4 steps to launching your SaaS product and getting traction

The market you enter your SaaS business into will likely be populated by companies that are more established and better funded than yours. When competing for hearts and minds in a crowded market, you’ll need to burst onto the scene with some force to get your product noticed. 

An effective product launch puts you on a growth trajectory that sets you up for long-term success. But how do you cut through the noise and persuade your target customers to listen to your elevator pitch, let alone actually subscribe to your product? Especially when you have a tiny marketing budget that’s somehow got to cover everything from marketing team salaries to adverts, to PR?

Read on for a 4-step process for pulling off a brilliant SaaS launch—including how to build on your successes to ensure they get traction once your product is out there.

Key insights

• Neither under- nor over-estimate your competition: do your research and be aware of who inhabits the space

• Resist the temptation of chasing money, and focus on providing real value to your users and what they care about. You want them to become your fans and supporters, so they can help you spread the word.

• Don’t improvise your Product Hunt launch: do your research, draft a plan, and learn the rules of the game  

• Don’t spread yourself too thin: as you get started, run small experiments and tests to find the 2–3 channels that will give you the most traction

A 4-step product launch checklist

Taking a new product from the pre-launch phase all the way to launch day requires collaboration between all major stakeholders, including the marketing, product, and leadership teams.

Use the following checklist as a guide to help inform your marketing strategy on the key factors to consider during your product launch.

1. Know your competition

When you go to market, you’ll need an understanding of the competitive landscape. As we suggested in our chapter on positioning and branding, start small by asking your current or prospective customers and target customers what alternatives they’ve tried or considered, and what they like and find valuable in your competitors’ products.

Just because a company has more funds than you doesn’t mean its product is better or that its business will be sustainable in the long run. You still need to be aware of its presence and be able to anticipate its actions and reactions.

When you know who you're up against, you can begin to differentiate yourself. Contentsquare, for example, is competing with dozens—if not hundreds—of other product analytics and customer experience tools, so we found some clear unique selling points (USPs) to help us stand out from the crowd. 

Firstly, our solution is an ‘all-in-one’ experience intelligence platform—so it’s the only tool you need to understand your customers. Second, it’s extremely easy to use—every member of your team can use Contentsquare to understand customer behavior and even uncover optimization opportunities for themselves. This strategy has helped us find loyal clients among medium to large businesses. 

2. Stay focused on delivering customer value

When you launch, your mind might naturally gravitate toward wanting to make the proverbial million dollars. Resist the temptation to think too big too soon—reframe your mission in terms of creating value for your customers instead.

Start small by creating real value for your first 10 customers, then for 100, and move up like that. If you do a great job, your fans will bring people in for you, and money will naturally follow. This is what counts as creating value:

• Creating a smooth customer customer onboarding process, for example by sending step-by-step emails to help users get the most out of your product

• Having a phone call if your customers have a problem, and emailing back when they ask you a question

• Making it a priority to be transparent, for example by notifying users of downtime, alerting them to pricing changes

• Publicly apologize for any mistakes you make and inconveniences you create 

Being responsive and helpful and using a personal touch is how you can potentially beat larger, better-funded, or more established competitors. 

Pro tip: at the launch stage of owning a SaaS product, you should be obsessed with your customers—and regularly check that you’re delivering value to them. One way to ensure you’re always open to suggestions is to use Contentsquare Surveys to place a feedback button on key pages. 

This unobtrusive widget won’t interrupt any users’ browsing experience, but it will give them the option to leave feedback if they feel inspired to. They’re also hassle-free to implement—you can set up a feedback widget in under 5 minutes.

Contentsquare's feedback button allows users to give an emoji rating to a closed-ended question, then leave a text comment to explain their reasoning

3. Create a strategy to launch on Product Hunt 

As you probably already know, Product Hunt is the place where new SaaS products get discovered. It’s the tech equivalent of the radio top charts: every day, thousands of new companies submit their products to be featured—and those who get the most upvotes and comments usually attract a wave of sign-ups.

Companies like Notion, Loom, and Zapier all found viral success this way. However, beware: today, there’s so much competition that the majority of startups do not see a big impact from their Product Hunt launch. 

Launching on Product Hunt is still a useful exercise to tell the world you’ve arrived and find your first fans, but don’t expect the kind of overnight success SaaS products experienced in the 2010s. Consider this launch just one of several actions you’ll take to gain traction.

Case study: Beep launch

Farid Shukurov and his team launched Beep, a project management tool, on Product Hunt in 2024. They were up against some tough competition—the popular generative AI tool, Midjourney V6, launched on the same day they did—but they still managed to take the #1 spot. 

Interestingly, the team used some very indie tactics to accomplish this. They painstakingly added members of the Product Hunt community on LinkedIn and messaged them on the day of the launch. Shukurov tells the story here. 

However, be advised that while strategies like this one are very common, they are risky and go against Product Hunt’s rules. The platform penalizes companies for asking their friends and family to upvote their products and requests that users only upvote products out of genuine interest. 

Beep at the top spot on Product Hunt (via IndieHackers.com)

Failing to prepare can be a costly mistake, so you should invest at least a month or 2 into your launch preparation. You should head to founders’ forums and read up on the latest tactics for succeeding on Product Hunt, since the algorithm changes regularly—but at a bare minimum, you need to 

• Set realistic goals: do you want to gain traffic from this launch or sign-ups? Are you looking to attract the attention of investors or just gain a high-quality backlink to boost your site’s SEO? 

• Create a dedicated landing page: ensure it’s polished, mobile-responsive, and optimized for conversions

• Encourage your network to sign up to Product Hunt and get involved in the community: they must sign up to an account at least 30 days before your launch, otherwise the algorithm may penalize you for spam 

• Identify a hunter (optional): finding a well-known Product Hunt user to ‘hunt’ your product can boost your visibility, though hunting your own product is also an option

• Refine your messaging: you’ll need to provide a tagline, product description, and a comment on your Product Hunt post 

• Prepare visual assets for launch day: ideally, a short explainer video as well as some screenshots of your product

• Plan your launch day: assign roles across your team to ensure someone’s managing social media, replying to comments, and rallying your community 

Since a day on Product Hunt is a 24-hour cycle, some teams gather together in a hotel or apartment and stay up all night to monitor their progress—but we’ll leave that up to you! 

Whether you hit your goals or wind up disappointed, it’ll be a learning experience. Spend the day after a launch taking stock of your progress and following up with your new supporters to keep the momentum going. 

4. Get traction

From blog posts to PR to offline events, there are quite a lot of customer acquisition channels you can use to get traction and turn a successful product launch into something more long-term—but just because they’re there, doesn’t mean you should use them all at once. 

Here are some examples of growth tactics to try out. Focus on the 2 or 3 channels that make the most sense for your niche and budget:

• Search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing are great, sustainable ways to build a business and generate demand—but SEO takes a lot of time. It’s also hard to predict the results you’ll get for your efforts, especially since the rise of generative AI tools (which have both disrupted search engine results and made it easier for every company to produce SEO content quickly) 

• Pay-per-click (PPC) and display/social advertising can give you a much faster start, but they might also prove expensive in the long term and difficult to scale

• Posting on established sites can help you reach your target market relatively quickly. And oftentimes, these sites will promote posts on social media, offering extra momentum to the campaign. For example, you can use sites like Quora and Reddit as a source of free and qualified leads. Find any questions related to the problem(s) that your product addresses, and add your own content.

• Influencer marketing is a great way to build authority in your niche and get signups for your product from people who are in your target market. It quickly gets expensive, but there are few other channels that so reliably produce qualified leads. 

• Paid media—that is, sponsoring podcasts, newsletters, and blogs in your niche—is another way to attract qualified signups to your product. It usually delivers a lower return on investment than influencer marketing, but is often easier to coordinate.

• Create promotions on sites like AppSumo and Dealify. These are libraries of new SaaS products that allow founders to create limited-time-only deals for early adopters, where users can buy lifetime subscriptions to their products for a one-off price. Whilst, yes, this defeats the whole business model of SaaS, some founders run short promotions on these sites to quickly acquire a first wave of users.   

Experiment and conduct small tests to find what works and what doesn’t, and double-down on what has proven successful. Studying crucial metrics like your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV) and getting a clear picture of what problems your existing customers are facing also help you find the right channels to reach new ones.

Blog posts

• How to Launch on ProductHunt, ProductHunt blog

• How I Designed and Launched a SaaS Product From Zero to the First 10 Customers, 

• Valerio Barbera

• How To Get #1 on Product Hunt – a Step-by-Step Playbook (2025), Steven Tey 

• The Founder’s Guide to an Effective SaaS Product Launch Strategy, Markus Palm 

Video & Audio

• My SaaS User Growth System: Get Your First 100 - 1,000+ Users, Simon Høiberg

• How to Get Your First Customers, Gustaf Alströmer 

• Product Hunt: How to Launch Your SaaS Product, Vedran Rasic

• Craft the Perfect Launch Strategy for Software Development and SaaS, David Hirschfeld 

Books

• Outmarket the Competition: Advanced Marketing Tactics to Drive Growth and Profitability, Nick Doyle  

• The Growth Equation: How Early Stage Startups Can Build a Powerful Engine for Growth, Andy Budd 

• Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times, Rebecca Homkes

• T-Minus 30: Why Good SaaS Products Fail and How To Fix It Before Launch, Ronald L Davis

FAQs about launching a SaaS product