This chart goes back to the beginning of 2023, when we had just launched our second SaaS product, and also shows our projections for the next year and a half.
From 2023-mid 2025, we had only one product; from late 2025 onwards, we’ve had multiple products.
Here’s what’s pertinent to you as a SaaS founder:
What are we doing at Wildfront to cause that same MRR growth acceleration in September/October 2026, that we saw with our prior product Aware in January 2024? In other words… what makes that forecast not just believable, but highly likely?
Put simply: we have a proven marketing playbook that works for our type of SaaS (SMB, $500-$15k ARPA), for getting off the ground and to 50k+ MRR:
Social @ $0 MRR: day -60 from launch is when you should start posting on your own LinkedIn account (and/or Twitter, or wherever you have the biggest audience and where your ideal customer hangs out). That means, if you can, 1-3 months PRE-launch you should be talking about the subject matter your SaaS deals with. Stories, industry vision, how-to, etc. Leading up to your launch, talk about what you’re going to launch and why, early success, tease feature designs, etc.
Search @ 1-2k MRR: Dedicate 15% of time/energy to Organic Search, which includes SEO and AEO, from the beginning, and don’t stop. That’s one afternoon per week of looking for backlink opportunities, creating high-value website content, publishing free tools, posting on Reddit, and so forth. This compounds nicely but takes time to get going. As the frontier companies train new models, your AEO will naturally improve due to ‘time in market’, so that you’re not just coming up when the LLM googles something, but has you in its training data set already.
Influencers @ 2-4k MRR: Start influencer marketing as soon as we have the first inklings of product/market fit. Basically, when customers start saying “I quit
(previous solution)and switched to your tool”, it’s time to start sponsoring influencers. This is what we did in January 2024… but it was too late, so we learned our lesson and are starting earlier this time with DemandBird :)Optional - Outbound @ 5k MRR: Of course the Social channel above includes doing some outbound, because you’re going to be sending DMs and such. But this #4 point refers to more of the ‘concerted effort’ outbound, where you’re putting structure and KPIs behind how much outbound you’ll do, and you’re starting to systematize it. Truly, though, this should only be a focus channel if your ARPA is north of 5k/yr, since below that it just is a giant pain in the ass to operate without much to show for it.
Optional - Ads @ …??: I don’t know, neither of us have really used paid media effectively before. All we’ve done is spend money relatively unprofitably, on ads. So don’t ask us for help here, heh.
We have run sponsorship campaigns before, so we have a pretty good idea that doing so again (now that it’s the right time) will be profitable and start to cause that next level of scaling. Of course you have to know what you’re doing, and sponsor the right people, for the right spend amounts, but again once you know how to do that, you can depend on it more.
If any of these marketing channels are new to you, I encourage you to check out our free academy with more tutorials and training on all of this and more. If you don’t see a topic covered in the academy that you want to be, just let me know and I’ll try to add it.
-Alex
SaaS founders, interested in applying to join our mastermind? We have a dedicated Slack channel + monthly calls + group coaching for marketing, sales, development, AI, finance, ops, and exiting. Reply to this email if you’re interested. Details here. Reasonably priced but not free :)
P.S. I’ll let my co-founder Mac share more later about his product development workflows that have allowed us to reach product/market fit faster than last round, but those are extremely cool too (and just as important as the marketing side of things).
Time to get that influencer campaign going...