How This $250K/Month SaaS Got Its First 100 Users (Steal This Playbook)

In two and a half years, Supademo grew from 0 to over 150,000 users and achieved over $3 million in annual ARR, and was named G2's #5 fastest-growing product in 2025.

Step 1 for acquiring the first 100 customers is to "capture the low-hanging fruit." This involved creating all competitor comparison pages to capture SEO traffic and building dozens of free tools, which now bring in 20% of traffic and a 15-20% sign-up conversion rate.

Step 2 is to "do things that don't scale." Joseph personally offered to manually create free Supademos for founders on Reddit and Indie Hackers, and these public demos attracted other users and led to sign-ups.

Step 3 is to "be everywhere your users are." Roughly 30-40% of visitors come from SEO and LLMs, 30% from word-of-mouth, watermarks, and referrals, and 20% from building in public on LinkedIn.

The biggest mistake early SaaS founders make is pursuing perfection and not launching yesterday. The only advantage is speed and urgency; the sooner you launch, the faster results compound.

Joseph started businesses at 14-15 years old, with diverse entrepreneurial experience including buying/selling electronics on Craigslist, an organic soy candle business, a clothing company, a digital agency, and a B2B seafood marketplace during college.

Most companies die by suicide or internal combustion rather than by competition. If you identify the right problem, the market is large enough, so you should start building without worrying about competitors.