Solved: Marketing Advice for New SaaS Validation Website

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I had a look at your situation. It's a common one, that feeling of 'analysis paralysis' when you're sat on a new product and the sheer number of marketing options feels overwhelming. The irony of it being a validation tool isn't lost on me, but honestly, this is a problem almost every founder faces, especially technical ones.

The good news is that the solution isn't to pick a channel at random and hope for the best. The paralysis usually comes from a few foundational pieces not being properly locked in place first. Get those right, and the decision on where to spend your first marketing pound becomes much, much clearer. I'll give you some initial thoughts on how we'd approach this, to hopefully cut through some of the noise for you.

We'll need to look at your offer... it's probably not what you think it is.

Right, let's get straight to it. The number one reason I see advertising campaigns fail for early-stage software isn't the ad copy, the targeting, or the budget. It's the offer. And I don't mean the product itself. Founders, especially technical ones, fall in love with their product, their features, their elegant code. But nobody buys features. People buy a transformation. They buy a solution to a painful, persistent problem. They buy a way out of a nightmare.

You've described your tool as something that "is meant to validate your SaaS before wasting time launching to 0 users." Logically, that makes sense. But it's not an offer, it's a description. It lacks urgency and emotion. I've worked with countless SaaS companies, and the ones that struggle are the ones that sell the 'what'. The ones that succeed sell the 'why'. We had one client, a medical job matching SaaS, with a cost per acquisition of over £100. We were able to reduce their CPA to just £7. The product didn't change—this shows the power of getting the offer and messaging right.

So, what's the real, gut-level problem you solve?

It's not "validating an idea."

It's the soul-crushing fear of spending a year of your life, every spare evening and weekend, and maybe your life savings, on a project that no one will ever use or pay for. It's the silent dread of hitting 'launch' on Product Hunt and hearing nothing but crickets. It's the frustration of being a talented developer who feels completely lost when it comes to business and marketing. Your offer isn't a piece of software; it's a shield against wasted life. It's a map out of the lonely wilderness of building in a vacuum.

Before you spend a single penny on an ad, you need to be able to articulate this transformation. Forget the features for a moment. What is the 'before' state of your ideal customer? (Anxious, uncertain, coding in the dark, fearful of failure). What is the 'after' state? (Confident, validated, building with purpose, talking to their first potential customers). Your software is just the bridge between these two states. All your marketing, your website copy, your ads, needs to be about this journey, not about the bridge itself. This is a critical distinction that most founders miss. They're so proud of the bridge they've built they forget to tell anyone why they should bother crossing it.

I'd say you need to define your ICP by their nightmare, not their job title.

This leads directly to the next point. "Solo founders or software developers" is a demographic. It's a starting point, but for advertising, it's next to useless. It's like trying to catch a specific type of fish by just throwing a net in the entire ocean. You'll catch something, sure, but it'll mostly be rubbish you don't want, and it'll cost you a fortune in effort.

To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their *pain*. You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Let's get specific. Which solo founder?

• -> Is it the Bootstrapper Betty? A developer with a mortgage and two kids, who has saved up £10,000 and has a six-month window to get a side project profitable before she has to give up and go back to her soul-destroying corporate job. Her nightmare is burning through her savings with nothing to show for it.
• -> Or is it First-Time Freddie? A brilliant 24-year-old engineer, just out of uni, living on ramen. He's technically gifted but terrified of sales. His nightmare is building something technically perfect that he's too afraid or clueless to actually sell. He doesn't want to become a "sales guy."
• -> Or maybe it's Serial-Entrepreneur Sarah? She's built and sold a small SaaS before, but she knows the pain of getting it wrong. Her nightmare isn't failure itself, but inefficiency. She can't stand wasting months on a feature branch that customers don't want. She values speed and data above all else.

These three people are all "solo founders," but they have fundamentally different nightmares. They need to see different ads, read different landing pages, and will respond to different value propositions. Betty needs to hear about de-risking her investment. Freddie needs to hear about finding customers without cold calling. Sarah needs to hear about data-driven validation and speed. By choosing one, you can create marketing that feels like it's reading their mind. Try to talk to all three at once, and you'll connect with none of them.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can find them. Where do they complain about this specific problem? Is it in the comments section of a Hacker News post about a failed startup? Is it in the r/SaaS subreddit in a thread titled "How do you know if your idea is any good?" Do they listen to podcasts like 'Indie Hackers' or 'Startups for the Rest of Us'? This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. Do this work first, or you have no business spending money on ads.

You'll need to calculate what a customer is actually worth to you...

The next thing that paralyses founders is the cost. They see a £10 CPC (Cost Per Click) on Google or a potential £50 CPL (Cost Per Lead) on LinkedIn and they run for the hills. This is because they're thinking like a consumer, not a business owner. The real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer to that question lies in its counterpart: Lifetime Value (LTV).

You absolutely must have a handle on this, even if it's just a rough estimate at first. Without it, you're flying blind. You have no idea if a £50 lead is a bargain or a disaster. Let's break down the maths in a simple way. You need three numbers:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you plan to charge per customer, per month? Let's say it's £49.
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after server costs, etc.? For SaaS, this is usually very high. Let's say 90%.
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you expect to lose each month? This is the killer metric for SaaS. A good benchmark to aim for early on is around 5%.

Now, the calculation is straightforward:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

So, with our numbers:

LTV = (£49 * 0.90) / 0.05
LTV = £44.10 / 0.05 = £882

In this scenario, each customer you acquire is worth £882 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This is the truth. This is your guiding star.

Now you can make intelligent decisions. A healthy LTV to CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio for a growing SaaS business is typically 3:1. This means you have room for marketing, salaries, and profit. With an LTV of £882, this means you can afford to spend up to £294 to acquire a single customer (£882 / 3).

Suddenly, things look different, don't they? That £50 lead from a perfectly targeted software developer on LinkedIn doesn't seem so scary. If you know that your sales process (or your free trial) converts 1 in 5 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £58 per lead (£294 / 5). This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality clicks. Use the calculator below to play with your own numbers.

You probably should scrap 'Request a Demo' and build a real offer.

Now we arrive at the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the Call to Action (CTA). The "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant CTA ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, a busy founder or developer, has nothing better to do than book a 30-minute slot in their calendar to be sold to by a stranger. It's high-friction, it offers zero immediate value, and it instantly positions you as a commoditised vendor, just another person asking for their time.

Your offer’s only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. For SaaS founders, you have an incredible unfair advantage here. The absolute gold standard is a free trial (with no credit card required) or a freemium plan. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation for themselves. When your tool helps them get their first piece of positive feedback on their own idea, the sale becomes a formality. You aren't generating "Marketing Qualified Leads" (MQLs) for a sales team to chase; you are creating "Product Qualified Leads" (PQLs) who are already convinced.

I can't stress this enough. In my experience, the SaaS clients that see explosive growth are almost always leading with a product-led offer. For instance, one of our campaigns generated 5082 software trials at just $7 per trial. These clients remove every possible barrier for a user to experience the core value of their tool. The companies that gatekeep their software behind a sales call are the ones that struggle, seeing CPAs in the hundreds of pounds for a single booked demo.

If for some reason a free trial isn't feasible right now, you are not exempt from this rule. You must bottle your expertise into a tool or asset that provides instant value. For your validation SaaS, this could be something simple but powerful:

• -> A "SaaS Idea Viability Score" Calculator: A landing page where a user inputs their idea, target market, proposed price point, and a few other metrics. Your tool then spits out a score from 1-100 with a mini-report on potential strengths and weaknesses. It solves a small, real problem for free and perfectly tees up your main product as the next logical step.
• -> A free email course: "Your First 10 Customers in 7 Days." A simple, automated email sequence that walks them through the process of validation, with each step subtly pointing towards how your tool makes it easier.

You must solve a small problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing. Ditch "Request a Demo." Offer value instead.

We'll need to look at the right advertising platforms for your audience...

Okay, with the foundations of Offer, ICP, and LTV in place, we can finally talk about channels. And the choice becomes much simpler. It boils down to one question: is your ideal customer *actively searching* for a solution right now, or do they need to be made aware that a better solution exists?

A) For the Actively Searching: Google Search Ads

This is your sharpest spear. These are people literally typing their pain into a search box. The intent is sky-high. For you, this means people searching for things like "how to validate a saas idea," "mvp testing tools," or "market research for startups."

Why it works: You're not interrupting them; you're answering their question at the exact moment they ask it. This is the lowest-hanging fruit.
What to do: Start with a small budget focused on a tight group of "high-intent" keywords. These are phrases that show someone is looking to *do* something, not just learn something. For example, `[saas validation tool]` is much better than a broad keyword like `saas ideas`. The square brackets denote an "exact match," meaning your ad only shows for that specific search, which keeps your traffic highly relevant. This pre-qualification is key; the keyword itself filters for the right audience.
The Catch: It can be expensive. Because the intent is so high, you'll be competing with others. But as we established with the LTV calculation, "expensive" is relative. A £15 click that leads to a £294 customer is a bargain.

B) For the Problem-Aware (But Not Searching): Social Ads

This is where your "Nightmare ICP" work pays off. Your ideal customer might not be actively searching for a validation tool today, but they are definitely feeling the pain of building in a vacuum. Your job is to interrupt their social media scroll with a message that hits them right between the eyes.

1. LinkedIn Ads: The B2B Sniper Rifle
Why it works: The targeting is unmatched for B2B. You can target people by their exact job title ("Software Engineer," "Founder"), their company size (like 1, which often means solo founder), and their professional interests ("Venture Capital," "Y Combinator," "SaaS"). You can find "First-Time Freddie" here with precision. One of our B2B software clients used this to great effect, getting qualified leads from decision-makers at a cost of just $22 per lead.
What to do: Run Sponsored Content ads (a single image or short video in the main feed) that call out the specific pain point. Drive them to your landing page with the strong, product-led offer (your free trial!). Avoid LinkedIn's Lead Gen Forms at first; they generate cheaper leads, but the quality is often lower as it's too easy for people to click and submit without really thinking.

2. Meta Ads (Facebook/Instagram): The Scalable Powerhouse
Why it works: It's generally cheaper than LinkedIn, and with the right targeting, it can be incredibly effective for reaching founders and developers. They might be on there for personal reasons, but their business pains don't just switch off.
What to do: This is where your "watering holes" research comes in. You can target people who have shown an interest in "Indie Hackers," "Product Hunt," "Paul Graham," or competitors like "Userlist." You can also target people who are admins of a Facebook Business Page, which is a good proxy for a business owner. The key is to test different interest groups to see which one resonates. We've had massive success for B2B SaaS on Meta; for example, one campaign drove 4,622 registrations for just $2.38 each. This shows how powerful the platform can be when you find the right pocket of users who feel the pain your product solves.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I've covered a lot here, and it can feel like a mountain to climb. But it's a logical process. Don't try to do everything at once. Work through these foundational steps in order. To make it clearer, I've broken down my main recommendations for you into an actionable plan below. Think of this as your way out of analysis paralysis.

Getting this stuff right is hard. It's not just about pushing buttons in an ad manager; it's about deep customer insight, financial modeling, and strategic positioning. It's why so many technically brilliant founders struggle to get traction. They build a fantastic product but fail on the go-to-market strategy because it's a completely seperate and complex skill set.

This is where expert help can make a huge difference, not just in executing the campaigns, but in helping you build the right foundations to ensure the money you do spend isn't just wasted. It's about avoiding months of costly mistakes and getting on the right track faster.

If you'd like to chat through this in more detail, we offer a free initial consultation where we can review your plans together and give you some more specific guidance. It's a no-obligation way to get a second set of experienced eyes on your strategy.

Hope this helps clear things up a bit.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh