Why we spent 6 months rebuilding our SaaS completely

I always hear people about launching and killing things fast and that's the playbook I used when starting out.

However that didn't really go anywhere in the first year we tried to launch a bunch of different SaaS.

Ultimately we decided that it's time to pivot the approach and to focus on two core bets for a whole year (2023) and just recently spent 6 months to redo one of our SaaS apps completely.

One of my favorite quotes since then has become:

Time in the market beats timing the market

Here's the full scoop on what, why, and where we're headed.👇

Btw, at the bottom is a TL;DR if you don’t feel like reading all this, hehe.

Background

We spent the last 6 months completely rebuilding an SEO tool that now does three core things:

• Keyword research
• Keyword clustering
• Content Briefs

Initially we launched the first version of the tool and started to see some traction, however after 2-3 months most of those early customers fizzled out, leaving us a handful of users.

We brought on a product Co-founder, who’s created frameworks for all the processes that we run in the tool, which we ended up productizing.

This gives us an unfair advantage because:

• We have in-house knowledge based on years of experience
• We have plenty of manual work of content briefs and keyword research that we can benchmark ourselves against, which we didn’t have before

The first milestone of the product will be to not be able to tell the difference between a $600 resale price manual content brief and an automated one.

Then we build a bunch of cool sh*t on top.

Challenges we faced

The main challenges we faced along the way were:

• Tweaking the algorithms to work with a limited amount of data because KW research APIs are expensive. We need to fetch just the right amount of KWs in order to stay competitive with the pricing
• Fighting GPT to create a long enough outline to really cover all the points. Sometimes we request up to 40 h2 and h3s based on what the competition is doing and it would return 5-8 then cutting us off. Getting this right took almost 2 months and we’re still only 80% there.

Why did we double down on this project

After initial spike of paying customers and peaking at around ~700 MRR most of our early customers churned.

The reason was that the final output of the product just wasn’t good enough.

This was a sign for us that the premise of the product resonates but that we need to do more work to make the product match that promise and we decided to double down.

Previously we’d kill products too early that failed to get traction within 2-3 months, this approach didn’t really work and it was time to shake the strategy up a bit.

Where are we going from here

We’ve already gotten the first found of feedback on V2 which falls into these categories:

• Showing too much data (we thought this is good but for most ppl it’s too much 🤷‍♂️)
• Too many steps to go from keyword to brief

The system already does a lot for you but we need to automate more and more of the processes, which is possible but takes time.

We have a tiny core of users that understand the future potential of what we’re building and are super excited about it, so now it’s time to:

• Find more of those
• Make it more user friendly

Plan for 2024

• Q1 will be all about activation
• Q2 will be all about retention
• Q3 will be all about scale
• Q4 will be about going to the moon… ofc 🤪

TL;DR

• We got nowhere with constantly launching new products
• We saw early signs of traction but the output wasn't up to the promise of the tool
• We're committed to make it work in 2024 with the goal to hit 10k MRR

Let’s connect

If any of this stuff resonated with you, let’s connect on Twitter.

I’m documenting the whole journey on there.

If you don’t have Twitter because it’s a POS these days lol, check out my weekly Build in Public Updates on YouTube.

P.S. If you've gotten this far, I wanted to let you know that we're on PH today, would love to get your support ❤️