Why we decided to run another version of our SaaS before we built a large customer base.
Our story started at the beginning of the year when we got an idea to run a side project - Seodity (https://seodity.com). We were planning to make a website crawler that supports the routine work of SEO freelancers, digital agencies and website owners.
We assumed that we would focus only on one feature and when we get a little bit of hype we will get cracking on other features.
So that’s what we did. We launched Seodity with an On-site crawler in July 2018 and started a marketing campaign. We were running AdWords. We wrote some texts on Hackernews and Reddit. Also, we acquired 230 registered users and two paying customers.
Most certainly, two customers are not too many, but we obtained extensive feedback from the Reddit community about lack of features that we decided to go all the way.
Knowing that we have 230 registered users, and 2.5k unique users who visited our website within about one month, makes us think the future will be brighter.
August 2018, we analyzed the mistakes we have made.
I'm pretty sure that there is many more. However, here are a few:
- We were too focused on the SEO stuff on the previous version of our Landing Page. We made a lot of content without much sense.
- Our pricing was exaggerated.
- UX wasn't straightforward as it could have been.
- Too little limit of web pages to crawl.
- What decisions have we made to fix our mistakes?
We have implemented the following new features:
- On-site with automatic weekly analysis,
- Comparison of competitors,
- SERP daily analysis with competitors,
- Uptime monitoring,
- Performance analysis based on Lighthouse which has automated weekly analysis.
- We have completely changed our pricing and crawl limits.
We have tried to simplify UX and make it more user-friendly. We estimated the time of each analysis that shows to a user when it ends.
We have to rebuild the landing page. We made the decision that we will focus only on simple explanation for our users about what Seodity is and how it can help.
So we made a lot of real images and animations of the app with short explanatory text. We divided all of the features to separate web pages.
We want Seodity to be one tool for handling all of the SEO stuff in one place.
We want to get feedback again. After that, we will implement the next operations such as a blog with SEO tutorials based on the Seodity tool.
What do you think about our "strategy," isn't it too risky?
I really like the cleanliness to your site overall, if I may add, maybe describe a little why you offer some of the features that you do.
For example, on https://seodity.com/on-site-content-analysis, you mention "headers checking" and then follow up with "checks all headers on your website", its pretty redundant copy. I would recommend informing me as to why it's important to check headers, etc.
I definitely like your value proposition, i may just become registered user 231 when i'm back in town and have time to register.
My advice is built fewer features and focus more on marketing.
SEO tools is a super competitive niche, with thousands of tire kickers asking about specific features, but newer pay even if you built it.
Not an expert opinion, but I'd say this sounds more like a roadmap than a strategy. You said it yourself, a lot of content, but lacking an overarching thought, a grand strategy. Say, "automate your SEO work", or similar. Then the items you outlined can be a roadmap to there, and you can go about this incrementally. Yolo have 2 paying customers - ask them which feature to do first. Ask the non paying less about this - which of the features would they pay for, if you did it first? Do the things incrementally.
... Is my humble opinion :) Please ask an expert about this, I'm just mostly repeating what other posters here usually post.