Solved: Marketing SaaS Product, OneClickAgents, Pre-launch

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It's good you're thinking about marketing now, before the launch. Most founders leave it too late and then wonder why nobody's signing up. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on my experience running campaigns for quite a few SaaS businesses. The usual advice you'll get is often a bit generic, so I'll try and give you a more direct take on what actually works.

We'll need to look at your ICP, but not in the way you think...

Right, first things first. Forget the sterile, demographic-based profiles you've probably seen. "Companies in the real estate sector with 10-50 employees" is next to useless. It tells you nothing of value and leads to generic ads that speak to absolutely no one. To stop burning cash before you've even made any, you have to define your customer by their pain. Their nightmare, to be exact.

You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, and expensive problem. What's the career-threatening issue that keeps them up at night? Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. For one of our legal tech SaaS clients, the nightmare wasn't 'needing better document management'; it was 'a senior partner missing a critical filing deadline, exposing the firm to a massive malpractice suit and reputational damage'. See the difference? One is a feature, the other is a fire you need to put out.

So, for 'OneClickAgents', what's the real nightmare? Is it a support manager terrified of losing their best agents to burnout because they're swamped with repetitive queries? Is it a startup founder who knows they're losing sales because they can't respond to leads fast enough after hours? Is it the crippling cost of hiring more staff when revenue is tight? This is the core of your messaging. You don't sell "AI agents"; you sell "an end to agent burnout" or "never missing an after-hours lead again".

Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can find them. Where do these stressed-out managers hang out online? What podcasts do they listen to? What industry newsletters do they actually read? What SaaS tools (like HubSpot, Zendesk, or Salesforce) do they already pay for? This isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your ad targeting. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads.

I'd say you need to build a compelling offer, not just a waitlist page...

Now we get to the most common failure point for pre-launch SaaS: the offer. A simple "Coming Soon - Sign up for updates" page is lazy and arrogant. It presumes your prospect has nothing better to do than wait around for you. It provides zero value to them and gives them no reason to care. You need to give them something tangible in exchange for their email address.

Your pre-launch offer's only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value, or at the very least, the promise of significant future value. This is how you build a list of genuine potential customers, not just curious onlookers. I've seen this work time and time again. For B2B SaaS, this usually comes in one of a few flavours:

• The Exclusive Early-Bird Deal: This is probably the most straightforward. Offer a significant discount for those who join the waitlist. Not 10% off. Something that feels substantial, like "50% off for the first 6 months" or even a limited number of "lifetime deals" (LTDs). I remember one SaaS client that brought in $30k from LTD sales alone, which funded their initial growth.


• The Private Beta Club: Frame it as an exclusive opportunity to be a founding member. People who sign up get to be the first to use the product, give direct feedback to the founders, and shape its future. This works well for building a community and getting invaluable user feedback before a wider public launch.


• The Value-Added Asset: If you can't offer the product yet, offer your expertise. Create a free tool, a comprehensive guide, or a webinar that solves a smaller, related problem for your ICP. For OneClickAgents, this could be a 'Support Ticket Grader' tool that analyses a sample of their tickets and shows where an AI agent could have the biggest impact. You solve a small problem for free to earn the right to solve the big one later.

Your landing page needs to sell this offer hard. It needs persuasive copy that digs into the nightmare we talked about, shows off the key features of your product with screenshots or a short video, and has a very clear call-to-action to sign up for the specific offer. Don't be vague.

You'll need to understand the numbers that actually matter...

Before you spend a single penny, you need to get your head around the basic maths of SaaS advertising. The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead (CPL) go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer lies in its counterpart: Lifetime Value (LTV).

Even with a pre-launch product, you can and should be making educated guesses about these numbers. It will dictate your entire strategy. Here’s how you calculate it:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you plan to charge per customer, per month? Let's say it's £100.
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? For SaaS, this is often very high, let's say 90%.
• Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of customers do you expect to lose each month? A good benchmark to aim for is around 3-5%. Let's use 4%.

The calculation is simple: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

So, in this example: LTV = (£100 * 0.90) / 0.04 = £90 / 0.04 = £2,250.

This means, hypothetically, each customer is worth £2,250 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is typically 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £750 to acquire a single customer (£2,250 / 3). If your sales process (or self-serve funnel) converts 1 in 10 trial users into a paying customer, you can afford to pay up to £75 per trial signup.

Suddenly, that £5 or £7 cost per waitlist signup from a Meta ads campaign doesn't seem so bad, does it? It looks like an incredible bargain. This is the maths that unlocks intelligent, aggressive growth. Use the calculator below to play with your own numbers.

You probably should use paid ads to build your waitlist...

You mentioned user engagement pre-launch. The fastest, most predictable way to get people onto your waitlist is through paid advertising. Organic stuff like posting on Indie Hackers or trying to get on Betalist is great, and you should do it, but it's not repeatable or scalable. Paid ads are a tap you can turn on and off.

The number one mistake people make here is running the wrong type of campaign. Do NOT run a "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" campaign on platforms like Meta (Facebook/Instagram). When you choose that objective, you are literally telling the algorithm: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm does exactly that, seeking out users who are least likely to ever click, engage, or buy anything. Their attention is cheap for a reason. You're paying to reach the worst possible audience.

Instead, you MUST run a conversion campaign, with the objective set to "Leads" or "Signups". You'll need to install the Meta Pixel on your landing page and set up a custom conversion event that fires when someone successfully submits the waitlist form. This tells the algorithm to find people within your target audience who are similar to those who have already signed up. It's a much more intelligent approach and it's how we consistently get results for our clients. One B2B software campaign we worked on generated 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each.

Where should you advertise? For a new SaaS without existing search demand, I'd almost always start with Meta. It's fantastic for generating demand based on user interests and behaviours. You can target people based on the software they use, the industry publications they follow, their job titles (to an extent), and more. Once you've identified your 'nightmare ICP', you can build audiences around them. For example, you could target people who are admins of Zendesk pages, have an interest in 'customer support', and also 'small business owners'. If your ICP is a very specific C-level decision maker, then LinkedIn Ads could be an option, but be prepared for much higher costs. I've seen CPLs of $22 and higher, which can be fine if your LTV supports it, but it's a bigger initial outlay.

The goal here is validation. Spend a few hundred pounds, not thousands. Can you get people to sign up for your waitlist offer at a cost that makes sense with your projected LTV? If yes, great. You've got something. If no, then your offer, your targeting, or your messaging is wrong. And it's far better to find that out now than after you've spent a year building the full product.

I'd say you need a clear plan for launch and beyond...

The work you do pre-launch sets the stage for your actual launch. On day one, you won't be starting from zero. You'll have a waitlist of warm, interested leads who have already raised their hand. Your first move is to email this list and convert them.

At this point, your offer needs to change. The waitlist is closed. The new offer is almost certainly a free trial or a freemium plan. Tbh, for most SaaS products, trying to get people to pay upfront without trying the product is a fool's errand. A completely free trial works best to get people in the door. I've worked on so many SaaS campaigns, and the ones that struggle most are those that hide the product behind a "Request a Demo" button or a paywall. Let them use it. Let the product prove its own value.

Your advertising strategy evolves too. Your waitlist now becomes your most powerful retargeting audience. You can run specific ads just to them, reminding them of the early-bird offer they signed up for and telling them the product is now live. These campaigns are usually incredibly efficient.

Then you start building out your funnel. You'll continue to run 'cold traffic' campaigns (ToFu - Top of Funnel) to attract new users into your free trial, using the audiences you validated pre-launch. You'll also build retargeting campaigns for people who visit your website but don't sign up (MoFu - Middle of Funnel), and for trial users who haven't yet converted to a paid plan (BoFu - Bottom of Funnel). It's a constant process of testing new audiences, new ad creatives, and optimising your funnel to improve conversion rates.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This whole process can seem a bit daunting, and there are a lot of moving parts. It's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best. It's about deeply understanding your audience, crafting a compulsary offer, optimising your targeting, creating compelling ads, and fine-tuning your landing page and funnel. Getting it wrong can be an expensive mistake.

That's often where professional help can make a huge diffrence. With years of experience specifically in scaling SaaS products, we can help you avoid the common pitfalls and identify the best strategies to drive down your acquisition costs from day one. We can provide insights you might not have thought of and handle the entire implementation and optimisation process for you.

If you'd like to chat through your specific plans for OneClickAgents in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial strategy session where we can take a closer look together.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh