Episode 626 | Scratching an Itch, Launching a Free SEO Tool, and Growing to $18k MRR

Rob Walling:
If you happen to be listening to this while you’re at Business of Software in Boston this week, my co-founder, Einar Vollset, is there live on the scene in Boston. And if you’d like to link up with him, if you’re interested in perhaps applying to TinySeed or, better yet, if you’re interested in potentially investing in our syndicate or in one of our next funds, you should reach out to Einar Vollset on Twitter. That’s E-I-N-A-R, V-O-L-L-S-E-T. His DMs are open. Or if you happen to see him in the hallway, just say hey. I’ve been a big fan of Mark Littlewood and the team at BOS since years, 2009 I think was the first one that I did attendee talk at and then I spoke at the next event. And as always, we wish Mark and his team at the best as they run their event this week.

Rob Walling:
It’s another episode of Startups For the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and this week I talk with Nick Swan, the founder of SEOTesting. We run through his experience launching a free tool, starting to charge for that, gaining traction, renaming the tool, getting a new domain name, rewriting the code base. It’s a really interesting and fascinating journey of growing SEOTesting.com to 18k MRR. Before we dive into our conversation, I want to thank you if you have rated this podcast in Apple Podcast, I’ve been trying to get to 1000 worldwide ratings, because there are so very few podcasts that have that number of ratings in the tool, and I believe when I started asking we were around high 800s and now I look today 977 ratings. And a rating doesn’t even need a review, you can just click five stars. So if you haven’t rated this podcast, I’d appreciate it.

Rob Walling:
Our most recent review is a five star review that says my favorite Startup podcast. It’s from Jazz Manders from Australia. I just spent eight and a half hours of a solo road trip listening to back to back Startups For the Rest of Us episodes, such a positive way to pass the time. I really appreciate that sentiment, Jazz Manders. And as always, these are the things that I bookmark and I read when I’m feeling discouraged. When I’m busy crying myself to sleep tonight, I think about these amazing ratings interviews and I really do appreciate them, and they do help this podcast find more listeners like you so thanks so much for helping out. And with that, let’s dive into my conversation with the founder of SEOTesting. Nick Swan, welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us.

Nick Swan:
Hi Rob, thanks for having me on. Excited to be on the show that I’ve listened to since the beginning, I think. Long time listener, first time caller or something, is that what I’ve got to say?

Rob Walling:
Yep. Something like that exactly. It’s great to have you on, man. We’ve interacted over the years, because I remembered you applied to TinySeed. You’re just one of the names that I recognized probably from Twitter or just MicroConf events or MicroConf Connect, whatever it is, and so it’s been cool getting to know you over the past several months. I want to give the podcast audience a chance to find out what you’re working on and where you are. And to start, I want to ask you’re running SEOTesting.com and curious where the business is, give folks an idea of where you’re at in the entrepreneurial journey.

Nick Swan:
Up until now we’ve been open with our numbers on Twitter. We do an update perhaps every quarter or so. At the moment we’re just over $18,000 monthly recurring revenue, just over 330 customers. There’s a small team of us, so there’s myself, Phil, who’s joined as a technical co-founder, which we’ll go into, and Tiago, who’s joined to help with customer service or customer support and some content, and then we make use of some freelancers and contractors and so on as well when and where we need them.

Rob Walling:
That sounds like a nice svelte team. I like those early days where it’s three to five people and you’re doing 20k MRI. Are you running at break even? Are you running negative right now given that you have a bit of TinySeed investment?

Nick Swan:
In general, we’re running at break even and that is mostly because any spare cash we would put into testing new marketing channels. Since having a TinySeed money come in, we’ve been back and forth and wondering what to do with it, so it’s still sitting in the bank account right now, which is a nice feeling having it there as a safety cushion type thing, but we’re going to invest that in one off projects or doing one off tests on different channels as well. So we’re going to go through a website redesign that will be a one off project and we’ll put some TinySeed money towards that, then we’re going to try some paid advertising channels that we’ll put the money towards as well. So we will in general run negatively I guess, but on a month to month basis I see it as being break even.

Rob Walling:
I realize I jumped the gun and didn’t do my standard read the H1. I’m supposed to say, “Your H1 is automate the reporting of page updates and changes, run SEO tests to see what works, track the performance of pages changed, tie your work to results in an exact and impactful way.” You want to give one example of how, I almost said webmaster, holy moly, a startup founder and internet marketer, someone who’s thinking about doing SEO, what would they use SEOTesting for?

Nick Swan:
It is a testing tool, that’s how we market it, that’s what we’ve called it, and we go through a bit of history of how we got to this point, but it’s basically a tool for reporting how a page has performed after you’ve made a change, so how it’s performed in the search results from a Google perspective. We’ll get the data before you made the change and then you can make your change and then compare it to the data after that change. So you can compare the clicks from Google, the impressions in the search results, the position of it and the click through rate as well. It’s interesting you say about the H1, we’ve just changed that last week from doing a bunch of customer interviews so it’s in a testing phase in its own, but from the testing point of view of the tool, it’s ended up having two uses.

Nick Swan:
So there is a testing aspect to it and that’s what a lot of customers use it for. So this is good if you are changing page titles, meta descriptions, and you want to test if the click through rate improves from those new page titles or meta descriptions, but we found out again from customer interviews that a lot of people and especially agencies are just using it as a general reporting tool. So as part of their client engagement and their retainer, they’re going to do some content refreshes on pages and things like that. And then so setting up a test, once they publish their changes, they can then show the client how it performed before they made their content refresh and compare it to afterwards to show how they’re making their impact results and giving them our return on investment and so on.

Rob Walling:
I find that so many internet marketing or online marketing SAS tools will start with the idea of, well, I imagine a marketer at a company can do this or a founder and our bootstrap solopreneur founder could use it and over time there usually becomes a use case for some agency to have some type of reporting or a dashboard or a client log. There’s some value to agencies. And sometimes that becomes the bigger and better part of the business because an agency, as a marketer at a SAS company or at a startup, there’s one person and maybe they do one project at a time, but at an agency, if they adopt something and they have 10, 20, 30 staff, suddenly that volume and that usage and even the value to them could be superior.

Nick Swan:
Certainly. And for a long time it’s been difficult for people doing SEO to show the results of their work as well, because it takes a long time or it can take a while for Google to index new content, for the results to start showing through. So anything that you can do to show the impact of your work in a quicker and more effective way, rather than having to look at data every day in Search Console and copy it and paste it into Excel and all those kind of things, it helps people in that way. I don’t know if it was on this podcast or another podcast I was listening to that said eventually all SAS tools just end up with a big reporting section ib their use, and eventually one of their benefits is the reports that come out of that tool. So we are at that point and it’s good. It’s been great talking to customers and finding this out, and that’s obviously how it’s impacting us in terms of changing our H1 and how we’re going to market it and talk to people about it as well.

Rob Walling:
And you sold a prior software company before this, so what led you to start SEOTesting? Now, for the listener, it wasn’t SEOTesting. When we started it was called SanityCheck. We’ll call it SEOTesting for the rest of the interview, but we will talk about that name change and the thought behind it. So you sell your prior startup, was it SAA?

Nick Swan:
No. So it was around Microsoft SharePoint. It was add-ins, web parts, like WordPress plugins but for Microsoft SharePoint, downloadable bits of software. And it was in the enterprise software space, but we weren’t really an enterprise software company. We were a small bootstrapped business. Again, it grew up to about 20 people. We started 2007. I think I sold my shares in it in 2013. I’d got to the point where I’d had enough of SharePoint. I saw it was changing in direction in a big way, so it was going a lot more cloud based so there’s going to have to be a big reworking of the kind of components and products that we’d built. My co-founder Brett still wanted to carry on with the business and so we came from an agreement where it was going to be a management buy out of my shares and we partnered on good terms, which is good.

Nick Swan:
The business is still going now and doing well, which is nice to see as well, but that gave me a bit of runway in terms of looking at what to do next. And what I find interesting is new ideas, new business models, that kind of thing. Lightning Tools was a previous company. I play golf so I thought I’m going to build websites for golf professionals. Turns out they don’t like paying money for golf professionals.

Rob Walling:
How’d that turn out? Yeah, exactly. I wished you’d have written in with a question here. I would’ve been like, “Oh, I hate to tell you don’t do things, but that’s…”

Nick Swan:
Well, I thought I like playing golf. I like going to golf courses. I can spend more time doing that and talking to golf professionals. It all sounds great. That was an idea that didn’t really work. So I ended up doing some affiliate marketing, so I built a voucher codes, website discount codes website. And that did really, really well as it went through Google updates and other people got impacted by updates and so on. And during that I was doing lots of click through rate testing, so we used the same page title format across all our retailer pages. And so coming up with a better crafted page title could lead to a nice increase in click through rate. It’s all a numbers game. You’ll get 100 clicks, four of those would click on an ad or on a discount code and you’d get a little small percentage of each sale.

Nick Swan:
So getting the page title could make a big difference to monthly revenue and so on. I started doing all this page title, click through rate testing, and it was just taking ages to track all the results in a spreadsheet, so every day looking at the results in Search Console and so on. And I think it was through your SEO tool that you made a big switch over from Google Analytics to Google Search Console for various reasons for your data, and so I think that made me think the Google Search Console API is something interesting to look at, and it was from there looking at Search Console. First of all, there was only three months worth of data available within that tool.

Nick Swan:
So the first thing I tried to build was just something that archived the data to put it all into a database and so on. And then it was then I realized that, hey, I can build some tooling around this testing thing to stop me having to look at the data manually each day, each week or whenever, and do some reporting around it. And that’s how the tool came out of just scratching my own itch really.

Rob Walling:
Got it. And so you were building this for your own purposes with this voucher code website. So it was an internal tool much like Drip was actually. It was an internal tool we built for ourselves and then realized this could be a product. And so did you realize there was more potential in SEOTesting and you bail on the voucher code or what happened with that business as you, I guess I’ll say, started focusing on SEOTesting?

Nick Swan:
The voucher codes sector is like any kind of affiliate marketing. It’s a real cutthroat business, so people will block out SEO, everything they can do to get ranking in Google and we were trying to do things the right way, but it was just really depressing seeing people buying thousands of links and ranking above you and Google doing absolutely nothing about it because it’s just a space they didn’t really care about or want to touch or improve. So as SEOTesting or SanityCheck gained a bit of usage from others in the community and so on, I diverted my attention to that. Again, because it was a new business model and a new tool, I don’t want to go to shiny objects syndrome type thing, but I’d done affiliate marketing and that voucher code space for three or four years and so SAS was a good thing to move into, I thought, and a new thing to try out and learn.
Rob Walling:
And so then you scratched your own itch, which if you’ve heard me I talk about this as scratch your own itch is a nice trait to have in a business you’re starting, but it’s not a panacea. It’s not like, “Well, you just do that and everything works.” It’s just Indie Hackers is littered with these projects of people who scratched their own itch and nothing came of it because no one else wanted it or no one was actually willing to pay for it, or you couldn’t reach people at any kind of scale. So you had built something that you wanted, did you do any validation beyond that or did you just start leaning into it and start marketing it to see if people wanted it?
Nick Swan:
I just started leaning into it to be honest. So I tried the approach of building things for other people, which was the Golf marketing website thing, and so I know this is survivorship bias in terms of this story, but I was in the mindset, well, if I build something and it’s useful for me and it’s saving myself time then that’s a good result out of this. And so it was bare bones SAS. I wouldn’t even call it a SAS app. It was just a tool that you could register for. It had the default bootstrap user interface, all that kind of stuff, and I was in a lot of or still am in a lot of SEO communities at the time, Facebook groups and Slack channels and so on. And so I just shared it there and said, “Look, here’s a free tool, give it a try, let me know what you think about it.” And that’s where the initial feedback and initial user group came from.
Rob Walling:
That’s interesting. So you did validate it because you built something for yourself, it probably didn’t require a ton of polish to make a free tool, and you basically say, “Here’s a free tool. Does anyone care?” And if it had been crickets, maybe wouldn’t have pursued it, but people signed up and started using it and then that was your early user base of people. Did you start getting feature requests and people wanting more to the tool?
Nick Swan:
Yeah. Early users, as you know, they love giving feedback and feature requests and so on. And so the feature requests started to roll in. Again, I was building an SEO tool, so it was things that were going to help me with my SEO work, and so a lot of the feature requests were good ones and I was able to build into the tool. And I guess we’ll come into how that perhaps made us have to choose a position that the tool is going to go into at a later date rather than being a general SEO tool. But the good thing about the SEO community is people are outspoken and willing to give feedback and get involved with free tools and help out, always willing to try stuff, which is great.
Rob Walling:
And so at this point, it’s very simple. It’s one or two main features. It’s the archiving of Google Search Console and tracking of results over time. Is that pretty much it?
Nick Swan:
Pretty much it, yeah. From that point of view, people just started saying, “Well, I’m doing this in Excel, can your tool do that? I’m exporting all the data and then doing this in Excel, can you build able a report for me that’ll do that?” And it was always like, “Yeah, that’s a great idea. This is a great idea. Let’s do it.” I miss those days thinking about actually, because it was so much easier to build stuff quickly.
Rob Walling:
Where it’s exciting. I can crank this out in a day.
Nick Swan:
I know. And people are like, “Wow, that’s amazing. You’ve done it so quickly.”
Rob Walling:
Because they’re used to month long road roadmaps or quarter long roadmaps or whatever. And I also love the refrain of I’m doing this in Excel, can you build it? Because, as we say often on the show, it’s like every Excel spreadsheet is a SAS opportunity to some extent for another. So then you have a free tool, you’re getting requests to for different reports. At what point do you think I need to start charging for this?
Nick Swan:
It’s interesting. I can’t remember. This is back in 2016, 2017, so it’s quite a while ago, and it was only me working on it. It was probably five months as running as a free beater. So that’s quite a period of time I think. And it must have been at some point I was like, “Wow, I need to start charging for this. I’m a host and a server,” that kind of stuff. And also I need to find out if it is a product that people are willing to pay for, because it’s all well and good that people are using a free beater and so on, but if I want to take it to the next level we’ve got to check that people are willing to pay for it.
Rob Walling:
The Paul Graham quote is the hardest part is building something people want. And I’ve always tacked on building something people want and are willing to pay for, because I’ve seen too many people build things that people want. They want to use it, but there’s no actual desire to pay for it. So five months isn’t bad. I have seen folks launch free tools, get a bunch of users, and then they either let it go on too long where it’s a free tool or they try to charge for it and no one’s willing to pay. That might be called the solopreneur or the indie hacker trap of just, well, I’m going to get as many people. As you were doing it, did you ever have that doubt of I’m giving away a lot, am I wasting a bunch of time?
Nick Swan:
Not really, because, again, I was building a tool for myself so I had that mindset of, well, if no one’s going to pay for it, it’s still saving myself time and my day to day SEO work. So I always had that to fall back on, because I certainly will have had those doubts, will anyone pay for it? That’s really the justification that you’re looking for. And for me, I enjoy building things that to save people time, help them solve problems and they enjoy using and the monthly recurring revenue and the money that comes in from that is by proxy of doing those things, so the money’s good obviously, and the monthly recurring revenue is nice and it’s nice to see it go up, but I think it’s just a result of doing those things in terms of building stuff that people find really, really useful.
Rob Walling:
It sounds like your happiness comes from the building, the making, the creating, and if you had infinite money, you would still build, make and create. Is that right?
Nick Swan:
I think so. Yeah. I can’t see a day where I retire. Whatever happens, I’ll still be working on things and coding on things. Maybe I might go back to the golf professional website idea and do it for free.
Rob Walling:
I love that. So you have a free tool, you’re five months in, you’re thinking I should start charging for this, and what’s next? How do you come up with your initial pricing? And what was the rollout when you told people, “I’m going to start charging for this tool.”?
Nick Swan:
Well, I put together the plans and I started with a price and it was far too low, so we did it on a per website that you’re going to add to the tool model and we scaled it that way. I think it started at $10 per month, which looking back on it in reflection it should have been higher than that, but you’re always nervous and worried and you want to get people on board. But I was all ready to turn the paid plans on, send out the email newsletter to say that we’re going to start charging, but we had been warning people as they signed up for the beater that at some point this is going to become a paid product.
Nick Swan:
But then we’ve got three small children and we had the news that we had to go to the doctors with one of our kids, and we went there, it as a Friday afternoon and a doctor said, “You need to go straight to the hospital.” Didn’t say what it was, but you know it’s going to be serious from that point of view and we were told that our daughter who was three and a half at the time was diagnosed with leukemia. So it went from literally it was the Friday, the Monday I think I was going to turn on paid plans and launch that, and so that turned everything upside down.
Rob Walling:
I can imagine. Really sorry to hear that. So did you postpone the pricing change? Were you just consumed with essentially you have a family crisis going on? How do you react to that?
Nick Swan:
It was just left as it was at the time. So for the first three days, we were just stuck in the hospital, we didn’t leave just as they did tests on Isabelle. Literally, as soon as we got there, she started having blood transfusions and platelet transfusions within two hour, so it was a real whirlwind of stuff going on and a lot to take on board. Then we went from our district hospital up to the main hospital in Bristol where they do all the children’s cancer treatment and so on, and so we were up there for two and a half weeks. I had my laptop with me. I could do bits and pieces.
Nick Swan:
I’d not announced to anybody that the launch of paid plans was coming, so it was just a case of just leaving things as they were and let the free beater continue for a bit longer. But from a work perspective, everything was just on hold for two weeks. Thankfully, story’s got a good outcome, Isabelle’s treatment went really, really well. She’s just a normal nine year old girl now, but it was obviously a stressful time and looking back on it I don’t know how to summarize. It really is difficult.
Rob Walling:
These are these hard things that we want to perhaps summarize and I’m glad there’s happy ending. We want to summarize it in, well, it was a hard time, but I got through it, which is true, but there’s also probably scars. Look, I’ve been through with the deaths in our families and Sherry losing her brother to suicide have been through stuff that has completely decimated us, and I don’t know that I’ll ever heal from that fully. There are still battle scars and scar tissue that I think is just not going to go away for me. Did it recur after they figured it out? And I don’t want to say cure, but what is it? It goes into remission and then she’s fine. Has it been okay since then?
Nick Swan:
Yeah. And it’s funny how you say she’s lucky and you look back on it and say, “We were lucky,” because she had the most common type of leukemia from diagnosis and the most treatable type. And so although it was two years of treatment and in and out of hospital on a weekly and daily basis, once you get through the first six months, it’s called maintenance, so she has 18 months worth of small amounts of chemotherapy and stuff like that. Once the intense bit of treatment is done, the biggest risk to her was infection from other illnesses like chickenpox and septicemia and things like that, but again, thankfully she got through all that without any big issue. The funny thing was because as a family we closed in as a group and we couldn’t go anywhere to soft play or swimming, the normal things you do as a kid. I think we ended up having six months of normality and then COVID happened and it was all locked down again anyway. So when it did go back to being locked down, we were like, “Well, this is almost like normal life for us.”
Rob Walling:
What an interesting adaptive advantage, because you’re like, “We’ve already been doing this.”
Nick Swan:
And in terms of battle scars, it’s funny what you’re saying, I still have. And this is part of the reason for wanting to join TinySeed as well. I have issues with long-term planning because for such a long period of time we would make plans and I would make plans in terms of what I want to do with the product, set some goals, things we want to try and accomplish and where we wanted to get to, but then Isabelle would spike a temperature, we’d be in hospital for a week and all those plans will get thrown out the window. And so I still have an issue with thinking long term.
Nick Swan:
Joining TinySeed has been one of the reasons for doing that was to set some more lofty goals, think a bit bigger, think about perhaps where we can take the business too. But again, it was just a case of Isabelle’s finished, we can get back to a bit of normality, we booked a holiday and so on, but then COVID hits and lockdown, holidays canceled. And so I can see the things that was affecting me from Isabelle’s illness, I can imagine it’s affected other people in terms of long term planning and stuff like that. It’s interesting.
Rob Walling:
Well, obviously glad things worked out and amazing to be working with you with TinySeed to help you think more long term about stuff. I’m curious, so two and a half weeks you’re in the hospital and then when does this click happen in you where you’re like, “It’s not just the time, it’s the mental energy to I’m going to do this big rollout of pricing and charging people for this product.” How long did you wait on that?
Nick Swan:
I think it was about three months. And so after the initial two weeks had been in hospital full-time, I think I sent out an email to all the people who were using SanityCheck, as it was called then, and just said, “Look, this is what happened.” Because I’d become quite good friends with these people as well, because I know I’m them from Facebook communities and they’ve been using the tool and we’ve been emailing backwards and forwards and stuff. They’ve been emailing in over those couple of weeks and they hadn’t heard from me, so I just let everyone know what was going on. And so it was quite nice actually over that 18 months period of Isabelle’s treatment, I’d keep people updated how she was doing, which was really nice. And so in hospital I had my laptop with me, not a lot of time to use it apart from in the evenings and late at night, but there was a lot of time of doing nothing where I could think and plan.
Nick Swan:
And so there was a lot of time of planning and thinking things out on paper. And so when you sit down at your computer and you bash something out, but then you realize you’re working on the wrong thing or you’ll go back and forth between different things, I did all of that thinking away from a computer and on pen and paper and so on, so that when I did have a bit of time to work, it was like I knew exactly what I was going to do and get done. And so looking back on that time, I was probably as productive as I would’ve been in terms of if I was in front of a computer for the full time, just because I did all of my thinking away from a computer. So then when I had two hours to work, it was really focused work that I made sure I got done what I wanted to get done and had it all planned out.
Rob Walling:
That’s super interesting. So then you had all this, I think of it caulking a bow or you’re just pulling back this crossbow and getting ready to let it go and launch this, so you do, you start charging, you let people know this is the pricing. Now the first question I have is did you only charge for additional features or did you charge people for stuff they had already been getting for free for six months? And then the second question is how did it all work out?
Nick Swan:
There was nothing free. We went just to having a paid plan. So we went from free beta to there being a 14 day trial, and then you’d start paying after those 14 days of trialing the product out. And it went well. There was an initial surge of customers, obviously from the people that had been using it as a free beater. And then obviously after the first couple of months where you get that big surge, you get a bit of a reset and then you realize that you need to do some marketing and letting other people know about the tool, and you start the slow SAS ramp of death from that point.
Rob Walling:
I want to call something out because it sounds like from the start you had said, “This is a free beta, but we will charge for this.” It wasn’t this is a free tool and suddenly you started charging for it, because that’s a mistake I see a lot of folks make. Were you pretty intentional about communicating to everyone it’s free for now?
Nick Swan:
Yeah, we had that on the landing page, probably the registration page and so on, so I didn’t want to set people’s expectations that this was going to be a free beater forever and then do a beta and switch, whatever it’s called, and say, “Hey, you need to start charging now.” It was always going to be this is going to be a paid product at some point. It’s an interesting question as to if no one had paid for it what I’d have done then, whether I’d have switched back to a [inaudible 00:26:49] because of the thing I said about just wanting to enjoying helping people and building things that people find useful, what I’d have done then, but we were always very upfront about we’re going to charge. And it’s interesting, I keep going backwards and forth between I and we, but it was only me at that particular time, so it’s funny.
Rob Walling:
Sometimes it’s hard and now you have co-founder Phil. And so were you happy with that initial, I’ll call it a launch, in essence of paid launch, and did it get to a few thousand MRR?
Nick Swan:
It got to a couple of thousand monthly recurring revenue. It continued to grow then and it did well. We did quite well with some paid Twitter advertising. Twitter’s good in terms of a SEO community. Again, I say good, there’s lots of moaning and shouting and arguing on there, but there are lots of SEO people on Twitter, which is when people are all together in one place, it’s a good place to be able to do some advertising also on. And so we’ve got some initial traction on Twitter. Word of mouth has always been good. So people like speaking about the good tools that they’re finding to help them with their SEO work. So we’ve always had good word of mouth marketing, which I know is difficult to scale, but it’s invaluable I guess from a thing you can’t buy or pay for.
Nick Swan:
I’m not sure if that makes sense or is right, so it continued to grow slowly. It’s funny because when we were working on Microsoft SharePoint, we were building on someone else’s platform and every two or three years they’d release a new version of SharePoint that we’d need to weigh our features and things that we built, and so I always said, “I’m never going to build on someone else’s platform.” We obviously did in terms of building on Google Search Console API and so our main part of the tool at this point was the archiving of the data, because only three months of data was available in Search Console. In January after, so this would’ve been 2018, they launched 18 months worth of data for everybody. So that had an impact then in terms of plans for the tool, what we were going to do with it. We didn’t know what was going to happen in terms of people having all that data available, but it had a long term impact on our eventual plans of what we were going to do with it and so on.
Rob Walling:
With HitTail, which is the SEO tool that you mentioned earlier that used Search Console, I was using, it was an unofficial API to scrape Search Console and they would break it about every year or so, and so I’d have to go and hack the code to fix it. And so I was frustrated with that and said, “Next company I start, no platform risk.” And then you start an ESP and you’re like, “I send emails and I can use Mailgun or SendGrid or whatever I want to do, spit out my own service if I need to. No platform risk.” Well, the platform there are the black lists, the spam list, and they are run by just random people, and one person sent an email to the head of one of these lists and said, “These guys are letting people send spam,” and they blocked us with no judge jury. They were the execution.
Rob Walling:
And it’s like, “Screw you.” And they’re one of the top 10 or top five in the world. So it was all of a sudden our IPS were blocked and SendGrid’s freaking out because they’re SendGrid’s IPS at the time. And it’s just there’s platform rescue everywhere is the unfortunate reality. I think there’s different grades of it, different levels. So you start having success, the tool is called SanityCheck at the time, at a certain point you rename it to SEOTesting and you got the .com for that, which is a great domain. Talk me through that, either the thought process, if the domain suddenly appeared and you’re like, “That’s it,” or if SanityCheck you’re like, “This just isn’t it long term,” and you went out seeking it.
Nick Swan:
There were a few things really. So because we were archiving lots of Search Console data, the database was getting quite big and I’m a developer or database administrator, so at some point I knew this was going to become an issue and I was going to have some sleepless nights about it. So there was a thought process of, well, now there’s 18 months worth of data available in Search Console anyway, do I need to be archiving all this data? That was one part of the thought process. The second thing was we’d plateaued in monthly recurring revenue and it started to get harder and harder in terms of getting new customers, so I got to the point where I did a bunch of customer interviews, I looked at some data, so what good customers or successful customers were using the tool for, and it all came back to the SEO testing functionality within the tool.
Nick Swan:
They didn’t really care about the archiving of data anymore. 18 months worth of data was more than enough for a lot of people. And SEO and Google changed so much that data from 18 months plus ago anyway isn’t worth that much. It’s not as valuable as it used to be because of the changes in the search result pages that are going on. So having that data from the customer interviews positioning was a big thing at the time as it still is now. I think April Dunford’s book had just come out, so I’d read that. I actually arranged a call with Asia Arangio, so from her agency she was doing free 30 minute consultation calls. So I got a call booked with her, jumped on a cal, and I said what I was thinking of doing about I’m focusing on the SEO testing bit of functionality.
Nick Swan:
I also said as well to her, and we had been getting this feedback from customers, because we had added ad hoc reports that people were requesting, people were seeing it as a general SEO tool or were thinking it was a general SEO tool. And so they were asking how does this compare to Ahrefs, how does it compare to SEMrefs? And I don’t want to compete with those companies. One’s a public listed company. One’s a massive company. And I’m a customer of Ahrefs as well, so I use their back-link data in bits and pieces. We were never going to go into that space that they occupy, but people were comparing us against those. So I said to Asia, “I’m thinking a positioning myself as an SEO testing tool to move myself away from being compared to those as the bigger tools.”
Nick Swan:
And she said, “That’s a great idea. Positioning yourself away from competitors is a thing to do.” And so she gave it a thumbs up as an idea. The idea was then to focus on the SEO testing functionality. You then, I say you as in you would probably think of doing the same thing, you just start checking domain names. And so I just checked SEOTesting randomly, and I think it was for sale on one of the domain name marketplaces, so I made an offer, quite a low offer, I think to start with and they came back and said, “It’s too low, but here’s a counter offer of, I think, it was $2,500,” which I thought was good value for money.
Rob Walling:
That’s a steal.
Nick Swan:
And so he was quite open, he said, “Look, I’m an IT person as well. I’m a marketer. I think you’ll do some interesting stuff with it. I just want to see the domain name put to use.” Which is from a people that own domain names and market and then sell them is you don’t usually get that take from people. So I was very grateful we bought it off in and that made the decision to go to the SEO testing route cemented it. I then decided to rebuild the app from scratch, which was we can go back and forth on whether that was a wise decision or not, but I needed to remove a big part of the archiving functionality that was in SanityCheck and work directly with just the Search Console API. So it made sense to rebuild it from scratch, but throughout those four months of rebuilding, I was like, “Is this the right decision?” From a positioning point of view, as much as should I be rewriting it from scratch point of view.
Rob Walling:
That’s a big risk. In retrospect it seems to me like it was the right decision, you agree?
Nick Swan:
Totally. Yeah. You’ve got the question about product market fit and my answer is I don’t feel with SanityCheck we ever got to product market fit, but with SEOTesting from launching paid plans on that, because I did a small free beater on that as well, because COVID hit exactly the week that we were launching SEOTesting, so I was at a point again where I was going to launch paid plans for a tool and then something big happened that I had to change those plans, but from the point of SEOTesting launching paid plans within nine months we got to the same monthly recurring revenue point that SanityCheck had got to in two and a half years. And so although a lot of the functionality was the same within the tools, just the naming and the positioning of the tool just made it a lot clearer to people what it was we were doing and it made more sense to them.
Rob Walling:
And that does lead me to our Startups For the Rest of Us segment. Nick, when did you know you had product market fit? And when I say when, by the way, just for the record, when is not just, well, April 2020, because that’s not actually helpful, but it’s when and how. What were the signs where you felt like this is really working, I have built something people want and are willing to pay for. And folks who listen to this podcast know that I asked this question a little tongue in cheek because product market fit I don’t believe it’s a binary, it is a continuum, and so it’s almost like when did you believe you started having stronger product market fit? We could say there’s one to 10 and when did you hit a six or seven or whatever, but it’s just in terms of when did things really feel like they were clicking and it’s like, “We are solving a problem for a lot of people, people are willing to pay for it, and now it’s more how do we get in front of more people.”?
Nick Swan:
It was definitely when we matched the SanityCheck monthly recurring revenue within nine months, but also I’d say, this isn’t a quantifiable thing, but it was just a feeling. It was just people understood the product more, they knew what they were signing up for, it was just an easier sell, and so pretty quickly within terms of launching SEOTesting I knew it was the right decision in terms of a positioning thing, but then also in terms of a product market fit, it was definitely the right decision.
Rob Walling:
And as we move towards wrapping up, I want to cover one topic that I think will be interesting to folks. And it’s you took on a co-founder, Phil, who you’ve mentioned a couple times, but a late co-founder because you started building in 2015, 16 and Phil came on in 2020, 2021?
Nick Swan:
Yes, that’s right.
Rob Walling:
And so what was your decision making process there of bringing another individual who has enough equity in a company that you refer to him as your co-founder?
Nick Swan:
When I started building the first version of SEOTesting, my previous software company, we’d got up to 20 people. The affiliate marketing website, we had 15 people. I just had enough of managing people and doing HR type things, and so with SanityCheck I decided, as an experiment, I was just going to run it as a one person software company just to see how big I could grow it as one person. So I did make use of contractors and freelancers to help out with various design tasks and things like that, but we got to a reasonable moment of monthly recurring revenue just as me, but a lot of people will think this is the dream in terms of waking up and deciding what you want to work on, but that is good for so long and then you need a bit of direction. So I made the decision the summer of last year to grow a team. I was just tired, bored, whichever way you want to put it, of working by myself.
Nick Swan:
I wanted people to brainstorm with, to celebrate the victories with, all that kind of stuff, and so I made the decision that I was going to build a team and I, first of all, looked at who I know already and who I’ve enjoyed working with in the past, and Phil was one of those people. He was building his own SAS tool, but he hadn’t quite got any traction on it yet. So I said to him, “You fancy doing some contracting on some specific bits of functionality we want built?” So he started doing it on that basis to start with, and we got along so well I was like, “Look, do you want to come on board full time? You can take technical co-founder status. There’s a chance of going through this TinySeed route, which will be good for you from SEO testing perspective, but also in what you want to do in the future in terms of building your own SAS tool as well.”
Nick Swan:
And so we’ve gone on from that point and it’s going well. To the point, I’ve got to say actually last Monday I committed to not writing any code anymore.
Rob Walling:
That’s a big step for a developer who’s been writing for a decade or two. How does that feel?
Nick Swan:
Actually it feels really good. I know when we got together in London for the TinySeed get together, this was one of my concerns around I should be spending more time marketing, but I enjoy coding. And I’ve actually got to the point now where I want to stop coding and I want to spend more time on marketing, which I think is a nice place to be in.
Rob Walling:
And I went through the same process and people would ask me for years and years, “What do you do?” I’m a developer. And suddenly I was like, “I still say I’m a developer, but I’m not actually writing code anymore.” And so I think it can be part of our identity and leaving that behind can be challenging, but I know that you’d been thinking about it for a long time. I don’t think this is something that suddenly came out of the blue.
Nick Swan:
No. To prepare for this interview, interestingly, I went through the past two years of journals, so I write a journal every couple of times a week or so on with thoughts about what’s going on and so on, and the past year was this is a marketing week, I need to focus on marketing, I need to get some marketing done, and that was a reoccurring theme. And I can see that although that was my aim for that week, I didn’t get much marketing work done. So having read through those journals, I felt a real sense of frustration and dropping the code is something I need to do for us to make progress, because it’s not just me now. There’s a team around SEOTesting and we’ve taken a commitment to TinySeed in terms of taking some investment and growing the business, so it feels like the right time for me and the right thing to do as well.
Rob Walling:
Nick, thanks so much for joining me on the show today. If folks want to keep up with you on Twitter, you are Nick Swan, spelled just like it sounds. And of course SEOTesting.com if they want to see what you’re working on. Thanks again for joining me.
Nick Swan:
Thanks, Rob.
Rob Walling:
Thanks for listening and subscribing to this podcast. It’s amazing being able to put myself into a creative endeavor like this and have so many folks tuning in and getting value and inspiration strategies and tactics from the work that we’re doing here. So thanks for listening all these months or years, however long you’ve been around. I hope you’re enjoying TinySeed Tales season three. We have another couple episodes of that season before we wrap it. I’ll be back in your ears again same time, same place next week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 626.