How to Get Your First 100 SaaS Users in Europe

The phrase first 100 users sounds precise. In Europe, it can hide a mess.

Imagine the first twenty signups for a new SaaS arrive from Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland and France. The analytics dashboard looks international. The founder has proof that people in several countries are curious.

What the founder does not yet have is enough information from any one group to know why people stay, why they leave, what they will pay for, or which message made them care.

This is the part I would get right before worrying about scale.

For an EU founder, getting the first 100 SaaS users in Europe is mostly a problem of concentration. Finding early users for a startup in Europe works better when the first group is small enough to learn from: similar people with the same painful problem, reached repeatedly until their language starts shaping the product page, the sales motion and eventually the referrals.

Europe can come later.

Do not start with Europe

The European Union has 27 member countries and 24 official languages.¹ The European Commission's startup and scaleup strategy still focuses on reducing barriers and helping startups expand across the EU.²

That is a useful warning for a founder with zero customers.

"European SMEs" sounds like a market because it contains a lot of companies. It is usually a poor description of the first people you should try to reach. A 14-person design agency in Hamburg, a logistics company in Rotterdam and a retailer in Milan may all fit the same broad firmographic filter while buying software in completely different ways.

Make the first market smaller.

For a B2B product, I would rather start with something like German recruiting agencies with 10 to 50 employees than "HR teams in Europe." For a developer tool, geography may matter less, but the same principle applies: one framework, one technical problem and one community is easier to learn from than every developer who can open an English landing page.

The aim is not to prove that the total market is small. The aim is to create a dense enough first cohort that patterns become visible. For a startup in Europe, early users are most useful when they are similar enough that their behavior can actually be compared.

You can widen the map once you have patterns worth carrying across a border.

Users 1 to 10 should feel manual

The first ten are recruiting.

I would start with people I can reach without pretending to have a marketing machine: former colleagues, previous clients, friends in the industry, investors, advisors, local founder groups and people who can make one useful introduction.

The ask should be specific. I am building this for this type of company. I think it may solve this problem. Would you try it with me for two weeks?

At this stage, a polite signup is much less useful than somebody who has the problem badly enough to tolerate an unfinished product.

Antler recommends working closely with a small number of early customers as design partners and keeping founder-led sales in place until the sales process is repeatable.³ That is a sensible frame. Your first users should be close enough that you can notice what they misunderstand and watch what they do after the demo ends.

If you sell B2B software, I would also distinguish users from customers immediately. Ten people from one company are ten users and one customer account. A hundred free registrations can look impressive while producing very little evidence that anyone will pay.

Pick the number that matches the business. You may be trying to reach 100 activated users, 25 paying accounts, or ten companies with multiple seats. Write that definition down before the launch traffic arrives.

One caution for European founders: do not turn "manual" into a giant scraped email list. EU data protection and ePrivacy rules matter for direct marketing, and the European Commission explicitly notes that email marketing has to comply with the ePrivacy rules alongside GDPR obligations.⁴ The exact rules and national implementations deserve their own review before you automate outreach.

Warm introductions, direct conversations and communities where people have chosen to participate are also better learning environments at this stage.

Stay with one acquisition channel long enough to learn it

Once a founder has five or ten users, there is a strong temptation to open every channel.

Post on LinkedIn. Start SEO. Launch on Product Hunt. Join Reddit. Send cold email. Make a newsletter. Add an affiliate programme. Run ads.

The activity feels like momentum because the calendar fills up.

I would do less.

Pick the place where the next twenty likely users are easiest to identify. For many B2B products that may be LinkedIn, an industry association, a specialist Slack group, a trade community or direct introductions. For developer software it may be a technical subreddit, Discord, GitHub community or forum. For a product aimed at a local profession, the useful channel may be much less fashionable: a national association, a small conference, or one well-run professional group.

Then stay there until the language starts repeating.

Freemius' 2026 discussion of the first 100 SaaS customers reaches a similar conclusion: early acquisition tends to be manual and relationship-driven, with targeted founder outreach doing more useful work than broad campaigns.⁵

The important output is not the number of messages sent. It is the information you collect.

Which sentence gets a reply? Which problem makes someone ask for a demo? Which objection appears three times in a week? Which job title understands the product immediately? Which people sign up and never return?

Put those answers back into the homepage.

A founder who has spoken with thirty relevant prospects should be able to write a better landing page than a founder who has generated thirty variations of the same copy in isolation.

Use the first customers to borrow trust

Around users 20 to 50, I would start asking a different question: what would make the next stranger less nervous about trying this?

For an unknown SaaS company, early customers can answer that question better than another paragraph of marketing copy.

Ask permission to publish a short case study. Get a concrete testimonial. Record the job the customer was trying to do, what they used before, and what changed after they adopted the product. If the product serves a regulated or operationally sensitive use case, document the trust information buyers keep asking for.

The European context matters here because trust often travels locally before it travels internationally.

If your first serious customer is a German accounting firm and your next prospects are German accounting firms, that reference has a clear shape. The prospect can recognise the company type, the operating environment and the problem. Later, when you enter France or Denmark, you may discover that some of the proof transfers and some does not.

That is useful information too.

This is also the point where I would ask every happy early customer for one introduction. Not a social-media share. One person who has the same problem.

A referral from a user who understands the product is a small test of whether your positioning is becoming portable. If customers struggle to explain who else should use it, the product may still be too broad or the value may still be too vague.

Launch after you can explain the product clearly

A launch can help you get first users for a SaaS. I would not ask it to discover the market for you.

Once you have enough conversations to describe the product in plain language, a launch becomes more useful. You know which screenshots matter. You know what the first sentence should say. You know which category is accurate. You have a better idea of what to do when a stranger signs up.

For an EU-based software company, Speartip is one place to do that. Every approved product receives a moderated 30-day launch, product and company pages, browse and search discovery, categories and alternatives, and the public profile remains after the launch window.⁶

I would combine that with one other launch or community where the likely users already spend time. The guide to launching SaaS in Europe covers the platform choices in more detail.

The point here is smaller.

Launch traffic is most valuable when it enters a system that already knows how to learn from a new user. If fifty people arrive and you do not know which five are your likely customers, the traffic disappears into a signup chart.

If you know exactly who you want to talk to, a modest launch can be enough.

Users 50 to 100 should leave evidence behind

The second half of the first hundred is where I would begin turning repeated conversations into public material.

Do not start a content operation because somebody told you every SaaS needs SEO. Write the page you now know prospects need.

If ten prospects ask how your product handles a specific workflow, publish the answer. If customers repeatedly compare you with the same incumbent, write a careful comparison page. If buyers from Germany keep asking where data is hosted, make the answer obvious instead of explaining it on the ninth sales call of the week.

At that point, SaaS customer acquisition in Europe can begin to compound. A founder-led answer becomes a page. The page earns search traffic. The search visitor becomes a customer conversation. The next conversation improves the page.

You also have enough users to look for referral behavior.

Who invited a colleague without being asked? Which customer mentioned you in a private group? Which integration brought a second company? Which country keeps producing qualified signups despite receiving no special attention?

Those signals are more useful than a generic plan to "expand across Europe."

If the Netherlands keeps producing good customers from an English product, investigate it. If French prospects consistently reach the pricing page and leave, talk to them before translating the entire application. If a Spanish partner can introduce you to ten companies in the same niche, that may be a better expansion test than buying Spanish search ads.

Follow the pull.

Do not confuse 100 registrations with 100 useful users

A lot of advice about how to get first users for a SaaS quietly assumes that every signup is equally valuable.

It is not.

For the first hundred, I would keep a small scoreboard that is difficult to flatter.

At ten users, can you describe exactly who gets value from the product? At thirty, do the same objections and use cases repeat? At fifty, have at least a few users stayed long enough to produce evidence or referrals? At one hundred, do you have a credible answer to the question: where would the next twenty come from?

If the answer to that last question is "another launch," you may still have attention rather than an acquisition channel.

That is fine. It is better to know.

The first 100 are early enough that weak retention, confused positioning and awkward onboarding are still cheap to fix. A broad paid campaign can hide those problems under a larger number of signups. Direct acquisition exposes them.

This is why I would resist fixed promises such as "100 users in 30 days." A low-priced consumer tool and a B2B security product do not move at the same speed. Neither do a German-only product and an English developer tool sold globally from an EU company.

The useful milestone is not the calendar date. It is the moment when acquisition stops feeling random.

The first 100 should make the next market easier

A good first cohort gives you more than a number.

It gives you a narrow customer description, the words customers use for the problem, a handful of objections, proof that somebody will pay, examples of value in the real world, and a channel where similar people can be found.

That is enough to make the second market easier than the first.

Maybe you begin with agencies in Germany and discover the same workflow in Austria. Maybe an English developer product starts with a Dutch community and spreads without localization. Maybe a French B2B tool gets its first cross-border customers through an integration partner rather than search.

There is no single European sequence.

The part I would keep constant is the order of work: concentrate, talk, observe, publish evidence, then expand.

If you are trying to get your first SaaS customers in Europe, do not begin by asking how to reach the continent. Find the smallest credible group that can teach you why the product deserves to spread.

Get ten people close enough to learn from, then find the next twenty through the channel where those people already gather. Use customers 30 to 50 to create proof, and use the rest to see whether that proof and the channel can reproduce themselves. Only then add a country.

If your company is based in the EU and the product is ready to be explained clearly, you can launch your software on Speartip. The launch lasts 30 days; the product and company record stay discoverable afterwards.⁶

Footnotes