Matt Swulinski's Paid-First Growth Engine: Run SaaS Like Ecommerce

Key points

1. 1

   Start paid on day one

   Harry says most people tell founders to wait on paid. Swulinski says start right away. In a week of paid you can test messaging, creative, funnels and positioning. Content and user interviews take far longer. He starts with three channels: Meta, Google and lifecycle messages by email, SMS or push. He says those three can carry a company to its first $1M to $10M in ARR. TikTok and Reddit can wait. He does want about 50 conversions on your main event first, so the algorithm knows who to look for.

   “paid is the easiest way to validate that you have PLG that you have a product that can scale”

2. 2

   Set up tracking before the first dollar

   Ecommerce has attribution tools that take 15 minutes to set up. In SaaS, each startup builds its own, and Swulinski puts 90% of companies at skipping this step. With a poor match rate, Meta cannot see half your buyers, so it targets at random. CAC climbs, and the founder decides paid does not work. Pick the one event that matters most to you. At Wispr Flow it was the download. Count free trial credits as marketing spend. He calls that fully loaded CAC.

   “our free trial credits get summed with marketing spend. If you're not doing that, then you're not really calculating your acquisition cost.”

3. 3

   The creative is the targeting

   Meta's Andromeda update stopped asking advertisers who to target. It reads the ad and finds the audience itself. So for a $100K Meta budget, Swulinski wants at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month. Viktor pays a couple hundred creators a percentage of ad spend, and each makes three to four videos a week. It also works with five agencies and an in-house team. The ads must differ in age, gender, setting and hook. AI is good for variations, he says, but full AI videos look like slop.

   “You need to constantly be creating net new completely wild weird ideas otherwise your acquisition costs will start to rise.”

4. 4

   Find the ceiling by overspending

   At Wispr Flow the team raised the budget five times from one month to the next to see what broke. They learned Meta should sit second to Google, and that some newsletters and a podcast did not pay. Then they pulled back and ramped up again with what they had learned. His test for spend is elasticity: chart spend against ARR and check that new spend adds revenue you would not have got anyway.

   “go as hard as you absolutely can and then see it blow up and then understand where and how it blew up.”

5. 5

   Pay affiliates, who are not yet customers

   Swulinski calls affiliates the most underrated channel. They are people outside your customer base who earn a cut for content and reviews, which sets them apart from an in-product referral program. At Viktor, 10 to 15% of monthly acquisition comes through affiliates on a 10 to 15% revenue share. An affiliate who signs a company paying $10K a month earns $1,500 a month.

   “it is the highest ROI channel and if you set up a strong affiliate program and you bring people into the door”