Ask HN: Can anyone share cases study of successful SaaS getting into the market?

Hi,

The background is we are a startup working on IoT development framework and we've just started to launch our product. The result of current advertising and promotion in the North American market is not up to much so far.

So anyone can recommend some worth-learning cases of SaaS products getting into North American market? (Actually we are doing PaaS stuff but considering SaaS is more common and easier to be as a reference)

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Hello - I am the founder of Rezi - b2c saas - I write on the topic of our growth https://www.jacobjacquet.com/

There is a bunch of great stories over at Indiehackers, most of which are SaaS. https://www.indiehackers.com/products?sorting=highest-revenu...

Have you met potential clients yet? Get on the phone, have a face to face meeting with them, and make sure you understand what's the problem they're facing before presenting your solution. Repeat 20 times, then summarize your findings by drawing a value proposition canvas. After you've manually onboarded a few customers, heard their feedback and have a clear sense of which persona uses and buys your product, then you might be ready to start investing in advertising and scaling your go-to market strategy.

Not North America, but my SaaS start-up grew mostly through networking and just cold and luke warm approaches to potential clients. We got a very extroverted team mate that didn't have any from of restraint in approaching people. This guy also had a goodwill factor surrounding him. He really helped in getting us in with a lot of companies.

It also helped that we had a very clearly defined market so we knew exactly who to approach. We also had no real viable competitors, so if they liked our proposition, we were an easy choice. So when we got in, we would set up an account with them, get them started and let them use the app for free for a month. Most would be convinced after that, some wouldn't.

Due to the interactivity, our up-front cost was quite high, but through word of mouth we started getting organic growth, which saved us from spending a lot in advertising.