SaaS •Entrepreneurship

How This $250K/Month SaaS Got Its First 100 Users (Steal This Playbook)

Starter Story • • 14 min • #141
How This $250K/Month SaaS Got Its First 100 Users (Steal This Playbook)

This is the story of how a $3M/year business got its first 100 paying customers. Every tactic, step by step, so you can do the same.

Summary

  • Joseph
    • Scaled two separate products to more than $3M in annual recurring revenue.
    • Built Super Demo after repeatedly struggling to demonstrate product value with recordings and outdated demos.
    • Started building businesses as a teenager, including buying and selling electronics, an organic soy candle business, a clothing company, a digital agency, and a venture-funded B2B seafood marketplace.
  • Super Demo
    • Helps companies create AI-powered interactive product demos in minutes instead of hours.
    • Creates guided, clickable, realistic product experiences that can be embedded on websites or in documentation.
    • Lets prospects experience a product’s aha moment without signing up or talking to sales.
    • Uses a Chrome extension to record workflows, clone the front end, and turn steps into an editable demo.
    • Supports chapters, HTML editing, reusable demo templates, voiceovers, cloned voice, and camera recording.
  • Metrics
    • Launched around two and a half years before the episode.
    • Grew from zero to more than 150,000 users.
    • Reached slightly over $3M ARR and just over $250K MRR.
    • Was named G2’s number five fastest-growing product in 2025.
  • Validation
    • Started from a problem Joseph had personally experienced while building businesses.
    • Talked to more than 100 B2B SaaS founders to confirm that product demos were painful.
    • Learned that people disliked creating product demos, disliked hearing their own voice, and needed better ways to keep demos current.
    • Built a small experiment to test whether people would pay.
  • First 100 customers playbook
    • Capture obvious demand first by targeting people already searching for a solution.
    • Create SEO content across the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel.
    • Build detailed competitor comparison pages to piggyback on competitor search demand and earn early search and LLM mentions.
    • Create ungated free tools in adjacent spaces, such as screenshots and SOPs, so visitors can get value before signing up.
    • Use programmatic pages with embedded demos for workflow keywords such as exporting Figma to PDF or merging cells in Excel.
  • Early acquisition tactics
    • Offered to create free Super Demo examples for founders on Reddit and Indie Hackers.
    • Asked founders to share product URLs, created demos for them, then replied publicly with the finished interactive demo.
    • Used the public replies to attract other founders who saw the demos and either requested one or signed up themselves.
    • Built distribution density through SEO, LLM visibility, communities, direct outreach, product updates, LinkedIn, Indie Hackers, and building in public.
  • Traffic sources
    • Gets roughly 30% to 40% of visitors from SEO and LLMs.
    • Gets about 30% from word of mouth, watermarks, referrals, and users sharing Super Demos.
    • Gets about 20% from building in public on LinkedIn.
    • Gets roughly 20% of all traffic from free tools, which convert about 15% to 20% of visitors into signups.
  • Tech stack and tools
    • Uses Super Demo internally for product demos, onboarding, and training.
    • Uses Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex heavily depending on the model or task.
    • Uses Linear for task management and integrations with Slack and Claude.
    • Uses AWS, Postmark, Intercom, Ahrefs, Clay, and Zapier.
  • Advice
    • Launch sooner and avoid chasing perfection.
    • Use urgency and speed as the founder’s advantage over incumbents.
    • Stop obsessing over competition and start building when the problem is right.
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