Solved: SaaS Sales Stalled Despite Word-of-Mouth Success

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I had a read through your situation, and honestly, it’s one of the most common problems I see. You've done the hardest part – building a great product that people love enough to recommend. That's proof you've got something valuable. The fact that paid ads are a 'black hole' isn't a sign that your service can't be sold with ads; it's a sign that the strategy is wrong. It almost always is.

Most founders think the ad platform is the problem, or their product just isn't 'right' for advertising. That's rarely the case. The issue is usually a breakdown in one of three areas: the core economic model (what you can afford to pay for a customer), the message (how you talk about the problem you solve), or the offer (what you're asking people to do).

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts on how we'd approach this. We're going to ignore the ad platforms for a moment and fix the foundations first. Get these right, and scaling becomes a predictable, mathematical process rather than a gamble.

We'll need to look at your customer's nightmare, not their demographic...

Forget everything you think you know about your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). "B2C SaaS user, aged 25-40, interested in tech" is a useless, sterile description that leads to generic ads that speak to no one. Your word-of-mouth growth is happening for a reason. You're solving a specific, urgent, and painful problem for a certain group of people. Your first job is to define that problem with absolute clarity.

You need to become an expert in their nightmare. Your customer isn't just a user; they're in a state of frustration. For a budgeting app, the nightmare isn’t 'needing to manage finances'; it’s the gut-wrenching anxiety at the end of the month when they don’t know where their money went. For a fitness app, the nightmare isn't 'wanting to get fit'; it's the feeling of failure after trying and quitting a dozen other programs. Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can build your entire marketing strategy around it. Every ad, every piece of copy, and every landing page should speak directly to that pain. This is what your current happy customers are telling their friends. They aren't saying, "You should use this great SaaS with these features." They're saying, "You know how we're always stressed about X? This thing I found completely solved it." You need to bottle that conversation and turn it into an ad.

I'd say you need to know your numbers, or you're just gambling...

The reason your ads feel like a "black hole" is likely because you have no idea what a good customer is actually worth to you. The most important question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Signup go?" but "How high a Cost Per Signup can I afford to acquire a customer who will stick around and be profitable?" The answer lies in calculating your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Without this number, you're making decisions based on feelings, not data. You might pause a campaign with a £10 Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) because it feels "expensive," when in reality, that customer is worth £500 to you over their lifetime, making it an incredibly proffitable investment. This is the single biggest mindset shift you need to make to succeed with paid ads.

Let's break it down:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month (or year)?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? Be honest here. Account for server costs, support, etc.
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? This is critical. A low churn rate dramatically increases LTV.

With these three numbers, we can calculate your LTV and, from there, a target CPA that makes sense for your business. Let's make this practical.

You probably should make your offer frictionless...

For a B2C SaaS product, the offer needs to be as low-friction as humanly possible. The goal of your ad is not to sell your software. Let me repeat that: the goal of your ad is not to sell your software. The goal is to get a potential user to start a free trial or sign up for a freemium plan. That's it.

You are selling the "aha!" moment, the instant they use your product and realise it solves their nightmare. The product itself should do the selling. Your job is to get them in the door. This means:

• A Gold-Standard Offer: A completely free trial (no credit card required) or a genuinely useful freemium plan is non-negotiable. Asking for a credit card upfront adds a huge amount of friction and kills conversion rates.
• Dedicated Landing Pages: Don't send ad traffic to your homepage. Your homepage has too many distractions (About Us, Blog, Features, etc.). Create a simple, dedicated landing page for each campaign that has one job and one job only: to get the visitor to sign up for the free trial. It should echo the pain points from your ad and present the trial as the clear solution.
• A Simple Sign-up: Make the sign-up process painfully simple. Email and password. Or even better, social sign-on (Google, etc.). Every extra field you ask for will cause people to drop off.

I've seen so many campaigns fail because the founder was too afraid to give away their product for free, even for a limited time. They send traffic to a 'Buy Now' page and wonder why nobody converts. You have to let people experience the value before you ask them to pay for it. Your word-of-mouth success is proof that when people try it, they love it. Your paid strategy must be built around that fact.

You'll need a message that actually works...

Now that you know your customer's nightmare and have a frictionless offer, you need to connect the two with a compelling message. This is where we use the "Before-After-Bridge" framework from earlier to write ad copy that grabs attention and forces a click.

Let's imagine your SaaS is a meal-planning app. A bad, feature-based ad would say: "Get AI-powered meal plans and automated grocery lists with our new app! Download today." It's boring, and it speaks to no one.

A good, problem-focused ad using our framework would say:

Headline: Tired of the "What's for dinner?" panic every single night?

Body: It's 6 PM. You're exhausted, the kids are hungry, and you're staring into the fridge with zero inspiration, about to order another expensive takeaway. Imagine instead, knowing exactly what you're cooking all week, with a grocery list that was automatically created for you. That's the peace of mind our app provides.

CTA: Get your first week of meal plans free. Start your free trial.

See the difference? The first ad sells features. The second sells a solution to a painful, relatable, daily nightmare. It sells the "After" state. We've worked on campaigns for software companies where simply rewriting the ad copy from a feature-focus to a problem-focus has cut the cost per trial in half. I remember one campaign for a software client in the events space; we generated over 45,000 signups at under £2 each by relentlessly testing messages built around the user's core frustrations, not the app's feature list.

You need to develop at least 3-5 different "angles" or ways of describing the nightmare and test them against each other. What resonates with one segment of your audience might not with another. Testing is teh key to finding winning messages you can scale.

We'll need to tell the ad platforms to find customers, not just people...

This is perhaps the most common technical mistake I see founders make. They log into Meta (Facebook/Instagram), create a campaign, and choose "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" as their objective. This is a catastrophic error.

When you give the algorithm that command, you are telling it: "Please find me the largest number of people inside my audience for the absolute lowest possible price." The algorithm, being very good at its job, does exactly that. It finds the people who are constantly online but never click, never engage, and certainly never buy anything. Their attention is cheap because they are not in demand. You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

The solution is simple: you MUST choose a Conversion objective for your campaign. This tells the algorithm to go find people within your targeting who have a history of doing what you want them to do - in your case, signing up for things. Yes, your cost per impression will be higher. But you will actually get signups. Brand awareness is a byproduct of effective conversion advertising, not a goal in itself for a company at your stage.

This is the main advice I have for you:

So, putting this all together, here is an actionable roadmap. This isn't a list of vague ideas; it's a step-by-step process to fix your advertising and turn it from a 'black hole' into a predictable growth engine. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

So, should you hire an agency?

This brings me back to your original question. You can absolutely follow the roadmap above and do this yourself. But as you can see, it's a specialism. Getting this right involves strategy, data analysis, copywriting, and technical setup. It's a full-time job to do it well.

An expert agency or consultant doesn't have a magic wand. What they have is experience. They've seen these problems hundreds of times across different accounts. They can short-circuit the expensive and time-consuming learning phase where you burn through cash trying to figure all this out. For instance, we worked with a medical job-matching SaaS client whose cost to acquire a user was £100. By implementing this exact strategic process, we brought that cost down to just £7. That's the difference expertise makes.

When you're looking for help, look for someone who asks you about your LTV and your customer's pain points before they even mention keywords or ad platforms. Look at their case studies – do they have real, tangible results for other SaaS companies? If they just promise you cheap clicks or a high ROAS without understanding your business fundamentals, run a mile.

This is a lot to take in, I know. But hopefully, this gives you a much clearer framework for thinking about growth. You've built the engine; now you just need the right fuel and a map to follow.

If you'd like to chat through this in more detail and see how it could apply specifically to your SaaS, feel free to book a free, no-obligation strategy session with us. We can take a look at what you've tried so far and give you some concrete next steps.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh