I didn't build in public, but I'm launching in public

Ready to Launch

This is a big moment for me – I'm finally ready to share SEO Flight Deck with everyone. It was originally made for just a few, but I've seen its potential and decided it's time for the world to experience it too. So, here we go, taking SEO Flight Deck out there, together.

Today we launched on Product Hunt, check it out below.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/seo-flight-deck

You can also learn more at SEO Flight Deck

I will be sharing every detail of our launch, starting today and ending sometime in the future. Our Stripe-verified income and diary can be found on our Indie Hackers product listing, once approved. There, I will share every strategy we attempt and all the results.

https://www.indiehackers.com/product/seo-flight-deck

Back Story

The Idea for SEO Flight Deck is Born

Back in August 2020 I was building E-Commerce websites for a few clients and assisting them with their SEO efforts. I wanted an easy way to track their keyword rankings in Google over time to assist them in establishing the effectiveness of their content and paid marketing efforts. I'm a software engineer, not a Search Engine Marketer, but I have been dabbling with SEO for a couple of decades now.

I tried a number of the popular tools out there, and while they worked, they just seemed bloated and overly expensive and I just felt they lacked the simplicity and ease of use that my, non-technical, customers needed. There seemed to be a gap in the market between hugely expensive products and useless cheap products and there the idea for SEO Flight Deck was born.

MVP Done and Dusted

It took around 8 months to build the SEO Flight Deck MVP. The intention was to give my E-Commerce customers the best Keyword Ranking Tool to suit their needs and budget.

I was providing it to them for free as a part of an existing website maintenance contract and I saw it as a tool to help me retain customers, I never really thought about selling subscriptions to it.

It didn't take long for my customers to start using it as part of their daily routine and new feature requests to started coming in. People were falling in love with it!

Decision to Productionize

After just over a year of 11 of my E-Commerce customers using SEO Flight Deck and contributing feature ideas, I realised that this web app really could benefit a lot of website business owners, outside of just my customer base.

I had a backlog of feature requests and customers chomping at the bit to get those delivered into the MVP. At this time I decided to productionize the MVP but if I was going to commit myself to building it, I felt a complete re-write was necessary to ensure the application architecture would be able to handle scaling up.

The big re-build began!

AI to the Rescue

Many months passed by and progress was slow. I was juggling full-time work and only getting a couple of hours of development done in the evenings and as much time as possible on the weekends.

My customers were still loving using SEO Flight Deck and their feedback was fuel that fed my motivation to keep going. One thing that concerned me was that while the product was beautiful and did everything I wanted it to do, I felt it needed a little more differentiation from the competitors as price and usability were only going to get it so far.

Around this time the AI hype train was speeding along and I was using AI tools extensively in other areas of my software development. I could have launched SEO Flight Deck at this time, but I felt I could leverage AI to expand on the existing value proposition.

I would spend the next 6 months building features powered by the Open AI API, many of which ended up in the recycle bin, apart from the AI Powered Keyword management feature, which the initial real-world testers absolutely loved!

Today I just Launched Product Hunt, please check it out!

https://www.producthunt.com/products/seo-flight-deck/makers

I'll be sharing every step of my launch journey here:

https://www.indiehackers.com/product/seo-flight-deck