How to Get Your First 100 SaaS Customers: A 3-Step Playbook

Getting your first 100 SaaS customers is the hardest part. Not because the strategies are complicated, but because most founders either overthink the approach or wait too long to start. Joseph Lee, founder of Supademo, didn't do either of those things — and he's now sitting at over $266,000 in MRR and $3.19 million in ARR across two separate SaaS products.

His company, Supademo, is an AI-powered demo automation tool that lets businesses create interactive, clickable product demos in minutes — no sign-up required, no sales call needed. It launched about two and a half years ago and has since grown to over 150,000 users, earning the title of G2's number five fastest-growing product for 2025. Joseph's earlier company, Freshline, a B2B seafood marketplace, was his first venture-funded product and the training ground for most of what he now applies at Supademo.

The origin of Supademo itself is a lesson in idea validation done right. Joseph had been a builder since age 14, running everything from electronics arbitrage on Craigslist to an organic soy candle company to a digital agency. Across all of these, he kept running into the same frustrating problem: demonstrating a product's value was painful. Making video demos with something like Loom was tedious, and the recordings went stale fast every time the UI changed. He didn't just assume this was his problem — he went and talked to over 100 B2B SaaS founders, confirmed the pain was widespread, and only then started building. That's the foundation. Solve a problem you personally have, validate it with real people, then launch as fast as you possibly can.

Now here's the three-step playbook he used to go from zero to his first 100 paying customers.

Step 1: Capture Obvious Demand

The first move is to go after the low-hanging fruit — people who are already searching for a solution to your exact problem. This is SEO, but done with surgical intent rather than as a generic content play.

Bottom of funnel — comparison pages: Supademo created detailed comparison pages pitting their product against every competitor. Think "Supademo vs. Walnut" or "Supademo vs. Storylane." These pages piggyback directly on the traffic competitors have already built. When someone is comparison shopping, they're moments away from a buying decision. You want to be in that conversation.

Middle of funnel — free ungated tools: They built dozens of free tools for adjacent needs — screenshot editors, SOP generators, and similar utilities. These tools had nothing to do with closing a deal directly, but they pulled in around 20% of Supademo's total traffic and converted 15–20% of those visitors into sign-ups. The logic is simple: if someone needs a screenshot editor and you give them one for free, they already trust you when they discover your core product.

Top of funnel — interactive tutorials: This is where Supademo did something genuinely clever. They created thousands of step-by-step interactive tutorials for common workflows — things like "how to export Figma to PDF" — and embedded a live Supademo directly into each piece of content. So the reader doesn't just read about how to do something; they interact with a demo showing them. The product sells itself inside the content.

This full-funnel content strategy is what laid the groundwork for consistent inbound growth before any paid acquisition.

Step 2: Do Things That Don't Scale

This is the step most founders skip because it feels inefficient. But inefficiency is exactly the point early on.

The strategy: Joseph personally went into communities like Reddit and Indie Hackers and offered to create free interactive demos for other founders. He'd ask someone to drop their product URL, then manually build a Supademo for their product and reply directly in the thread with the finished, fully interactive demo.

Why it worked: The founder who posted could immediately see the value. They could sign up, duplicate the demo, and start using it in minutes. Zero friction, immediate payoff. But the real magic was what happened publicly — other people in the thread saw the demos, got impressed, and either asked for one themselves or signed up directly. It created a viral loop inside communities where trust already existed.

The principle behind it: Removing friction for potential buyers is one of the highest-leverage things you can do early. You're not waiting for someone to understand your product from a landing page. You're handing them the "aha moment" on a silver platter. Joseph did this manually, repeatedly, until the organic interest compounded enough that he didn't need to do it as intensively.

Paul Graham's famous advice to "do things that don't scale" isn't just a philosophical point — it's a concrete growth tactic. The founders who grind through the unscalable work early are the ones who build enough momentum to eventually scale.

Step 3: Be Everywhere Your Users Are

There's no single magic channel anymore. If you're betting everything on one platform or one strategy, you're fragile. The third step is achieving what Joseph calls "distribution density" — showing up consistently across every place your target users congregate.

For Supademo, that breakdown looks like this:

• 30–40% of traffic comes from SEO and LLMs (their content strategy pays off here)
• 30% comes from word-of-mouth, powered by watermarks on shared demos and referral mechanics baked directly into the product
• 20% comes from building in public on platforms like LinkedIn and Indie Hackers

Building in public is underrated. Joseph and the Supademo team consistently shared their story — the wins, the challenges, the milestones. This isn't just personal branding. It creates an audience that follows your journey and roots for you. When you launch something new, it lands in a community that already knows who you are.

Word-of-mouth through the product itself is the PLG (product-led growth) engine at work. Every time someone shares a Supademo with a prospect or customer, the Supademo watermark is visible. That watermark drives new sign-ups passively, at scale, with zero incremental cost.

The core idea here is that distribution isn't something you bolt on after building the product — it's something you architect from day one, across multiple channels, so no single point of failure can kill your growth.

The Bigger Picture

What makes Joseph's playbook compelling isn't that it's novel — it's that it's disciplined. Most founders know they should do SEO. Most know they should engage communities. Most know they should build in public. But they do it inconsistently, without a clear framework, and then wonder why the results don't compound.

The sequence matters too. You start by capturing demand that already exists (Step 1), then you manually remove all friction to convert that interest into real users (Step 2), then you build the multi-channel presence that makes compounding possible (Step 3). Each step sets up the next one.

Supademo also runs as a freemium, product-led growth model, which means the product itself does a lot of the selling. Prospects can experience the full "aha moment" — clicking through a realistic, interactive demo clone — without talking to sales or even creating an account. That's a design decision with real strategic intent behind it.

If you're sitting on a SaaS idea right now, the takeaway isn't to wait until everything is perfect. It's to launch fast, talk to real users, do the unglamorous work of manual outreach, and build your presence everywhere your customers already are. The speed of learning is your biggest advantage as a startup. Use it.

You can check out Supademo directly at supademo.com — their freemium model means you can try it without any commitment and see why 150,000 users found it worth sticking around for.