the market. That specific set of features, when we first, first started out, could have been used by anyone. What I'd recognize was it could be used by anyone that uses email. Could have been PR people, BizDev people, HR people. But we decided to follow principle number one and we said, nope, we're gonna focus on salespeople. And specifically, we're gonna focus on inside salespeople and SDR reps. That was our ideal customer profile. We didn't start off like that originally, but as soon as we did, that was one of the first critical points of our go-to-market machine and this giant growth hack that we ran to amass 100,000 users that really kicked things into gear. So principle number one for you, as you are building out your go-to-market strategy, as you're looking to drive growth for your SaaS business and amass 100,000 users, is that get specific on exactly who you wanna be targeting that needs your product the most. Once you have that in place, a lot of other things come together. That's when principle number two came in for me, especially with ToutApp. People didn't quite know what our tool did. Salespeople just use CRM and that was it. Marketers used email marketing automation, but that was very different than what we were building. And anytime we approach salespeople and said, hey, we help you be more productive, we help you send emails, we help you track them, we help you use templates, they were quick to say, wait, hang on, no, no, no. You should go talk to marketing. They're like the email people. We don't do that. And we're like, no, no, no, no. You are sending a lot of emails for sales. You are prospecting into people. You're following up on leads. That's all email. That's all phone calls. We help you streamline that. We have to educate people about that space. People didn't quite know how to think about us. And if you're building a disruptive SaaS offering, then very often you have to actually educate the market. You could even be building a commodity offering. You're building yet another CRM. And in that case, you have to educate the market on why they should go with you versus the gold standard, which is Salesforce. So principle number two is we built our manifesto. We built a differentiated message, a narrative, a core message that was transformational, that educated salespeople on why they needed to be using our product. And we dubbed it under the guide, how to write kick-ass sales emails. This is what it looked like. It was pretty awesome. And it got downloaded tens of thousands of times. And we use that as a core asset to spread our message and educate salespeople all over the world on why they should be using our platform. And also just how to be more effective with the email communications they were doing as salespeople so they can win more deals, which is ultimately what they really, really cared about. So principle number two and principle number one went hand in hand because if we hadn't set a proper ideal customer profile and focus on salespeople, then our message on how to write kick-ass sales emails and the manifesto that we use would never have come together. It would have been diluted. We probably would have written a manifesto like how to write emails. And who would have used that? We would have never gotten the traction that we did to amass 100,000 users and also paid customers on top of that. So these two principles were the linchpin for ToutApp and really getting the growth going. Once these two things were established, we had our core go-to-market strategy. And that was half the battle. Then the real thing came together. We went to principle number three. Now, before I go to principle number three, let me just pause here for a second. Are you starting to see the power in this? If you are a regular viewer of this channel, I talk about ICP and manifesto all the time. But I wanted to do this episode just to reiterate the fact of how powerful these are and how timeless they are and how nuanced they are. Picking the right ICP. When I work with founders inside of my go-to-market program, we look at 29 different points on how to really nail in on the right ICP. Note, our ICP wasn't just salespeople. It was salespeople that were inside salespeople and SDRs. And that happened to be in a particular type of company. And that's why we were able to grow so fast. But also on top of that, how you communicate to these people to really position your product so that they're more likely to use it, you can educate them, and you stand out in the market, and you are differentiated in terms of the competition. That was the manifesto. These were all nuanced things that we did. And I talk about in this channel and I work with founders on my go-to-market program. This is nuanced work, but when you do them, they work incredibly well. And that's the power in this. So if you're starting to see the power in just these two principles and how powerful they are when you implement them, can I just get a yes in the comments below and also smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm that just loves it when you do that. Also, if you are an early-stage SaaS founder and you're like, look, I wanna get to 100,000 users. I wanna get to 1,000 customers. I wanna get to that next stage of growth. I really need to embrace this founder-led go-to-market journey. I really need to align my team. We really need to nail our ICP and our messaging. This is exactly why I run my SaaS go-to-market coaching program. You don't have to go anywhere right now. I'll tell you more about it at the end of this episode. I'll link to it below. Right now, let's go to principle number three because on top of the ICP and the manifesto, this principle number three is the thing that really brought everything together, and I wanna tell you about it. Also, smash that like button while you're here for the YouTube algorithm that just loves you when you do that so that we put a lot of love into these videos. Okay, principle number three was we ran a Broadway show, but every Broadway show is slightly different. When I work with founders, there's a concept of a Broadway show. The concept of a Broadway show, which is the principle that I talk about in this channel, is you wanna run a consistent set of sales and marketing activities on key channels to bring your manifesto to your ICP. That's a Broadway show instead of being all random. But the different strategies that go into Broadway shows, and it's nuanced, it depends on the company. That's when I work with founders and I coach them, we talk through exactly what the right strategy was. Specifically for ToutApp, principle number three here was we followed the host parasite strategy. What we said was, look, we wanna target salespeople. Let's find out exactly who is already selling to salespeople. Where are these salespeople already hanging out? And remember, this is early 2010s. All the way from 2010, all the way to 2017 was the ToutApp journey. At that time, you had to target salespeople to get really smart about it. Now, there are all these communities of salespeople that are online, but that didn't exist back then. It was mostly offline. But we had to figure out how to really hack into this. So what we found, and this seems obvious, but it wasn't obvious as we were navigating, it was who else sells to salespeople? It was CRM companies. And we looked at Salesforce, we looked at HubSpot. HubSpot was just now starting to get into the CRM space. Back then, it was just purely marketing automation. And we're like, look, there's Salesforce, there's Oracle, maybe there's HubSpot, but really, Salesforce is king. So we started to follow what we call the host parasite strategy. What we said was, let's integrate with Salesforce. We actually use their APIs to integrate into them. Then we said, let's actually figure out what marketplaces they have. Salesforce happened to have the Salesforce AppExchange. So we listed ToutApp over there. Then we said, what events do they have? Well, they had Dreamforce, and they had all these smaller events. So we started going to those events. And we didn't just stick to Salesforce, we also said, well, where else are salespeople searching for tools and looking for things? And we found that there was one more marketplace. There was a Google Chrome store. So we went and listed ToutApp in over there. And we started to actually be a parasite to this host. Salesforce and Google were already targeting all these users that we wanted to go after. We basically became a parasite in them and started to provide value and started to participate in their ecosystem. What that allowed us to do was get in front of our ideal customers and then get our product and our manifesto right in front of them. And that allowed us to really accelerate the growth. If we had to just purely spend money on advertising, or we just purely had to spend money on cold calling and cold emailing, we would have never scaled so quickly because we found a host that was already selling to our ideal customers. And we brought our differentiated message through the marketplaces, the events. And then on top of that, with the ads, we were able to run a Broadway show that was leveraged. And that was the host parasite strategy that we followed. Now, should every company use a host parasite strategy? No, it really depends. And this is why we actually talk through what is ICP, what is a manifesto, what is a differentiated message and what is the right strategy for the Broadway show? It's nuanced, but the principles are true. And with those three things in play, the ICP, the manifesto, and then that host parasite Broadway show, we create this custom go-to-market machine that amassed us 100,000 users. And it was really beautiful when you think about it. The way it worked was we would go into the host at all different hook points. We would constantly introduce our differentiated message. We either got them into a free trial of our product, which converted to paid at 7% on a regular basis, or we got them into our manifesto, which then got them into the free trial of the product. Or we got them into the free trial of the product and then we overlaid it with the manifesto. So it was a two-prong strategy to really educate these salespeople and get a mass movement going of using ToutApp. There's so many other nuances that we did further into the product, further into the go-to-market strategy that's beyond the scope of this video. But these three principles helped us really get the leverage we needed as a tiny company to amass 100,000 salespeople using our product. And no wonder I keep running into people all the time. They're like, oh, I used to use ToutApp. And I'm like, that's weird. And then I'm like, well, the math checks out. There's so many people that downloaded it and used it. No wonder I meet them so often. So to recap, principle number one for this growth strategy that I used to amass 100,000 users, we flashed out our ideal customer profile and got very specific about exactly who we were targeting. Principle number two, we crafted a manifesto with a very differentiated message. We thought about what were the objections. We thought about exactly what these people need and what they care about and crafted this manifesto that made the world of difference to actually get their attention and convince them to get into our product. And then we brought that manifesto to our ideal customers on a consistent basis by running a Broadway show. And specifically, we followed the host parasite strategy, the different strategies that exist for running a Broadway show, just like how there are 29 different points for building an ideal customer profile. But these were the specific things we use for ToutApp because that's what made sense for it to actually drive that growth. So now you know exactly how I amassed 100,000 users. And by the way, these are the same principles I follow here for Unstoppable, my current company today, which now we're about, at the time of this filming, we're roughly around 46,000 subscribers and over 250 customers. The principles don't change, but the way you apply them specifically for your product and for your target market and the messaging, those are the things that are the really fun parts to figure out. And when you do, incredible things happen. And that's why I'm such a big believer in actually fleshing out your go-to-market strategy using these three core principles that now you know. What you may not know is, TK, I need to build these pieces out, but how do I actually build out my ideal customer profile? How do I know if it's specific enough or detailed enough? Or am I slicing it in the right way? Or am I leaving too much money on the table? How do you know what your manifesto should be? Like, how do you craft the manifesto? And how do you structure it? What do you title it? How do you know exactly what strategy to follow for your Broadway show? If you're at this stage where you're looking to figure out your scalable go-to-market strategy, you're looking to align your team on how to drive growth, this is exactly why I run my SaaS go-to-market coaching program. Inside of this program, we follow three key things. Number one, we flesh out your ICP. Number two, we build out your manifesto. And then we teach you how to run a Broadway show using the right strategy to bring your manifesto to your ICP on a consistent basis. It's an incredible program. We've shared so many success stories of founders and SaaS companies that have gone through this program right on this channel. And we have more founders joining, and I'm working with you directly one-on-one to make sure that you're set up for success as you figure out these core components. So if you wanna learn more on how to work together to actually build out your go-to-market strategy and apply these principles and operate the nuances on how to build your machine, then I encourage you to go to tkkader.com slash GTM, tkkader.com slash GTM. On that page, you'll get all the details about the program. And then if it looks like it's a fit, just go ahead and fill out the little form and we'll get on a call. On the call, we'll figure out exactly where you are, what your goals are in your business, and if we're a fit for working together. The better the fit, the better the results, which is why we have this call. If it sounds like you're the right fit, we'll give you all the information and then we'll be off to the races and you and I start working together inside of the go-to-market program. So just go to tkkader.com slash GTM and also link to it below. Also, if you got value from this video, please smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. It just loves it when you do that. And so do we, we put a lot of love into these videos. I truly do these videos and my team works really hard to develop these videos and edit these videos and plan for these videos and promote these videos so that we can help as many SaaS founders as possible. So also if you have a fellow SaaS founder, a team member, part of a Slack group or WhatsApp group, a group of people that would get value from this video and this channel, please share this with them. It'll just mean the world to us as well. I drop an episode every Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches from actually having done it and still doing it, being in the trenches just like you. So be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon. And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business. When you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable. I'm TK and I'll see you in the next episode or inside the SaaS go-to-market coaching program. Take care, everybody. So if you're excited to begin, wait, hang on. This is the beginning, isn't it? So let's go to intro.