- Okay. So you've got a SaaS business, you've got some revenues and now you wanna get to
a hundred thousand users, but you don't have a billion dollars in VC money to spend on ads. What do you do? So on this episode, I'm gonna walk you through the exact growth hack that I use to amass a hundred thousand users for my last SaaS business ToutApp with not a lot of marketing spin Intro. (upbeat music) What's up everybody, welcome
to Unstoppable I'm TK. And on this channel, I help SaaS founders like
you navigate the path to the next stage of
growth navigate the path to product market fit and beyond. So if you're new to this channel, I drop an episode every single
Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, be sure to hit the Subscribe
button and the bell icon so that you get notified every
single time I drop an episode with the TK energy. Also, if you're already
part of our channel, if you're part of my SaaS
go to market program, welcome back it's really
great to see you here. Now, here's the thing. If
you're a SaaS business, if you're just a venture
back start period, one of the studies show that 40 cents of every venture dollar, actually gets deployed
towards advertising. That means that 40 cents
out of every dollar they're venture capital
deployed in new a startup gets spent on either
Facebook ads or Google ads, or Amazon ads, you name it. Which is kind of crazy,
so the question is, if you don't have a huge amount of money to deploy in your ads, if you don't wanna build
that kind of business, where it's just really,
really expensive advertising, that drives and as soon
as you turn it off, you no longer have any more users. If you just don't even have
that kind of cash to deploy, what do you do? What do you do to get to
a hundred thousand users? Now I use this very
specific growth strategy inside of ToutApp and I've seen it used in other SaaS businesses
very well, very effectively. So I'm gonna walk you
through this exact strategy on how we got to a hundred
thousand users at ToutApp without a lot of marketing spent. Super excited dig in I'm gonna walk you through the exact principles, quit and smash that Like button
for that YouTube algorithm and let's dig into principle number one. So principle number one, the
first thing you need to do, and don't hate me for this
I was like, Oh my God, they're gonna be like, what
the hell, trust me with this. The first principle is,
who is my ideal customer? I know I constantly talk about building ideal customer profiles. If you don't have an
ideal customer profile, be sure to check out this video about building an ideal customer profile, three things you didn't
know about what you need in your ideal customer profile. I know I keep talking about it. It's so important, but this
is important, trust me. You need to get super specific about who is your ideal customer. You get super specific about who are they? Where do they hang out? What did they use? What's their profession? You need to niche down as much as possible because the rest of these
principles build on top of this. If you are really wide in your ICP, this strategy will not work. The narrow you are the
more specific you are, the more effective you
will be in this strategy. This is why I wanted to start with this. I know that like I keep talking about ICP, but honestly like it really
is principle number one in a lot of things for growth. So principle number one, who is your ICP super specific. I'll link to that video below. You can check it out after this
if you haven't seen it yet. The second question you wanna ask, now you'll know why principle
number one is important. The second question you wanna
ask to employ this strategy is you wanna ask, who is
already selling to my ICP? and must be something complimentary to what you are selling. I'll give you an example. So when I started ToutApp
and I was figuring this out, I was selling software to salespeople. I helped salespeople be
more effective over email and then over phone and then over social. So I was like, okay, who's
already selling to salespeople and they're selling something that's complimentary to what I'm doing. Meaning it's not a competitor. And it was easy for me
because I got so specific. I was like, Oh cool, CRM vendors. And it wasn't just Salesforce,
there was Highrise, and there was honestly a whole
long tail of CRM companies that I used this strategy on. It was brilliant on how
it all came together. So the second question is, who is already selling to my ICP. This is why you have to
get super specific on this. The broader you are, the
more water down this will be. So you wanna get super specific on who is my ICP and who
is selling to my ICP. Once you have this on remember,
it has to be complimentary. Which means that if that
company sells on this thing, there are some gaps that they have now, they're like, "Oh, you don't
know how to do this last piece that our software doesn't
do, but yours does." It has to be complimentary, so you make a list of that. Then once you have those two things, then it's principle number three. Principle number three is you need to employ Host-Parasite marketing. Host-Parasite marketing
is an old school strategy, it's a bunch of old
school marketing books. I read it in a marketing book
that I'm reading right now by Jay Abraham amazing marketing genius. Host-Parasite marketing
is what you're gonna use to actually drive to a
hundred thousand users with these two elements. Now, if I dig into principle number three, I have some details on
exactly what you need to do and what I did the toutapp. Let me just pause here for a second. Have you started seeing
the difference here? The difference here is that
you're not just going out to Facebook and Google,
and you're not just saying, "Hey, give me some people that
might be interested in this." What you're doing is
you're trying to figure out what are other companies that
are already spending money to acquire these customers, that would also be my customer. What are they selling? It has to be something complimentary. who are these people? Because you're gonna go and
they're gonna be the host, and you're gonna be the parasite and I'll teach you how to be the parasite. Are you see the difference? Are you seeing the difference here? If you are gonna smash that Like button for the YouTube algorithm
if you haven't already, also hit me with a Yes
in the comments below if you are brave enough. I love hearing from you guys
also share your comments if you'd like to, if
you have some questions, put it down there, and then let's dig into how to actually implement
principle number three, Host-Parasite marketing. There's three ways that you
can actually deploy this. All right especially in software, this is an old school principle, but the rules are slightly
different in software. I'm gonna teach you how to do it. So the first thing that you can do is, you can do an API integration. Now, normally before back in the days, let's just say you have a
brick and mortar company and you wanted to do a
partnership with another company. You have to go meet with them. You have to draw up a contract. You'd have to get special permission. Now that has been completely eliminated for the base layer of partnerships for every SaaS business. Do you wanna know why? APIs. APIs are like the defacto open standard for doing a BizDev relationship. People don't quite think
about it this way but when you great into a
complimentary company, complimentary piece of software, you're essentially entering into some form of a partnership with them
and you're adding value to both to your mutual customers. So the easiest way to get
started on this is figure out who are these companies
that are already selling to your ideal customers and figure out how to actually do API
integrations into them. I did this on day three of ToutApp. I figured out, okay, Highrise, which was then owned by 37 signals that they own the CRM product at the time it was Highrise. And I'm like, okay, Highrise has a lot of people
that would use ToutApp because they're the CRM they don't have any email capable as I do. So I integrated with them. I did a little Chrome Extension where you would insert a
button inside of Highrise, and I said, "Hey, here's
an email, a tout button." And now they have special capabilities for emailing right out of their CRM. And I would log the data back in. And I essentially did that integration and I built it all out and
I created a little video explaining what it does. And I emailed it to 37
signals I kid you not. This is a real story. I emailed there was
something going on inside, "Hey, I integrated into you guys, here's the exact value that we provide. It'd be awesome if you can just
promote this to your list." At that point they
didn't have a marketplace or anything so they had a mailing list. So they said, "Totally." I think they had like 250,000
people in their mailing list. So literally on their
next mailing list all at the bottom, they said, "Hey, ToutApp integrates with Highrise, you can now email right out of high rise and early activities will
be logged automatically and you can track what's going on. And boom, just like that
toutapp got exposure to nearly 250,000 people because I basically hooked
into their open API. I figured out that they
were complimentary. I figured out that they had a gap that they will never gonna fail but I did. And I emailed them saying,
"Hey, we did this integration. Here's a video would
you mind promoting it?" And boom, just like that, we got exposure to 250,000 salespeople. And that obviously led to
a huge number of signups and conversions for our product. The first one is API integrations, the second one is going into the company and hooking up into their
ecosystem or marketplace and forging some sort of partnership. This is how we did this at ToutApp, again was massive for us. We realized that there was
gonna be two big marketplaces that we really wanted to hook into where salespeople would be around. The first one was obvious
it was Salesforce. Salesforce had app exchange, which is a giant ecosystem and so we knew that, okay, we need to go
hook into that ecosystem because a lot of our
buyers are gonna be there. Salesforce doesn't have
these capabilities, and when we get listed on that marketplace and we need to make sure that
we integrate into Salesforce and that way from that marketplace
people would discover us and then sign up. That one is easy. That one was obvious. Other one was we had a Chrome Extension that hooked into Gmail. And so what we did was we got listed in the Chrome Web Store. On the Chrome Web Store we knew that salespeople were
looking for certain things. So we optimize the SEO
so they would find us and boom that Chrome Web Store ended up becoming one of our
biggest generators of users that allowed us to get to 100K. Are you starting to get this? So the power in this is you
got afford some partnerships and hook into ecosystems
that these companies have and make sure you get listed
in their marketplaces. And I'm gonna tell you this, all it takes is one strong marketplace. If you find one strong marketplace where your ideal customer, your ICP, this is where you get to
get super specific about it. If you can find that one marketplace where they're already hanging
out, already buying solutions, you can optimize on that listing. That alone could be the growth engine that gets you to 100,000 users or more that's the power in
Host-Parasite marketing. And by the way, like I got to
see the other side of this. Eventually, like once we sold toutapp, I joined Marketo and Marketo as part of my SVP of strategy role I
was also as VP of alliances and I owned like the Marketo ecosystem, which was one of the largest
and Martech rolled up to me. So launch point was ecosystem. There's this guy named Shai that ran it. He reported into me it was
an incredible ecosystem. And I saw on our site what
it was like to partner with all these smaller companies. And it was amazing for me to
see how many vendors in Martech really worked the partnership
and the relationship and how many of them just didn't bother and how big of a difference it makes. Trust me in this, there are people in these other companies that are paid to make sure that people enter into a Host-Parasite relationship. They want more software
vendors in their ecosystem, and they want their
customers to get more value. And sometimes they'll
wanna cut of that revenue, but still they wanna extend and make sure the customer
stay in our happy, because that's the strategic mode. So there are people that are
paid to make sure you enter into a Host-Parasite
relationship with them, which is why the partnership plus ecosystem plate is super powerful. And then finally, the last
piece of Host-Parasite marketing that you can employ is, and
this builds on each other is co-marketing and co-selling. Co-marketing and co-selling, this is when you can actually go
into some of these companies and say, "Hey, listen,
you have 100 salespeople and you're selling the customer
product data which you owe. Now I'll tell you why,
product B, which I own is actually super valuable. And if you sell it to them, though, the customer will get more
value and they'll stick around more and you actually
can make some money, I'll give you 10% of
revenues that you generate. You just have your marketing team and sales team include our
product when you sell it, or you include as part of some sort of post sale process." And believe me, these
kinds of arrangements do exist and are incredible
when they went work. Because what that means
is that you don't have to build out your sales team, your product gets sold by the sales team that's owned by that company. And that company is more
than and happy to do it because they know if
their customer is happier, they'll stick out longer and they get a copy of your revenue, which will still be
cheaper than you building out your own sales team. Are you guys starting to get this? So these all build on each other. The basic thing is build
an API integration. The second thing is hook
into their ecosystem and their marketplaces. All it takes is one marketplace. And the third one is
looking to co-marketing and co-selling relationships. Now at ToutApp, we did API integrations, we hooked into marketplaces, and then we also entered into
co-marketing and co-selling with other companies as well. The biggest spend that we ended up doing was Dreamforce for Salesforce. We went in and that was
essentially co-marketing. We went in into their trade
shows, we had our boots, we invested in their marketing programs and they got our word out
there along with their brand, which was super powerful. There was one point where we were like a seven person company, and we had essentially negotiated a deal where we had two boots. Two boots seven person company,
people thought we were huge. Like it was kind of crazy. We were just hitting them 1 million ARR. We hadn't even raised our series A yet, but it was so powerful. And that brand presence was so powerful. We, our revenues grew even faster. We got an acquisition
offer during Dreamforce. We actually got a series
they offer during Dreamforce. So all of these things work really well. So in conclusion, if you
wanna get to 100K here's how I did it with ToutApp
do Host-Parasite marketing. This is like an amazing strategy. It's a real growth hack that you can use to be successful the way you do it is you get super specific with your ICP, figure out what are the other companies that are selling to that ICP already that's complimentary to you, and then start with API
integrations assets to promote you, then do a partnership and
enter their marketplace. And then co-marketing and co-selling. This is the last art of BizDev truly. We get so obsessed with giving
40 cents of every dollar to Facebook and Amazon and Google, We forget that there are other companies that would love a smaller revenue cut, and when we can actually get
predictive ways of selling to the customers that they already own, that would love our product as well, because it's complimentary. And that's what I have for you today. I hope you got value from that. Now look, if you are building
out your SaaS business and you're driving to
that next stage of growth, and you want more principles like this to build out a differentiate
go to market machine, be sure to check out my 5-Point Startup Growth Strategy Guide. In it, I go into much more
depth into other principals, that aren't building a
differential go-market engine and driving growth for your SAS business. All you need to do is
GETUNSTOPPABLE.COM/STRATEGY or just follow the link below. If you got value from this video, please be sure to hit that Like button and also be sure to hit
the Subscribe button and that bell icon in case
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this community stronger. And that means the world to us. That's the big reason we do this. Lastly remember, everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business, but when you are with us, yours, it's gonna be unstoppable. I'm TK. I'll see you in the next episode. (soft music)
