It's time for another SaaS marketing tip.

When you're about to launch something new, your first step shouldn't be buying ads, optimizing for SEO, or posting on social media.

One of the highest-leverage marketing activities you can do is this: write a personal email to anybody in your network who might care.

I'm advising a startup right now (I'll tell you more about them in the future). They want me to help them get more beta testers. My first step was to list people I know who might be interested in the product.

As I added names, I started sending out emails/DMS that look like this:

I wrote a similar series of emails when Jon and I started working on Transistor:

And I reached out to this list again when we launched on Product Hunt:

Sending personal emails like this is a classic "do things that don't scale" action. This is how we got our first ten customers for Transistor.

If you can't think of anyone to send emails like this, that might be a red flag. Ideally, you've already been investing time in building relationships with the kinds of people who buy products like yours.

If you can't do this, it might indicate that you don't know enough about your product category, industry, or community.

Want to do this?

I've made a "Prospect List" template in Google Sheets that you can copy. To get started, write out 4-5 names of people you know (who are in your market) and start writing emails.

If you do this, reply to this email and tell me about it!

Cheers,
Justin Jackson
​@mijustin​

PS: Do you want to share this with a friend? I've published today's tip on my blog.

​
​

This newsletter is brought to you by:​
​
🎙️ Transistor​
2024 is a great year to start a podcast

⚡ MegaMaker ⚡
My private community for bootstrappers