The SaaS Founder's Paid Acquisition Framework

Most Go-To-Market strategies for new SaaS products are built on a foundation of guesswork, outdated assumptions, and a fundamental misunderstanding of how to acquire customers online. You've probably been told to define your ICP, build a funnel, and run some ads. But this advice is so generic it's dangerous. It leads founders to burn through their seed funding on campaigns that target the wrong people with the wrong message and an offer nobody wants.

The truth is, a successful paid acquisition strategy isn't about following a checklist. It's about a relentless focus on three things: the customer's deep-seated pain, the undeniable value of your offer, and the ruthless optimisation of your campaigns for profit, not vanity metrics. Forget what you think you know. Let's build a GTM framework that actually works.

So, you think you know your customer?

Let's start with the most common point of failure: the Ideal Customer Profile. I've seen hundreds of them. They usually look something like this: "Our ICP is Sarah, a Head of Marketing at a B2B tech company with 50-200 employees, based in London." This tells you absolutely nothing of value. It's a sterile, demographic-based profile that leads to generic ads that speak to no one.

To stop burning cash, you must redefine your customer not by who they are, but by the problem they have. You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your customer isn't a job title; she's a leader terrified of her best developers quitting out of frustration with a broken workflow. He's a finance director who spends the last week of every quarter manually reconciling spreadsheets, knowing one wrong formula could cost the company thousands. Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state.

For one B2B SaaS client in the legal tech space, their initial ICP was "law firms with 20-100 solicitors." It was useless. We spent time with them and redefined it as: "The partner at a mid-sized firm who lies awake at night terrified that a junior associate will miss a critical filing deadline and expose the firm to a multi-million-pound malpractice suit."

See the difference? Now we have emotion. We have stakes. We have a nightmare we can solve. This informs everything. Our ad copy isn't "Better Document Management." It's "Never Miss a Filing Deadline Again." Our targeting isn't just "Interests: Law," it's targeting members of specific legal associations, followers of niche legal tech influencers, and layering job titles with behaviours that indicate tech adoption.

Before you spend another pound on ads, do this work. Map out the nightmare. What is the urgent pain that keeps your ideal customer up at night? Once you know that, you can find them. Find the niche podcasts they listen to on their commute, the industry newsletters they actually open, the SaaS tools they already pay for. This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire GTM strategy. If you haven't done this, you have no business running ads. The path to scaling your SaaS starts with a deep understanding of who your early adopters truly are and what drives them.

How much can you actually afford to pay for a customer?

The next question I always ask founders is, "What's your target Cost Per Acquisition?" The answer is usually a number plucked from thin air, like "£50" or "under £100." This is the wrong question. The real question isn't "How low can my CPA go?" but "How high a CPA can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?"

The answer lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Until you know what a customer is worth to you over their entire relationship with your business, you're flying blind. You'll turn off promising campaigns too early because the initial CPA looks "too high," while your competitor, who knows their numbers, is happily acquiring those same customers and building a sustainable business.

Here's how you calculate it. You need three numbers:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month/year?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for costs of goods sold (COGS)? For most SaaS, this is high, often 80-90%+.
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

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

Let's say your SaaS costs £200/month (ARPA), your gross margin is 85%, and you lose 3% of your customers each month (churn).
LTV = (£200 * 0.85) / 0.03
LTV = £170 / 0.03 = £5,666

Suddenly, you have clarity. Each customer you acquire is worth £5,666 in gross margin to your business. A healthy SaaS business aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £1,888 to acquire a single customer. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified trials into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £188 per trial signup.

That £150 CPA from a LinkedIn campaign doesn't seem so scary now, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. Stop guessing and start calculating.

Why your ads are being ignored (and how to fix it)

Once you know who you're talking to (their nightmare) and what you can afford to spend, you need to craft a message they can't ignore. Most SaaS ads are a laundry list of features. "AI-powered analytics." "Seamless integrations." "Collaborative workflows." Nobody cares. Your prospects don't buy features; they buy solutions to their problems. They buy a better version of themselves.

Your ad copy needs to speak directly to the nightmare you identified earlier. Two of the most powerful frameworks are Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS) and Before-After-Bridge (BAB).

Problem-Agitate-Solve: You state the problem, you poke the bruise to make it hurt more, and then you present your product as the painkiller.
Example for a FinOps SaaS:
(Problem) Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why.
(Agitate) Another fire to put out. Another awkward conversation with the CFO. Another weekend spent digging through logs instead of planning for growth.
(Solve) Our platform gives you a single pane of glass to see exactly where every pound is going. Find and eliminate cloud waste in minutes, not days. Start your free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today.

Before-After-Bridge: You paint a picture of their current, frustrating reality (Before). You show them the desired future state (After). And you position your product as the vehicle to get them there (Bridge).
Example for a project management tool:
(Before) Project deadlines are flying past, nobody knows who's working on what, and your status meetings are a chaotic mess.
(After) Imagine every project delivered on time, complete clarity on team workload, and meetings that are actually productive.
(Bridge) That clarity is just a click away. [Your SaaS] is the bridge from chaos to control. See how.

Stop selling the drill. Sell the hole. Better yet, sell the feeling of satisfaction from having a perfectly hung picture. This is the core of effective messaging. I remember this approach working wonders for one B2B software client; we generated 1535 trials on Meta Ads by focusing our ad copy entirely on the pain of manual data entry.

The button that's costing you a fortune

Now we arrive at the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer. Specifically, the "Request a Demo" button. This is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do than book a 30-minute slot in their calendar to be sold to. It's high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor.

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. It must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

For SaaS founders, you have an unfair advantage here. The gold standard offer is a free trial or a freemium plan. And critically, without asking for credit card details. Let them use the actual product. Let them experience the transformation firsthand. When the product itself proves its value, 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. Dealing with low signups on a freemium model requires a specific approach, but it's a much better problem to have than no signups at all.

If your product is too complex for a self-serve trial, you are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, content, or asset that provides instant value. For a cybersecurity SaaS, it could be a free, instant 'Dark Web Scan' for their company domain. For a data analytics platform, it could be a 'Data Health Check' that flags the top 3 issues in a sample of their database. You have to give value before you ask for a meeting.

Choosing your battleground: Which ad platform first?

With a clear ICP, a solid grasp of your unit economics, a compelling message, and a frictionless offer, you're finally ready to run ads. But where? The choice of platform should be dictated by your customer's behaviour.

Broadly, there are two types of platforms: intent-based and discovery-based.

Intent-Based (Google Ads): This is for capturing existing demand. People go to Google when they have a problem and are actively searching for a solution. If your SaaS solves a known problem that people search for (e.g., "crm for small business," "employee onboarding software"), Google Ads should be your starting point. Your job is to show up with a relevant ad that speaks to their search query. We have an entire guide on Google Ads for B2B SaaS that covers this in depth.

Discovery-Based (LinkedIn, Meta): This is for creating demand. People are on these platforms to connect, learn, or be entertained, not necessarily to buy software. Your job is to interrupt their scroll with an ad so relevant to their nightmare that they can't help but click.

• LinkedIn Ads: The targeting here is unmatched for B2B. You can target by exact job title, company size, industry, and even specific company names. It's expensive, but the precision is incredible. It’s perfect when you know the exact role of your buyer. We've seen costs of around $22 per lead for highly-targeted decision-makers, which is a steal when you know your LTV. If this is your audience, you need a specialised LinkedIn Ads strategy.
• Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram): Don't dismiss Meta for B2B. While the targeting isn't as precise as LinkedIn, it's powerful for reaching audiences based on interests, behaviours, and lookalikes of your existing customers. It's often much cheaper than LinkedIn. We ran a campaign for a B2B SaaS product that got 5082 trials at just $7 each on Meta, a result we couldn't have achieved on LinkedIn at that price point.

Stop paying to reach people who will never buy from you

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

The algorithm, being the ruthlessly efficient machine it is, 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. Why? Because those users are not in demand by other advertisers. 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.

For a new SaaS, awareness is a vanity metric. It doesn't pay salaries or keep the servers on. The best form of brand awareness is a competitor's customer switching to your product and raving about it. That only happens through conversion. Awareness is a byproduct of having a great product that solves a real problem, not a prerequisite for making a sale.

That is why, for 99% of early-stage SaaS companies, your campaign objective should be set to "Leads" or "Sales" (or whichever event is closest to a trial signup or purchase). This tells the algorithm, "I don't care about cheap impressions. Go find me the people within my audience who have a history of taking the action I want them to take." It will cost more per impression, but you are paying for quality, not quantity. You are paying to find customers. A comprehensive paid acquisition strategy must be built on this principle.

Structuring your first campaigns for success

Okay, let's say you've chosen Meta as your starting point. How do you structure your campaigns to avoid chaos? I recommend a simple, long-term structure based on the marketing funnel: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

ToFu (Prospecting): This is where you find new people who've never heard of you. Your goal is to drive them to your website to start a trial or consume your content.

• Campaign Objective: Leads/Sales (optimising for Trial Signups).
• Audiences to test: Start with detailed targeting (interests, behaviours). For example, if you sell a tool for Shopify store owners, you'd target interests like "Shopify," "WooCommerce," and followers of e-commerce influencers. Once you have data, create Lookalike audiences of your best customers, trial signups, or even high-value website visitors.

MoFu (Consideration): This is for people who have shown some interest but haven't converted yet. They visited your site, watched a video, but didn't sign up. Your goal is to bring them back and give them another reason to try your product.

• Campaign Objective: Leads/Sales (optimising for Trial Signups).
• Audiences: Website visitors from the last 30-90 days (excluding those who signed up), people who watched 50%+ of your video ads, people who engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page.

BoFu (Conversion): This is for people who got very close to converting but dropped off. They started the signup process or added a plan to their cart but didn't finish. These are your hottest leads.

• Campaign Objective: Leads/Sales (optimising for Trial Signups).
• Audiences: People who visited the checkout/signup page but didn't complete it in the last 7-14 days.

This structure ensures you have a systematic approach to finding new customers and nurturing them towards a conversion. I remember one client, a recruitment SaaS, saw their cost per user acquisition drop from £100 to just £7 after we implemented this exact structure on Meta and Google Ads, optimising each stage of the funnel. For a founder just starting out, this kind of organised approach is a core part of an effective framework for your first ad campaign.

What if I haven't launched yet?

If you're pre-launch, your goal isn't to get trial signups, it's to validate your idea and build an initial audience of evangelists. The strategy here is to build a waitlist.

1. Create a Simple Landing Page: This isn't your final website. It's a single page that clearly explains the nightmare you're solving and how your SaaS is the solution. Use compelling copy (PAS or BAB frameworks work great here too). The only call to action should be to join the waitlist. 2. Offer an Incentive: Give people a reason to sign up now. This could be an extended free trial, a lifetime discount, or early access before anyone else. 3. Promote It (Cheaply): Don't spend a fortune on ads yet. Promote your waitlist page on platforms like Product Hunt, BetaList, and Indie Hackers. Post in relevant subreddits and Facebook groups. Engage in communities where your ICP hangs out. 4. Nurture Your List: Don't let your waitlist go cold. Send regular updates (but not spam) about your progress. Ask for feedback on features. Make them feel like founding members. This will turn them into your first customers and biggest advocates when you launch.

Spending big on paid ads for a waitlist is usually a mistake unless you have a very clear launch date and a proven message. Focus on organic and low-cost methods to build that initial tribe. Mastering the art of the pre-launch is a crucial part of any succesful go-to-market product launch.

Your Action Plan

Launching and scaling a SaaS is incredibly difficult. Paid acquisition is a powerful engine for growth, but it's also a quick way to burn cash if you don't have a solid strategy. The framework I've outlined isn't just theory; it's based on my experience running numerous successful campaigns for SaaS companies, generating tens of thousands of trials and significant growth for our clients.

Here is my main advice for you, summarised in a table:

This is a lot to take in, and implementation can be tricky. As a founder, your time is best spent building your product and talking to customers. Many founders we work with find that trying to become a paid acquisition expert on top of everything else is a recipe for burnout and costly mistakes.

If you've read this and feel that you'd rather have an experienced partner to build and manage this engine for you, we can help. We offer a free, no-obligation strategy session where we'll look at your specific SaaS and build a custom GTM paid acquisition plan. It’s a chance to get an expert second opinion and see if we might be a good fit to help you scale.