I Built A $4K MRR Affordable SEO Tool In 6 Months
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?đź”—
Hey guys - My name is Jaume Ros and I'm the founder of Clicks.so. I started the company around 6 months ago with the goal of bringing high-quality SEO data for affordable prices.
Most people who sign up to Clicks are small business owners/designers/programmers who want to grow their business with SEO - but aren’t willing to pay $100-$200 a month for SEO tools.
Last month the business hit $4k in MRR and it’s been growing 10-20% month over month. It’s super exciting cause it's still very early - and it's just me building and growing it.
How did you come up with your business idea?đź”—
I’ve been in the SEO game for the last 8 years, and I've had a youtube channel where I talk about SEO for the last 3 - and one of the biggest complaints I've gotten from beginners/small business owners is that the legacy SEO tools are too expensive.
Someone who is getting started in SEO, or who isn’t sure if SEO is the right growth channel for their business might not be ready to spend $100-$200 a month for an SEO Tool - so I decided to build one!
Before building anything I started with just a landing page with a waitlist and talking about it in my youtube videos, and mentioning it on twitter and things picked up pretty quickly. Within the first month there were more than 400 people on the waitlist so that was a great indication I had to keep building and launching it.
Give us a step-by-step process for how you built the first version of your product.đź”—
I started everything with the waitlist - and once the waitlist hit 500 people I decided I was going to go fully into it. I knew how to code a little bit from a coding bootcamp I did a few years back so I decided to get back into and use this as an opportunity to also teach myself how to code.
It took me basically 5-6 months to get the first MVP out - learning to code is an absolutely excruciating process - but around the same time ChatGPT started to get really good at programming so that sped up everything a lot more. Starting costs were quite low since it was mostly just a lot of my time. I did hire a developer every once in a while to help me fix things if I didn’t know how to move forward - and that has helped me move really quickly.
The business model from the beginning was a subscription - people pay for access to the SEO data, and they have a limit on how much data they have access to every month depending on their plan.
I financed everything with savings I had from client work that i’ve done in the past. Moving from client work to building my own SAAS has meant that I took a pretty severe pay cut but I have so much more freedom moving forward.
How did you “launch” the business?🔗
So I did an initial launch for the beta of the app just to see how people used the app and whether my quick 6 month MVP with below average code would bring people in. I sent an email to all the people on the waitlist - more than 1000 at that point, posted on twitter - which got reshared by a few SEO buddies of mine and I sold out my goal of 50 customers within the first 24 hours.
We hit approx $900 in MRR in 24 hours - Beta launch was a success.
After a closed beta of 3 months - working with churn, improving the product and the design I decided to relaunch it properly and this one went a little different.
I posted a video on my Youtube channel - which to this day has almost 3k views, I posted on twitter, on linkedin, and sent another email to the 1k+ email list with an updated price point. The launch did quite well and we probably added another 20-25 customers overnight and we crossed $1k MRR in the first proper month of the business being open.
How did you land your first customers?đź”—
First customers came through my Youtube channel and the waitlist I mentioned before. It’s a great way of gauging demand to know if it even makes sense to build the business - seeing if people are excited about it or not - and then once your MVP is built - its an even better way to get those first customers signing up since they’ve been waiting for you to finish the prod!
Invest in your personal brand and everything else will come as a result. I recommend Youtube. Post one video a week for 6 months on something you’re knowledgeable about and it’ll change your life.
How have you grown your business?đź”—
The growth of the business has come to this day through 3 main strategies. The first being my youtube channel - being consistent and garnering thousands of views every month the youtube channel is a constant source of traffic to the site.
Twitter has been a great source of new clients as well - i’d recommend finding one of those social listening tools that tell you when one of your competitors has been mentioned. I’ve been strategic with twitter where whenever someone asks for a cheaper competitor to one of the legacy expensive tools i’m one of the first to comment since the social listening tools let me know as soon as someone has posted about that.
My replies on those tweets can often get thousands of impressions on their own.
I set up an affiliate program with tolt.io - and that has been great as well. The affiliate program alone has made over $3.5k in revenue. Because of my youtube channel and knowing most of the folks in the industry a lot of people with audiences signed up early and since i’m one of the few SEO softwares offering 30% lifetime recurring commissions. That has been a great incentive to get people in through the affiliate program.
I’m now starting to build my SEO properly and I'm also testing out cold emails - will be posting updates to all of that on my Youtube channel.
Give us a breakdown of your revenue & financials.đź”—
In the first 6 months we hit $4k in MRR - and we have approx 160 paying customers right now. The company is quite profitable and the margin fluctuates but it's between 70-80% profit.
The business has grown consistently over the last 7 months since the official launch around 10-20% every month. Summer months there was some more intense churn and lower levels of growth - but so far the business has kept growing.
What does the future look like?đź”—
I’d like for the business to hit $10k MRR by the end of the year. It's a steep goal - but the product is now mature enough that there's some type of product market fit, the retention is decent - so now its time to stop coding and focus on growth.
I’m going to be focusing a lot on SEO - try to build some free tools which are always a great way for a saas to build backlinks and get traffic on google - going to try my best to send 100k cold emails - see what that does and am going to continue pumping youtube videos since I see that as the greatest source of growth for the business.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?đź”—
One of the main things I've had to learn is to just keep going. You’ll have days of more churn, days where people complain - they’ll say the tool isn't as good as X or they were expecting something else - and while it's easy to feel personally attacked since its something you built and put out there - there are plenty of other people that have been paying nonstop for the last 7 months and are super happy with the tool. Just keep going - and don’t stress too much over the day-to-day.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?đź”—
My main advice is to focus on building your personal brand first. I wouldn’t be where I am today without my youtube channel. I get invited to conferences, I've met most of the big players in the space, I’ve made videos for the Ahrefs (deleted because i’m building a competitor), and the Semrush Youtube channel (still up) - and it's all because of my Youtube channel and my personal brand.
Invest in your personal brand and everything else will come as a result. I recommend Youtube. Post one video a week for 6 months on something you’re knowledgeable about and it’ll change your life.
Where can we go to learn more?đź”—
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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