🚪How Minh built a programmatic SEO SaaS with $1000 MRR
The No-Code Success Story of Minh and SEOmatic
Hello everyone,
Katt here with a new story from No-Code Exits.
This week I talked with Minh, I’m blown away by the clear problem his product is solving and also.. how good it looks!
Learn:
💪 how he found the idea by doing client work
🏗️ why he is so bullish about Bubble
💸 he is using SEO to grow organic traffic to 10K per month
🧪 he experiments with improving churn
Enjoy it and happy building my friends!
🎈 7 Cool Finds
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Join the 100 Days of AI challenge and learn something new about AI for 100 days.
Gummy Search helps you with finding real problems to solve (or complaints about competitors) for that perfect business idea.
Ctrlalt helps you to find the best startup tools on the internet.
Small Bets is a cohort course that learns you how to minimize risk with building a portfolio of small businesses.
*This section is a mix of paid sponsorships (links in bold) and cool things I use, discovered or made.
🔥 Maker Interview
Hello Minh, tell us a little bit about yourself
Hey, I'm Minh. I was born in Vietnam and grew up in France. I have a Master degree in Finance and worked as a consultant for 7 years in Paris and London.
I started this career just because I didn't really know what to do. But I was bored. I couldn't stay more than 2-3 years at the same position.
And one day, I saw this ad about a free programming school named 42 in Paris. It picked my interest because the school had no teachers and you need to pass a test called "La Piscine" (The Swimming Pool) to enter the school. Basically, they put 1000 candidates and you learn programming by doing for 1 month 15 hours per day 7/7. People were sleeping at the school, more than 300 persons left within one week, hard problems to solve... it was hardcore. But weird enough, I enjoyed every minute and met some great team mates and now friends.
To be honest with myself, I was just an average developer at this school.
But I really liked business, so I launched a SaaS platform for perks and benefits with a guy from the school. We made 5 sales to enterprises for a total of 7k ARR in 1 month but failed to ship the product because my co-founder left me for unknown reasons (no messages or whatsoever, I still don't know)... it was a hard first entrepreneurial experience for me.
And at that time, one of my friends told me to not quit and continue my project with No-Code and I was like no, not for me. I didn't learn code the hard way to play with "No-Code". For the record, we were in 2019 and No-Code was not very popular. But after my failed adventure, I started to learn Bubble and was amazed by the capabilities and ended up doing freelancing with Bubble for scale-ups companies.
What's the moral of the story?
- Listen to your friends
- Don't quit too soon
- Don't sleep on the power of No-Code
Tell us about your product that you made?
SEOmatic is a new way to automate and scale your content creation with programmatic SEO and AI. Basically, the idea is to generate SEO pages at scale to drive more traffic, leads and sales to your business, similar to how TripAdvisor or Zapier is doing it to drive traffic for their business.
I had the idea when I was working for a client. I was working with the Head of SEO for a cycling brand and we had to create a lot of programmatic pages (for cycling events). I was amazed by the amount of traffic we were driving by targeting long-tail keywords (i.e marathon in {{City}}). Their website is driving more than 15K visits/month with just SEO.
That's why I wanted to do the same for my own projects and thoughts why not make it a SaaS. This strategy would be helpful for any entrepreneur starting a business and win positions on Google.
Which tools did you use?
Bubble! This is my go-to tool for any kind of web projects. I can't recommend enough this tool for people starting a project. And I'm not talking about MVP. People have this misconception that nocode = MVP but it's not true. Bubble can take you through all the stages of your startup.
My tech stack:
My marketing stack:
Mailerlite for emails
Crisp for chat
SurferSEO for keywords
What went into building the initial product?
It took me 2 weeks to build the first MVP and get my first customer through #buildinpublic on Twitter.
The product was very bad at that time so I offered it at a lower price and every time I reached 10 customers, I increased the pricing by $5/month until I reach my current pricing. In the meantime, I was iterating on the product and only shipped what people asked or bugs.
Customers were surprised by the speed of execution and could see a feature implemented in an afternoon. I think this contributed a lot to build trust and make customers like the product even more.
What's your business model and how have you grown your revenue?
My business model is SaaS subscription based and my plan starts at $39/month for indiemakers and up to $149/month for SEO agencies that needs to do programmatic SEO for their clients.
I also have Parity Pricing deal to make it affordable for everyone, this helps me to cover a global market.
How have you attracted users and grown your product?
My main source of traffic to grow revenue comes from:
my affiliates program with a generous offer 30% recurring revenue for them if they bring new customers
organic traffic with SEO (mainly blogs posts + programmatic SEO)
Can you share your SEO process?
Do keywords research using SEMrush, Ahref or even Ubersuggest. Aim for low competition keywords with the highest volume possible.
Use SurferSEO to cluster keywords into clusters. SurferSEO will tell which keywords are in the same cluster so you can create one article that target same similar keywords.
For each cluster, write a long piece of content and aim for cluster that have a Keyword Difficulty below 5 if you have a new domain name.
Create pillar content that is more general and that will introduce different clusters. SurferSEO will tell you what are the clusters that have the same topics.
What are the biggest challenges you've faced and how did you overcome them?
I think this is the biggest problem for any SaaS entrepreneur: Churn.
I was fighting against churn every day and still fighting against it today. When my product clunky, churn was very high (up to 80%!). Then I worked on improving my onboarding and made a lot of changes:
free trial game to earn more free trial days
video tutorials & documentation
email sequence onboarding
etc.
Helping customers to find the "aha moment" helped me reduce my churn to 20-30% which is more close to the industry standards!
Can you share some numbers/stats?
Revenue: ~1K MRR
Users: ~50 customers
Visitors: ~1K visits/month (SEO)
What's your advice for No-Code Makers who are just starting out?
I know the audience is mainly nocoders so I want to address this audience. With nocode, you gain a lot of power. It can really be easy to fall into a features trap. Instead, focus on a minimum set of features for your MVP and make the experience delightful for your users (improve onboarding!).
AND DON'T QUIT.
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