How do you reach first 100 paid customers for SaaS?

Depends heavily on your target group. For B2B probably Linkedin & Twitter, for B2C Facebook, Insta, TikTok, as well as Youtube, and for B2D maybe HackerNews and Reddit. With a little bit of budget and a narrow niche you can experiment with Google ads (~$30/month minimum)

can try onboarding affiliates ! technicalities can be handled using "first promoter"

A marketing budget isn't necessary, because in the beginning stages you are trying to get problem-fit before you get into the product-market fit stages.

Cold outreach, social media (groups etc), listings

Multichannel cold outreach & social presence. Build a segment aligned to a potential ICP and send personalized emails talking about the problem & not the product. Meanwhile, keep engaging with the audience on LinkedIn, and Twitter, etc. Understand your personas in the initial where they hangout on the internet so you what channel to try next.

You can try BetaList, Owwly, MicroStartups, and also HackerNews. For the SaaS founder, I would consider launching on SaaS lifetime deals websites, like AppSumo. I know a lot of SaaS founders found success on these websites.

Launching on Marketplaces and Communities like Indiehackers, App sumo, Betalist, Product Hunt etc..

All you need are 2 channels. 1 scalable, 1 non-scalalbe Non-scalable channels: - Messaging Linkedin users - Messaging Facebook group member Scalable channels: - Twitter - Seo - Reddit - Quora

You have to know where your target audience is and create awareness about that SaaS product you're building. LinkedIn is one of the most commonly platforms used for B2B. Regardless where you end up at, you have to build awareness firstly. Have you thought, after building the product, to do the product launch here? Good luck with building the product and establishing its user base!

I'd say first of all get yourself listed on as many SaaS listing and review platforms as possible, and your social media such as LinkedIn along with a Wikipedia page should be up and running. Once you created all of this, you can start with the main thing because people will search about you after that and all this is to make sure they know you're a legitimate company. The "main thing" I referred to here was cold outreach. Cold emailing is really not given as much credit as it should get, you can go through the web and will find evidence that it is a great strategy almost everywhere. You can use a prospecting tool like Aeroleads to find potential clients in the niche you're addressing with your product and an email sequencing tool like MailChimp to automate the email outreach process, just make sure that your email content is valuable and form a good lead nurturing strategy. My suggestion would be to target people in the age group of 20-35 (if your product concerns this group at all) because this segment is what marketers call something like 'the daredevils' while doing market segmentation because they are not afraid/reluctant to test out new products. Once start sending thousands of emails every few days, people will automatically start searching for you and the interested ones will definitely use your product.

I think platforms like Product Hunt, Capterra, AppSumo are good for it.

It all depends on what kind of SaaS business you have. It happens that cold email works very well, and it happens that twitter helps to find a lot of customers.

Freemium by far seems the best way. But can be problematic if you struggle to convert them later on. Good practice is to cap the overall Product value. And offer it later on when you end up monetising. To reach users without a huge marketing budget, build in public and use channels like Product Hunt to get feedback and validation.

Telegram seems to be great for any Web 3.0 tool marketing - find the public groups and reach out!

There are Free tools to import lists of your ideal prospects/customers and manage messaging outreach at scale to send your offer, via email and on LinkedIn. A good one is Jobin.cloud (free) but there are also others tools not too expensive. Automation will help a lot if you are alone. With a good proposition and good communication, it will be not too difficult to find your first 100 paying customers. Good luck!

Pick up the phone and call the closest people in your network.