Solved: Marketing a SaaS Product with No Budget for Ads

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Saw your post and the situation you're in is incredibly common. Building a great bit of software is one thing, but getting it in front of people is a completely different skill set. It's a real pain when you're trying to do it all with no cash.

I've put together some of my thoughts based on my experience running paid ad campaigns, especially for software and apps. I'll start with the zero-budget stuff and then move on to what I'd do if I was in your shoes and had a bit of money to play with later on. It's a bit of a long one, but hopefully it gives you a proper roadmap.

We'll need to look at getting your first users for free...

Before you even think about ads, you need to get your first batch of users. This is less about massive growth and more about getting proof that people actually want what you've built. It’s also your best source of early feedback to make the app better, which will be vital later when you're paying for every click.

My first port of call would be the directories for early adopters. These are places where people are actively looking for new and interesting tools. I'm talking about sites like:

Product Hunt, Betalist, Indie Hackers, maybe even Capterra (though it's more B2B focused, could be worth a look).

Getting listed here isn't just a vanity thing. The users on these platforms are usually tech-savvy and love trying new things. They're often happy to give you brutally honest feedback, which is gold dust at this stage. A good launch on Product Hunt can send a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand, curious users your way in a single day. That's enough to get initial data on how people are using your app, where they get stuck, and what features they actually care about. This is the stuff that helps you refine your messaging before you put money behind it.

Next up is content and SEO. Now, I’ll be honest, this is a long, slow grind. It's not going to get you a flood of users overnight. But it's about laying foundations for the future. You mentioned your app is an AI-powered study tool. This means students are your target audience, and they are definitely searching for solutions to their problems online. They are 'problem aware'.

You need to think about what they're typing into Google when they're stressed about exams. Things like:

• -> "how to revise for A-levels fast"
• -> "best way to make flashcards from notes"
• -> "apps that summarise lecture notes"
• -> "how to beat procrastination when studying"

If you can create genuinely helpful blog posts, guides, or even free tools that answer these questions, you'll start to show up in search results over time. It takes a huge amount of time and effort, and you have to be consistent. But a single, well-ranked article can bring you a steady trickle of highly relevant users for years to come, completely for free. It's a marathon, not a sprint, but one you should probably start running now.

Lastly on the free front, you could try some light PR. This just means reaching out to people who have an audience of students. Think student lifestyle bloggers, education tech journalists, or even YouTubers who focus on study tips. Don't just send a generic "check out my app" email. Tailor it. Tell them *why* their specific audience would find it useful. Frame it as a story: "A new AI tool is helping UK students cut their revision time in half." A single feature in a popular blog or newsletter can be a massive kickstart.

I'd say you should define your offer by the problem it solves...

This might sound a bit abstract, but it's probably the most important bit of advice I can give you. The reason most advertising fails, especially for new products, isn't because the ad was bad. It's because the offer wasn't compelling enough, or it was aimed at the wrong person.

You need to forget about "B2C SaaS" or "AI-powered study app". Those are descriptions of your product. They aren't a reason for someone to use it. You need to get into the head of your ideal user. What is their specific, urgent frustration? Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a demographic like "students aged 18-22". It's a problem state. For instance:

• -> It's the A-Level chemistry student who has a mountain of textbooks and feels completely overwhelmed, terrified they're going to fail and miss their university offer.
• -> It's the university undergraduate juggling three modules and a part-time job, who's falling behind on lectures and needs a way to catch up fast.
• -> It's the medical student who needs to memorise thousands of terms and finds traditional flashcards tedious and ineffective.

These are specific pains. Your app isn't a tool; it's the aspirin for their headache. Once you know the exact pain, you can craft a message that speaks directly to it. This is where the 'Before-After-Bridge' framework comes in handy. It’s a simple way to structure your message:

Before: Describe their current world of pain. "Staring at a 50-page chapter at 1 AM, feeling like nothing is sinking in? Drowning in lecture notes and worried about the upcoming exam?"

After: Paint a picture of the world once their problem is solved. "Imagine turning those 50 pages into a concise summary and a set of smart flashcards in under 5 minutes. Walk into your exam feeling confident and prepared."

The Bridge: Your app is the bridge that gets them from Before to After. "Our AI study app is the bridge. Upload your notes, get instant summaries, and test yourself with intelligent quizzes that focus on what you don't know."

This kind of messaging is a thousand times more powerful than just listing features. You're not selling AI; you're selling confidence, saved time, and better grades. Getting this right is non-negotiable before you spend a single pound on ads.

You'll need a solid plan for your first ad spend...

Alright, let's say you've got some traction, some positive feedback, and you've scraped together a small budget. The temptation is to just spray it around and hope for the best. Don't. You need a plan.

First, a massive warning. The single biggest mistake I see people make is choosing the wrong campaign objective. On platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you'll see options like "Reach" or "Brand Awareness". It sounds tempting, right? You want people to be aware of your brand. But you must avoid these like the plague.

When you choose "Awareness", you're telling the algorithm: "Go find me the largest number of people for the absolute cheapest price." And the algorithm is very good at its job. It will find you people who are cheap to show ads to precisely because they never click, engage, or buy anything. You're literally paying to reach the worst possible audience. For a startup, awareness is a byproduct of making sales, not a prerequisite for it. You need users, not just eyeballs.

So, your campaign objective MUST be conversions. This could be 'App Installs', 'Signups', or 'Free Trial starts'. This tells the algorithm to go and find people who are not just likely to see your ad, but who are similar to people who have previously taken the action you want them to take. It's more expensive per impression, but infinitely more effective.

Now, which ad platform? For a student-focused app, you have a few great options.

1. Google Search & Apple Search Ads: This is for capturing people who are already looking for a solution like yours. They are actively typing "best revision app" or "AI note summariser" into a search bar. This is warm traffic. It's usually more expensive per click, but the conversion rate can be very high because the intent is there. Apple Search Ads are particularly good as they show your app right at the top of the App Store search results, at the exact moment someone is looking to download.

2. Meta (Facebook/Instagram) & TikTok: This is for reaching the people who *aren't* actively searching. The students scrolling through their feeds to procrastinate. This is where your 'Before-After-Bridge' messaging is so important. You need an ad that stops them in their tracks and makes them realise you have a solution to a problem they've been pushing to the back of their mind. We've seen great success here for apps. I remember one campaign we worked on for an app in the sports and events space; we used a mix of Meta, TikTok, Apple, and Google Ads to get them over 45,000 signups at under £2 per signup. Another B2C software client got 5,082 trial signups at about $7 each using just Meta ads. It shows what's possible when you get the targeting and messaging right.

I'd say your targeting is everything on social...

On platforms like Meta, you can't just aim your ads at "everyone aged 18-24 in the UK". You'll burn through your budget in hours. You need to be much smarter. I usually prioritise audiences in a specific order, moving from broad to highly specific as the ad account gathers data.

Here’s how I’d structure it for your app:

Phase 1: Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Finding New People

You start here. This is about prospecting. Your goal is to test different groups of people to see who responds best. I'd create seperate ad sets for different 'themes' of interests.

• -> Educational Interests: Target users interested in pages like Khan Academy, Coursera, Quizlet, or specific educational publishers.
• -> University/College Interests: You can often target people who have listed specific universities on their profile, or who are interested in pages like UCAS or The Student Room.
• -> Behavioural/Demographic Interests: Target based on 'Field of Study' or 'Education Level'. This can be quite broad but is worth testing.
• -> Problem-Related Interests: This is more creative. Think about what your target users like. Maybe they follow 'studygram' accounts, productivity gurus, or use other apps like Forest (for focus).

The goal is to run small budgets to each of these, see which one gives you the lowest cost per signup, and then turn off the losers and put more money behind the winners.

Phase 2: Middle/Bottom of Funnel (MoFu/BoFu) - Retargeting

This is where things get powerful. Once you start getting traffic to your website or app store page, you can 'retarget' those people. These are warm leads. They know who you are. They've shown interest but haven't converted yet. You can create audiences of:

• -> All website visitors in the last 30 days (but who didn't sign up).
• -> People who watched 50% of your video ad (but didn't click).
• -> People who started the signup process but abandoned it.

You show these people different ads. Maybe with a testimonial, a reminder of the key benefit, or a special offer ("Finish signing up and get your first week free"). This is often where the cheapest conversions come from.

Phase 3: Lookalike Audiences

This is the holy grail of social media advertising. Once you have at least 100 people who have signed up (though more is much better), you can ask Facebook to create a 'Lookalike Audience'. The algorithm analyses the thousands of data points of your existing users and goes and finds millions of other people in the country who look and behave just like them. It's incredibly powerful. You can create lookalikes of your best users – for instance, people who not only signed up but also used the app three times in the first week. This focuses your budget on finding more people like your most engaged customers.

We'll need to look at what you can expect to pay...

This is the "how long is a piece of string" question, but I can give you some realistic ballparks. The cost of getting a new user (your Cost Per Acquisition, or CPA) depends on lots of things, but primarily your ad quality, your targeting, and your landing page conversion rate.

For a simple signup in a developed country like the UK, here’s some rough maths:

• -> Your Cost Per Click (CPC) will likely be somewhere between £0.50 and £1.50.
• -> A decent landing page should convert visitors into signups at a rate of 10% to 30%.

So, your potential CPA range is:

• -> Best case: £0.50 CPC / 30% conversion rate = £1.67 per signup.
• -> Worst case: £1.50 CPC / 10% conversion rate = £15.00 per signup.

As you can see, it's a huge range. Our goal in any campaign is to push the numbers towards that best-case scenario by constantly improving the ads (to lower the CPC) and the landing page (to increase the conversion rate). Hitting that sub-£2 CPA like we did for the other app I mentioned is achievable, but it takes rigorous testing and optimisation.

But CPA is only half the story. The real question is, how much can you *afford* to pay? This is where Lifetime Value (LTV) comes in. You need to know what a customer is worth to you.

Let's do a quick, hypothetical calculation for your app:

• -> Let's say your monthly subscription is £9.99.
• -> Your gross margin (after app store fees etc.) is 70%.
• -> Let's say on average, you lose 15% of your customers each month (your churn rate).

The LTV formula is: (Average Monthly Revenue per User * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

LTV = (£9.99 * 0.70) / 0.15
LTV = £6.99 / 0.15 = £46.60

This means, on average, each new paying customer is worth £46.60 in gross margin to you over their lifetime. A healthy business model aims for an LTV to CPA ratio of at least 3:1. This means you could theoretically afford to spend up to £15.53 to acquire a new customer and still have a profitable business model. Knowing this number changes everything. It stops you from panicking if your CPAs are £5, because you know you're still making money in the long run. It frees you to invest in growth intelligently.

This is the main advice I have for you:

That was a lot of information, so I've boiled it down into a table of actionable steps. This is the kind of phased approach we would take, moving from zero budget to a scalable paid acquisition engine.

As you can probably tell, this isn't a simple 'set it and forget it' process. Getting paid advertising right involves a lot of moving parts: strategic planning, audience research, creative development, data analysis, and constant optimisation. It's very easy to burn through a lot of money very quickly if one of these pieces isn't working properly.

This is where working with a specialist can make a huge difference. An experienced eye can spot opportunities, avoid common pitfalls, and build a system that generates users profitably and predictably. It often ends up being cheaper than the cost of learning through your own expensive mistakes.

Hope this has been helpful and gives you a much clearer path forward. If you ever get to the stage where you have a budget and want to discuss a proper strategy for your app, feel free to get in touch. We offer a free initial consultation where we can take a closer look at your specific situation and give you some more tailored advice.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh