What should I do every day to market my SaaS?

One distribution action, and only one, in a block of about ninety minutes before the day gets loud. Seventy minutes on the action itself, fifteen answering yesterday's replies, five writing down the number you did and naming tomorrow's action. Rotate the action across the week so you cover all four ways to get customers: ten warm asks on Monday, one post and its comments on Tuesday, thirty-five to forty cold sends on Wednesday, warm follow-ups on Thursday, and on Friday whichever of those three actually produced replies.

How much time a day should a founder spend on marketing?

Ninety minutes, five mornings a week. That is seven and a half hours a week, and 150 hours across a hundred sessions. More than ninety minutes and it starts eating the product; less than about sixty and the volumes drop below the point where the result tells you anything. The hour matters more than the total. A block that happens at 07:00 survives a bad day, and a block scheduled for 16:00 gets eaten by a support email roughly every third day.

What are the daily marketing tasks for a solo founder?

There are only four kinds, and each has one daily version. Warm outreach is ten messages to people who already know you. Posting is one published thing plus the replies underneath it. Cold outreach is thirty-five to forty sends off a list you built earlier. Paid ads have no daily version at all, which is the part founders get wrong: ads get a capped budget, a stop date and one look a week. Everything else that feels like marketing (tweaking the landing page, picking a CRM, reading about marketing) is preparation, and preparation is not a session.

What does a marketing routine for founders look like week by week?

Monday warm, Tuesday posting, Wednesday cold, Thursday warm follow-ups plus new asks, Friday a repeat of whichever action got replies that week, and two days off. That default lasts about three weeks. After that, weight the week toward whatever you have stored energy for and whatever is answering. Two hundred names in a spreadsheet means warm gets three mornings. A cold list that replies at 3% means cold gets three mornings and the other two get squeezed.

Is it better to do marketing every day or batch it once a week?

Daily, by a wide margin, and the reason is arithmetic rather than discipline. A four-hour Sunday block is 240 minutes once a week against 450 minutes across five mornings, so batching costs you almost half your volume before anything else goes wrong. Batching also removes the reply loop: a warm ask sent on Monday gets answered on Tuesday, and the conversation happens inside the same week. Sent on Sunday, the answer arrives when you are back in the product and are not looking.

Should I do marketing in the morning or the evening?

Morning, and preferably before you open the product. Evening blocks are the first thing sacrificed when a customer emails at 17:30, and they are also when your judgement about whether an action is worth doing is at its worst. If your only real block is evening, keep it, but move the decision. Choose the action in the morning and write it in one line, so the evening version of you inherits an instruction rather than a choice.

What do I do on a day when I have no time?

Run the floor version, which is the smallest thing that still counts as a session. One warm ask takes five minutes. Three cold sends off the existing list take eight. Answering the replies already waiting takes ten and produces more conversations than most full blocks. The point of the floor is not the output, it is the count. A hundred sessions with eleven floor days is a real hundred; a broken streak restarted three times is not.

How do I know if my daily marketing is working?

Count replies, not impressions. A reply is a human who answered a specific person, and it is the only early signal that survives contact with small numbers. Warm outreach should return two or three replies from ten asks on the same day. Cold outreach needs fifty sends before a reply rate means anything, so do not read Wednesday one. Posting needs about thirty posts across twelve weeks before silence means anything, which is the whole reason people quit it in week nine.

Do I need a marketing plan before I start a daily routine?

No, and waiting for one is the most common way the first thirty days disappear. You need three things, and you can have them in twenty minutes: which of the four you are running tomorrow, the number that counts as done, and the time the block starts. The plan assembles itself out of the first two weeks of replies, and it will be better than the one you would have written in advance, because it is made of things people actually answered.

What if I have no audience and nobody to message?

Then Wednesday is your whole week for a while. Cold outreach is the only one of the four that works on day one with no list, no audience and no budget, and the daily version is unchanged: thirty-five to forty sends off a list you built the day before. Keep one posting morning running underneath it at a low cadence, because the clock on publishing only starts when you publish the first one, and the people who reply to those posts become the warm list you did not have.

How long before a daily marketing routine produces customers?

The first warm replies land the same afternoon, and the first customer usually comes out of them inside two weeks. Cold takes about a week of sends to produce a reply rate worth reading and a few weeks more to produce a paying customer. Posting is the slow one at six to twelve weeks. A hundred sessions at five a week is twenty weeks, which is roughly five months, and that is the honest window for a first hundred customers rather than a first customer.

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Method

The daily marketing routine for solo founders: one action a morning

8 August 2026 · 16 min read

Every working morning, do one distribution action and only one. Give it ninety minutes: seventy on the action, fifteen answering yesterday's replies, five to write down the number you did and name tomorrow's action. Rotate which of the four ways to get customers it belongs to across the week. Monday, ten warm asks. Tuesday, one post and its comments. Wednesday, thirty-five to forty cold sends. Thursday, warm follow-ups. Friday, whichever of those got replies. Count sessions rather than calendar days, take two days off, and decide tomorrow's action tonight so the morning contains no decisions at all.

That paragraph is the routine. The rest of this page is what goes in each block, the volumes that count as done, what a hundred of these mornings adds up to, and the four ways the whole thing quietly stops working around week three.

Why one action and not a list

The instinct is to make marketing a checklist. Post something, send a few emails, reply to a comment, update the landing page, look at the numbers. Six things, ninety minutes, fifteen minutes each. It feels responsible and it teaches you nothing, because every one of those six efforts lands below the volume where a result is readable. Ten cold emails is not a test. One reply out of ten is either 10% or luck and you cannot tell which.

One action at full volume behaves differently. Forty sends produce a number you can act on. Ten warm asks produce two or three conversations by lunch. One post with twenty minutes of replies underneath it produces more than four posts published and abandoned. The intensity is the thing that makes a morning legible, and intensity is impossible to split four ways.

The rotation happens at the day level instead. That way each morning stays single-minded and the week still covers everything, so you are not blind in three of the four for a quarter. If the four are new to you, read the Core 4 explained first, because the rest of this page assumes you know which one you are in at any given moment.

The week, day by day

Here is the default. It is not a personalised plan and it is not meant to survive contact with month two. It is meant to be runnable tomorrow at 07:00 without a single decision in it.

The default week

Day	Lane	The one action	Done means	Inside the seventy minutes
Monday	Warm	Ask ten people who already know you.	Ten messages sent. Not eight sent and two sitting in drafts.	Five or six minutes each, thinking included.
Tuesday	Posting	Publish one thing, then sit underneath it and answer everything.	One post live, plus twenty minutes of replies.	Forty-five to seventy on the post if you did not draft it the night before.
Wednesday	Cold	Send the same message to a list that already exists.	Thirty-five to forty sends, message unchanged from the first to the last.	Two minutes each once the list exists. Building the list is a different job.
Thursday	Warm	Follow up Monday's silence, then ask eight new names.	Ten follow-ups and eight new asks.	Follow-ups run at about ninety seconds. New asks at five minutes.
Friday	Whichever replied	Repeat the action that produced replies this week, at the same volume.	Whatever its own day asks for.	No new channel is ever introduced on a Friday.
Saturday, Sunday	Rest	Nothing.	Nothing. Rest is not a bonus round for people who fell behind.	Zero minutes.

Five working mornings, two rest days. Friday stays unassigned until Thursday evening, when you already know which action answered this week.

Monday is warm because warm pays back the same day, and starting a week with two replies in your inbox by lunch does more for the next four mornings than any amount of resolve. The warm outreach templates cover what the ask actually says, which is the part that stalls most people for three days.

Tuesday is posting because it is the slowest of the four and the only one that keeps working after you stop. A post from March still brings people in September. Publish once a week from day one, even badly, because the clock does not start until the first one goes up. If the blank page is the problem, what to post when nobody is reading is the one to open on a Tuesday morning.

Wednesday is cold because it is the only one of the four that works with no list, no audience and no budget, and because forty sends a week compounds into a real experiment inside a month. The one rule that matters: the message does not change between the first send and the fiftieth. The cold email templates give you a first version so the morning is not spent writing one.

Thursday is warm again, and mostly follow-ups. This is the most underrated morning of the week. A follow-up takes ninety seconds and roughly doubles what Monday produced, because silence from someone who knows you is almost always a busy Tuesday rather than a no.

Friday belongs to whatever answered. If Wednesday's list replied at 4%, Friday is another forty sends to the same list. If Tuesday's post produced three DMs, Friday is a second post on the same subject. Nothing new gets introduced on a Friday, because a new channel started on a Friday is really a way of avoiding the one that is working.

What the ninety minutes is made of

The decision is not inside the block. It happened last night, took about a minute, and got written on one line. Everything below happens after you already know what you are doing.

Ninety minutes, three parts

70 min The one action Runs at full volume until the number is hit or the timer goes, whichever comes first.

15 min Replies Every reply, comment and question from yesterday, answered before anything new goes out.

5 min The count The number you did, and one line naming tomorrow. Plain text is fine.

The fifteen minutes of replies is the part founders cut first and should cut last. A reply is a person who already raised their hand, and answering one converts better than any new send you could have made with the same fifteen minutes. Comments under a post are warm outreach that arrived without you having to be brave first. Answer everything before you send anything new.

The five minutes at the end look pointless and are not. Writing "38 sends, 2 replies" takes twenty seconds and gives you a row of numbers that, six weeks later, is the only honest record of what happened. Then one line naming tomorrow. That line is the reason tomorrow starts at full speed instead of with twenty minutes of deciding.

One morning in each of the four

The block is the same shape every day. What fills it changes with the lane, and so does the number that counts as finished. Read the last column, because it is the one that tells you whether twenty mornings of something is worth spending.

What one session looks like, by lane

Lane	One morning of it	Done means	Per unit	Twenty mornings produce
Warm outreach	Ten asks to people who already know your name.	Ten sent, none half-written.	4 to 6 minutes each	200 asks, which is more names than most solo founders actually have.
Posting in public	One post, then the comments underneath it.	Published, and every reply answered.	45 to 90 minutes each	20 posts, which is two thirds of the smallest honest test.
Cold outreach	Thirty-five to forty sends off a list built earlier.	Same message on all of them.	2 to 4 minutes each	About 750 sends, which at 0.6% is four or five customers.
Paid ads	Nothing daily. A budget, a stop date, and one look on Friday.	The cap was set before the first euro left.	10 minutes a week	One test of 250 to 500 euros, read once, at the end.

Rates used: warm converts at roughly 10% per ask, cold at about 0.6% per send. Those are the same numbers the first 100 customers playbook runs on, and they hold up better as ratios than as absolutes.

The paid row is the one worth arguing with. Ads do not get a morning, because there is no daily action in paid that is worth ninety minutes of a founder's attention. Checking a dashboard is not distribution. Set the cap, set the stop date, write both in the calendar before the first euro leaves, and look on Friday for ten minutes. Anything more frequent than that is you reading noise and calling it work.

The warm row has a ceiling worth planning for. Most solo founders have somewhere between 40 and 300 people worth contacting, so ten asks a morning empties the list inside a month or two. That is not a failure. Warm is the opening move and it closes when the names run out, which is exactly when Wednesday should start taking two mornings instead of one.

The arithmetic of a hundred mornings

Ninety minutes times five days is seven and a half hours a week. A hundred sessions at five a week is twenty weeks, so the whole thing costs about 150 hours spread across five months. That is the entire budget. Here is what it buys at the volumes above.

A hundred sessions, split and counted

Where the mornings go	Sessions	What that produces
Warm outreach	35	about 350 asks and follow-ups
Posting in public	20	20 posts and their comment threads
Cold outreach	40	about 1,500 sends
Reply days and catch-up	5	no new sends at all
Total	100	150 hours, about five months at five mornings a week

Now the number that makes the case for deciding the night before. Suppose choosing what to do eats twenty minutes at the start of a block, which is conservative for anyone who opens the laptop without a plan. Twenty minutes times a hundred sessions is 2,000 minutes, or 33 hours. That is 22% of the entire 150-hour budget spent on deciding rather than doing, and it is spent in the worst possible increments: small, daily, and invisible.

The conversion side of these volumes lives in the first 100 customers playbook. If you want the numbers run against your own target and your own working days rather than the defaults here, the 100 in 100 goal calculator does the division in about four minutes, and tells you either that the target is smaller than you feared or that it was arithmetic fiction from the start. Both are useful on day one and expensive on day fifty.

The six rules that keep it running

A routine is only worth writing down if it survives a bad Tuesday. These are the six that take the most punishment.

One action, never two. If the morning contains a bit of posting and a bit of cold, it contains neither. The moment you catch yourself doing a second thing, stop and put it on tomorrow's line.
The decision happens the night before. One line: the lane, the action, the number. Sixty seconds while the laptop is still open. This is the single cheapest thing on the page and it is worth 33 hours over a hundred sessions.
Every session ends with something sent, published or spent. If nothing left your machine and reached a human who is not you, it was preparation. Preparation is fine, and it is not a session.
Replies before sends. Always. A person who answered you is worth more than ten people who have not heard of you, and they go cold in about two days.
Count sessions, not calendar days. Session 31 is your thirty-first, whenever it happens. A customer emergency moves the finish line by a day and costs nothing else, which matters because being behind schedule is a much better excuse to quit than being tired.
The floor is six minutes. On the worst day of the month you do the smallest version and it still counts. What breaks people is not the small day, it is the zero that resets the count.

The floor version of a session

Warm One ask. Five minutes. Send it from your phone before you stand up.

Posting One real reply to a comment on something you published last week. Four minutes.

Cold Three sends off the existing list. Eight minutes. No new list, no new message.

Any day Answer the replies already waiting and send nothing new. Ten minutes, and it still counts.

The four ways this stops working

Almost nobody abandons a daily routine on purpose. It degrades, usually in one of four ways, and all four have the same tell: the block still happens and nothing leaves the building.

The research morning

You spend seventy minutes building a list, refining a filter, checking a domain, reading about deliverability. It is genuinely useful work and it produces zero sends. Two of these in a row and the week has one real session in it. The fix is the third rule and it is unforgiving: build lists in the fifteen-minute slot or on a Friday, and never let the primary block end with nothing sent.

The rewrite loop

Fifteen sends, one polite no, and you go back and rewrite the pitch. Then fifteen more, another no, another rewrite. Six weeks later you have sent ninety messages, tested six versions, and learned nothing about any of them, because fifty is the smallest number of sends at which a reply rate stops being noise. Send all fifty with the same words. Then change exactly one thing.

The dashboard habit

Checking signups, refreshing the analytics tab, looking at post impressions. It feels like being on top of the numbers and it is the marketing equivalent of weighing yourself four times a day. Look weekly. Put the numbers in the five-minute slot where they belong, and give the seventy minutes to something that reaches a person.

The batching fantasy

This one arrives disguised as efficiency. You decide to stop doing ninety minutes a day and instead do one big four-hour session on Sunday. The arithmetic is against you before you start: 240 minutes once a week against 450 minutes across five mornings, so you lose almost half your volume immediately. Worse, the replies come back on Monday and Tuesday, when you are inside the product and not looking, so the conversations that do start quietly die. Most founders try this twice.

Underneath all four sits the same thing, which is that deciding is the expensive part and doing is not. That is the subject of why founders quit marketing, and it is worth reading if you have started a routine like this before and watched it evaporate in week three.

Your first week, exactly

No plan, no research, no tooling. Tonight, do the first item. Tomorrow, run the block.

Tonight: write one line. Tomorrow's lane, tomorrow's action, tomorrow's number.
Tonight: put a ninety-minute block in the calendar for tomorrow morning, before you open the product.
Monday: list every person who would recognise your name. Message the first ten of them.
Tuesday: publish one thing about a problem you solved last week. Answer every comment.
Wednesday: thirty-five sends to strangers who match your customer, all with the same message.
Thursday: follow up everyone from Monday who went quiet, then ask eight new names.
Friday: repeat whichever of the three produced replies. Nothing new.
Every day: five minutes at the end. The number you did, and one line for tomorrow.
Saturday and Sunday: nothing. That is part of the routine, not a lapse in it.

If you genuinely cannot tell which lane deserves the extra mornings, the free tools answer the two questions that decide it. One asks seven questions about what you sell and who you could already name, then gives you a split across the four. The other works out how many actions your target needs at your actual conversion rates. Neither takes longer than the block you are about to run.

Why this works when willpower does not

The routine is boring by design. It contains one decision, made the night before, and after that it is only execution, which is the easy half. The founders who reach a hundred sessions are almost never the ones with the best tactics. They are the ones still sending on session 70, when the novelty has gone, the graph is flat, and nothing about the morning feels like progress. That is not a personality trait. It is what happens when the morning stops asking you to choose. The full compression of a hundred days into a real working schedule is in the Rule of 100 in a two-hour day.

Tomorrow at 07:00 you will either know what you are doing or you will not. That is the whole difference, and it costs one line tonight.

Frequently asked questions

What should I do every day to market my SaaS?: One distribution action, and only one, in a block of about ninety minutes before the day gets loud. Seventy minutes on the action itself, fifteen answering yesterday's replies, five writing down the number you did and naming tomorrow's action. Rotate the action across the week so you cover all four ways to get customers: ten warm asks on Monday, one post and its comments on Tuesday, thirty-five to forty cold sends on Wednesday, warm follow-ups on Thursday, and on Friday whichever of those three actually produced replies.
How much time a day should a founder spend on marketing?: Ninety minutes, five mornings a week. That is seven and a half hours a week, and 150 hours across a hundred sessions. More than ninety minutes and it starts eating the product; less than about sixty and the volumes drop below the point where the result tells you anything. The hour matters more than the total. A block that happens at 07:00 survives a bad day, and a block scheduled for 16:00 gets eaten by a support email roughly every third day.
What are the daily marketing tasks for a solo founder?: There are only four kinds, and each has one daily version. Warm outreach is ten messages to people who already know you. Posting is one published thing plus the replies underneath it. Cold outreach is thirty-five to forty sends off a list you built earlier. Paid ads have no daily version at all, which is the part founders get wrong: ads get a capped budget, a stop date and one look a week. Everything else that feels like marketing (tweaking the landing page, picking a CRM, reading about marketing) is preparation, and preparation is not a session.
What does a marketing routine for founders look like week by week?: Monday warm, Tuesday posting, Wednesday cold, Thursday warm follow-ups plus new asks, Friday a repeat of whichever action got replies that week, and two days off. That default lasts about three weeks. After that, weight the week toward whatever you have stored energy for and whatever is answering. Two hundred names in a spreadsheet means warm gets three mornings. A cold list that replies at 3% means cold gets three mornings and the other two get squeezed.
Is it better to do marketing every day or batch it once a week?: Daily, by a wide margin, and the reason is arithmetic rather than discipline. A four-hour Sunday block is 240 minutes once a week against 450 minutes across five mornings, so batching costs you almost half your volume before anything else goes wrong. Batching also removes the reply loop: a warm ask sent on Monday gets answered on Tuesday, and the conversation happens inside the same week. Sent on Sunday, the answer arrives when you are back in the product and are not looking.
Should I do marketing in the morning or the evening?: Morning, and preferably before you open the product. Evening blocks are the first thing sacrificed when a customer emails at 17:30, and they are also when your judgement about whether an action is worth doing is at its worst. If your only real block is evening, keep it, but move the decision. Choose the action in the morning and write it in one line, so the evening version of you inherits an instruction rather than a choice.
What do I do on a day when I have no time?: Run the floor version, which is the smallest thing that still counts as a session. One warm ask takes five minutes. Three cold sends off the existing list take eight. Answering the replies already waiting takes ten and produces more conversations than most full blocks. The point of the floor is not the output, it is the count. A hundred sessions with eleven floor days is a real hundred; a broken streak restarted three times is not.
How do I know if my daily marketing is working?: Count replies, not impressions. A reply is a human who answered a specific person, and it is the only early signal that survives contact with small numbers. Warm outreach should return two or three replies from ten asks on the same day. Cold outreach needs fifty sends before a reply rate means anything, so do not read Wednesday one. Posting needs about thirty posts across twelve weeks before silence means anything, which is the whole reason people quit it in week nine.
Do I need a marketing plan before I start a daily routine?: No, and waiting for one is the most common way the first thirty days disappear. You need three things, and you can have them in twenty minutes: which of the four you are running tomorrow, the number that counts as done, and the time the block starts. The plan assembles itself out of the first two weeks of replies, and it will be better than the one you would have written in advance, because it is made of things people actually answered.
What if I have no audience and nobody to message?: Then Wednesday is your whole week for a while. Cold outreach is the only one of the four that works on day one with no list, no audience and no budget, and the daily version is unchanged: thirty-five to forty sends off a list you built the day before. Keep one posting morning running underneath it at a low cadence, because the clock on publishing only starts when you publish the first one, and the people who reply to those posts become the warm list you did not have.
How long before a daily marketing routine produces customers?: The first warm replies land the same afternoon, and the first customer usually comes out of them inside two weeks. Cold takes about a week of sends to produce a reply rate worth reading and a few weeks more to produce a paying customer. Posting is the slow one at six to twelve weeks. A hundred sessions at five a week is twenty weeks, which is roughly five months, and that is the honest window for a first hundred customers rather than a first customer.