Build Free products/tools targetted at subreddits & forums for a boost in brand awareness and signups. Free tools are much more likely to go viral than paid ones and less likely to get banned on subreddits. So you can integrate the free tool in your posts on subreddits and use the traffic to cross sell your paid SaaS.
This growth strategy is used by Chatbase
A Brief About Chat Base
Chatbase is a chat application builder that lets you create custom AI chat agents trained on your data.
How ChatBase Implemented this Growth Strategy
- The founder of Chatbase made. a list of subreddits for popular book and created a free Chatbase ( chat agent trained on the book) for their community. So users in the community can ask any questions or doubts they had about the book and get answers.
- Chatbase was essentially losing money on offering this free service, but the main goal was to get a massive volume of people to click and open their domain. This move boosted their domain authority and directed users to his landing page where they could see the paid SaaS offering
