Engineering growth: How we got our first 20 paying SaaS customers

Growth hacking is not about taking shortcuts, or get-rich-quick schemes. It's about systematically finding creative ways to engineer growth and get customers for a startup.

Here is the guide on how we got our first paying 20 SaaS customers - and how you can too.

After now 4 spending years engineering growth myself for my B2B SaaS past 100 paying customers - and running experiments almost every day of the week. Here is my take on the definition of growth hacking.

“Finding ways to get outsized growth returns with fewer resources - either amongst customers, optimizing existing growth channels, or finding new ones.”

Imo 'growth engineering' is a more accurate term than growth hacking.

1. 🧪 run scientific experiments

2. 🛠️ get practical with it -> get your hands dirty

3. ✏️ produce content, code, etc. to scale yourself

4. 📊 measure, follow-up and find what works -> double down

5. 🚀 make growth happen

• ❌ get-rich-quick schemes

• ❌ finding a silver bullet that solves growth forever

• ❌ something theoretical you draw up in the boardroom

• ✅ systemizing growth like an engineer (A/B testing, Bullseye Framework, etc)

• ✅ being creative, finding new ways to grow with limited resources

• ✅ not brute forcing channels everyday just because you "should"

• ✅ having your company spend time on the right things to reach your ICP

• ✅ introducing growth hooks into your product -> expose it to the world

• ✅ finding paths of least resistance

There are lots of channels to choose from when growing a startup.

To be more specific there are 19 growth channels listed in the book 'Traction: A startup's guide to getting customers' by Gabriel Weinberg (2014).

You should not work with all channels, or even experiment with all of them. But it's good to have an overview - to make sure you pick the right ones for your (1) startup and (2) ICP.

But also the (3) right way to grow for you as a founder, as founder-gtm fit is imo hugely important to succeed.

You can use the Bullseye Framework (also from the book Traction) to choose a few ones - to make sure you stay focused, while allowing for experimentation.

Here are the 5 growth channels that produced our first 20 paying B2B SaaS customers for my startup Univid.

1. Partners & doped WoM 💉

2. Outbound sales ☎️

3. Existing communities

4. Built in virality 🦠 

5. Founder-led content ✏️

Let's take a look at each one and see exactly what we did. (coming soon..)

Me giving a talk on the topic of Growth Engineering at KTH Innovation in Stockholm, Sweden