Hey!

Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to generating demand for your B2B product using social & content.

ICYMI: I launched a SaaS last week. It’s called Bluecast, and it helps you write better LinkedIn content, faster.

Users are loving it.

And we’ve gotten some feedback that our free trial setup is a little too generous. So we’ll be making some updates to how we feature-gate parts of the product later this week.

You can still get in now with the original, “probably-too-generous,” free trial offer. Try it out here.

One more note: if you’ve been using Bluecast, would love to grab 15 minutes to chat through any feedback you have. Just reply to this email and LMK.

Now, for today’s edition, I want to walk you through the thought process behind this launch. I’ve got 3 marketing strategies you can steal.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

Behind-the-scenes of my SaaS launch

3 marketing learnings from launching Bluecast publicly and beating our sign-up goal by 6X

I announced a SaaS product last week—it’s an AI writing tool for LinkedIn, called Bluecast.

The launch was insane. I was running on 4-5 hours of sleep and the strongest cold brew I could get my hands on for a good chunk of last week.

My co-founder and I had a rough idea of how many sign-ups we’d get. We ran it up to 6X our original goal. We also hit the Claude rate limit on launch day…lmao.

Now that I’ve caught up on some sleep, I figured I’d give you an inside look at the marketing and how I thought about setting things in motion for the launch. There are 5 tangible lessons that you can steal as a SaaS founder or marketer.

1. Content amplifies.

You know the saying “you can’t out-train a bad diet?” Same thing applies to marketing.

You can’t out-market a bad product.

Well, let me backtrack. You can out-market a bad product for a short stint. A flash-in-the-pan launch can get you a large influx of users. Then you get a bunch of people into your product who quickly find out your product sucks.

Marketing only influences how fast users find out whether your product is good or not. I think that quote came from Alex Hormozi.

With Bluecast, I knew we had a strong product. From the day my co-founder showed me an early version of the product, I was confident we had something that outperformed the other LinkedIn content tools on the market.

I’d be lying if I said there weren’t nerves before launch. Did I just gaslight myself into thinking we had a strong product for last last 3 months? Will we be exposed as frauds? You know, the usual not-founded-in-reality imposter syndrome thoughts.

As we launched, the market response confirmed that we did in fact have something people want, and the user experience did in fact live up to the hype. I was able to exhale a bit.

Users have been loving the platform so far (the Writing Styles in particular blew people away).

Now, marketing just amplifies that. The launch post continued to gain a ton of traction because folks were so excited (and other reasons I’ll get into in a second).

One note here. I intentionally ran the launch post from my account, not the Bluecast brand account.

Founder accounts tend to get more engagement in 2024. This is why founder-led content is becoming the norm (and the thesis my agency is built on).

If you're launching a SaaS in 2024, you need to account for founder content in your distribution plan.

2. You don’t win launches on launch day.

A lot of SaaS founders treat their marketing like a “6-minute abs” workout program.

You aren’t going to get a chiseled six pack from doing that YouTube video workout 2-3 times. Takes months of training, and dieting, and managing your recovery.

You aren’t going to run a successful SaaS launch with 1 week of half-assed hype posts and a launch piece on LinkedIn. Takes months (or years) of building good will with your audience.

It’s funny. Our launch was stupid simple.

→ 1 launch post on social (published to LinkedIn and X)

→ 1 dedicated newsletter send

Why did we eclipse our original user goal and land at 6X that?

Well, like we just covered, the product was strong. But, arguably even more important, I’ve been establishing myself as a “thought leader” (ew gross) in B2B marketing and LinkedIn strategy for years now. I’ve given over and over and over to my audience in the form of free content. So when I launched a product that fit with their needs, they:

1. Trusted the fact that I put my name behind it.

2. Were just stoked that I had launched something they could use.

This analogy from my friend Michael made me laugh.

I saw a similar trend with Compound, my agency. We’ve been at capacity since inception. Content is to blame. I am able to drive traffic and create trust with customers by posting stuff on the internet. The difference with Compound is that we have a limited amount of spots. I can sell services to infinity (if I was to keep quality high).

With SaaS, the upper bound does not exist. I can just publish more, better content and see number-on-dashboard go up. It’s cool. Lol.

3. Everything in the launch post was intentional.

Yes, we ran the entire launch with one main post. This was intentional, and so was damn near every line in the post.

Now, why one post?

Well, on social platforms nowadays, when a post hits…it hits. Especially true on X. And for this launch, I wanted to have one post blow up, not to have 17 posts kind of do okay.

Now, a few secret ninja copywriting and content strategy hacks I used in the post:

A) I positioned the post as an announcement.

LinkedIn loves announcements and milestones. Think about that college friend who got a consulting job you know they hate—I’m so humbled and excited to accept this offer at Deloitte. Think about whenever a startup announces a new round of funding or gets acquired. Those posts always rip.

So, I framed the launch post in a similar way. The hook read: “HUGE announcement today. I’ve been wanting to do this for years.”

The “HUGE.” The fact that is was all caps. All intentional. I also used “I’ve been wanting to do this for years” to create curiosity. I want the reader thinking “You’ve been wanting to to what for years, Tommy??”

B) I didn’t lead with a product shill, but I also didn’t bury the lede.

Right after the hook, I introduced the product & what it does. I didn’t want to wait until the end of the post to share the actual product, just in case readers didn’t make it to the end.

Notice how I didn’t go into a 3 paragraph ramble about the product and its features.

“So I did: it’s called Bluecast, and it’s a tool that helps you write better LinkedIn content, faster—so you can build your personal brand.”

1 sentence. And it intros the name and the value prop of the product. It also fits into the story that the post is telling. Feels natural. Think about how your favorite podcasters work ad reads into the natural flow of the show. Same vibe.

C) I answered the “trust” question.

You gotta answer the question: Why should I trust you?

My core audience knows why. But as the post picks up traction, I wanted to be sure “cold” readers would be able to answer it, too. So included this line packed with social proof:

“I’m a believer that every founder and marketer should be producing content on LinkedIn. It changed my life.

Posting content online changed my life. I built my agency to 7-figures off of it. I landed my dream job off of a cold DM because of my personal brand.”

I introduced my philosophy on social content and tangible results that show my expertise. Notice how each example hits a different potential user. “Built an agency to 7-figures” speaks to founders and “landed my dream job” speaks to in-house marketers.

D) I kept the image scrappy.

I debated whether to go with a scrappy image or a product GIF.

I landed on this selfie at my messy desk setup, with Bluecast pulled up in the background:

I wanted to capture “scrappy startup founder” vibes. A super clean product GIF or animation would be too polished for that.

I also from the 200+ posts per week we publish across Compound clients that IRL photos with people in them tend to perform better than branded graphic assets. Why go against that trend for my own launch?

A lot of early founders want to appear “bigger” than they are. Mistake. Being small is a competitive advantage. People want to root for the underdog.

Look at what Jimmy Kim has done with Sendlane. He’s been able to create a ton of noise off of organic social by taking the “David VS Goliath” angle.

Now, I’m not sure we’ll get this direct with Bluecast. But I’m sure that as users see the product is run by people who are in the weeds on LinkedIn and not post-exit founders who are mentally checked out, being “small” will also be our competitive advantage.

E) I included a direct link in the post.

OMG. Tommy…what are you doing?!? Links kill reach!!

Sure. I wouldn’t spam links in every post. But in this case, my priority was getting traffic to the site. I didn’t want to “hope” the readers would click to my bio and find the right link there.

So, I included it in the post.

400+ LinkedIn engagements later…I don’t think it hurt us too much.

What’s next?

Now that we’re through launch, I’m cooking up our marketing roadmap for the rest of Q4.

I mentioned this in the launch newsletter (great follow-up read btw), but 2 channels will be our core focus for the foreseeable future:

1. LinkedIn (duh)

2. Email

LinkedIn will help us gain top-of-funnel awareness (and some conversions) and we can use it to drive folks to our email list where we’ll nurture them. This is marketing 101. Fundamentals. But the fundamentals work.

Question for you though. What do you want to know about our marketing strategy? I plan on sharing a lot of the behind-the-scenes here in Social Files. I know I lot of SaaS founders and marketers read this weekly.

And along with insights from client work at Compound, my own observations from growing Bluecast will be valuable for you.

Last thing. Quick shill. If you want to grow on Linkedin, sign up for a free trial of Bluecast. My co-founder wants me to double to user base by end-of-month.

🗃 FILE CABINET

Here’s my favorite marketing and business content I bookmarked this week.

• The Best LinkedIn Content Strategy for SaaS by Tommy Clark 🎥

• How I edit with Bluecast by Tommy Clark 🎥

• My Evidence Based Guide to Making Money Online [TIER LIST] by Alex Hormozi 🎥

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, appreciate you allowing me into your inbox every week.

And again, thank you for the response on Bluecast so far. It’s insane. I feel grateful for your support—and as every founder loves to say, we’re just getting started.

Talk soon,

Tommy Clark

PS: Check out Bluecast with a free 7-day trial here (no CC required).

PPS: If you want Compound to run a founder-led content motion for you… save a spot on our waitlist here. We’re at capacity through August, but looking to partner with some SaaS startups in September.