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Ankur Tiwari
Ankur Tiwari

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Organic SaaS Growth: The quest for immortal SaaS

It took me over 3 months to develop a website.

And 7+ months to get 500 registered users. Registered, not active.

Over the course of next few months, I tasted my first success with Facebook ads. I grew sales and solved some pressing issues with the growth.

But I only had one growth channel, and relying 100% on it was not something I felt comfortable with. So, I asked Google and YouTube “how to build new growth channels”.

A day spent only to realize that most of the top ranking blogs and videos are just noise. They are either based on top-level strategies or are pure PR garbage.

Nothing actionable there! Spend days reading them and you will not be able to execute a single thing to attract new clients.

For example, look at this screenshot:

Google search result for 'how zoom grow'

This top result tells three things:

Being customer driven

Great product

Zoom spent huge money on billboards

Now, which of these insights you can actually use today to build your audience tomorrow?

None.

And this is not a lone case. Internet is filled with such ‘top results’.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the importance of top-level strategic insights. But if you are a Founder or CMO trying hard to gain traction, build audience and grow revenue, what you need are actionable strategies, not the ones from boardrooms’ slides.

So I started my research again, this time little differently.

I started researching the growth strategies that some of the most successful companies adopted. I didn’t go to blogs this time.

Rather I used analysis tools, interviews of founders, experienced free trials and dug deeper into their campaigns.

Though every company built its engine of growth differently, but I found one common thread among all success stories:

“Every successful company’s first and most reliable growth channel was organic.”

No exceptions.

No paid ads.

And you know, this is not even the trickiest part.

Trickiest part is that you will find people teaching about Google ads or Facebook ads. But almost none to talk about organic growth strategies. At least not on google’s first page. The world of Internet is the world of low signal / noise ratio today.

So, I have decided to research and write about organic growth strategies. Not top-level boardroom’s talk, but real actionable strategies and tactics.

I am writing Organic SaaS Growth newsletter on substack.

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