A story of how I turned my SEO internal tool into a SaaS with $11,000 in revenues and $450 MRR in 7 days. AMA!

👋 Hello everyone,

My name is Phuc, and I am a TALL stack developer and niche site builder. As a programmer who has been in the SEO industry since 2016, I always want to build apps to finish the boring SEO tasks that I or my teammates have to repeat every long day. One of them was called Larseo (”Lar” is in Laravel - the PHP framework that I use to build it and “seo” is just SEO).

In the beginning, Larseo was just an internal tool of my team to manage writers, content, backlinks, and keyword ranking. I never think to publish it to the world until I met an old friend on Twitter, Tony (You probably know him if you are using Black Magic or Xnapper).

I read all of his newsletters and his posts on Indie Hacker, I asked him for advice to build audiences on Twitter and he encouraged me to build a SaaS. Then, whatever comes has come, I started a new project with a familiar and most exciting command to create a new project 🔥

Validating the idea

I started to validate my idea by posting Larseo on some SEO Facebook groups that I attended. I was very surprised when many people liked my idea. I added my Twitter profile to those posts and asked people to follow me to receive updates. I nearly doubled my Twitter following within a single day (from 100 to 200 followers, 🥳) and more friends on Facebook.

Besides the positive comments, there were also negative comments comparing what I was going to do with like Ahrefs, SEMRush? I just ignored them because I haven’t thought to compete with those big companies who have worked in this industry for at least 10 years. I have tried to focus on different niches and audiences. Moreover, I simply just wanted to convert my internal tool to SaaS and see how it goes.

Beta Testing

After I finished the MVP of the backlink analytics tool. I set up the landing page so people can sign up for beta testing. I rapidly get reached 100 sign-ups.

At this time, I continue adding more and more features like Traffic Analytics, Keyword Finder. I also interacted with other users on Twitter to gain more followers (which Tony suggested I do) and it worked. I had more followers and more users signed up for beta testing.

After I finished the MVP of 3 main tools: Backlink Analytics, Traffic Analytics, and Keyword Finder, I decided to deploy the first version of Larseo.

• Composed email campaign to let signed-up beta testing users know.
• All manual tests passed (by myself 😂)

Everything was good until my database went down 😱.

Larseo is running on serverless and there was a technical reason that I couldn’t limit the Lambda worker on my AWS account so it tried to use as much as workers as needed and my database got bottlenecked.

After the database issue was resolved, everything was back to normal and I got ~80 registered users (26% of sign-ups for beta testing) on the first day. Here were the 24-hour performance of the campaigns.

First campaign

The second campaign to tell users knew Larseo was good after the incident

I also created a Facebook group for Larseo and a public Road Map so users can monitor the process as well as request new features, and report bugs.

In the next 2 weeks, I continue clearing bugs and adding new features. I also received compliments and love from beta users which gave me a lot of motivation.

My initial plan only allowed people who signed up for beta in advance to register an account but I got messages daily from people who missed the sign-up and they would like to have a test account, so I opened the registration page for everyone.

When my Facebook group has been growing faster, I decided to stop leaving comments on others' tweets. I felt Facebook groups brought me more users and I didn’t have enough time to do it anymore (but I have still posted the feature updates on my Twitter profile). I canceled all the Twitter tools subscriptions (Black Magic + Tweet Hunter)

One month later, I crossed 400 registered users. All I did at this time was add features and post updates on Larseo’s Facebook group and my Twitter profile. When adding big features, I sent emails to registered users (I didn’t want to spam their email inboxes with minor improvements or bug fixes). There was no fancy marketing stuff. Users liked the new features and they shared my posts with other groups and I got more users every day.

On September 1st, Larseo reached 1,100 registered users, and 2 offers to buy Larseo even though the MRR is still $0 (and they still have me to work on Larseo). This was a good signal for me, so I could know I was on the right track 🎊.

However, those numbers were not the most important things for me. The most valuable thing was the feedback from users. That could help me to improve Larseo day by day. I even received a 2—pages long document from a user that listed all things I need to do to improve Larseo 🙏.

I created a blog for Larseo. The first blog was a guide to finding low-competition keywords with Keyword Finder (I received a lot of requests from beta users for this guide).

Early Bird Access

After Larseo crossed 1,300 users, I decided to open Early Bird access. Here were my todo list:

• Add the billing system
• Create a new landing page
• Ask beta users to have their testimonials
• Publish another blog post on how I crawl data and calculate metrics on Larseo. If you’ve ever worked in the SEO industry, you will know how the data is important. I wanted my users to know all those things so they could trust me and feel confident when purchasing the Early Bird deal.
• Prepare Facebook, Twitter, and email content.

After 1 week of working on the pricing, I proposed 3 plans (for both subscription and Lifetime deal).

• Yearly plan = Monthly plan x 10
• Lifetime = Monthly plan x 18

I was pretty scared to release the lifetime deal but If I have a lot of users purchase it, I would have money to re-invest in Larseo.

At this time, I think Larseo had enough tools for an SEO project, including:

• Backlink Explorer
• Traffic Explorer
• Keyword Finder
• Keyword Clustering
• Content Gap
• Topic Explorer
• Backlink Monitor
• And a lot of features were planned on the public Road Map.

My first sale was a little surprise. I deployed the code before the Early Bird date one night, and I didn’t tell anyone, but there was a customer subscribed to the highest plan.

Almost crossed $1000 on the Larseo's first early bird sale day.

There was an issue with payments from India which were under RBI regulations. I resolved it by using top-up or Paypal.

Finally, there were some numbers after 7 days Early Bird discount:

👥 1753 registered users
🫂 42 customers
💵 $11,000 in revenue
📈 $450 MRR
👀 4,900 page views

A lot of users purchased the lifetime deal. I think they did that because Larseo had a clear road map and they saw the value they would get in the future.

My goal is to reach $1000 MRR by the end of this year. I will start doing SEO for Larseo’s blog and affiliate program.

Thank you for reading, and AMA! 😊