How to Market a SaaS Product When Nobody Knows It Exists

If nobody knows your SaaS product exists, more features will not fix it. You need to put it, again and again, in front of the specific people who already have the problem it solves, in the places where they are already looking for help. For most early products, that means two kinds of places: conversations where buyers ask for recommendations (Reddit threads, forums, communities), and short videos that show the product working to people who have never heard of it.

So the practical way to market a SaaS product with no audience is: pick one narrow buyer, find where that buyer asks questions, show up there honestly, get the product on camera, and measure which of those places sends signups. Do that every week. The rest of this guide is the step-by-step version, with the mistakes that get founders banned or ignored.

Why nobody knows your product exists

Building software has never been cheaper. With AI coding tools, a founder can ship a working product in a weekend. That also means your buyer now sees more new tools than ever, and launch day buys you very little attention. A post on Product Hunt or X brings a spike, then silence.

The founders who get past this treat distribution as a weekly job, not an event. Paul Graham made the same point years ago in Do Things That Don't Scale: early startups grow because the founders go out and recruit users by hand. The tools have changed since then. The principle has not.

The founder of PhantomFlix, one of the products we work with, put it plainly to us: they used to think building was the hard part, and it isn't. The hard part is getting the product in front of people who would actually want it, and then doing that again next month.

Step 1: Pick one buyer and one painful problem

"Small businesses" or "teams" is not a buyer. You cannot find them, so you cannot reach them. Write one sentence:

[Job title or type of person] who [situation] and is frustrated that [problem in their own words].

For example: "Solo accountants with 20 to 50 clients who lose hours every month chasing receipts by email."

Test the sentence by searching for it. If you can find people describing that problem in their own words, you have a buyer you can reach. If you cannot, narrow it or change it before spending anything on marketing.

Step 2: Find where that buyer asks for help

Your buyer is already asking questions in public. Your job is to find those conversations before your competitors do. Good places to look:

• Reddit. Search for phrases like "any tool for", "alternative to [competitor]", "how do you handle [problem]" and "what do you use for". Add the name of the niche subreddit where your buyer hangs out.
• Google results that link to Reddit threads. Old threads that still rank on page one keep getting read for years. A helpful reply there can keep sending visitors long after you post it.
• Niche forums, Slack and Discord groups, Facebook groups for the profession you picked.
• Comments under YouTube and TikTok videos about the problem.

Keep a simple list: the link, the question in one line, how recent it is, and whether your product genuinely answers it. Ten good threads a week is plenty for a start.

Step 3: Answer honestly, and say who you are

This is where most founders get banned. Reddit's sitewide rules ask people to post authentic content in communities they have a real interest in, and they prohibit spam and content manipulation such as vote manipulation. On top of that, every subreddit has its own rules on self-promotion. Read them before posting.

What works:

1. Answer the question first. Give the advice you would give if you did not have a product. Name other options when they fit better.
2. Mention your product only if it really fits, and say plainly that you built it or work on it.
3. Post from a real account with a history in that community, not a fresh account.
4. Do not drop links unless the community allows it. People who want it will search for the name.
5. Never buy upvotes or ask friends to upvote your reply. It is against Reddit's rules, and moderators notice.

A reply like this works well:

We had the same problem with receipts. What fixed most of it for us was a shared inbox plus a monthly reminder, and Dext works if you want something established. Disclosure: I built a small tool for this exact case (receipts by WhatsApp), happy to share if useful.

That reply helps even if the reader never clicks. That is the point.

Step 4: Get the product on camera with real creators

Threads catch people who already know they have the problem. Short videos reach people who have the problem but have not gone looking yet. A 30 to 60 second video of a real person showing the product solving one problem often explains a SaaS product better than a landing page does.

You do not need famous influencers. Small creators who make content for your buyer (accountants, developers, students, small shop owners) usually have audiences that trust them, and they cost far less. What matters:

• Give them one problem and one moment to show, not a feature list. "Show the moment you find a lost receipt in five seconds" beats "talk about our features".
• Let them speak in their own words and post from their own accounts. Scripted ads read as ads.
• Make sure the post is disclosed. In the US, the FTC's Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers says paid posts must clearly disclose the relationship, in the video itself, not buried in a profile. TikTok asks creators to switch on its commercial content disclosure setting for paid posts, which adds a "Paid partnership" label.
• Pay for results you can check. Paying a flat fee up front for views that may never arrive is how small budgets disappear. Paying per verified view, up to a cap, keeps the risk with the outcome.
• Give every creator their own tracking link so you know which video sent which clicks.

Step 5: Measure what sends signups, then repeat it

Without measurement, you will keep doing whatever feels busy. Track four numbers per channel, per week:

Use a separate tracking link (UTM tags) for each thread and each creator. After three or four weeks, drop the channels that bring views but no signups, and put the time or money into the ones that do. Then do it again next month. Distribution compounds only if you keep doing it.

A real example, with small numbers

We publish our own results, including small ones. Two founders who work with us shared theirs:

• PhantomFlix used this approach (people talking about the product where buyers already were, measured per post) and the founder reported more than 100 people signing up. This was a hand-run campaign, before the work was done through Veeted's software.
• PhantomDetectAI, an AI detection tool, ran it for one week and got 10 signups. The founder's own view: ten is not a big number, but it is a real start, it is measurable, and it shows what to try again.

Both numbers are self-reported by the founders, and both products are early. We will publish fuller breakdowns (spend, views, clicks and cost per signup) as campaigns finish.

When this approach does not fit

Be honest with yourself about these cases:

• Enterprise sales with six-month cycles. Threads and videos can build awareness, but deals close through direct sales and relationships.
• No clear problem yet. If you cannot write the one-sentence buyer from Step 1, marketing will not save the product. Talk to users first.
• Regulated categories (finance, health, legal) where creators' claims need careful review. You can still use this approach, but plan for slower, stricter approvals.

The weekly routine

If you only take one thing from this guide, make it this hour-a-day routine:

• Monday: find 10 fresh threads where your buyer asks for help.
• Tuesday to Thursday: answer the best ones honestly, and brief or review one creator video.
• Friday: check which threads and videos sent signups, and cut what did not.

If you would rather not do all of it by hand, Veeted does this for SaaS, AI and app founders: it finds the threads, drafts disclosed replies, gets real creators posting about your product, and reports every post, verified view, click and signup. To see what it would find for your product, get a free campaign plan. It takes a website URL and returns video angles, creators to brief and Reddit threads in under a minute, with no signup or card. If you would rather talk to a person, send us a brief, or read how Veeted works.