Newspapers only cover startup stories when there’s millions raised or billion-dollar valuations.

But it’s not an accurate representation.

The majority of SaaS startups have no venture capital at all.

In fact, according to Kalungi’s 2023 B2B Saas Marketing report, the biggest problem facing SaaS CEOs and founders is ‘limited resources’.

This creates a problem for SaaS video marketing.

For most people reading this, spending $100,000-1,000,000 on a professional marketing video is not an option.

You’re bootstrapped.

You need SaaS video marketing strategies you can use right now.

If that’s you, then you’re in the right place!

Keep reading for 10 SaaS video marketing examples you can hack without a huge budget.

Airtable uploaded a professional SaaS product demonstration video in September 2016 to their YouTube channel.

By then, Airtable had already launched an iOS app, created a Slack integration and raised over $10 million – including from the actor and investor Ashton Kutcher.

But Airtable’s video marketing story started in July 2015.

Airtable’s first 20 marketing videos were simple product demonstrations with titles like:

The videos are under a minute long and are simple screen videos.

It might not even seem like video marketing…

But Airtable co-founder Howie Liu figured that salespeople only needed to see his product once and become instantly hooked.

Liu famously pitched to Ashton Kutcher on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles between filming for Two and a Half Men, and Kutcher later said:

“I can really see this taking off, beyond Hollywood. Even in my own world, I could see hundreds of different use-cases. They have spreadsheets tracking all these different stuff, it’s one giant organizational problem.”

It wasn’t until 2017 that AirTable had seen enough organic growth to start pursuing enterprise clients with a billboard strategy in San Francisco and the Bay Area.

It’s hard to tell how the demonstration video series boosted Airtable’s user base as they only recently began releasing user data – today, over 300,000 businesses use Airtable and revenue is over $100 million.

But as 2015 was the year Airtable received its first major funding and launched the app, we can assume this simple SaaS video marketing strategy worked.

Dropbox owes almost all its success to SaaS explainer videos.

This was as true in 2007 as it’s still true today.

You see, Dropbox’s homepage for the past 15 years has been a single call-to-action with a single product explainer video.

Obviously the explainer video has been updated over the years…

But the first Dropbox explainer in 2007 was a screencast with a voiceover from Drew Houston – he released it to Hacker News and won the first 70,000 users to the beta version of Dropbox.

Houston also used the video as part of his application to Y Combinator.

The video is so simple you wouldn’t believe it.

You might be surprised that Shopify’s first-ever marketing videos were customer testimonials.

That’s right.

Even though the Shopify platform was the product, Shopify marketed itself with testimonials.

It’s because Shopify’s early target audience was small businesses who wanted a solution that took the stress out of building a website online.

In fact, the 2008 Shopify homepage had written in large font:

“Shopify has a super-clean design that makes setting up a store incredibly easy.”

That’s all Shopify wanted new customers to know about the product.

The new customers were actually sold by watching others succeed on Shopify.

We went back through the Shopify video library on Facebook.

The first marketing video dates to November 2010 and is a customer testimonial of DODOcase, a small business making iPad cases.

The video has some production involved.

But, if you’re a SaaS company in the early stages of growth, you’ll probably find a customer testimonial more affordable than a creative product explainer from a top production studio.

The SEO and analytics platform Ahrefs do SaaS a little differently.

Founder Dmytro Gerasymenko is critical of fast-paced growth in the SaaS industry and the typical advertising strategies that scale fast.

In its early years, Ahrefs spent nothing on marketing.

Ahrefs still has no sales team.

Gerasymenko believed the product would sell itself if only the right audience could find it and then share it with friends and partners.

That’s why in August 2015 Ahrefs launched their YouTube channel with a 20-video playlist called ‘Oversimplified SEO’.

Rather than shouting about their product, the videos have titles like:

Of course… in the tutorials, you see the Ahrefs product at work making SEO look easy.

But some of the videos have over 100k views because they answered important questions the target market wanted answering.

Ahrefs is a good example of using how-to or tutorial videos can be used to sustainably from your SaaS business – and how it’s possible to bootstrap your growth to $100 million ARR without VC funding or big marketing spend.

ClickFunnels is a web application for building sales funnels and is famous for growing without any venture capital backing.

In fact, the first year of growth came from one webinar.

Russell Brunson tells the story how he struggled for months to get people to sign-up for a free trial of ClickFunnels.

And then…

Something clicked and he closed 60% of the room after giving a presentation on a paid subscription deal to use ClickFunnels.

Here’s how Brunson describes the breakthrough in a podcast:

“We had a presentation that converts. I want you to understand how important and how powerful that is. I was like, ‘I can go home now and I can do it a thousand times, over and over and over again. We’re gonna be rich!’”

He turned the presentation into a webinar and did between 1-5 times a week for a year between 2014 to 2015.

In 2024, ClickFunnels will hit $1 billion in sales.

According to Russell Brunson this success was all built off the back of one webinar that converted.

We know what you’re thinking.

“I’ll never be the next Salesforce.. What’s the point in learning from them?”

Hear us out.

In the early 2000s, Marc Benioff was just another software vendor who couldn’t get people to sign up even to a free trial.

Until he hit upon the ‘beachhead’ method.

Marc Benioff realized that if one prominent customer in a market started using Salesforce, he could leverage the news to bag lots more customers.

But what’s surprising is that Salesforce’s initial target market was SMEs.

Here’s where the SaaS video marketing strategy comes in.

We went back in time to Salesforce’s first ever upload on YouTube – a case study video.

And it’s not for an enterprise client.

Salesforce’s marketing video on YouTube was about Fireclay Tile (a small 27-person manufacturer of ceramic tiles) and how they grew revenue 15% using Salesforce’s SaaS tools

That was March 2011.

It wasn’t until a few years later that case study videos from enterprise clients like O2, Activision and Phillips started popping up.

Case study videos are great to get new clients in your target audience thinking… If the software helps this kind of company, then it can help my company too.