Mocki

So https://mocki.io has been launched with a free plan since around February this year. Users have been steadily trickling in and the total count is nearing 500. A paid plan has been in the works for over a month now due to only having nights and weekends to spend on it but I finally deployed it to production 🥳

We have not done any real research or validation around the willingness for our users to pay for a tool like Mocki, but quite a few users have passed the 1000 request per month limit and a few have asked about a paid plan so I hope fingers crossed that we will get our first paid user as a Christmas present.

Question for discussion: How do you validate the willingness to pay for the products you build? At some point I thought of having a fake checkout button and track if someone clicks it but decided not to do it in the end.

The development process was quite straight forward some initial decisions had been made, namely:

• A subscription is attached to a single project
• A user attached to the project is the "billing user" and pays for the Premium plan for the project
• To start off, there is only one paid plan to keep things simple. The free plan has a limit of 1000 requests per month and the Premium plan allows unlimited requests.

To speed up development I used Stripe Checkout and the Stripe Billing Portal. With Checkout, I only needed to set up my plan in Stripe and then I could redirect the user to Stripe where the credit card details are entered. Then I did not have to worry about input validation, API requests to create the subscription and so on. When the purchase is made, a webhook is sent to my backend which upgrades the project to Premium and then the user is redirected back into the app.

Managing subscriptions is also made easy by using the Billing Portal. In a similar fashion as Checkout, I could redirect the user to the Billing Portal to cancel subscriptions or update payment information. The downgrade is done via another webhook.

With this fairly simple logic, most work done was in the frontend with pages for upgrading, and an overview of the number of request made to the projects.

Do you have any experiences or takeaways when launching a paid plan for an existing free product?

The thoughts behind this feature started at a beach in Vietnam almost a year ago now and now it is finally launched!

I started focusing on implementing this feature during the last two months since it will give the product something unique and fill a gap which I think is present in the segment that we are in.

After a couple of hours work and a couple more hours of debugging a tiny issue that blocked the release version 1.0 of GraphQL support is now finished.

While the actual coding was one thing, I also spent some time on marketing the feature on our public website. The result is this feature page: https://mocki.io/graphql. I have had great success with SEO optimized feature pages targeting a primary keyword including long tail searches. Hopefully, there will be similar results for this page.

Basically I would target a primary keyword, in this case "Mock GraphQL API". Then, to find the longtail keywords, I would type "mock graphql api" into Google to see what suggestions I get. Since the Google suggestions are based on what other users are searching for these should be relevant and included in my article as well. In this case suggestions such as "mock graphql users api" appeared. Hence, I included a "User API" section on my feature page.

The next step is to try to drill down into actually converting my visitors into paying customers!

When starting out building Mocki (https://mocki.io) we went into the now obvious trap of building before marketing. We spent weeks coding and adding features while people didn't even know of the product. Since we are both experienced with SEO and online marketing we should have known better. Especially since getting steady traffic through search engines takes a long time.

We shipped the MVP in February and right about then started to think of how we should actually drive traffic to the site. The SEO work started off posting the site to different startup and software listing sites. While we realised these links would not give us much authority it was an easy way to get the site indexed and to get some initial traffic going.

The next step was guest posting and content marketing. Here we reached out to a number of high quality sites who worked with guest authors. After some emailing of article ideas back and forth we went to work writing long pieces of content. Some accepted the articles straight away while some required an editing process before publication. With our fingers burning we finally had some high quality, in content and relevant backlinks to the site. In parallell to this we also published content on our own site to build the on-page authority and posted them to content aggregation sites.

Fast forward around two months from the first article and the site has started slowly climbing the SERP for our target keywords which now gives us a few hundred visitors per month. While this is still not a lot, we hope to continue doing guest posting as well as doing some outreach campaigns. This result in higher DR links in the future to really start competing for our most competitive keywords.

• What are your SEO takeaways for SaaS startups?
• Do you have any ideas what we could do on the site SEO wise?

Thank you all for the daily inspiration on IH!

About a year ago me and my co-founder started talking about quitting our jobs and going traveling for a while to work on our next product. We have some success before with a digital course platform where we create the content ourselves. However that did not really scale but brought us some extra income in addition to our day jobs. This time we wanted to build something for an international audience that we could bootstrap and market 100% through digital channels.

After a couple of months discussing how we could start our journey I got in touch with an old client I did consulting work for. They agreed to hire us both part time working remotely for at least six months. We took their offer and set sail to Da Nang, Vietnam where we have spent the last two months building the MVP for Mocki - https://mocki.io.

Mocki is a tool that lets developers create mock APIs using configuration as code synced to your GitHub repository. You might have come across simple services like this before but we want to take it one step further and support advanced use cases that the other tools do not offer. Our vision is that developers will use our tools to create stunt doubles of each of their microservices to become independent of dependencies, be able to run everything locally without spinning up a cluster of services on your machine or in the cloud.

Right now we are talking to our first users and trying to validate our thoughts on how this tool could be used.

All feedback is welcome - design, features and anything else!