Solved: SaaS tool struggling to gain user traction

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on getting your new SaaS tool out there. It sounds like you've built something genuinely useful, which is the most important first step. But as you've found, building it is only half the battle. The other half is getting it in front of the right people, and that's where things can get tricky and expensive if you don't have a solid plan.

Your situation is super common. A great product, ready to go, but a big question mark over how to get those first crucial users without burning through cash. The temptation is to just start shouting about your features to anyone who'll listen, but that's a fast track to disappointment. The solution is a bit more nuanced and involves being almost obsessively focused on who you're selling to and the specific, painful problem you solve for them. Forget "getting people to hear about it" for a moment, and let's focus on getting the *right* people to feel like you built it just for them.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, let's get brutally honest. "Remote teams, virtual assistants, and small businesses" is not a target audience. It's a phonebook. It's so broad it's effectively useless for advertising. Trying to market to this group is like trying to catch fish by boiling the ocean. You'll spend a fortune and have nothing to show for it. This is probably the number one mistake I see founders make. They build a tool that *could* be used by lots of people, so they try to talk to all of them at once. The result is a generic message that resonates with absolutely no one.

You need to forget the sterile, demographic-based profile for a moment. It tells you nothing of value. To stop burning cash, you must 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 take your target user: the person "juggling multiple clients, gigs, or side projects." What's their actual nightmare?

• -> It's not "needing to be more productive." That's a vitamin, not a painkiller.
• -> It's the gut-wrenching 3 AM panic that they've forgotten a critical deadline for their biggest client.
• -> It's the constant, low-level anxiety that a crucial piece of information is buried in one of seven different apps—Slack, email, a Google Doc, Trello, their paper notebook...
• -> It's the frustrating realisation that they spent two billable hours on admin and organisation instead of the actual work that gets them paid.
• -> It's the fear of looking unprofessional and unreliable, which for a freelancer or VA, is a death sentence for their business.

This is your target. Not a "VA from the UK". It's the VA who is terrified of dropping a ball and losing a £2,000/month retainer client. That specificity is everything. When you understand the nightmare, you can craft a message that feels like you're reading their mind. Every ad, every piece of landing page copy, and every feature description should be a direct answer to that nightmare.

Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads. Get on calls with a dozen VAs or freelancers. Ask them what keeps them up at night about their workflow. What tools have they tried and abandoned? What's the most frustrating part of managing their client work? Their answers are the raw material for your entire marketing strategy. Without this intelligence, you're just guessing.

Your offer needs to be built to solve their pain

Once you've nailed the nightmare, the next step is to make sure your offer is the perfect antidote. Right now, you're describing your product by its features: "centralized workspace," "AI assistant," "minimalist UI." This is how engineers and product people talk. It's not how customers buy.

You need to translate every feature into a benefit that directly solves the pain. For example:

• -> Feature: A clean, centralized workspace.
  Benefit that solves the nightmare: "Stop losing critical client info across 5 different apps. Find anything in seconds and never miss a deadline again."
• -> Feature: Built-in AI assistant for daily planning.
  Benefit that solves the nightmare: "Turn chaotic client requests into a clear, actionable plan for your day in under 2 minutes. Spend your time on billable work, not admin."
• -> Feature: Minimalist UI.
  Benefit that solves the nightmare: "Finally, a tool that gets out of your way. No complicated setup, no distracting clutter—just pure focus on what matters."

See the difference? One is a technical description; the other is a promise of relief from a specific pain. Your entire website should be rewritten to speak this language.

Now we get to the most common failure point in all of SaaS advertising: the offer itself. The "Request a Demo" button is probably the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, a busy freelancer or small business owner, has nothing better to do than book a 30-minute meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as just another vendor. It's a conversion killer.

For a tool like yours, you have an incredible advantage. The product itself can be your best salesperson. The absolute gold standard offer is a **frictionless free trial** or a **generous freemium plan**. Critically, this means NO credit card required upfront. The goal is to get them into the product and experiencing that "aha!" moment of relief as quickly as humanly possible. Let them see for themselves how it calms the chaos. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality.

You aren't trying to generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for a sales team to chase. You are creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs)—users who are already convinced because they've experienced the transformation first-hand. This is a fundemental shift in thinking that will define your success.

We'll need to look at calculating your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Right, before you even think about setting a budget for ads, you need to answer a fundemental question. The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but "How high a Cost Per Lead can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer to this lies in its counterpart: Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the single most important metric you're probably not tracking yet.

LTV tells you the total profit you can expect to make from an average customer over the entire period they stay with you. Once you know this number, you can make intelligent decisions about how much you can afford to spend to acquire that customer (your Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC). Without it, you're flying blind, likely trying to get leads as cheaply as possible without knowing if those cheap leads are actually costing you money in the long run.

Here’s the basic maths. You need three pieces of information:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you plan to make per customer, per month? Let's say you have a plan priced at £30/month.
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for costs like servers, support, etc.? For SaaS, this is often quite high, let's estimate 85%.
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you expect to lose each month? This is a tough one to predict early on, but a typical rate for a new SaaS might be around 5%.

Now, the calculation is simple:

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

Using our example numbers:

LTV = (£30 * 0.85) / 0.05
LTV = £25.50 / 0.05 = £510

In this example, each customer is worth £510 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This is your truth. This is the number that unlocks everything.

A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV:CAC ratio. This means for every £3 of lifetime value, you can spend £1 to acquire the customer. With a £510 LTV, that means you can afford to spend up to **£170 to acquire a single paying customer**.

Suddenly, the game changes. You're no longer terrified of spending £5 or £10 for a free trial signup. If your free-trial-to-paid-customer conversion rate is, say, 10%, that means you need 10 trial signups to get one customer. With a £170 allowable CAC, you can afford to pay up to **£17 per free trial signup**. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality signups.

To make this tangible for you, I've built a little calculator below. Play with the numbers based on your own pricing plans and estimates. See how small changes in churn or price can dramatically affect your LTV and, consequently, your allowable ad spend.

I'd say you need to pick the right advertising channels

With a clear ICP, a solid offer, and an understanding of your unit economics (LTV/CAC), you can finally start thinking about where to spend your money. Your choice of ad platform should be dictated entirely by your customer's behaviour and intent.

There are broadly two types of potential customers you can reach:

1. Those Actively Searching for a Solution (High Intent): These are people who are problem-aware and solution-aware. They know they have a workflow issue and are actively looking for a tool to fix it. They are typing things like "best task manager for freelancers," "Trello alternative," or "productivity app for multiple clients" into a search engine.

The only place to catch these people is **Google Search Ads**. This is bottom-of-the-funnel advertising. You're putting your solution directly in front of someone at the exact moment they're looking for it. It can be more expensive per click, but the conversion rates are typically much higher because the intent is baked in. For a new SaaS, this is often a great place to start to get your first paying customers, as they are pre-qualified by their search query.

2. Those Who Have the Problem But Aren't Searching (Interrupt-Driven): This is a much, much larger group of people. They are your ideal customers—the VAs and freelancers drowning in chaos—but they aren't actively looking for a tool right now. They might think their messy system is just "the cost of doing business." Your job here is to interrupt their day with a message that makes them problem-aware. You need to show them an ad that reflects their nightmare back at them so powerfully that they stop scrolling and think, "Wow, that's me. There might be a better way."

The best platforms for this are social media channels, primarily **Meta (Facebook & Instagram) Ads**. The targeting capabilities are incredibly powerful, allowing you to find people based on their interests (e.g., they follow other business tools, belong to freelancer groups), job titles ("Virtual Assistant"), behaviours, and more. From my experience, Meta can be incredibly effective for B2B SaaS, especially when the target user is a small business owner or solopreneur who uses the platform personally. I remember one campaign for a B2B software tool where we drove 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 per registration using Meta Ads. In another, we generated over 5,000 software trials at about $7 each. It absolutely works if you get the targeting and messaging right.

A Critical Warning: The "Brand Awareness" Trap

Here is an uncomfortable truth about advertising on platforms like Meta. When you set your campaign objective to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific, and very stupid, command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, in its infinite wisdom, does exactly what you asked. It seeks out the users inside your targeting who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever sign up for a trial or pull out a credit card. Why? Because those users are not in demand. Their attention is cheap. You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product. It's an absolute waste of money for a startup.

The best form of brand awareness is a competitor's customer switching to your product. That only happens through conversion. From day one, every single campaign you run MUST have a conversion objective. For you, that means optimising for "Signups" or "Leads" for your free trial. This tells the algorithm, "I don't care about cheap impressions; go and find me the people within my target audience who are most similar to those who have already signed up." The system is brilliant at this, but you have to give it the right instruction.

You probably should focus on Meta Ads Targeting first

Assuming you start with Meta Ads to reach the broader, not-actively-searching audience, your targeting is the next piece of the puzzle. This is where your deep dive into your ICP's nightmare pays off again.

You don't just target "Small Business Owners". That's lazy and ineffective. You get specific. Ask yourself:

• -> What software and tools do my ideal customers already use and pay for? (e.g., Calendly, Slack, Asana, ClickUp, HubSpot, Xero). You can target people interested in these.
• -> What influencers, blogs, or publications do they follow? (e.g., Tim Ferriss, Pat Flynn, industry-specific blogs for VAs).
• -> What Facebook groups or online communities are they part of?
• -> What are their job titles? On Facebook, you can target "Virtual Assistant", "Freelancer", "Social Media Manager", etc.

You build audiences based on these specific interests and layer them to get more precise. For example, you could target people who have an interest in "Upwork" AND "Asana". This suggests they are likely a freelancer who is already using project management tools. This is infinitely better than just targeting "Freelancers".

As you gather data, your strategy will evolve. Here’s a typical prioritisation I'd use for an account like yours:

You'll need a message they can't ignore

You can have the most precise targeting in the world, but it's worthless if your ad creative is bland. Your ad needs to stop the scroll and speak directly to the nightmare we identified earlier. The most effective framework I use for this is the **Before-After-Bridge**.

• -> **Before:** Describe their current world. Paint a vivid picture of the chaos, the stress, the specific frustrations they feel every day. This shows them you understand their pain.
• -> **After:** Describe the new world your product makes possible. Paint a picture of calm, control, and confidence. This shows them the destination.
• -> **Bridge:** Position your product as the simple, clear path from the "Before" state to the "After" state.

Let's write an ad for your tool using this framework:

Headline: Stop Juggling Clients. Start Managing Them.

Ad Copy:
(Before) Your screen has 15 tabs open. A client's urgent request is buried in a Slack DM, a critical deadline is in a forgotten email, and your real to-do list is on a sticky note that just fell behind your desk. Sound familiar? That's the chaos of client work.

(After) Now, imagine starting your day with a single, clear dashboard showing exactly what you need to do for every client. Deadlines are clear. Notes are organised. You feel in control, not just busy.

(Bridge) Our tool is the bridge. We built a minimalist workspace to centralise everything, so you can focus on billable work, not admin. Start your 100% free trial today and reclaim your focus in 5 minutes. No credit card needed.

This ad doesn't lead with "we have an AI assistant." It leads with an empathetic understanding of a real problem. The features are mentioned as the mechanism (the bridge), but the core of the message is the transformation from pain to relief. You should test dozens of variations of this, focusing on different angles of the pain point.

Let's talk about what costs to expect

This is the million-dollar question. "What will it cost?" Based on the data points from hundreds of campaigns, we can make some educated estimates. For a signup-based conversion objective (like a free trial) in developed countries like the UK, US, Canada, etc., you're typically looking at a Cost Per Click (CPC) between £0.50 and £1.50. Your landing page conversion rate (the percentage of clicks that turn into signups) will hopefully be somewhere between 10% and 30% if it's well-optimised.

Let's do the maths:

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

Your actual Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) for a free trial signup will almost certainly fall somewhere in that range. I've personally run campaigns for apps where we've achieved costs under £2 per signup, but for a B2B SaaS tool, I'd say a realistic starting goal would be to aim for under £10 per trial user. This brings us back to the LTV calculation. If you know you can afford to pay up to £17 per trial signup, a £10 CPA looks pretty damn good.

To help you plan, here's a simple budget estimator. Plug in how many trial users you want to acquire each month and your target CPA to see what kind of ad spend you'd need. This makes budgeting a logical exercise, not a guess.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To wrap this up, launching a SaaS tool is a marathon, not a sprint. Getting these foundational pieces right before you scale your ad spend will save you an enormous amount of time, money, and heartache. Here's the step-by-step plan I'd recomend based on everything we've covered.

As you can probably tell, this is a complex process with a lot of moving parts. Getting the strategy right is one thing, but executing it flawlessly—managing the campaigns, analysing the data, and continuously optimising—is a full-time job that requires deep expertise. Many indie teams try to do this themselves and end up wasting their limited runway on campaigns that were doomed from the start because of a flaw in one of these foundational steps.

This is where getting expert help can make all the difference. We specialise in this exact process for SaaS companies. We handle everything from the strategic planning to the day-to-day campaign management, ensuring your ad spend is working as efficiently as possible to drive real growth.

If you'd like to chat through this in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial strategy session where we can take a look at your specific situation and give you some more tailored advice. It's often the most valuable 30 minutes a founder can spend before they start spending money on ads.

Hope this detailed breakdown has been helpful and gives you a clear path forward!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh