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Why Nobody Can Tell You "How to Do Marketing" for Your SaaS

September 7, 20266 min read

Short answer: "how do I market my SaaS" has no single answer because marketing isn't a bug with one cause — it has many inputs and no clean fix. The move that actually works is boring: put out volume first, then find the one channel nobody else is fighting you for (usually an integration with a product that already has your audience), and then ship before it's ready and read the silence as data.

Someone posted in a startup founder forum: two years, zero sales, more than ten SaaS products built, none of them sold. The ask was for tips on marketing. That question can't be answered in the shape it was asked, and the reason is worth more than any tip would have been: marketing is not a bug, and it is being debugged.

A bug has one cause and one fix. You find the cause, you apply the fix, it works or it doesn't. That is what "how do I do marketing?" is asking for — a solution to paste in. Marketing has many inputs and no single fix, which is why every answer to that kind of thread is either useless or contradicts the one above it.

The first step is volume, and there is no clever way around it

Not a channel strategy. Not a positioning exercise. Volume: put yourself out there, live stream, record content, post videos, and see what happens.

That advice is boring, and it is the only honest first move, because until you have shipped a quantity of things into the world you have no data about which of them works. You are not choosing between strategies yet. You are producing the evidence you will later use to choose.

What ten products and zero sales actually tells you

If you have built ten SaaS apps in two years and made no money, the odds are overwhelming that at least one of them could have earned. The bottleneck was never the building. You built ten times.

So the honest diagnosis is not "my products are bad." It's closer to: nobody knows they exist, and you haven't been the one putting them in front of anyone. If you're not showing up and not actually trying to market it, it won't work — not because of a rule, but because there are tens of thousands of people in the exact same position, competing for the attention of the same audience, and most of them are trying harder than that.

Find the channel nobody is fighting you for

This is where the advice stops being generic. Everyone crowds the same channels, and the cost of attention on all of them goes up together.

If you know how to build software, you have an option most founders don't: find other SaaS apps that already have the audience you're trying to reach, and integrate your tool into theirs. You are not competing for that audience. You are borrowing it from someone who benefits when you do.

Run this once and it can convert far better than any paid channel — one version of it hit 32%. It costs essentially nothing: there is no ad spend in an integration, and no algorithm to beat.

The numbers from a real first month, so you know what the bar is

Content marketing, one month, run properly:

  • A handful of subscribers
  • ~2,000 views
  • one long-form video every other day
  • one short every day

Is that a lot? No. Will it make a visible dent on its own? No. Is there a long way to go? Yes.

That is the point. If those numbers are reachable, they're reachable for most people trying — this is bare minimum, and it is what showing up looks like before anything compounds. If you can't clear it, you'd have to be working quite hard at being worse at marketing than that.

Ship it before it's ready, then read the silence

The last piece is the one that actually moves things, and it sounds worse than it is: sell the prototype as if it were the fully functioning, production-ready software you wanted it to be.

Not to deceive anyone — to get people far enough in to tell you something. Once they're onboarded you can watch what they do, ask them afterward, or let them tell you straight. You can build the feedback tooling into the platform itself and it costs almost nothing.

And then the inversion most founders miss:

If nobody signs up, nobody stays, or nobody pays — that IS the feedback.

It is not a null result and it is not a verdict on you. It is the most specific information you will get all month, and it is what you edit the marketing and sales copy against. You sell to them. You listen to the reasons they give for not joining. You use those reasons to fix the copy. Eventually people start signing up, and by then you're talking to them closely enough to keep improving it.

What to do on Monday

  1. Stop asking for the fix. Write down the last three things you tried to market this product. If the list is short, that is your answer.
  2. Pick a volume commitment you can actually hold for a month — one video every other day and one short a day is the shape that produced the numbers above. Put it in the calendar, not on a list. (If you need the system for turning one recording into a month of output without burning your week, that's laid out step by step here.)
  3. Make a list of five SaaS products that already serve your customer and are not competitors. For each one, write the single sentence describing what an integration between you would give their user. That sentence is your outreach message.
  4. Ship the thing you've been polishing and put a feedback prompt inside it. Onboard ten people this week, however scrappy.
  5. Write down what happens when nobody responds — which step they stopped at, what they said, what they didn't say. That is the copy brief for next week.

If step 3 is the one you want to run properly, that is exactly what Ordana is for — it finds the SaaS products that share your audience and solve a different part of the same problem, and handles the revenue-share contract and payout once you agree to integrate.

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