Behind-the-Scenes Story From Founders building not-profitable AI Product
It took me a long time to make our product great, but it's still not quite there.
The idea of generating AI articles was on my mind since the start of last year.
SaaS that will entirely understand your brand details with just your website & publish SEO optimized blogs for keywords that you should be ranking for, completely automated!
Idea Validation
Me & my co-founder @aminmemon created a quick landing page outlining the broad features of the product that we are proposing in plain simple text with an Early Signup form. We had purchased a premium 4-letter domain name Abun.com which we planned to use for this new SaaS. We added Abun on one of our existing company's website and early signups started coming in. The response was overwhelming. We received around 500 early signups. This early validation gave us the confidence to proceed.
Here's what the initial landing page looked like:
Setback in Getting Started
The journey was not without its challenges. After validating the idea with the attention that we got through early signups, we hired a WordPress plugin developer who could build the functionality of the product so it can be auto-posted on WordPress. The developer failed to even build the basic login/signup page based on an outline design that we gave him. After that we hired another developer, the result was same. The design wasn't complex, it was very basic. The one that we have live on our current Signup/Login Page. All this experience was a big waste of valuable time; about 2-3 months lost with no progress.
Restarting Efforts
With this experience we decided to start building Abun without any WordPress plugin. The process was quite simple. Start building a chain of prompts that will achieve the desired results & gradually keep optimizing the prompts based on use-cases.
Initially Abun generated normal GPT-like articles. We tweaked the prompts frequently so it can generate content for all types of content. Gradually we moved towards creating better articles (still not completely satisfied with it yet) & automating everything from featured image, internal & external links, keyword research, competitor keywords, etc.
I tried making the entire process from signing up to getting your first article as smooth as possible. I installed Hotjar on our SaaS & watched videos of users navigating through the product. This usage helped me understand the areas where the users are facing problem & than working on optimizing them for giving the best experience. This rework took months to finish and took most of the time.
Feature Suggestions from Users:
Meanwhile...
While all of this was happening, months passed one after another & now there are loads of entrants in this space & it's cluttered way too much currently. We did not wanted to launch a half-baked product so we kept it low-key and kept improving it internally.
After investing almost 8-10 months into the product we granted early access to 100 users last month. We fetched feedback from these users to identify the shortcomings & suggest essential features required in the product. This feedback consisted of mainly feature requests that would be essential for the users. We building these features & pushing them every week. All the updates can be tracked on our Roadmap.
But here's the thing: nobody's paying for yet. I am thinking that it's time to start doing a full-blown marketing instead of iterating the product endlessly.
You can check out our website at https://abun.com & let me know what all is it falling short of being a great product. Would you use it? If not, why?
Love it. This is a fantastic product.
I am currently in the SEO trenches on my project, so I might be your target audience.
The only reason that I didn't pay for this is because you gave me the option to use it for free. I think your product is there (I want that Webflow integration, though, lol), and I would buy this.
I was also thinking that if the customer only needs 30 articles, they might use the free trial, take the 30 articles, cancel the membership, and sail off into the sunset.
Thank you for the appreciation. It makes me happy that you find Abun valuable enough to consider using it.
I have the Webflow Integration on my Roadmap. I will try to finish it sometime this month. You can upvote it on the Roadmap to be notified once it is live.
Lastly, I think my communication on the website wasn't as clear as I wanted it to be. Currently Abun is offering 30 articles for Free every month. No credit card required. I plan to keep it like this for a few more months till I add more features to it & perfect the product.
Looks interesting. Signed up and connected one of my website. Just wondering who you think is the intended target audience for a tool like this?
When I started working on Abun, the ideal target audience in my mind were solo-founders & startups with a team size of less than 10 members.
The thought behind it is that anybody who does not have bandwidth to manually publish articles to their blog to keep it fresh at all times. I am looking at a target audience who are willing to invest $99 per month to maintain their site's content freshness effortlessly, without the need for manual input or approvals.
I think you need to talk to some of these audience (if you haven't had yet). I don't think anyone would be keen on having AI generated content on their main websites (Auto populated ones). Also $99 per month is a steep price. As the competition is intense you need to find a different angle. Are the articles currently generated getting indexed in G and getting some traffic? If yes, then it could be a good supplement to this idea mentioned by Danny @ https://twitter.com/dannypostmaa/status/1753406345758519602 basically the idea being creating simple tools and then redirecting traffic to main website/tool. But this would be a very small niche.
Hey there - great insight into your journey. Thanks for sharing !
Just took a quick look at your product and it's a great one - congratulations for what you've done so far. I believe you're not far from getting it right - two things I would focus on:
Second, focus on distribution: identify all the directories and list there. Don't forget to build your brand in parallel with active social media marketing. Bonus if you can build a community around your product
Hope I was able to help and i'm sure you'll turn this company around pretty soon. Keep me updated !
Thank you for all your inputs, Rayan.
I kept the current number of articles for early access users so they can generate as many articles as they can and point out the problems they are facing. This will help evolve the product much faster.
For the time being I plan to grandfather the signed up users as long as I am able to generate revenue from new users. But if there aren't any paying customers, than soon this will become unsustainable for me.
I have prepared a list of directories & starting to list there. I am yet to start on any social media marketing & creating a community. I'd love to know if you have any more ideas around this area.
Thanks for sharing.
I think you'll find that launching the product as soon as you can help you get better feedback. Just make sure that the product can do what you promised, and you should be good to go.
If nobody is paying, my questions would be "is the idea validated?" and "how are you finding your target audience?"
I agree to some extent about time to launch it now. My idea was, if somebody is entrusting automation of their blog on my product, I gotta make it perfect.
I have not started any outreach/marketing methods yet. Just conversing with the early access users.
Thanks for sharing! As someone who's spent a lot of time personally on SEO, I was also looking into an adjacent product. On the surface this space looks great - clear value proposition, verifiable and aligned LLM use case, and pretty simple to price. Any ideas for why y'all haven't been able to convert any sales, especially considering the large waitlist interest? Do you think it's the competitors - are they converting?
On top of my mind I see 2 hurdles.
About competitors, I did not research into a thorough competitor analysis of the new entrants yet. I should be looking into it very soon.
I'd start with the distribution of usage from your existing users. For example, what percentage of your users use all 30 of their articles every month? What percentage don't use any at all? It can be hard to tell PMF when you have a free product, but having users is better than having nothing, and the right analytics could generate a lot of insights.
This looks great! Thank you for sharing!
I would love to see your blogs as an example. I am not sure if there are, but I could not find from the link to blogs you shared.
As someone who does not understand fully understand how SEO optimization works, but curious to know how blogs and keywords are going to help my site.
That's a great idea. I will draft a small blog explaining all the important aspects of SEO & along with that what all Abun automates for you so that you do not have to worry about doing it manually yourself.
Thanks for sharing, good luck to you guys!
Thank you. Fingers crossed.
Sorry to be a debbie downer but the idea of publishing AI generated articles to a blog seems absolutely ridiculous to me. If you have spent any effort at all on your blog, why sabotage it with auto-generated content?
Feel free to express your honest thoughts.
If the user is assured that auto-generated content ranks than he will have the confidence to use Abun for their content generation.
Very cool backstory, thanks for sharing!
Hope you found it insightful. :)
Thanks for sharing!
Happy to know that. Hope you found my journey insights valuable.