Saurabh Lahoti is the founder of GTMDialogues, helping early-stage B2B startups scale with sharper GTM strategy, inbound marketing, and founder-led storytelling.
For SaaS startups, customer acquisition isn’t optional - it’s existential.
Subscription businesses live and die by their ability to bring in new users consistently. Churn is a constant, and unless your acquisition engine outpaces it, growth flatlines fast. This makes choosing the right acquisition channels not just a marketing task, but a survival strategy.
But there’s no universal answer.
Channels that work brilliantly for an enterprise SaaS with deep pockets can fail completely for a bootstrapped vertical SaaS. The best-performing strategies depend heavily on your stage, product complexity, buyer persona, and available resources.
This guide breaks down ten proven acquisition channels that SaaS founders and GTM teams actually use, from SEO and email to partnerships and communities. For each, you’ll learn:
If you're figuring out how to bring in your next 1,000 users or your next 100 logos, this breakdown is for you.
But before diving into specific strategies, let's examine the landscape of acquisition channels available to SaaS companies. Each option offers distinct advantages and challenges depending on your business model, target audience, and stage of growth.
The most successful SaaS companies rarely rely on a single channel. Instead, they build an acquisition strategy that combines complementary approaches, often starting with 2-3 core channels and expanding as they validate results. This multi-channel approach creates resilience against algorithm changes, market shifts, and increasing competition.
Let’s discuss all these channels one by one:-
Despite the rise of social media, messaging apps, and automation tools, email continues to be one of the most effective and underappreciated acquisition channels for SaaS startups.
Why?
Because it gives you direct access to your potential customers’ inboxes without algorithms, character limits, or platform dependencies, when used strategically, email isn’t just a communication tool; it’s a personalized sales engine that can convert curious leads into long-term users.
Unlike paid ads that disappear the moment your budget runs out, email builds over time. Every subscriber you add becomes a long-term asset: someone you can educate, re-engage, upsell, or turn into a brand advocate.
Most SaaS companies use email in one (or both) of these ways:
Both approaches can generate a pipeline, but they serve different stages of the buyer journey.
Email is especially effective if:
If you're still validating your messaging or trying to move early users from “curious” to “converted,” email gives you room to test and iterate fast.
The biggest mistake early teams make is treating email as a megaphone instead of a conversation.
Fix it by starting small: segment by use case or industry, keep each email focused on one next step, and test variations in subject lines, content, and CTA structure.
Email works even better when combined with:
Used well, email doesn’t just support your GTM strategy,it becomes one of its core pillars.
Search is one of the few acquisition channels that works while you sleep.
When someone types a question into Google,“best CRM for remote teams” or “how to automate invoice reminders”,they’re signaling intent. If your SaaS shows up in the results, you’re not just getting traffic. You’re entering the conversation at exactly the right moment.
That’s the power of organic search. It brings in high-intent users at scale, without paying per click. But unlike paid ads, SEO isn’t plug-and-play. It’s a long game, one that compounds over time if you do it right.
For most SaaS businesses, especially those with:
...organic search can become a foundational growth channel.
Let’s say you’re building a team productivity tool. You could rank for keywords like:
Each of these brings in users who are already looking for a solution like yours.
How It Works
There are three core components to a strong SaaS SEO engine:
Think of it like building a library: the more relevant and well-organized your content, the more likely Google is to recommend you.
SEO delivers strong ROI when:
It's also one of the best compounding channels; content published once can generate traffic for years with minimal upkeep.
Many SaaS teams invest in SEO too early or without a strategy. Common mistakes include:
Here’s how to fix it: Start with specific use cases and long-tail keywords. Write content that helps users solve a real problem, not just rank. Pair that with good technical hygiene and a few solid backlinks, and you'll start seeing organic wins faster than you think.
Pro Tip: Combine SEO with Product and Content
The best-performing SEO strategies often overlap with:
When your content solves actual buyer problems and ties back to your product, SEO becomes more than a traffic channel - it becomes a conversion engine.
If SEO is the long game, paid ads are your on-demand switch for traffic.
Done right, they help SaaS startups test messaging, reach new audiences, and generate pipeline, fast. But they can also drain your budget quickly if you don’t understand how to target, measure, or optimize the funnel.
Most paid channels (Google Ads, LinkedIn, Meta, Twitter, YouTube) offer hyper-specific targeting options. You can choose by job title, company size, intent signals, or even competitor keywords. That precision makes them especially powerful for early-stage SaaS teams trying to validate positioning or accelerate signups.
Paid ads work best when:
Let’s say you offer a compliance automation tool. You can run Google Ads targeting keywords like “SOC 2 for startups” and drive traffic to a landing page built specifically for CTOs or security leads.
Or, if you're selling HR software, you could run LinkedIn Sponsored Posts that target HR managers at companies with 50–200 employees, offering a downloadable “Remote Onboarding Checklist.”
The strength of paid is that it lets you meet buyers where they already are - scrolling, searching, comparing.
Each type has a different place in your funnel. The goal is to match the format with the intent.
Paid channels are especially effective when:
Take ITILITE, for example. The SaaS travel and expense management platform uses paid ads not only for lead generation but to track what messages and pain points get the most traction. Their team monitors how different industries respond to specific positioning angles, and uses those insights to refine their outbound messaging, event strategy, and landing page copy.
In this way, paid isn’t just a growth lever; it becomes an insight engine.
Paid ads also work well when layered with other channels. For instance, you can promote your best-performing SEO content to expand reach or use paid retargeting to bring back users who dropped off after visiting your pricing or demo page.
Paid marketing often fails when teams:
To make paid work, start narrow: one segment, one offer, one landing page. Test methodically. Measure against meaningful metrics like trial activations or demo requests, not just vanity clicks.
If you’re running ads and not learning anything, pause and regroup. Paid is most powerful when paired with strong analytics and a willingness to kill what’s not working.
Once you find a message-market match, then you can scale spend with confidence.
Before you hire your first AE or build a playbook, there’s one salesperson your company already has: the founder.
This insight was front and center in Rishabh Ladha’s session, “Life Is a Sales Funnel.” He emphasized that in the early days, every sales call is a discovery lab: you’re not just selling, you’re observing the customer’s language, motivations, and resistance. These insights become the raw material for messaging, onboarding flows, and even product roadmap decisions.
In early-stage SaaS, this channel isn’t optional. It’s how you earn your first 10–50 customers.
Founders have what most SDRs and account execs don’t:
Buyers pick up on this. They feel they’re speaking to someone who built the thing, not just someone selling it. That makes discovery calls feel like problem-solving sessions, not pitches.
Founder-led sales doesn’t follow a rigid playbook. It’s a highly personalized, hands-on motion that evolves with every conversation:-
This isn’t scalable. But it’s not supposed to be.
Founder-led sales is about learning what resonates, what doesn’t, and what stops people from converting.
If you can’t sell it, no one can. Here are signs you should take the lead in selling as a founder:-
For B2B SaaS companies, founder-led sales often works best with complex, high-consideration products, especially if your buyers are also founders, functional heads, or domain experts.
Some founders hesitate to sell because:
But here's the truth: selling isn’t about pressure. It’s about understanding problems, asking the right questions, and making sure there’s a fit. No one’s better equipped to do that than the person who built the product.
Record calls. Track questions. Write down how buyers describe their problems. The insights you gather through founder-led sales become the foundation of your future sales scripts, onboarding flows, and content strategy.
Not all growth needs to be owned. Sometimes, the fastest way to acquire customers is to plug into someone else’s distribution.
Partnerships and integrations give SaaS startups access to pre-built audiences, distribution channels, and complementary products, without spending months building an audience from scratch.
Done right, these channels don’t just bring traffic. They bring qualified, high-intent users who are already familiar with the ecosystem you’re integrating into.
In SaaS, partnerships can take several forms:
At early stages, even a simple integration with the right tool can put you in front of hundreds (or thousands) of the right buyers.
Partnerships work because they shorten the trust curve.
When a user sees that your product “works with” a tool they already use,and you’re listed in that tool’s ecosystem,it increases credibility.
If you co-market with a known player in the space, their authority lends you visibility. And if you build integrations that solve annoying workflow gaps, users adopt faster because the value is obvious.
Partnerships aren’t a volume game, they work best when they’re rooted in strategic alignment between your product, your ICP, and the tools they already trust:-
Integrations, in particular, tend to drive higher retention because your product becomes part of a broader workflow.
Many startups expect immediate returns from listing an integration or launching a co-marketing campaign. But visibility doesn’t equal adoption.
Partnerships fail when:
The fix: choose depth over logos. One high-value partnership with real joint GTM > 10 shallow ones with no traction.
Ask your users:
“What tools do you use alongside ours?”
“Where did you first hear about [tool you integrate with]?”
Then prioritize integrations or co-marketing with the 1–2 platforms that come up most often. Those early wins compound.
In a world saturated with ads and automation, people trust people.
That’s why communities and creator-led growth have become breakout acquisition channels for SaaS, especially in niche or technical markets. When your product is mentioned in a Slack group, a Twitter thread, or a niche YouTube video, it doesn’t feel like marketing. It feels like a recommendation.
This channel isn’t about scaling ads. It’s about showing up where your audience already gathers and earning trust through participation, not promotion.
Communities can take many shapes:
The key is relevance. A 200-person Slack group full of RevOps leaders might outperform a 20,000-member LinkedIn group full of mixed roles.
Creators are individuals who’ve built an audience around a specific topic, toolset, or workflow. These include:
For SaaS, even a small shoutout from a credible creator can lead to a spike in traffic, trials, or word-of-mouth mentions, especially if your product fits into a known workflow or category.
Community and creator-led channels work best when trust and peer influence play a major role in how your users discover and evaluate tools:-
Community mentions can also be powerful when layered on top of other efforts, like SEO (through backlinks), email (creator shoutouts), or partnerships.
This channel takes time. It fails when:
The fix: Show up consistently. Share genuinely useful content. Engage first, promote later. And when you work with creators, give them freedom to tell your story in their voice.
Ask every new user:
“Where did you hear about us?”
If people mention “someone posted it in a Slack group” or “saw it in a Twitter thread,” double down. These signals often show up before attribution tools catch them, and they point to where trust is already forming.
Content marketing is more than blog posts; it's how your product earns attention, educates your market, and builds long-term trust at scale.
For SaaS startups, it plays a foundational role in acquisition, especially when your product solves a problem that requires explanation, comparison, or buy-in across teams. A single high-performing piece of content can bring in traffic, leads, backlinks, and brand recall for months or even years.
But content only works when it’s built with clarity and intent. You’re not just writing about your product, you’re creating material that helps your users do their jobs better.
Content in SaaS takes many forms:
Done right, content becomes an always-on acquisition engine that moves prospects from awareness to action.
Content shines when your product needs education, context, or trust-building before a user is ready to act:-
Content marketing also helps with sales enablement, backlink generation, and partnership development, it’s a GTM multi-tool.
Many SaaS startups write too broadly or too selfishly. Common pitfalls:
The fix: Treat content as a product. Interview users, look at support tickets, and sit in on sales calls to identify actual pain points. Then reverse-engineer content from real problems, not just keywords.
Writing is 50% of the work. The other 50% is getting it in front of the right audience.
Repurpose blog posts into:
Every piece of content you create should serve at least two channels.
For SaaS companies, especially in B2B, events and webinars aren’t just about lead gen. They’re about building trust at scale.
When someone attends your event or webinar, they’re opting into a deeper, more focused experience with your brand. It’s a signal that they’re not just curious: they’re considering, evaluating, or already solving for the problem your product addresses.
That makes this channel ideal for mid-to-bottom funnel engagement. You’re not just getting attention, you’re starting a relationship.
You don’t need a huge budget or a 5,000-person conference to win here. What matters is relevance.
The goal isn’t just registrations, it’s resonance.
Events and webinars deliver the most value when your buyer needs education, reassurance, or hands-on exposure before making a decision.
Events work especially well when paired with an outbound motion. Invite leads to a webinar instead of a demo; it lowers the ask and builds trust.
Too many teams treat webinars like check-the-box tactics:
The fix: Treat your events like product launches. Have a clear positioning (“This is for X persona solving Y problem”), invest in distribution (partners, paid, organic), and design a follow-up sequence to turn attendees into trials or meetings.
The most effective SaaS events don’t just teach, they connect.
Events that create value and connection lead to higher conversion, stronger brand recall, and faster sales cycles.
When a buyer is almost ready to make a decision, where do they go?
Not always your homepage. Often, it’s G2, Capterra, Product Hunt, or the Salesforce AppExchange, places built specifically to compare tools, read reviews, and explore alternatives.
That’s why review sites and marketplaces are high-intent acquisition channels. Prospects visiting these platforms are already in buying mode. The right positioning and social proof here can nudge them over the line.
Unlike top-of-funnel traffic from content or social, users browsing review sites:
If your brand shows up consistently and is backed by strong reviews, you immediately become part of the conversation.
Each serves a different purpose, some are about credibility, others about discovery. Choose based on your GTM stage and product model.
This channel is especially powerful when paired with a strong sales or retargeting motion. If someone sees you on G2 and then gets a personalized ad or outbound email, that’s a warm lead, not a cold one.
Startups often overlook review platforms because:
The fix: Start small. Ask 5–10 early users to leave detailed reviews. Use those reviews in your sales decks, product pages, and retargeting ads. A few strong reviews are more powerful than a dozen generic ones.
This isn’t just reputation management, it’s pipeline acceleration.
Sometimes, the fastest way to get customers is to stop waiting and knock on their door.
Outbound prospecting is the most direct acquisition channel you have,especially in the early days of building a SaaS. You’re not relying on SEO, referrals, or brand. You’re reaching out to your ideal customers, starting conversations, and learning what sticks.
When done right, outbound doesn’t feel like spam. It feels like a relevant nudge. The goal isn’t to sell immediately, it’s to start a dialogue.
Outbound isn’t just cold email blasts. It’s a system built around research, relevance, and repetition.
Early-stage founders often run this motion themselves,and it doubles as market research.
Outbound delivers best when you know exactly who you’re targeting and can speak to a specific pain point with precision.
It’s especially effective in niche verticals or with new categories that haven’t yet reached mainstream search or community channels.
Many SaaS teams give up on outbound too quickly. Common reasons:
The fix: focus on quality over quantity. Build a list of 50 highly relevant prospects. Personalize every message. Track which CTAs, subject lines, and pain points get responses. Outbound isn’t a volume game, it’s a relevance game.
Outbound doesn’t just generate pipeline, it teaches you:
Even the no’s are useful, if you’re listening.
With so many channels to choose from, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, or worse, spread your efforts too thin.
The goal isn’t to do everything. It’s to do one or two things really well based on your GTM stage, customer behavior, and team strengths.
Here’s a simple framework to help you prioritize.
Before picking a channel, you need to understand what your business actually needs right now - learning, traction, scale, or expansion.
Your GTM stage should shape how you prioritize channels, budget, and effort:-
Each stage has different constraints, team size, budget, and clarity on ICP. Choose your channels accordingly.
Not every channel makes sense for your buyer. Ask:
If you're selling to developers, community-driven growth and integrations may outperform paid ads.
If you're targeting CFOs, high-trust content and outbound might work better than webinars.
Let your customer behavior, not trends, drive your channel choices.
Pick 1–2 channels. Run lean tests. Measure conversions, not just clicks or impressions.
Ask:
If a channel shows an early signal, double down if it doesn’t, move on, and document the learning.
No channel works overnight. Commit to 60–90 days of focused effort before declaring it a win or a wash.
What matters most isn’t the channel, it’s the fit between the channel, the message, and the moment your customer is in.
If you’re an early-stage SaaS team, focus on one or two channels max. Trying to do everything, SEO, ads, content, outbound, events, at once, will dilute your efforts and make it harder to learn what’s working. Master one channel, extract the signal, and then layer in others once you’ve built muscle and repeatability.
Give each channel at least 60–90 days of focused execution. That means committing to consistent activity, clear metrics, and structured experimentation. If you don’t see early signs of traction, like lead quality, engagement, or learnings you can build on, it might be time to pivot or pause.
That’s common, especially in horizontal SaaS. The trick is to start with the channel that matches their buying moment. For example, if they Google their pain points, start with SEO. If they rely on peer recommendations, explore communities. Your goal isn’t to reach everyone, it’s to start where you can build momentum and expand from there.
Not necessarily, but they’re risky if you haven’t nailed your ICP, messaging, or conversion path. Paid ads are a multiplier, not a fixer. They amplify what’s already working. If your funnel leaks or your offer isn’t compelling, paid will burn cash fast. Use it for fast feedback loops, not as your only lever.
The most budget-friendly channels are usually content, cold outbound, and founder-led sales. They take more time than money, and they also teach you the most about your market. Even 10 high-quality conversations or content-driven signups can shape your entire GTM strategy.
Saurabh Lahoti is the founder of GTMDialogues, helping early-stage B2B startups scale with sharper GTM strategy, inbound marketing, and founder-led storytelling.
