AMA! Bootstrapped 2 profitable SaaS, launching a 3rd one

Ask yourself a few questions.

• Do big players completely lock the market?
• Is there still room to innovate?
• Can you solve a pain point not addressed by your competitors? How big is that niche?
• Is pricing your only lever?

I feel the pain. If you're coming from the tech world and are on your own to market your product, this is tough.

At the very start, Linkody was a free and very simple tool. I worked on a new, better version with paid plans to see if I could convert a few of these users.
After that, I developed this free tool https://www.linkody.com/en/seo-tools/free-backlink-checker that kept bringing new customers on autopilot until it got replicated by all the competitors. All my customers still come from organic traffic.

For LinkStorm, I used the same technique. I developed a free tool based on the technical proof of concept that I had developed at the time. I let it capture emails while I was working on the new version. This helped me validate the idea while getting contacts. Having 2 SaaS in the same industry, I could also tap into these tools' users to get my first LinkStorm customers.

Crawling the entire web requires a massive infrastructure out of reach for a bootstrapped startup. Actually, there are not so many companies that can do it apart from search engines. The big SEO tools like Moz and Ahrefs do it. Ahrefs is trying to diversify by entering the search engine market because they already have the crawling and indexing infrastructure.

This requires so much hardware; these tools are far from being comprehensive. Even Google does not cover 100% of links. Not so long ago, Google had serious crawling and indexing issues.
That's why I developed my second SEO tool https://indexcheckr.com. People use it to check if their backlinks are indexed, and if not, submit them directly to some indexer tools (tools that use some proprietary techniques to get content indexed by search engines).

Back to Linkody, I'm pulling the links from several providers. They complement each other; this helps me be as comprehensive as possible.
Once I know the backlinks, I have my own crawlers that check them daily. This is a key differentiating feature from the big tools like Moz. I notify my users when a link is removed or changed (for instance, from follow to nofollow) in less than 24h.

Because the big tools cannot refresh daily the billions of pages they have indexed, a big percentage of the links they provide are actually gone. So, when I pull the links, my bots immediately check them.

Sure! PM me.

Internal linking! That's why I developed the tool in the first place :)

Good internal linking with relevant anchors helps search engines understand your content better.
Good internal linking keeps your user consuming more content, decreases bounce rates, and improves the user experience. And Google is taking more and more user experience into account when evaluating websites.

You have total control over your content. It's not like building backlinks, for instance. If you already have a lot of content but have never spent time revising your internal linking, it's probably far from optimal, and you're sitting on a pile of link opportunities.
Optimizing internal linking, however, is very time-consuming. This is why this practice has been underrated I believe. However, this pain point is about to be solved; there are new tools, and I hope to make LinkStorm the best one.

See my reply to @alexsmith47
When there is such a competition, it's difficult to differentiate yourself. So I decided to build another tool that solves a different pain point. This is a form of extreme pivot, I assume.

I've learned many lessons, and here are two significant ones.

The first lesson is that being a solopreneur while bootstrapping a SaaS is incredibly challenging. Whatever you do will be quickly replicated by competitors with more resources. Thus, reaching a point where your revenue allows you to hire additional help and accelerate development is crucial.

The second lesson stems from this realization that minor, differentiating features are not sufficient. Radical innovation is necessary.
In my search for SEO pain points that are still not adequately addressed, I identified internal linking. Currently, no tool effectively automates the process of building relevant internal links.
LinkWhisper was the first to address this problem as a WordPress plugin, and now competition among plugins is heating up.
However, LinkStorm is not just another plugin; it's designed to work with any site by crawling its content. This approach introduces many technical challenges, raising the barrier to entry for competitors.