<p><b>IN SHORT</b></p><p>We started our project in March 2024, inspired by a famous tweet from Danny Postma. His framework for starting a business is the following: you should find a keyword that has:</p><ul><li>&gt;500 monthly search volume for 1 country (which means enough people are looking for this)</li><li>&lt;20 keyword difficulty (which means low competition so it’s feasible to rank in the top 10 on google with some basic SEO work)</li><li>Has enough related keywords so that you create pages around those keywords for even more organic traffic</li></ul><p>If you have found a keyword like that, build a good and relevant product around it, optimize it for SEO (content and backlinks) and it will get organic traffic on auto-pilot.</p><p>But we noticed when we followed the steps of Danny Postma to find these keywords, it was not that easy. The free tools didn’t give us all the necessary information and the paying keyword tools were expensive and/or overwhelming for non-SEO experts. So we decided to create a tool to make it easier.</p><p><b>KEY HIGHLIGHTS:<b></b></b></p><ul><li>Founded on March 2024</li><li>#1 Product of the day on Product Hunt</li><li>Annual revenue: $26,000</li><li>Profit margin: around 90%</li><li>Built with no-code tools</li></ul><p><b>TEAM</b></p><p>We are Lee and Katrien (aka Katt). Lee lives in the UK and is an experienced Bubble developer. Katrien (aka Katt) lives in Belgium and works in content marketing for different companies. We are a great team with an aligned vision (keep it simple, pretty and efficient) and our skill set complements each other.</p><p>We are selling our product as we want to focus on other projects but we also have the feeling that we reached the ceiling with our ‘marketing skills’. We strongly believe that there is so much potential (2.2 million people are looking for business ideas on Google every month) but it needs someone with the right skill set to level up.</p><p><b>THE PRODUCT</b></p><p>Our startup started as a tool that just checked if your idea met the defined ‘Danny Postma’ keyword criteria (now known as single search). People could use it for free for 3 tries. If they wanted to check more they had to buy credits. Next to that we added a curated idea library (just an airtable with keywords curated from ahrefs). After a successful Product Hunt launch we kept improving the product.</p><p>The product exists now out of 4 main components (short video here):</p><ul><li>Single search (works with credits): checks if your idea fits the criteria</li><li>Smart search (works with credits): you input a topic and it returns a list of keywords that fit the criteria</li><li>Idea Library: Curated ideas with business potential that fit the criteria</li><li>How-To Guides: Step-by-step guides that guide you from keyword to product</li></ul><p><b>BUSINESS MODEL</b></p><p>After experimenting with pricing in the first month, where we offered the different products separately (buy credits or buy library), we quickly settled on this bundle approach:</p><ul><li>Year plan: People pay a one-time fee that gives them access to the library &amp; guides for 1 year and receive 150 credits to use.</li><li>Lifetime plan: People pay a one-time fee that gives them access to the library &amp; guides forever and get 150 credits to use.</li><li>Credits: When people run out of credits they can buy new credits</li></ul><p>The price for the year plan is $79 and for the lifetime plan $99. The credits packages cost between $12-$48. We have a profit margin around 90%.</p><p><b>TECH STACK</b></p><p><b>Bubble</b> (around $60 per month)</p><p>Bubble is a full stack no-code web builder that enables anyone to build and design powerful web and mobile apps – without code. With wide-ranging features including a straightforward drag-and-drop editor, pre-built components, an AI page generator, and built-in database and logic functionality, it’s quicker than ever to build secure, professional applications. It empowers non-technical persons so they don’t need to be dependent on engineers. Another great advantage is that you can ship new features in hours/days instead of weeks.</p><p><b>Data For SEO API </b>(around $140 per month)</p><p>DataForSEO is the API we use for all the keyword data. With their trust-worthy data-mining algorithms and their credits-based pricing they are a great solution.</p><p><b>Bloghandy </b>(free)</p><p>Bloghandy is a simple SEO-optimized blog platform that we use to publish our blog articles and our guides.</p><p><b>Loops</b> (free)</p><p>Loops is a clean and user-friendly email platform we use to send onboarding -, product update - and marketing emails with.</p><p><b>Substack</b> (free)</p><p>Substack is used to send our branded newsletter. We chose Substack as it’s free to use and we can also tap into their growth network to get new subscribers.</p><p><b>Analytics</b></p><p>For analytics we have been using different tools. We started with free tool Microsoft Clarity (March-July). In July we switched to Plausible so we could track conversions. We weren’t able to set up tracking correctly so now we are giving Datafast ($9 per month) a try.</p><p><b>Crisp </b>(free)</p><p>Crisp is the chat widget on our website that we use to answer questions from potential customers and users.</p><p><b>MARKETING</b></p><p>To turn website visitors into leads (who are not ready to purchase) we have a free <b>branded newsletter</b>. Every 2 weeks we share 3 free keywords. It’s a great way to stay top of mind, educate users and promote our platform in a subtle way (most of the time just 1 line and a CTA at the end). There are 5500+ people on the newsletter list. The content of the newsletter is recycled on Medium and sometimes on Reddit and Indiehackers.</p><p>Next to that we build our startup in public on <b>Twitter</b>. We repurpose content from the newsletter. We plug our platform under business ideas related posts.</p><p>We have an<b> affiliate program</b> (via LemonSqueezy) which brought in a total of 16 customers.</p><p>And we set up the ground work for <b>SEO</b> by identifying low competition keywords and wrote some blog posts about it.  We also built a system to easily create category pages again around relevant keywords (for example: AI business ideas).  These category pages are easy to manage in our app and super quick to create.</p><p>Results: Articles and blog posts get impressions but not a lot of clicks.</p><p><b>THE GOOD</b></p><p><b>Ready to scale</b></p><p>Our startup has a high conversion rate (&gt;1.5%), a unique and loved product and a high profit margin. It’s ready to scale without any extra dev work.</p><p><b>Systems and processes</b></p><p>We set-up systems and processes so it’s easy to run the platform.</p><p><b>New customers</b></p><p>New customers don’t require any work as this all runs automatically (upgrading, onboarding emails,...).</p><p>Main process to keep it running:</p><ul><li>Add new ideas in the library every other week (takes +- 1 hour)</li><li>Select 3 ideas to write a newsletter issue about</li><li>Publish the newsletter on Substack (takes 30 minutes). We have a Claude Project that helps with writing.</li><li>Repurpose content on Medium, Reddit, X, Indiehackers (takes 2 hours)</li></ul><p><b>Customer support</b></p><p>Only a few questions per week via chat.</p><p><b>SEO optimised pages </b></p><p>The system we set up to create SEO-optimised category pages makes it super easy and quick (10 minutes per page) to create them.</p><p>In our platform app we have an admin page where you can:</p><ul><li>Click create new page</li><li>Add ideas from the library</li><li>Write title and description</li><li>Publish</li><li>Page is automatically added to the footer and overview page</li></ul><p><b>No-Code</b></p><p>The complete product is built with No-Code which means it’s easy to transfer, ideal for non technical persons and it helps you ship fast.</p><p>Loved and unique product.</p><p>There are a lot of keyword tools. But they are expensive, have a learning curve if you are new to SEO and they are overwhelming with 100 features our customers don’t need. Our platform stands out with its simplicity and clear focus.</p><p><b>The Bad + Opportunities</b></p><p>No organic traffic.</p><p>No marketing on auto-pilot because organic traffic is not there yet. So our platform requires other marketing efforts to acquire users. At this moment all organic clicks are from branded queries. But we did the groundwork for SEO (blog articles and category pages) so with patience or optimizations (technical improvements? higher domain rating?) it can start to kick in…</p><p><b>API risks</b></p><p>Our platform needs to use an API to get the search data. This means you will always need to pay to use their API and are dependent on their quality. So far we had no problems and it seems Data For SEO is a trust-worthy brand.</p><p><b>Recurring value / revenue</b></p><p>A tool to find business ideas is not something you need every day. Still, we think there is recurring revenue potential. Look at successful companies like trends.vc, exploding topics and gummy search people pay for every month/year. By adding features that give the user reasons to return more often there might be  potential to switch to a subscription business model.</p><p>Some ideas:</p><ul><li>Keyword alerts</li><li>Trend alerts</li><li>In-depth reports every week or month</li><li>…</li></ul><p><b>Credits spent</b></p><p>We are always focused on acquiring new users and not really on how to increase usage with our existing users. By focusing on adding features that make them return and spend more this can be increased.</p><p>Some ideas:</p><ul><li>Automated emails to return</li><li>Charge 1 credit to see SERP results</li><li>Add feature where you can look for keywords around upcoming trends</li><li>Charge 1 credit to let AI brainstorm product idea, features, monetization, mvp, step by step plan, marketing, backlinks, …</li><li>…</li></ul><p><b>Upselling potential</b></p><p>We probably left some money on the table by not recommending tools (with affiliate links) or creating templates and boilerplates (directory / job board/ …)</p><p><b>Level up marketing (Video, ads, social media marketing, SEO)</b></p><p>The marketing we did has been pretty limited. Video, ads, consistent social media marketing, SEO, … there is a lot of untapped potential and room to grow.</p></br>✅ $26,357 in Annual Revenue✅ 586 customers✅ Business model: Credits✅ Built with Bubble