We shipped an app to total silence — turns out we'd made every SEO mistake a technical founder can make

A couple of years ago, two developers and a designer (me being one of the devs) shipped Heap — a mobile app that turns voice notes, photos of business cards, and scribbled notes into proper CRM-ready leads. We were proud of it. It worked.

Then: no downloads, no traffic, nothing. Not "slow growth" — nothing.

Turns out we'd made the exact mistakes you'd expect from a team that can build software but has never thought about how anyone finds it: no keyword targeting, no content beyond a single landing page, no search intent alignment. We were writing about what we'd built, not what anyone was actually searching for.

We went looking for tools to fix it and hit a different wall — every SEO tool assumed we already spoke the language. Crawl reports we could run but not interpret. Audits that dumped 200 issues with no sense of what to fix first. Eventually we just built what we needed ourselves — that part's a separate story.

Full story (and the two failure modes that killed our growth before it started) here: https://blog.snippetflow.io/en-us/seo-for-startups-a-founders-guide-from-real-mistakes/

Curious if other technical founders here hit the same wall — what tripped you up, and did anything actually work to fix it?