How I’m turning 100M pageviews into a SaaS business

Hey Indie Hackers,

I’m Chandan. Some of you might know my site, Geekflare.

I started it back in 2015. Over the last decade, we’ve been heads-down writing tutorials for developers & SMBs. We bootstrapped it to over 100 million pageviews and built a business on ad revenue and partnerships.

But recently, I realized we were sitting on a massive opportunity that we weren't capturing.

Developers weren't just coming to us to read about how to do things; they were looking for tools to do it for them.

So, we are making a major shift.

We aren't stopping the content, but we are effectively transforming from a Publisher into a SaaS Platform.

We launched our first two products:

1. Geekflare API: We realized how painful it is to maintain headless browsers. So we built an API that handles the infrastructure to extract data for LLMs/RAG.
2. Geekflare AI: A collaborative workspace for teams to use 40+ LLMs in one place.

The Strategy: This is a Content-Led Growth play. We have the top-of-funnel traffic; now we are building the bottom-of-funnel product.

Has anyone else here successfully layered a SaaS product on top of an existing content site/newsletter?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this transition. It feels like the natural next step, but managing Content Operations and SaaS Development simultaneously is a new challenge for me.

Thanks!