Affiliate marketing might work, depending on your SaaS. e.g. this is what drove convertkit to 600k MRR

> Once we hit about $20,000 MRR (through direct sales and word-of-mouth) we added an affiliate program. That worked exceptionally well because bloggers — our target market — are used to using affiliate programs to generate revenue. Also, if a small business owner loves your product they might tell 2-3 friends. But if a blogger loves your product, they'll tell 20,000 readers! So we had a very natural distribution path built in.

> We decided to pay a 30% recurring commission each month, rather than a large upfront commission, mainly because we didn't have any cash and couldn't cashflow anything up front. That turned out to be a great decision since many bloggers want a predictable, recurring income source.

> Later on we started doing webinars with our affiliate partners as a way to help them drive more sales. This not only grew our email list significantly (up to 50,000 subscribers in a year), but also drove a ton of new revenue. Today we pay out just over 10% of our revenue each month to our affiliates."

Thank you for the suggestion.

> "Once we hit about $20,000 MRR"

Interesting. I wonder why the $20k MRR... I have $50 MRR (dollars... not thousands). But I don't see anything about affiliate marketing that would prohibit starting early.

This is going to be dependent on a few factors (market, product, etc.) but I'd rather be an affiliate for a product with a proven track record of conversions unless I really love a product and just want to promote it. If I know a product already has a high conversion rate and $20k+ MRR then I feel better about the prospects of sending 20k people there and getting a hefty percentage than I would about a new product bringing in $50. Maybe my thinking is wrong though.

I doubt it was specific to the exact MRR number. More likely their growth stalled using the methods that were taking up all of their time (direct sales, word of mouth).

For some $N MRR (magic point where you look for scalable channels), N should be large enough that you have a product that your market wants and will pay for, and the market is large enough that you were able to manually scale it to N.

The heuristic is something like "if you can get big enough doing low-efficiency/manual marketing, you've likely gotten close enough to the important things* and can move on to testing scalability".

* things like product/market fit, market size, clear communication, well defined value prop, etc.

If you are really small, your struggle with an affiliate program will be convincing affiliates you are worth promoting. They want to see a strong EPC number and ideally a recognized brand.

Not sure it's a case of waiting, but that they just didn't add the feature until then. If you're heads down on sales and development, guessing they just didn't have the scope/implementation to do it then.

I would postulate that it's just that they didn't think of the idea before. Affiliate marketing is nice because you are promising a share of revenue on conversion, so it just hits your margins a bit.

It's not so nice because it can screw consumers over a bit (e.g. try and find a non-biased review of an affiliate marketed product such as convertkit)

I don't know at what MRR you set the threshold, but you would want to have an understanding of actual costs, growth cost estimates, customer retention, etc. before you start promising commissions to affiliates.

Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) had a great post last week about getting your first 10 users, much of that post dealt with the importance of direct marketing / sales calls: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534034

Audience size usually correlates pretty well with time + money invested; if there are any shortcuts there's not much incentive to share them here.

If you're looking for a free source of relatively fresh ideas, try https://www.julian.com/learn/growth

Do you do content marketing (blogging) to an email list?

The OP is the actual guy behind wakatime.

For my market it helps that programmers are reachable online. Are there any online communities where you could post your MVP to get initial users?

You could also start writing about your market, to gain a following who could become your initial users but that usually takes a long time to ramp up.

It isn't easy. Welcome to the grind! Figure out how to market without spending money. SEO, a few emails, word of mouth, social media sharing, etc. If you're product can't grow this way to the customers you serve, maybe find a new product or find new customers.