SEO Hook

Four months ago I did an unusual indie hacker move: I quit my high-paid job to work on an “ambitious” startup idea full time. I had some savings and calculated that I had about six months of runway for my family, roughly until January 2025. The plan felt simple. I’d ship the MVP in one month, launch, then go hard on marketing and SEO. Easy.

Of course, that’s not what happened.

After the first month, the product clearly wasn’t ready. “No problem,” I told myself. “I just need one more month to get it done.” So I pushed the deadline.

Month two ended. Still not ready. The scope grew a bit here, a refactor there, one more feature I was sure users would “definitely need”. I moved the deadline again.

Then it happened again. And again.

At that point I started to feel really uncomfortable. Savings were going down, but in my head I was always “almost there”. You probably know that feeling: the launch is always about 2–3 weeks away. I kept thinking, “Once I launch, I’ll finally start doing marketing, SEO, content, all the stuff I know can move the needle.”

SEO was a big part of the plan. On my previous side projects, organic traffic was always the main growth channel. So I knew I couldn’t skip it this time. But there was a problem: my runway was shrinking fast.

One day I sat down and did the math properly. With our current burn, my family and I had about three months of runway left. Three. Months. The launch date for my “main” startup was still fuzzy. And good SEO tools are… not cheap.

The tools I liked the most were in the $150–$250/month range for the volume I needed. With my situation, that wasn’t “tool money”, that was “extra runway” money. That’s basically one more month of living. I realized I simply couldn’t justify it.

At the same time, I also realized I didn’t actually need the full SEO suite. I didn’t care about 100 fancy charts. I didn’t need a full-blown “all-in-one platform”. My core, very boring need was simple: I just wanted to track the positions of my keywords in Google for my website and for some competitors. See how they move over time. That’s it.

So I did something a bit crazy: I asked my wife (she's also a developer) for help with this.

I told her, “Can you vibe-code something quick for me? Nothing fancy, just a tool that takes my keywords, checks Google SERP, finds my site and competitors, and plots the positions over time.” No sign-in, no billing, no onboarding flows. Just a scrappy internal tool so I don’t have to pay $200/month.

She said no problem.

Two weeks later we had a working version. It was simple, a bit rough, but it did exactly what I needed: track keyword positions, show how they changed, let me compare with competitors. I tried it on a few test keywords and a couple of competitor sites, and I really liked the preliminary results it produced. It was focused, clean, and not trying to be a “marketing platform for enterprise synergies” or whatever.

And here’s where the ridiculous part of the story begins.

I realized this little tool solved a very specific, very real problem: “I just want to track my rankings without paying enterprise prices while my runway is on fire.” I know a lot of indie hackers are in that exact situation. Limited budget, limited time, but still needing some kind of SEO visibility.

So we asked ourselves: why not turn this internal tool into a small product and see what happens?

We gave it a name (the most exciting part is to find a free domain name 😅), wrapped a UI around it, added proper auth, plugged in Stripe, and found a free domain: seohook.org. I threw together a landing page, wrote some copy, wired up payments, and now this tiny internal helper is a live product. It hasn’t proved it will make serious money yet, but it does already solve a real problem for me — and hopefully for others. Now it’s all about seeing whether I can actually promote it, get users, and grow it a bit to give me an extra month of living unemployed.

Right now my wife is actually the one in charge of this project. I jump in when needed: hard technical stuff, feedback, some marketing ideas, tweaking copy, helping with product decisions, that kind of stuff. That setup lets me stay focused on my “big” startup while still pushing this smaller product forward. So this isn’t a full pivot — more like a side quest that accidentally shipped before the main game.

From idea to live version, it took four weeks.

And my original “big” startup? Still not launched. I’m really hoping to finally launch it next month… but I’m also very aware that the “I’m almost there” curse might repeat again 😂. At least now, while I’m fighting that boss battle, we have a small shipped product running in parallel that doesn’t really slow down the main roadmap.

What I like about this story is the contrast.

We often think our main startup idea is the Big Thing™ that must succeed. We pour months or years into it. But sometimes the small, boring internal tools, the hacks we build because we’re broke or annoyed, have a much cleaner value prop and a much faster path to “something is live”. No stealth mode, no giant vision deck — just “this annoys me, let’s fix it”.

I’m using SEO Hook on my “still-not-launched” main project to prepare for its future SEO strategy. I’m tracking the keywords I want to rank for, checking how my domain behaves, and planning what to test when I properly launch. As the rankings move (hopefully up and not down 🙃), I’m going to share the whole journey: what I try, what fails, what works, and how it affects traffic and revenue.

I’ve already connected my Stripe account to share (probable) revenue , and I’ll keep posting updates as things evolve. If you’re into this kind of “build in public + SEO experiments + slightly stressed founder with a family” combo, you can follow along and see what actually moves the needle and what’s just noise.

If you want to try the tool itself, you can check it out at seohook.org. When you create your first project, you’ll get $10 in credits to play with, so you can track some keywords, compare with competitors, and see if it fits your workflow. Worst case, you confirm I’m bad at UX. Best case, it saves you from paying for a giant SEO suite you barely use.

I’d really love feedback from this community.

Was my product idea really crazy for red ocean of available SEO tool ? Is the landing/dashboard UX good enough for a first version? What would you expect from a “simple SEO rank tracker” that doesn’t try to be an entire marketing suite? Any feedback on this is welcome. Follow me if you're interested in my and my wife's further steps on pushing it to life.

And if you’re currently stuck in that “launch is always 3 weeks away” loop like I was, maybe this is a small reminder: sometimes the fastest way to ship something is to look at the tools you wish existed for yourself — and just build those first. Even if they don’t turn into the next unicorn, they might still pay a bill, solve a real problem, or at least give you a fun “I launched before I launched” story to post on Indie Hackers. Thanks for reading )