Solved: SaaS Beta Soft Launch - Too Early to Market?

Hi there,

Thanks for your enquiry about a soft launch for your SaaS and thought I could offer some thoughts from my experience running these sorts of campaigns.

Honestly, the question you're asking about timing is the one every founder asks, but it's probably the wrong question. The real issue isn't *when* you should start marketing, but *what* you should be marketing. Getting people onto a waitlist for a product that's still months away is a good way to burn through enthusiasm and cash. The momentum dies, the list goes cold, and by the time you launch, you're starting from scratch anyway. My advice is usually to reframe the entire "soft launch" idea. Let's look at how you can get real, valuable feedback and your first users without wasting time on a launch that's doomed to fizzle out.

You probably should forget the 'soft launch' and focus on validation...

Right now, you're at 50% MVP. Your biggest risk isn't a lack of beta testers; it's building the wrong thing. I've seen so many startups spend a fortune on ads trying to get people to sign up for a beta, only to find out they've solved a problem nobody actually has, or at least, nobody is willing to pay to solve.

The whole "build a waitlist" thing is a bit of a myth. It sounds productive, but what does it actually get you? A list of emails from people who were mildly curious for 30 seconds. There's no commitment. They haven't used the product, they haven't paid you anything. It's a list of strangers, not a community of beta testers.

I wouldn't start any kind of promotion until one of three things is true:
-> You have a genuine MVP you can put in front of people *right now* to gauge real demand.
-> You are literally about to onboard your first cohort of beta testers next week.
-> Your full public launch is imminent (i.e., in the next 2-4 weeks).

Anything else is just premature. The idea of your team all changing their social media banners is a nice vanity exercise, but it achieves very little. It alerts your friends and former colleagues, who are the worst possible people to give you feedback. They'll be nice to you. You don't need nice, you need brutal honesty from people who represent your ideal customer. Which brings me to the most important bit of work you need to do, long before you think about ad campaigns or launch strategies.

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

Forget the typical Ideal Customer Profile exercise. "Developers aged 25-40 at mid-sized tech companies" is a demographic. It tells you nothing useful. It leads to generic messaging that gets ignored. You need to stop thinking about who your customer *is* and start obsessing over what their professional *nightmare* is.

Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. It's an urgent, expensive, and maybe even career-threatening problem that keeps them awake at night. What is the specific, burning pain that your SaaS is built to extinguish?

For example, if you're building a tool for project managers, the pain isn't 'needing better organisation'. The nightmare is the CTO breathing down their neck because a critical release is delayed for the third time, and their team is about to revolt over scope creep. The nightmare is looking incompetent in front of leadership.

If your tool is for finance teams, the pain isn't 'manual data entry'. The nightmare is a multi-million-pound forecasting error caused by a copy-paste mistake in a spreadsheet, leading to a disastrous board meeting. That's the stuff people will pay to avoid.

You need to become the world's leading expert on this one specific nightmare. Once you've defined it, you can find the people living it.

Where do they hang out online when they're trying to solve this problem?
-> What niche podcasts do they actually listen to on their commute?
-> Which industry newsletters do they open without fail?
-> What other SaaS tools are already on their company credit card?
-> Are they in specific Slack communities or Subreddits complaining about this exact issue?

This intelligence is the entire foundation of your marketing. Without it, you're just guessing. Do this work first, and you'll know exactly who to talk to and what to say. With this knowledge, you can craft a message they physically can't ignore.

I'd say you need to build an offer they can't ignore...

Once you know the nightmare, your ad copy and your entire offer should be built around it. Too many SaaS ads talk about features. Nobody cares about your features. They care about their problems. You need to connect your features to their pain relief. There are a couple of classic copywriting frameworks that work really well for this.

1. Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS): You state the problem, you twist the knife to make them feel the pain, and then you present your solution.

2. Before-After-Bridge (BAB): You paint a picture of their world *before* your solution (the nightmare), show them the dream world *after* your solution, and then present your product as the bridge to get them there.

Let's imagine your SaaS is a tool that automates bug reporting for development teams. Here’s how you could apply these frameworks:

See the difference? We're not selling "automated bug reporting software". We're selling an end to frustration, saved time, and a more productive engineering team. This is what gets clicks from the right people.

You'll need to kill the "Request a Demo" button...

Now we get to the offer itself, the thing you want people to do. The single biggest mistake I see in B2B SaaS marketing is the "Request a Demo" button. It's the most arrogant, high-friction call to action imaginable. You're asking a busy, important person to book time in their calendar to be sold to. It screams "I am a commodity vendor, please evaluate me."

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. This is how you truly entice beta testers.

For a SaaS founder, the best way to do this is with the product itself. The gold standard is:
-> A completely free trial, with no credit card required.
-> A generous freemium plan, also with no credit card.

Let them use it. Let them experience the transformation from the 'Before' state to the 'After' state you promised in your ad. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You won't be generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for a salesperson to chase; you'll be creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced and ready to buy.

This is your beta test. Not a closed-off program for a select few, but an open invitation for your ideal customer to solve their problem for free. The people who activate and use the product are your beta testers. Their behaviour is your feedback. This approach is infinately more scalable and provides much more realistic data.

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

Before you even think about spending money on ads to drive people to your free trial, you need to understand your numbers. Most founders obsess about getting the lowest Cost Per Lead (CPL). The real question is: "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a fantastic, long-term customer?" The answer is in their Lifetime Value (LTV).

You can make some educated guesses at this stage. Here's the basic maths:

Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you plan to charge per month? Let's say £100.
Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that? For SaaS, it's often high, let's say 90%.
Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of customers do you expect to lose each month? Let's start with a conservative 5%.

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

So, in our example: (£100 * 0.90) / 0.05 = £90 / 0.05 = £1,800.

Each customer, on average, would be worth £1,800 in gross margin to your business. This number is your North Star for advertising.

A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means for a customer worth £1,800, you can afford to spend up to £600 to acquire them. Suddenly, worrying about a £7 cost per trial signup seems trivial, doesn't it? This maths frees you from the tyranny of 'cheap leads' and allows you to invest in acquiring the *right* customers.

You'll need to choose your advertising channels wisely...

Once you have a validated offer, a frictionless trial, and you understand your unit economics, *now* you can think about paid advertising. Don't just spray money everywhere. Be strategic.

Organic/Early Buzz: Listing on Product Hunt, Betalist, and Indie Hackers is great. But think of it as a way to get initial feedback from tech-savvy early adopters, not as a scalable growth engine. It's a one-off sugar hit.

Paid Advertising: This is where you build a predictable, scalable machine for customer aquisition. Your choice of platform depends entirely on your ICP's "nightmare".

-> Are they actively searching for a solution to their nightmare? If someone is typing "software to automate bug reporting" into Google, they have a high-intent problem. You need to be there. This means Google Search ads are your best bet. You're capturing demand that already exists.

-> Are they *not* actively searching, but living the nightmare every day? This is where you use social platforms to interrupt them with your compelling message. For B2B SaaS, this usually means LinkedIn Ads or Meta (Facebook/Instagram) Ads. Here, your targeting is based on their job title, company, industry (LinkedIn), or the interests and behaviours you uncovered in your ICP research (Meta).

A word of warning: do not run "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" campaigns. You are giving the platform permission to find the cheapest, lowest-quality people in your audience who will never click or buy. It's a complete waste of money for a startup. From day one, your campaigns should be optimised for conversions—trial signups, in your case. We’ve managed many SaaS campaigns, and the results speak for themselves. We’ve driven 5,082 software trials at $7 each for one client on Meta, and for a more niche B2B software, we achieved a $22 cost per lead on LinkedIn. It's about finding the right people on the right platform with the right objective.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

As you can probably tell, this is a complex process. Getting the foundation wrong in Phase 1 means everything you do in Phase 2 and 3 will fail, which can be an incredibly expensive and demoralising experience. Getting expert help to navigate this can be the difference between finding product-market fit quickly and running out of money while you're still guessing.

We specialise in this exact process for SaaS companies. If you'd like, we can offer a free, no-obligation strategy session where we can look at your specific situation in more detail and give you a clear plan of action. It might be helpful to have a second pair of expert eyes on this before you commit to a launch plan.

Hope this helps give you a different perspective.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh