How I Grew A SaaS Product to $450 MRR With Social Media Marketing

I'm a developer who has been trying to build his own products for 3 years, and it is only within the past year that I have begun to figure out how to do some type of marketing for my apps and get real paying users. My marketing channel of choice is organic social media, and I grew one of my products to ~$450 MRR in 3 months purely through social media marketing.

This is the content strategy that I used to do so.

For some context:

The product I’m talking about is nexusresearch.ai. It is a chat pdf tool targeted towards students.

Now, onto the content strategy.

1) Make your first post really boring

The first post for every account that I make is the same: it is a “sales” video. Just a very simple walkthrough of what the product is and how it can solves a particular problem.

Pin this post to your profile so that it is the first post that anyone coming by your account will see.

99.999999% chance this post won’t go viral, and that is expected. It isn’t supposed to. It is strictly there so that eventually once your future videos go viral, people will watch your pinned video and learn about your product.

example video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cy6-fAJME4x/

2) Build your initial audience

Now it’s time to build your base audience. You’re going to want to talk about your product every single post and talk about how great it is — but now is not the time.

I like to build an initial base audience of my users with some fun, general content and then once I have some initial base of users I start to make content about my product.

The reason for this is because of how the algorithm works in terms of pushing out videos. The algorithm a/b test your video with a small audience pool and then if that initial small audience pool like the content, they start pushing it out to an even bigger pool, and so on and so forth.

When you don’t have a base audience, it is harder for the algorithm to target the right demographic of people that will like your content.

Build your initial base of users and then once you have that initial base of users you can start pumping out the real marketing content.

For my product, I decided to lean into comedy videos to build my initial base of students. Here are some examples:

— https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzEdn_WOjQD/

— https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzHD3Veubzh/

— https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cztju7GO9AF/ — https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzwwV7Ku-Sq/ — this video was the one that went really viral and helped establish my account.

3) Figure out your “golden” piece of content and double down on it.

I describe a “golden” piece of content as something that is

• repeatable
• organically shows the product

This is the hard part. It’ll take time to find this content format, but when you do find it it will pay dividends.

This is the golden piece of content I found for my chat pdf product.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0MYi3gueNy/

The whole premise of this video series is finding ridiculous articles (e.g. “Which doctor cheats on their spouse the most?”) and then summarizing the findings of the article by using my chat pdf tool.

Repeatable? Yes.

Organically shows the product? Yes.

Once I found this content I just doubled down on it and milked the format as much as I could.

I also started a second series of “If colleges were honest” that regularly went viral and helped to get more and more eyeballs into my page (https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0FqH3OuS1C/)

P.S. Real apologies for the shameless plug here, but I promise that if you found this type of content helpful or useful and you want to learn more about social media marketing, you'll enjoy thecontentmarketingblueprint.com, a database of case studies of startups that have successfully grown through organic social media marketing for you to learn from their playbook. Also no pressure at all to check it out if you don't want to 🙂

Enjoy and happy posting 🚀

Feel free to leave any questions and I'll be more than happy to answer them.