Building an SEO product to $14k MRR in a crowded market

Rick van Haasteren built a side project that he used when freelancing for SEO clients. Then, during the pandemic, he decided to make a real go of it, and he turned it into a full product: SiteGuru.

Four years later, it's bring in $14k MRR.

Here's Rick on how he did it. 👇

Going all-in on a side project

For the past eight years or so, I've been working on SiteGuru, an SEO tool that aims to make ranking in Google easier, even if you're not an SEO expert.

My background is a weird combination of marketing and development, which gave me a solid founder-product fit — I needed to have a solid understanding of how websites work while, at the same time, understanding marketing and business goals.

I started building SiteGuru when I was still working as an SEO consultant. I needed a simple audit tool that would help me spot the main issues on a client's website, without having to sift through hundreds of reports, trying to find out what's relevant and what's not. Eventually, I decided to build something myself.

As I used SiteGuru myself on client projects, I learned what worked and what didn't, which helped me fine-tune the tool. Then, during the pandemic, I decided I really wanted to try and make a full-time business out of SiteGuru.

I quit my job and focused fully on making SiteGuru a mature product that would help me pay the bills. It's been four years now, and it's still the best decision I've ever made.

I never hated my job, but I was always looking forward to the weekends. Now, I love what I'm doing and I look forward to Monday mornings, so I can get back to building cool stuff!

From internal tool to side project to standalone product

When I started off, SiteGuru was just an internal tool and a side project. I loved building products, so whenever I got home from work, I would continue working on it. It took a lot of evenings and weekends to turn an audit tool into a full-blown, reliable SEO product that people love.

When I started working on SiteGuru full-time, I was finally able to speed up development. Then, when I hired a developer, things got even more serious.

Now, the product is much more than just an audit tool: We pull in all sorts of data from Google and other data providers to provide insights — way beyond just checking your website. And we're using AI to come up with SEO-consultant-like recommendations, things that I never thought would be possible.

We're running mostly on Laravel Vapor, which makes scaling super easy. That's extra useful because many processes, like fetching data from Google and crawling and auditing websites, run in the background.

We also use a legacy PHP framework for the frontend, which is old, but it works. Everything runs on AWS. Since switching to Vapor, we've spent a lot less time worrying about infrastructure.

Growing an SEO tool with SEO

We've spent a lot of time writing content about SEO.

That was tricky at first, because most other SEO tools were doing the same thing. Looking back, I should have added a lot more influencer-based marketing into the mix. Organic content works, but in a competitive space like ours, it takes too much time.

If we had done more outreach and built an audience before building a product, we probably could have grown faster.

See your users in action

The SEO tool space is a busy space. Initially, it was hard to carve out our own niche. However, we found that most tools are extremely focused on SEO professionals, and not so much on general marketers lacking in-depth SEO skills.

When we started focusing on that audience and spent a lot of time optimizing our user experience, SiteGuru surfaced as one of the easiest-to-use SEO tools.

To do that, we spend a lot of time seeing our users in action. To do that, we set up a session recording tool. Every week, we go through a number of recordings, seeing our users move across the screen. This helps us identify bottlenecks, things that are broken, or features that are unclear. It can be frustrating to see this, but it helps us find issues and build a product that people really love.

It's particularly helpful with launches. Every time we launch a new feature, we watch screen recordings and we always see things that don't work — despite proper testing. Using screen recordings is a sure way to spot issues and UX imperfections quickly.

That's my pro-tip for every founder: Watch some screen recordings of your onboarding and see how your users go through it. You'll feel their pain. You'll see your own product through the eyes of a new user. I guarantee you that there will be some quick fixes that can boost your conversions.

Understand your customers

You need a true understanding of your customers. Every time I chat with one of my customers and they show me how they use our software, I get new ideas on how we can better help them do their work.

The best way to do that is to do the work your clients are doing. In my case, that meant taking on SEO projects, and using SiteGuru to run them.

In other words, you have to eat your own dog food. Not just clicking around, but actually working as your customers would. There's no better way to get a feel for what your customers want than being your own customer.

Consider lifetime deals

We sell SiteGuru as a subscription service, so we're a SaaS. We're also offering a limited version of SiteGuru as a lifetime deal, which has been a great revenue booster for us.

Lifetime deals sound scary to many SaaS founders and I can see why. But for us, it really works. We upsell our pro features as monthly add-ons, and many lifetime deal buyers stack multiple deals, so they basically keep buying. We've been able to keep our costs under control, so it has definitely paid off for us.

What's next?

The SEO space is changing rapidly with the rise of AI. Tools like ChatGPT are replacing Google searches, and Google itself is also changing to use more AI.

At the same time, the core principles of SEO still work: Create a technically sound website, with great content for your users, and build authority.

We want to continue helping our clients do that in the age of AI.

You can follow me on LinkedIn. And check out siteguru.co!