Learning Web Development & Launching a SaaS in 50 days

[Aulig]

Weeeellll, I've been slacking a bit. Haven't really been working on this, as I was busy with my bachelors thesis and my last exam (its on monday).
To be honest, I would've had time to work on it, but I've been lacking motivation and I didn't really have the energy, as I'm also moving.

So a few days ago I decided I should do just a bit of work on the website, just updating stuff to make sure there's no security vulnerabilities etc. So when I go around testing if everything's still working after the update, it turns out my order form was broken this whole time...

So HUGELY important learning: add error reporting and automated tests you regularly execute. At least add error reporting so you get notified when a user triggers an error, as that's very little work and there's free solutions for it.

And then, to make matters worse, Google decided to fuck me up badly. Remember the huge SERP gains I posted in my last update? Well, those were gone and I've dropped to new lows (4th and 5th page). Couldn't see any negative SEO involved (I'm not really a competitor worth doing negative SEO on yet anyways). Well, this really messed with my motivation and I started blaming myself, thinking it might have been because of the error in the checkout flow. Maybe google somehow picked up huge bounce rates or something and is pushing me back in the SERPs for good? I was wondering how long it'd take to get another chance where google would improve my rankings to see whether the user experience has improved.

But then (just before I started writing this post), everything changed again


I bounced back up! The drop was on september 13th, and today, on september 19th, the rankings improved to pre-drop levels. I know from experience that drops often precede upwards movement in rankings, but I didn't expect it to be such a hard drop.
Of course, I hoped that it would be a drop before a jump, but still I can't tell you how relieved I am right now. It really would've sucked going into my self-employment journey with the huge ranking drop as a start.

Anyways, now you know what I've been up to. I haven't quit this journey and hopefully never will (at least not unsuccessfully ). I hope you're looking forward to my more frequent future updates and keep working on your own projects too. If I can work for 10 months on a project I planned to have ready in 50 days, you can stay dedicated to your project too. Good luck my friends.

 

[Aulig]

Also just noticed one of my Reddit backlinks dropped. The subreddit got banned. Guess Reddit is not a fan of those sellers that just create tons of subreddits on one account and post a bit of spam on them. The subreddit I created myself, where I mirror my blogposts using IFTTT, is still up, so doing something like that seems to be way more long-term and probably more useful in google's eyes than just buying reddit backlinks.

 

[Aulig]

Update on my SERPs & search impressions:




Those keywords are basically spread on the second page

Will be interesting to see how things progress. I'll continue working on the product and some translation issues I found on the website.

 

[Aulig]

Also, I have an article ranking on the second page of my target keywords. I'd prefer my homepage ranking there though. I'll have to see how I can fix that, probably adding more content to my homepage and eventually 301 redirecting the blogpost there.

Because basically my homepage is conversion optimized and looks a lot better, while the blogpost has more information. I hope I can combine them in a way to get the best of both worlds.

 

[Aulig]

I've now added more content to my homepage and improved its conversion rate (to checkout). Still have a lot more ideas on how to improve that, for example that users dont need to sign up with a password, just enter their email.

Currently the blog article I don't want ranking is still moving up the ranks and is on page 1 (ranks 3 - 8) for my german keywords and almost on page 1 for my english keywords. Great news, just that I want my homepage ranking there instead I still hope I can switch them out by just giving the homepage more content without having to 301 redirect, as I fear that could also make me lose my rankings. Traffic has been increasing along with it, almost 100 unique organic search visitors per week at the moment:

A part of my product broke and I need to wait for a 3rd party to hopefully fix it asap. In the meantime I have some other development work to do though too.

Edit: Just checked, according to GSC my homepage wasn't recrawled since the changes, so I'll definitely wait a while before making more changes on it.

 

[Aulig]

Good stuff, my plan has been working out. In general, my impressions are still growing:


Also, conversion rate to checkout improved since my changes. Adding more content to the homepage helped a lot too, it's getting a lot more impressions now.

I also solved the issue with the broken product part

 

[Aulig]

Still dealing with the cannibalization issue: The dotted line is the blog article I don't want to be ranking, the other line is my homepage which I want to rank. As you can see, the homepage definitely caught up but didn't surpass the article like I wouldve hoped. I'll give it more time and hope the guest posts which I'll point to the homepage (when I get to building them) will help. Because at the moment, the blog article also has more links pointing to it, so maybe that's making a difference too.

Apart from that I have my bachelors degree now and can focus on this fulltime for the next ~6 months!

 

[Aulig]

Heya everyone!

Good news, just got my first sale! $50/month coming into the bank. Now I just need to make sure I can deliver, which does include fixing some issues lol.

Wish me luck

 

[axcer]

Congrats and best of luck!

 

[sfnet]

Heya everyone!

Good news, just got my first sale! $50/month coming into the bank. Now I just need to make sure I can deliver, which does include fixing some issues lol.

Wish me luck

You can't fail your first customer. Good luck

 

[NachoMan]

Heya everyone!

Good news, just got my first sale! $50/month coming into the bank. Now I just need to make sure I can deliver, which does include fixing some issues lol.

Wish me luck

Congrats! Please let us know how it goes.

 

[Aulig]

Congrats and best of luck!

You can't fail your first customer. Good luck

Congrats! Please let us know how it goes.

Thanks guys!
I've created a bit of a spin-off of my product that is a bit worse in the user experience, but will work for more of the clients. I'll use it for all clients where my original product doesn't work well. I'm in contact with the first client to deliver the product (its a digital download initially).

And just 2 hours ago I got another order! About $48/month. I'm a bit stressed out now and have no clue where all these orders are coming from lol. I still need to do a bit of development work, which I hope I can finish ASAP so I can deliver my orders.

Thanks to everyone who has been following this journey and believed in me, you helped me stay accountable to this project and it looks like it will be paying off now. Ironic how I wanted to launch this project after just 50 days and now it's been like 10 months lol. But who cares about that, all that matters is that it seems to be working out now. I think until April I'll definitely be able to live off of this income, so I won't have to go back to university

 

[Deleted member 464710]

How would you accept payments?

 

[Aulig]

How would you accept payments?

I have Stripe and Paypal integrated on my website, but I'm thinking of switching to Paddle to avoid the huge VAT hassle.

 

[Aulig]

I've applied for Paddle, hope they accept me and it's not too much work to set up.

All in all I have 3 customers now, bringing in around $135 in monthly recurring revenue (probably $125 profit, only expenses are my domain & hosting). But that sudden increase in customers showed me I definitely need to invest my time into putting automated systems in place, otherwise I'd never be able to handle the sort of volume I'm aiming for. I'm probably aiming for 2-3 new customers a day, which could mean (I'm guesstimating here) that in 2 years I'd reach my arbitrary goal of $50k/m in profit. When/if I reach that point I'll probably try to sell the business. But for now there's still lots of stuff to do before that

 

[NachoMan]

I've applied for Paddle, hope they accept me and it's not too much work to set up.

All in all I have 3 customers now, bringing in around $135 in monthly recurring revenue (probably $125 profit, only expenses are my domain & hosting). But that sudden increase in customers showed me I definitely need to invest my time into putting automated systems in place, otherwise I'd never be able to handle the sort of volume I'm aiming for. I'm probably aiming for 2-3 new customers a day, which could mean (I'm guesstimating here) that in 2 years I'd reach my arbitrary goal of $50k/m in profit. When/if I reach that point I'll probably try to sell the business. But for now there's still lots of stuff to do before that

That's great buddy keep up the good work. You inspire me to keep pushing because there's always light at the end of the tunnel.

 

[Aulig]

That's great buddy keep up the good work. You inspire me to keep pushing because there's always light at the end of the tunnel.

Thanks man! There definitely is, best of luck to you too


Ranking update for my important (US) keywords:


Pretty good and I still haven't done much off-page SEO lol.
Once I'm done with my current automation tasks I will contact a bunch of people that wanted a demo of the product. I assume that will result in a few orders again, which will be good to see, how much effort order fulfillment still is with the automation in place. It'll probably also show me further optimization possibilities. One such optimization I'm currently thinking of is automating customer support by having a website where they can track their order and see the next steps they or I need to complete to continue with the order.

Once I'm done with that, I think I'll finally work on off-page SEO to push my site to the top of page 1, because then I'll be able to handle lots of orders hopefully.

 

[leecousa]

Thanks for great sharing

 

[sfnet]

Thanks man! There definitely is, best of luck to you too


Ranking update for my important (US) keywords:
View attachment 151180

Pretty good and I still haven't done much off-page SEO lol.
Once I'm done with my current automation tasks I will contact a bunch of people that wanted a demo of the product. I assume that will result in a few orders again, which will be good to see, how much effort order fulfillment still is with the automation in place. It'll probably also show me further optimization possibilities. One such optimization I'm currently thinking of is automating customer support by having a website where they can track their order and see the next steps they or I need to complete to continue with the order.

Once I'm done with that, I think I'll finally work on off-page SEO to push my site to the top of page 1, because then I'll be able to handle lots of orders hopefully.

I'd very much be interested in a demo too

 

[Aulig]

Holy smokes, I haven't posted an update since 6 months?! Thank you very much for reminding me @RealDaddy

I'll try to list the most important things that happened since then:
- SEO hasn't improved a lot sadly, but I must admit that I have been lazy in that regards, as always
- Managed to automate a lot of stuff, fix bugs etc.
- Hired 2 VAs that can take care of some of the difficult to automate work
- Currently at ~$840 monthly recurring revenue

Some things I learned that you might find interesting too:

I decided to switch from a subscription payment to a one-time payment.

Currently the OTP equates to around 2 years of monthly payments. In contrast, currently the average subscription time is around 3 months at the moment (= around $120). However it's higher than that in reality, because that includes about half of my customer base that (hopefully) won't cancel soon. I guess in a year or so I'd have more accurate stats on how long the average customer stays subscribed. But with this calculation the switch to OTP would be an 8x increase in revenue per customer.

Why did I switch?
- Initial setup for customers always takes a couple hours of work, so it was not really worth my time when they canceled after just 2-3 months
- Having to deal with failed payments is super annoying, you won't believe how often people forget to load up their credit card, switch banks etc. All of which makes the payments fail and you have to try to get ahold of them so they update their payment information -> super annoying and often times I couldn't reach them
- Less low value, high effort customers: by providing a cheap monthly price you get cheap customers that expect unrealistic stuff for a tiny price point

These 3 aspects were super frustrating and I don't want to be pissed off because that increases the chances of giving up

- Subscription fatigue: lots of people don't like paying for subscriptions and would rather pay a one-time price (even though they might be cheaper off in many cases)

Was the switch worth it?
While using the subscription payment I got on average 1 new customer every 4.5 days. Now it's around 1 every 2 weeks. So ~3.1 times less customers, but currently around 5.8 times (not quite the 8x i mentioned above, but the sample size is low so it might change still) higher revenue per customer. Even from that calculation alone it's worth it, but you also need to keep in mind how much less work I have to do then That allows me to work on improving the product instead, which I enjoy a lot more than customer support.

Going to bed now - might post another part tomorrow if i remember to do so