How To Get Your First 1,000 SaaS Users in 2026 (Step By Step)

So I've scaled over 100 SaaS companies, and I can tell you one thing, and getting your first 1,000 users is the hardest part about building any software company out there, not because it's complicated, but because most founders are doing it completely wrong from day one, and they build for months on months on months, launch, and nobody really gets the traction that they're looking for. They run some ads, get a few signups, do word of mouth and referrals, and they're not really getting anywhere. So in this video, I'm gonna be showing you the exact step-by-step breakdown, exactly how to get your first 1,000 users, and this is the exact same system I leveraged. get Acrely to $20 million in valuation, or even at last from 10 to over 120 K in monthly occurring revenue in the first 120 days of working together or instapation from two demos a week to over 200 demos a month. So stick around till the end. Cause I'm going to be showing you exactly how to go ahead and build the exact same system. that we did inside of their businesses. All right, so in this video, we're going over why most SaaS founders never get to a thousand users with their software company and the problem not being their product and they keep working on the product repetitively and they do nothing on the marketing and sales end, which is one of the biggest reasons why people spend all these years and thousands of dollars on development and they don't have the time and money for actual marketing and getting the company off the ground and they're just super ambitious about the product, but they don't spend enough time on the marketing. Maybe because they don't have experience, maybe because they've been burnt before by other marketing agencies, maybe because they just don't know what they're doing at all and they've tried all the things. that you can name right bait ads outbound word of mouth referrals tech conferences so on and so forth so the problem is not ultimately the product but it is generally the acquisition system behind it meaning you can have a absolutely amazing product but if you have bad acquisition nothing is really ever going to work right and so there's three reasons why founders get stuck before a thousand users right so one of the three things being they're targeting the wrong icp right they're targeting everyone and anyone instead of one very specific ideal customer profile the reason why i like to target one ideal customer profile is just due to the fact that you can go ahead and create all your marketing all your messaging all your resources towards one icp and they resonate with it they feel like this is made for them it's tailored around their needs and that's one of the biggest reasons why they're going to choose you against everyone else in the marketplace two they have the wrong messaging right their messaging does not speak to a really really painful problem which is why they don't ever end up clicking on your basic generic ads that are super well designed and formatted by your designers or canva or whatever right they don't care because it's not the right messaging right or three you're doing the wrong channel right you're going ahead and going after them when you know maybe all of them are on meta and Facebook. You're maybe doing LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, whatever it might be. You're maybe just on the wrong channel, right? So when you try to speak to everyone, you end up resonating with literally nobody, right? And this is one of the biggest lessons I've learned after scaling over 150 SaaS companies, generating millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue and scaling companies past $20 million in valuation, right? And so a few things I will go ahead and get started with to get your very first five users. And this is kind of like the manual way of doing it, right? But it's like, start with people you already know in your network, your friends, your colleagues who match your ICP and reach out to One manually, right? Just through LinkedIn, through iMessage, whatever you guys have. Tell them exactly what you're building and you just need some feedback from someone who would actually use it, right? Offer a free account in exchange for honest feedback. Put them in like an early stage group chat, whether it's Discord, WhatsApp, whatever. Just create a community, right? Because eventually you want to create a moat in a community around your software so that way people know about it. Your job is not to scale, but your job is to pretty much serve these people so that they become advocates, right? They create a moat. They create a community. They start talking about it to other people. You start getting feedback. You start reiterating. You start using their pain points and understanding what... messaging would work on the front end, right, for the marketing. So that's that. Now, if you really want to get from five users to really 100, the next step is like once you have five users who generally love the products, you know, that pretty much activates referrals. Your very first step is done there, right? They start telling their friends and the word starts spreading generally, right? And then from there, they give, you know, early users a referral link, right? Give them a good reason to share it to their best friend or give them a good reason to share it to their business partner, whoever it might be, right? Like early discounts, special pricing, make them feel like insiders, like early stage founders, or like they do this at the gym all the time, you know. we had a gym, I think it's like 20, 20 kilometers away from me. And I generally went there because they gave a early membership, right? It's a beautiful gym. Everything's brand new, all the machines and all that. And they started giving me referrals to refer my friends. I started referring them. They got 20% off, 10% off, 15% off. I got a bunch of guest passes. So it gave me a really good reason to tell my friends about it and get, have them come try it out on top of that, give them a discount to sign up. Right. And that's one of the best ways to actually go ahead and really just market a product that you have and really get from five years to a hundred, just like that. Right. And this is literally what you can do to literally spend $0 on ads. still get tons of users. Now, the next stage is really, how do we get from 100 to 1,000 users? And this is where now you need marketing expertise, now you need experience, and you need a lot more effort and understanding in the SaaS world and marketing in order to get off the ground, right? And so referrals alone won't get you 1,000 users. That's just the pure truth. If you're relying on word of mouth referrals, you are literally killing yourself and shooting yourself in the foot because you're never going to scale. You're just relying on other people's word, and you can only get so far. You're going to hit this growth ceiling where you're just not able to escape that. It's just not consistent whatsoever, right? So what I would do, is start creating a content strategy whether it's on linkedin youtube instagram tick tock whatever and start posting three times a week about your journey your wins your losses start doing a little bit of a build in public thing right and this is huge on on twitter lots and lots of people do this and they get users by sharing their experiences what they've tried what worked what didn't and that's what people like that's what people resonate with right and that's going to start to build traction and awareness and you can go ahead and start creating content around your icp as well so not only are you building in public getting feedback from real-time founders but you're also building content towards your icp and start using their their pain point, ask some of your early stage users, what are some of the biggest pain points that they have? What do they genuinely look forward to the most about, you know, turning on your product or going on your website, right? And start creating short form content around it, right? And the goal is to just really just build trust, capture demand, and just create awareness, right? So this is the very first step, right? And so the next step is your outreach, right? So you should go ahead and lead with a very specific observation about the business, offer something valuable, not just like pitching your product, right? So follow up consistently, most people really give up after like one touch, and the money is literally in the fucking follow up. If you're not following up, nothing's going to work. This is the same thing with cold email. This is the same thing with LinkedIn. This is the same thing with iMessage. This is the same thing with sales calls. This is the same thing with literally everything, no matter what channel you have in sales and marketing, when you go ahead and get a lead, you need to follow up to make sure that they're interested, keep them in a pipeline, keep them engaged, keep them warm and really just start. Don't, don't obviously bombard them, but create a messaging style and a workflow that you follow consistently that works as a proven sales process to go ahead and keep them in pipeline, keep them engaged and really go ahead and make sure that they actually end up converting right now, the real way of actually getting to roughly over a thousand users. just continuing growth is really just creating a user funnel, right? Where you attract users, you retain users, and you just continue to scale operation. This is ultimately what everyone wants. And so once you have some traction, you have product market fit, this is generally when you want to turn on ads, right? And you can even get product market fit with paid ads, right? Because not everyone is going to be able to prove their product works even if you're at 30K a month, even if you're at 50K a month, even if you're at 100K a month, you can't really truly prove that your product is product market fit just with 100 or 200 or 300 users. You need to continue to run it again. And one of the best ways to do this is paid ads, right? So run four different angles at the same time, test them for a week, see how they do, and then cut the ones that aren't performing, double down on whatever gets the most qualified leads. Now I'm not saying leads, I'm saying qualified leads. And that's ultimately what we care about is who out of our ideal customer profile is specifically qualified. Those are the people that we want to go after, right? Not the cheapest leads, the most qualified ones. And there's a huge difference in this, right? And so what also makes a huge difference is retargeting. So like one of the biggest things that I've realized is like a lot of people put off to the side, email sequences, SMS, triage calls. What I love for our clients to do is start retargeting a lot of people that showed interest in their content, in their ad before, on their website before, because these are people that have showed interest. We know they have intent. We can retarget them and get them to go ahead and eventually buy. One of the best examples of this is I actually have a whoop here, right? This is a whoop. And essentially what it is, it tracks your health. You might've heard about it. I saw one of my best friends have it and I asked him, so what is that? He's like, it tracks your sleep, tracks your health, tracks your steps, all that. And he told me why it's different than an Apple watch. I was like, okay, cool. Started popping up on my feed, swiped up one day. It wasn't interesting. continued to pop up on my feed and I eventually ended up buying a $250 whoop and like I'm on a subscription for fucking life now for like $50 a month I've been paying for like the last seven months they made a ton of money because they retargeted right and so this is absolutely crucial and this works with everything meta LinkedIn Google YouTube everything you name it so install pixels on your website and this is the number one thing that you can do when it comes to just like getting people back in right and really just doing that quote-unquote follow-up but on ads right so there's that and then when someone raises their hand reach out to them in three to five minutes whether they opt into your ad, we need speed to lead. So whether it's over email, whether it's over LinkedIn, we need an AI inbox management system, create a messaging workflow that consistently works repeatedly. And once you proved it with your manual work and your own efforts, then go ahead and automate that consistent workflow. Cause you know, it's proven and do it with, you know, a setter or do it with AI and reply automatically on email under five minutes. You could do this with instantly. You could do this with smart lead. Um, and on LinkedIn, you could do this with, Hey reach, right. Or on paid ads. What I personally recommend don't use an AI dialer. Cause a lot of people, depending on your ICP, They don't really listen or watch AI setters as like huge thing, right? In some enterprise industries, right? So if we're going after like, for example, like med spas, they're not really going to care, right? When you reach out to them with a setter, it's not really going to get their attention because they're going to know it's like an AI dialer. It's like an AI speaking to them. As opposed to when a human reaches out, if you have the right conversational workflow, you hit the right angles on that call, you're most likely going to be able to get them booked in a demo and eventually go ahead and close them, right? So the biggest thing here, the weekly system is really just go ahead and launch new ad campaigns, launch new outbound campaigns. campaigns review all the results look at all the analytics and data cut off whatever isn't working double down on the winners repeat the same thing next week and this is how you're going to be able to grow week over week month over month now the biggest thing with this if you don't know how to actually do this consistently it's not going to work whatsoever and that's one of the biggest things with this is if you're not sure of what to do with the actual system then it and you don't have the expertise you're going to burn through a lot of time you're going to run through a lot of cash and you're just generally not going to know what to do so if you want a full audit and a general personalized game plan on exactly what to do from top to bottom for your song software company with your own personalized messaging offer positioning and actual ad angles go ahead and book a call down below with me and my team we'll jump on completely for free complimentary and create an entire game plan on exactly what you need to do personalized towards your software in order to actually get to the next level now how to actually keep users once you have them right so once you're getting users that's only half the battle the next thing is really keeping them and this is what really builds the business because if you're just getting users consistently and they're just all falling out and it's like a leaky bucket you pour water in water comes out and you're not really growing you're in the same position month after month then go ahead and start creating a onboarding flow, right? See what really retains these people, right? And this is ultimately what's really going to work is people want to go ahead and see value fast. They want to get the time to value. They want to get what they bought the product for really quickly, right? And so use case studies, use an onboarding flow, and that's what you're going to be able to do to kind of get even more customers on the front end, right? Because once you actually impress a lot of these people that have bought your product, use those case studies on the front end and continue to actually go ahead and grow, right? And then from there, you can really focus on retention, right? And this is one of the biggest things when it comes to actually scale. is retaining a lot of these people, right? So yeah, that's kind of it when it comes to generally what I would do is really just go ahead, create a repeatable system, and you'd be able to go ahead and get from 100 to over 1,000 users consistently. So yeah, if you want us to come in completely done for you without you lifting a finger, without you having to test all these different angles, outbound campaigns, think about product market fit, think about messaging, think about targeting, and all this sort of stuff, go ahead and book call down below. We'll do all that completely done for you without you lifting a finger. Literally, we have guarantees in place for some of the SaaS companies we work with where we get them at 90. even a hundred qualified demos every single month guaranteed, or they don't pay us a single dime. So if you're interested in something like that, go ahead and book call down below. We'll do a full audit of your SAS and see if we can actually work together.

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In this video, I break down the exact step-by-step system to get your first 1,000 SaaS users in 2026 using ICP targeting, content marketing, outbound, referrals, and paid acquisition.

You will learn:
• Why most SaaS founders fail to reach 1,000 users (and how to fix inconsistent customer acquisition)
• How to identify and target your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for faster growth and better conversions
• The exact process to get your first 5–100 users without paid ads using manual outreach and referrals
• How to turn early users into advocates who bring in more users organically
• The best SaaS content strategy (LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok) to generate consistent awareness and inbound leads
• How to use cold outbound (LinkedIn + email) to book demos and acquire users predictably
• The tools and systems to personalize outreach and increase response rates and conversions
• When and how to start paid ads (Meta Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads) to scale user acquisition
• The role of retargeting, pixels, and multi-channel funnels in converting more users
• How to build a full acquisition system (content + outbound + ads) that compounds growth
• Why speed to lead and automation can double your demo booking rate
• A weekly execution system to consistently test, optimize, and scale what works
• How to improve user onboarding, activation, and retention to grow faster with less churn

If you're struggling to get users, relying on word of mouth, inconsistent growth, or random marketing efforts, this will show you exactly how to build a predictable SaaS growth system and scale to your first 1,000 users and beyond.