Table of Contents
- Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
- How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
- Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
- What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
- What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
- Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
As an entrepreneur, I was looking for ways to growth an online business quickly with minimum effort and cost. That's where I came across Programmatic SEO.
Never heard of Programmatic SEO? Basically, it's a process to automate and scale your content creation by generating thousands of landing pages using templates that can dynamically insert data from a dataset.
I've learned how to implement it by working along side with the Head of SEO from a French scale-up company in the sport business. We were creating thousands of pages to cover every running events. And it worked. We were ranking #1 on Google for a lot of long-term keywords with more than 7k pages indexed and +18k visits/month.
Then, I thought why not making it a SaaS to help niche site owners, digital agencies, SaaS startups do the same? That's when I've started seomatic.ai in October 2022.
How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
I recently reached the milestone of 1K MRR and it took me 5 months to get there.
I think I got the first customer in 2 weeks by just #buildinpublic on Twitter. It's an effective way to build a community and share publicly your journey. I try to give back to the community by sharing tips that worked for me every time I reach a new level of MRR. It gives boost and strength for those who are still reluctant to start their indie maker journey!
I've also created multiple lead magnets (programmatic seo course, 50 programmatic seo examples, etc) to capture e-mails. E-mails list is key when you are starting a business.
Then, I recently turned SEOmatic to a complete Product-led growth with the creation of a Freemium plan: no more paywall, easy signup, self-onboarding, upgrade when you are ready, user referrals, etc. Trying to create a Growth Loop here.
So if you are curious about Programmatic SEO, give SEOmatic a try!
Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
I released the MVP in 2 weeks as well using nocode/lowcode tool like Bubble. This is my only stack that I need to build a SaaS business. Obviously, there are some challenges and limitations like creating an infrastructure that scales and can generate thousands of pages. But you can always get away with a little bit of code.
I would really recommend nocode for everyone starting a business in 2023.
What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
I can't live without these tools: Bubble for app development, MailerLite for email solution, SurferSEO for on-page SEO optimization, June for Product Development, Senja for testimonials...
It costs me roughly 150$/month to run an entire SaaS business at scale.
What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
1/ Validate your idea
Put a paywall early to validate your idea then put all your effort on onboarding and user retention, this is key before thinking about scaling anything. All your marketing effort will be vain if the onboarding is bad.
Then decide later to remove or keep the paywall. But make sure to that you are building features and talking the right customer: those who are actually paying you.
2/ Acquisition channel
Some founders will tell you that you shouldn't be doing SEO when you are starting your SaaS business. Mainly because it takes too much time to see the effect and it's hard. But I think it's a wrong advice. Just pick the acquisition channel you are most confortable with, it can be SEO, Ads, Cold calls, whatever. For me, it was SEO because I'm confortable with SEO and it took me only a month to see the results and grow my organic traffic using basic SEO and Programmatic SEO
3/ Sales is a number game.
So you have to work backward. You need have a target MRR and see based on your pricing how much customers you need, then based on your customer conversion rate you will know how much traffic you need to bring in. Then find a way to bring that much traffic. That's as simple as it.
Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
My favorite books about entrepreneurship: MoM Test, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ogilvy on Advertising
If you are really interested in SEO:
- How the F*ck newsletter
- SEOmatic's blog
