What I Learned Launching a SaaS Product With Zero Marketing Budget

I launched Scorafy with exactly zero dollars allocated to marketing. No paid ads, no influencer deals, no PR agency. Just me, a laptop, and whatever organic channels I could find.

This isn't a humble-brag disguised as a strategy post. It's an honest account of what the early days of a bootstrapped SaaS launch actually look like - what worked, what didn't, and what I'd tell another founder in the same position.

The starting position

When Scorafy went live, I had:

• A working product with three pricing tiers
• A landing page that I'd rewritten twice
• A personal LinkedIn network of about 2,000 connections
• Zero email list
• Zero existing audience in the coaching/assessment niche
• Zero marketing budget

What I did have was consulting experience with the target audience (coaches, educators, HR professionals), a genuine understanding of their pain points, and enough stubbornness to keep going when the numbers were small.

What worked

LinkedIn content

This was the single most effective channel. Not because LinkedIn is magic, but because my target audience lives there. Executive coaches, HR leaders, and learning & development professionals are active on LinkedIn in a way they're not on Twitter or Instagram.

What performed well:

• Personal stories about the build process. Posts about the actual experience of building Scorafy - the decisions, the mistakes, the progress - consistently outperformed generic "AI in coaching" thought pieces.
• Specific numbers. Posts with concrete figures (time saved, reports generated, lines of code) got more engagement than abstract claims.
• Honest takes. A post about what I got wrong in the early build attracted more genuine interest than posts about what went right.

What didn't work on LinkedIn:

• Product announcements. "Scorafy is live!" got polite congratulations but minimal click-throughs. Nobody cares about your product. They care about their problem.
• Long-form thought leadership without a personal angle. Generic "AI is transforming coaching" posts disappeared into the algorithm.

Directory submissions

I submitted Scorafy to every relevant SaaS directory I could find. The free ones. Results were mixed, but the effort-to-reward ratio was favourable since each submission took about 15 minutes.

Directories that delivered:

• SaaSHub - approved quickly, sends occasional referral traffic
• AlternativeTo - good for SEO and comparison shoppers
• G2, Capterra, GetApp - slow to build reviews but important for credibility long-term

Directories that were disappointing:

• BetaList - now paid only. No free tier means it's not a zero-budget option anymore.
• There's An AI For That (TAAFT) - also paid only now. The landscape for free directory listings is shrinking.

SEO content

I wrote blog content targeting specific long-tail keywords that my audience actually searches for. Things like "how to automate assessment reports" and "AI tools for coaching practices."

The traffic from SEO is small but growing, and it compounds. A blog post written today will still be generating traffic in six months. That's fundamentally different from a social media post that dies after 48 hours.

Personal outreach

This felt the least scalable and was the most effective per-contact.

I reached out directly to coaches and HR professionals I knew from previous consulting work. Not a mass email. Individual messages referencing specific conversations we'd had about their reporting challenges.

Of the people I reached out to personally, a meaningful percentage signed up for trials. The conversion rate from personal outreach was dramatically higher than any other channel.

The lesson: at zero scale, high-touch beats high-volume every time.

What didn't work (or was overrated)

Product Hunt

I haven't launched on Product Hunt yet, so I can't speak from experience. But from researching other SaaS launches in the B2B space, the consensus is: Product Hunt drives a spike of traffic that's mostly other builders, not your target customers. For B2B SaaS targeting a specific professional niche, the ROI on a Product Hunt launch is questionable.

I might still do it for the backlink value and general visibility, but I'm not planning my launch strategy around it.

Twitter/X

My target audience isn't on Twitter in meaningful numbers. Executive coaches and HR directors are on LinkedIn. Trying to build a Twitter presence from scratch while launching a product would have been a distraction.

If your audience is developers or other startup founders, Twitter makes sense. For B2B SaaS targeting established professionals, LinkedIn is where the attention is.

Generic AI content

Early on, I wrote a few posts about "the future of AI in coaching" and "how AI is changing assessment." They were fine. They said reasonable things. And they generated almost no engagement because thousands of other people are saying the same reasonable things.

The content that worked was specific, personal, and grounded in my actual experience building and using AI tools. Not predictions about the future - observations about the present.

The importance of founder-led marketing

Here's something I didn't appreciate before the launch: in the early days of a bootstrapped SaaS, the founder IS the marketing.

Nobody cares about your brand. They don't know your brand. What they care about is whether the person behind the product understands their problem, has built something that solves it, and is trustworthy enough to hand their data to.

That trust comes from you showing up as yourself. Writing about your experience. Being honest about what your product does and doesn't do. Responding to questions personally. Sharing the journey, including the parts that aren't polished.

This is uncomfortable for a lot of founders. We want to hide behind the brand and let the product speak for itself. But at zero scale, the product can't speak. You have to speak for it. And you have to speak as yourself, not as a corporate entity.

Metrics (honest version)

I'm not going to pretend Scorafy is a rocket ship. It's early days. Here's what the early metrics actually look like:

• Website traffic: growing steadily from SEO and LinkedIn, but still modest
• Trial sign-ups: encouraging but small numbers
• Conversion rate: promising from personal outreach, lower from organic channels
• Revenue: early-stage. Enough to validate the pricing model, not enough to quit consulting

This is what early-stage bootstrapped SaaS looks like. Anyone who tells you their product "took off" from day one is either lying, has an existing audience, or spent money on ads. For the rest of us, it's a slow build.

And that's fine. The product works. The pricing works. The infrastructure works. Now it's about putting in the reps on distribution.

Practical tips for other bootstrapped founders

If you're launching a SaaS product with no marketing budget, here's what I'd prioritise:

1. Go where your audience already is. Don't try to build an audience on a new platform. Find where your target customers spend time and show up there consistently.

1. Write about the build, not just the product. The story of how and why you built something is more interesting than a feature list. People connect with founders, not with products.

1. Make personal outreach your first channel. Before you build a funnel, before you optimise your landing page, before you write a single blog post - reach out to people you know who have the problem you solve. Ten personal conversations will teach you more than 10,000 page views.

1. Submit to every relevant free directory. It's low effort and compounds over time through backlinks and referral traffic.

1. Write SEO content from day one. Blog posts targeting long-tail keywords are the best zero-budget marketing investment. They take months to rank but years to decay.

1. Be honest about your stage. Don't pretend to be bigger than you are. Early adopters actively prefer working with founders who are accessible, responsive, and building in public. That's an advantage, not a weakness.

1. Track everything. Set up analytics from day one. You need to know what's working so you can do more of it and stop doing what isn't.

The zero-budget launch isn't glamorous. There's no viral moment. No hockey stick graph. Just consistent effort, honest content, and the gradual accumulation of trust.

But the advantage of bootstrapping is that every customer you acquire is real. They found you because you solved their problem, not because an algorithm served them an ad. That's a foundation you can build on.

If you're in the early days of your own launch and want to compare notes, reach out. I'm always happy to talk with other founders who are building without a safety net.