Launching something new and up to $600 MRR

I'm in the middle of a course launch right now and stumbled upon a new service offering.

I wanted to use Indiehackers as a way to document my own journey. (TBH, I have no idea if anyone will read this other than me.)

I think documenting a journey, or building in public as the kids say, can keep someone accountable to a result.

Either the idea is validated and succeeds.

Or it's not and fails for whatever reason.

But either way, this is my way of getting to either one of these results.

Background

My specialty is in SEO and growing sites to 100k visitors and beyond. I've done it for a couple of different software companies now.

So, I decided to launch an online course over the past 2 weeks.

Launching a course has never been my dream, but it was a way to monetize my current audience, and I thought it might be a road to fund something else.

The launch is going OK, but something even more interesting has happened.

The Problem

Last week, during the launch one of my email subscribers contacted me and wanted some help with SEO... but he didn't want to buy my course.

At first I thought maybe he wants coaching/consulting?

Instead, what he wants is for someone to tell his freelance writers exactly what to write about each week.

I told him I could do that.

He asked "how much?"

I told him $500 a month.

He agreed. (We also do a 30 minute call each week to discuss strategy)

However, I realized that he had the same exact issue I had. Making sure the writers covered all of the keywords/subheadlines/images/etc. required to rank a post.

Because if you don't give the writer direction, you can end up spending a lot of time editing on the back end.

It turns out, 4 other people contacted me with a similar issue.

Maybe there's an idea here...

The MVP

I'm a marketer at heart. I used to be a dev. But it's been 18 years since I graduated college and haven't done much engineering since.

So my MVP needed to be much, much, much simpler.

It's manual!

Basically, for each person, I will manually analyze the SERPs and create a document for a writer's brief.

And I'll charge $50 per month.

How it's going

So far, I have 3 clients, which is some validation.

I've charged the one client $500 for this service + consulting and I've 2 more clients that I'm charging the $50 per month.

Which is the $600 MRR. :)

Short Term Goal

My short term goal is to get to $1K MRR by the end of Q1.

I don't plan to invest time/money building anything until I see if there is a market for it.

And I'll use my current audience to see if there's anyone else intersted.

*I haven't decided if I'm counting the consulting with that $1K MRR or not.

But at $1K MRR at least that is a nano-saas at minimum and deserves some automation.

We'll see how it goes down.