🚪How Lee & Katt are growing their micro-saas to ramen profitability

I'm selling No-Code Exits 💔

Hello there,

I’m selling No-Code Exits. It is with pain in my heart but if I want to make this indiehacking work, I need to ruthlessly focus. I’m hoping to find a buyer who wants to continue inspiring with no-code stories.

So I thought it is time to share the full story of my most recent project which has been stealing all my time: Build The Keyword. Warning: it will be long and detailed 😁.

Read about:

✨ From tweet to product
🔥 Having a co-founder rocks
🧰 Our detailed no-code tool stack
💥 Learnings and marketing tactics

Enjoy and happy building.

PS: missed the last interview? Read here how Ambar built a job seek platform with $10,000 revenue.

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🔥 No-Code Founder Story

Learn every week from a real world no-code success story

You need internet friends

I remember like it was yesterday. The year is 2022. I was part of the 100 Days of No-Code community and we had these regular calls to keep each other accountable. I was the new kid in the group. Freshly graduated from the No-Code bootcamp, taking my first indiehacking steps and working on an info product.

I was in awe of all these makers in the call who were working on their own terms with no-code! One of them was Lee Launches. We kept crossing paths at online No-Code events and ended up together in an amazing no-code group chat. It was (and still is) our little warm corner on the internet where we can ask each other for feedback, advice and share great resources.

In april 2023 someone shared this legendary tweet from Danny Postma about building successful products around keywords with decent search volume and low competition. We were all so excited about it because finding product ideas that would traffic on auto-pilot sounded like the golden indiehacker dream. We kept recommending the tweet and returning to it. And I did a weak attempt but I only realized later I picked up the wrong keywords because the free tools didn’t show all the data 😅.

In february 2024, this lead to me suddenly posting this idea in our group which got the ball rolling…

Lee in launch mode

Lee was excited about the idea I shared. We brainstormed together how it could look like, we named it jokingly DaaS (Danny as a Service) and then… we continued working on our other projects. We were trying to stay away from shiny objects. But 1 day later Lee DM’ed me. He is an amazing Bubble dev so he could not resist building something. I’m so happy he did.

Absolutely out of control

From there it went out of control. This was too exciting. Bye focus! Lee improved the tool by connecting it to a Google API. And I started curating a library of keywords that fit the recommended keyword criteria of Danny Postma. On the 1st of March (7 days later) we launched Build The Keyword on Product Hunt with:

• A simple landing page with a tool that checks in 1 click if a keyword has decent volume and low competition. For $9 you could buy more credits.

• Airtable base with 200 curated ideas that you could buy for $29

• Branding that stood out 😂

It was an amazing day.

Product of the day, now what?

For Lee and me, it was the first time we had a product that people were getting so excited about. People were using it, paying for it, giving us feedback and sharing it with others.

We both had been trying to focus on our latest project (me: No-Code Exits and Lee: LaunchAI) but we couldn’t let this momentum pass. We also realized that we really love working together. We both have different skills (Lee: rroduct and Bubble, Me: marketing and business) so we are a great team.

Not getting rich quick

After the Product Hunt launch, we decided to keep working on Build The Keyword for one more month and this silently led to 5 more months. We grew it to 4,621 users and 379 paying users. We are not at ramen profitability yet (we don’t live in Bali and both have a family 😅) but it feels within reach.

But to be honest, it was/is HARD. This is not a story of just launch and swim in money. It is a story of trying to focus and doing the boring things (I learned this from Dan Kulkov his annoying helpful marketing tweets) and keep doing the boring things even when you are tired of it. We had good months where we started dreaming of stopping our freelance gigs and we had bad months where we started doubting every decision.

Let me share some things that helped us:

Do the boring things

1. Talk to your users

After the Product Hunt launch I had a call with 15 users. This helped us to understand their problems, goals and vocabulary. We used this to define our ideal customer, prioritize features and create the best value proposition.

This blog article helped me preparing for this.

2. Raise your prices

From the beginning it was clear to us that we needed to raise our prices. A 9$ product with 2 founders is not a sustainable plan. So we focussed on adding features to make the product more valuable. What started as an Airtable base and a simple search tool evolved to 2 search tools, a dynamic library of (500+!) curated ideas and a collection of guides to go from keyword to product.

3. Experiment & measure

We experimented with different pricing plans and are tracking every week the most important numbers. It is probably not 100% accurate but it gives us some data to help making decisions.

I shared a copy of our simple template here. In the beginning we used Microsoft Clarity for analytics. Now we use Plausible Analytics because you can see the conversion for every source.

4. Free retargeting

From the start we added a newsletter where we shared 5 keywords every 2 weeks. Like that we educate our potential users, stay top of mind and get the email from people who are not ready to buy.

We decided to do this on Substack as this is free and we also hoped their recommendation network would help us grow (it does, but no crazy numbers)

5. Get feedback

From the beginning we made it easy to share feedback in our app. We did this by adding a chat widget and feedback buttons. Like that you understand what your users need and easily spot bugs or inconsistencies (in the content for example). Because Lee is building everything with Bubble we can move super fast.

You can add a chat widget for free with Crisp.

6. Be careful with a free plan

Only 3% of your users will convert to paying users. That means you will need a huge amount of users to become a profitable business. So we decided to just give 3 free credits to new users. Like that we catch potential customers their email, they can try out part of the product (with enough teasers to our pro product) and they can understand the core of our product without being able to benefit too much from it.

There will always be people misusing this (we see you!) but so far the benefits outweigh the disadvantages

Read this great article about free plans from Marc Lou.

7. Twitter is not enough

We tried (and are still trying) a lot of marketing tactics and aiming for a healthy mix of marketing channels.

What we tried:
(🟢 good results , 🔴 no results, 🟡 not convincing results, 🟣 too early to tell)

• Category pages targeted at relevant low competition keywords 🟣

• Plugging Build The Keyword under relevant tweets 🟢

• Posting on relevant indexed Quora and Reddit topics 🔴

• Recycling our newsletter content on Indiehackers 🟢

• Partnerships with communities 🟡

• Getting featured in newsletters 🟢

• Idea tweets / building in public 🟢

• Publishing on Medium 🟡

• YouTube SEO videos 🟣

• Affiliate program 🟢

• Discount emails 🟢

• Reddit articles 🟡

• Hackernews 🔴

The next months we will be focusing on long-term channels to grow our traffic by:

• Writing blog articles around long-tail keywords (with bloghandy.com )

• Creating free tools around relevant low competition keywords

• Publishing more YouTube videos focused on low competition keywords (still so much to learn here)

8. Focus on conversion

In the beginning we focused on optimizing our conversion. Our aim is 1%-2%. If we can’t make it consistently work, it’s probably a sign that we should move on. We added lots of social proof, nailed our positioning, created a better pricing page, discuss objections in the FAQ, improved the signup and purchase process, …

9. Get over it

I hate calling with strangers, talking on podcasts and being on video. Well, get over it Katt. 😆 If you want to take this seriously, you need to learn that you have to do stuff you don’t always like. The alternative is back to a 9-5.

I bought an amazing mic to level up my audio.

10. Send the damn emails

Sending emails is boring but people need time or the right moment to push the buy button. We nurture free users by sending an email sequence where we share freebies, discuss problem/solution, show examples with revenue, …

Sending sales emails can feel pushy but people have 1000 things on there mind and need reminders. If you are about to raise your prices or have a discount action, let your users know. And let them know again a few hours before the discount ends.

We use Loops for our marketing emails.

11. Leave room for experimentation

After focussing for 5 months we gave ourselves permission to work on a Build The Keyword project for 2 weeks. To keep ourselves accountable we organized an (async) challenge with a Slack community.

I wish I could say that this was part of a genius marketing master plan but it exceeded our wildest expectations. 200+ people joined and are working on their Build The Keyword products, upgrading to pro , building in public, sharing amazing good vibes, … It’s by trying new things that you learn what works.

12. Have a co-founder

Lee and I agree that having a co-founder is underrated:

• We keep each other accountable

• We brainstorm and discuss to find clarity and make decisions

• We learn from each other

• We help each other level up and try to do better

• We celebrate wins and cheer each other on

• We divide tasks so we have more time to do them well

The only downside is that you need double revenue to reach ramen profitability ;-).

13. Ignore the shiny objects

To be able to consistently do all these boring tasks you need time. You only have time when you are not hopping from new shiny idea to new shiny idea. We were both still freelancing around 2 days per week but the other days we were focussed on Build The Keyword.

And now the bad stuff

We have seen competition come and go. Our product is an appealing idea to build but (aspiring) indiehackers are a though crowd to sell to. We also need to start our revenue every month from 0 as we don’t see how we can add value on a monthly basis and offer a product with recurring subscriptions (the golden dream for every indiehacker). So every months feels like our revenue can easily fade and that is scary.

We probably didn’t pick the ‘most profitable’ niche but we are passionate about the problem that we are solving so for us, it is easy to stick with it. We have no clue what we are doing and week by week we figure it out together and try, fail, learn, iterate. But one thing is sure we are brimming with ideas so watch out, so much more to come 👀.

You can follow us building and growing Build The Keyword on Twitter (Lee and me)

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