How failures led to a SaaS [audio]
failory.com
failory.com
From my own personal experience and from all the successful Indie hackers the easiest way seems to be idea that tell you how to genreate traffic / leads to your site. SEO software, Social marketing software, also lot of spam software like gmass, etc. This area seems to have the most success for quick growth.
This is partially selection bias. Most successful niche businesses prefer to avoid publicity because it might encourage more competitors. It's better to fly under the radar with minimal competition as long as possible. The more people who know about your profitable niche, the more your margins will be reduced in order to remain competitive.
Yet when it comes to generic "shovel" services like SEO, having your name and business spread across the internet is free publicity and free reputation building. The product and market are already mature and saturated, so there is no worry about new competitors. Instead, it's a game of getting your name out there as much as possible. The more people see your name on famous podcasts and websites, the more value they assign to your services.
I've always liked the "sell shovels" idea but it's not as useful as it sounds. It just puts you in an endless loop:
- Don't sell trucks, sell fleet management services to people who want to sell trucks.
- Don't sell fleet management services, sell fleet management software to fleet management companies.
- Don't sell fleet management software, sell project management software to software teams.
- Don't sell project management software, sell a database to B2B software companies.
- Don't sell a database, sell servers to B2B platform companies.
- Don't sell servers, sell logistics services to infrastructure tech companies.
- Don't sell logistics services, sell transportation to those logistics companies.
So now you're back to selling trucks.
If somewhere in the loop we had "mine crypto," then OK, maybe don't mine crypto but do sell mining hardware or whatever. But few business endeavors have such lopsided odds as mining, of the gold or crypto variety.
There's a been a movement to have better optics / positioning for SEO products that appeal to the main stream buyers (eg. your folks that work at Macys or Credit Karma). That's why well polished tools that are priced higher like Botify, DeepCrawl, Clearscope, etc. are coming to market and doing quite well.
If you ignore SEO, someone in your organization will eventually bring in snake oil SEO to fill the void. It is indeed amazing.
There are plenty of tricks, gimmicks, and zero-day hacks whose effect may be as short as a couple of hours, but indisputably, there are many SEO customers who see real increase in search rankings. That's why SEO is still a thing -- it works, at least enough of the time to make it a worthwhile risk.
If you ignore the business's desire to dominate Google results, then yeah, it's no surprise that someone eventually recognizes and attempts to fill the gap. It's best to address these inevitable interests directly so you don't get cut out from the process.
This is obviously a different situation than 10-15 years ago, but there still are so many companies who are still trying to pay for services that made sense in that era.
You certainly do need to attend to business needs. I work at an agency and that’s a big part of my job. I’ve recommended “implementing an SEO program” many times because that’s what will get a budget to do work that will lead to improve searches. It’s not SEO, though, just the Ship of Theseus described above, sold using a term that prevents useless or harmful SEO from being purchased elsewhere.
I would say that backlinks are still a hugely important part of "SEO" (with or without the scare quotes).
Companies run things called "Private Blog Networks" so that properties under their control can backlink to each other and get the PageRank bumped. Discerning PBN's place on the spectrum between Public Relations and just outright "link buying" basically depends on how charitable you're feeling that day.
This is the shtick of every big SEO business: "Of course SEO doesn't work, so we don't do SEO! We optimize your position in search engines through good old-fashioned $UNTAINTED_TASK_NAMES!" The point is that it's activity explicitly targeted at gaming search results, and thus, "Search Engine Optimization".
The only way to make it more difficult for dishonest people to make a buck on this would be for Google to get a lot more explicit about how it formulates its rankings, which, for obvious reasons, they don't. As long as there's no objective measurement or standard, there will be no real way to be sure that the techniques employed by a specific vendor 1) work at all; and 2) are ethically satisfactory. Someone with a backdoor at Google, after all, could make a pretty penny. It'd be naive to pretend like such things are never attempted at an org the size of Google.
People will take advantage of every hack they can to get Google to rank them more highly; as long as that's true, not only will the SEO marketplace thrive, but people will be identifying and exploiting those hacks.
It’s a bold move to price something beyond $9/mo and it’s so refreshing to see.