May 1st, 2017 was when I'd had enough of FWD: Please review meta title on this page emails from my manager, and set on building Pulse Website Auditor.
I was working in a large corporate environment and was responsible for the website's content. There were multiple content loaders and new content was being added to the website daily (press releases, blog posts, etc.). Whenever someone added a broken image, missed a meta title, or forgot about alt text, it fell on me to a) fix and b) apologise for not ensuring our website was following every nitty-gritty bit of content loading best-practice.
We were in a highly competitive industry (insurance) and everything needed to be A+ to compete for organic traffic.
Here is what I've done from May to December to change my situation.
Pitched the idea to a developer
I was at work when I pitched the idea to a developer. After a little back and forth, I elaborated on why I think the world needs a better website auditor in the email below.
What I didn’t explain was that outside of my day job where I had a budget in the hundreds of thousands to spend, I was frustrated by how expensive website auditing and SEO tools in general were. Most people can’t afford $99p/m for a audit or keyword tracking tool! I wanted to create something 90% of website owners will be able to afford.
Built a pre-launch website
I purchased a domain for under $10 from GoDaddy. Finding the domain took about an hour of searching ExpiredDomains.net because I didn’t want to start from a brand new domain name, I wanted one that had a little bit of domain authority already. After searching through all words that gave the vibe of “keeping your finger on the pulse of your website” I saw PulseProduct.com. Not the catchiest of domains, but I didn’t want to dwell too long on picking one.
Hosting was purchased from WPEngine.com because a) it's simple, b) has a built in staging environment which will be beneficial for when the website grows larger c) has amazing support via live chat and d) is fast. WPEngine isn’t the cheapest host, but I hate changing hosts so I thought I would start with the host I want to be at long term. Godaddy, Hostgator, or Bluehost offer cheaper hosting if you don’t want to shell out the $29p/m for WPEngines smallest plan.
I then threw up a one-page website that explained the concept, why it would benefit any website owner, and how Pulse would be different from competitors. I used the Startuply theme which I purchased for USD$49. Once I purchased, installed, and customized the theme, I started seeing it everywhere! Not a surprise really since it has had 2,874 sales at the time of writing.
After a lot of reading GrowthHackers.com and Indiehackers.com I settled on a design. This Hotjar.com blog post was also a wealth on information on launching a SaaS product. Little things like changing the landing page call to action from ‘Register’ to ‘Request an Invite’ can make a big difference.
Once the landing page was up and running (via a theme purchased from Themeforest.net) I started a Twitter account and put the ad shown below live with a $50 budget.
The result of this advert was 107 email sign ups on the landing page, which to me indicated that the idea I was pitching was of interest to others. 107 is of course a tiny sample size, and all I got was an email address, not commitment to purchase the product, but I figured if I could find 107 people to sign up to try the product from a quick Twitter ad on an average landing page, I could find 100 people to become customers if I spend more than $50 and a day on marketing.
Designed & Built the Product
Building the product consisted of lots of hacking around in Notepad++ to try to get the actual tool looking like how I wanted it to look. I’m not a developer, so this was lots of frustrating trial & error, and copying and pasting from tutorials and purchased admin themes to get the service looking how I wanted it to look.
The main theme I used as a base was Limitless, which was also purchased from Themeforest for USD$24.
These designs were then sent to the developer, who made it all actually work.
Once the service was up and running I started using it for my day job, to alleviate the frustration that is shown in my email at the top of this post. I used Trello.com to report bugs & request features, and new versions of the site were pushed to production by the developer once or twice a week.
Launched Free Beta Version
Linkedin Founder Reid Hoffman once said the quote below, which we followed when making Pulse publicly available:
If You’re Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late
The first launch of Pulse wasn’t the most polished product, but it solved the issue that I wanted solved: affordable & automated crawling of a website.
Our goal during the beta period was to iron out all bugs, and get real user feedback on what people liked and didn’t like. We actually added a feedback tab into the main navigation, so any beta user could submit a comment directly into our development Slack channel, which could then be copied/pasted and prioritised in Trello.
In total we had approximately 100 users sign up to use the beta version of Pulse, and all of them were invaluable in shaping what the product is today. They not only reported bugs, but they let us know what was important to them, and also provided some testimonials that we could use on our website.
Turning on Paid Subscriptions
Literally within 12 hours of changing our Pricing page from directing people to the beta sign up form, to the paid registration form integrated with Stripe, we had our first account created (thanks, Tharshan!) He found us via the Indie Hackers forum in one of my introduction posts there when I first joined the community.
