Linkology.io

I haven't touched Linkology for a while since my agency needed more attention. But I came back today and realised that we already have 10 paying customers and most of them are on a more expensive plan.

This really fired me up to invest more time and to finally jump over my own shadow and schedule user interviews.

The onboarding flow is a huge problem. Most users remain inactive, even though they get a free trial and can play around with the app without any restrictions.

Figuring out these problems will be my main focus for the coming weeks. Next target - 100 paying customers!

I joined the OnDeck Nocode Fellowship in July and its been a fun ride! It brought me back to building apps and also reenergized me enough to look at what I had built for Linkology.

I see a lot of potential in this app since it helps SaaS owners (or subject matter experts in general) to get the word out about their products and projects. There is probably no better way to get some quality backlinks and mentions from some of the worlds largest media outlets like forbes.com, businessinsider.com or many others.

The HARO process is quite painful without Linkology so I know that we solve a real pain point. I am excited to get back to building new features and to improving the app experience while learning with my fellow ODNC students.

I think there were two factors that lead to me not investing too much in Linkology after the initial excitement of our launch and getting a first paying customer.

1. I felt a bit burned out after spending so much time on learning how to build this app. I just couldn't bring myself to work on it for a while. Also I had learned a lot in the process and the app itself felt "messy". I had no energy left to clean it up and build a foundation for future development.

2. I had to invest more time in our agency. Since we do link building for SaaS and got some really good press and attention in that space early 2021, things got really busy. I had to focus a lot on hiring and managing growth. Since the agency is the bread winner and Linkology was just a fun side project, I decided to focus my time on growing the agency.

I guess that was the right decision and I am very happy with where we are with dofollow.io - my agency. But I wish I had spent more time on the app to at least fix some bugs and leave it with a solid foundation intact.

After launching the MVP we quickly reached out to some agency friends to ask for feedback. And not only did we get feedback - we also got our first paying customer on January 11th!

This was super exciting since it was the first time in my life that I had earned money from an app that I had built myself. From scratch. Without knowing how to code or even how to build nocode apps at that level.

I had a lot of experience with tools like Zapier, Airtable etc. but a fully fledged webapp with somewhat advanced business logic was a new level.

Shame that what followed were the "dark ages"...at least for a while.

The only good thing about COVID is that I had a lot of time to learn how to build an app. I spent so much time during lockdown learning various nocode tools and early January 2021 I finally had my first prototype of Linkology.io - ready to launch.

I realise now that I had overengineered things and I had added way too many features that shouldn't have been part of the MVP.

But hey...Linkology was live and our team could get to work.

This project was born out of frustration.

Back some time mid 2020 my cofounder and I were focused on building up a new division of our link building agency. The new team would focus on a platform called HARO (helpareporter). The way HARO works is that it connects journalists to subject matter experts.

Whenever a journalist is writing about a specific topic they are looking for quotes from experts to beef up their articles. HARO collects these questions and sends them out to their audience of experts - 3 times a day - in form of an email.

Our team was handling HARO for our clients - all subject matter experts - to get them mentioned on sites like forbes or business insider. Similar to what a PR agency would do, just more targeted.

The problem with this was our process. HARO is very manual and email based. Each email contains 50+ questions from journalists which you need to manually parse to find relevant queries.

Without going into details - the process is a bit old school and manual which lead to a lot of frustration on our end.

That's when we started thinking about a better solution. We wanted to use HARO as a foundation but build a "wrapper" around it to make every day work and handling of these queries easier and faster.

The main problem was - neither of us knew how to code.

But I was so fascinated by the idea of building an app that I started looking into various nocode tools like bubble, webflow, parabola etc.

It took me a few more months before I had a working prototype and I think I rebuilt it 3 times before I was happy. But the seed was planted...not just for the app but also for me as a fledgling nocode developer.

It was the start of a fun ride that is still ongoing.