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Ask me anything: bootstrapping our first SaaS to $500 MRR spending $0 on marketing

Hey IndieHackers!

First of all, I’d like to do a quick introduction: A bit more than a year ago, my colleague Alex and I launched our first SaaS: NakedSSL. This is a niche tool for developers built with a very simple goal: solve for once the recurrent problem of redirecting naked domains with SSL when using 3rd party hosting services like Heroku or Netlify. As a small digital product studio working on different products, we found ourselves repeating the same process every time we launched a new web project – so trying to solve that for ourselves sparked the idea to create this product. If you want to read more about the creation process and first year recap, we created a Medium post about it (numbers are outdated).

Although we both have created and launched (lots of) digital products, this has been the first time that we fully own it at 100%, which means that we didn’t need approval from external stakeholders or permission to move into any direction, and this allowed us to basically try whatever we wanted and at the pace that we wanted, learning a lot by trial and error.

And after this quick introduction, it’s time for you 🙃 Ask me anything in the comments 👇

Looking forward to hearing your questions!

posted to Icon for group Product Development
Product Development
on April 1, 2020
  1. 1

    Very interesting,

    I was wondering if you have updated your "landing pages" to improve their SEO. Do you have an advice on this point?

    1. 2

      Good point, thanks for your question! Yes, we periodically update and release new landing pages with information related to the different hosting providers – but we do not really have a schedule for it, it's totally random. One thing that took us some time to figure out was the right approach for this and what type content to provide in such landing pages: "what do people search when they have the problem that our product solves? what kind of solution are they looking for? what do they expect to find in this landing page?" etc. We noticed that we get higher conversion rates when we provide lot of helpful information ("It works like this and you can solve it this or that way"), and a tool that they can use even before they register ("Check if we can redirect your domain without registering").

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