Pre-Story
I bought a NoCode Website Builder SaaS in 2022 for $800k.
It had good growth just before I bought it, but right after the growth stopped.
Here is my other story where I shared the details of why this happened and how I overcame it.
Today I realized that in the last months, we've grown 15000% Dec 2023 vs Dec 2022. I was shocked, to be honest, but then looked at all the other stats and it was real. I somehow was so busy doing the work, that I even missed this moment, and in this post, I wanna share the 15 most important actions/strategies I've executed over the last 6 months.
We went from almost no growth or small growth to near-exponential growth from all the channels at once.
→1. SEO.
I know it sounds obvious. But 90% of founders still do nothing about it. SEO is the single best-ever green source of traffic. It takes time to see results, but eventually it over-delivers.
We had zero SEO work done until April. I learned it from scratch.
Later I realized SEO is amazing and I need to have it for all my products, so I automated all of it with AI agents and tools, which have been used for unicorn, seobotai.com for all the blog posts. indexrusher.com for fixing the indexing issues.
→2. Directories and Backlinks.
When doing research of my traffic, I realized that I get many clicks from various web directories.
After looking around the internet, I realized there are 1000s of directories I’m not listed on yet.
So I started just doing that manually, it was pretty time-consuming.
One day I came up with a listingbott.com idea, to turn it into autopilot.
Today web directories account for 30% of my traffic in some months.
→3. Social media: X
I had 47 followers back in April. It was obvious to me that social media would soon become the key player in attention and B2B world.
I tried all sorts of ways, made many mistakes, wrote a bunch of sh*tposts, tried failed AI-generated posts, and eventually in May I figured out what’s best.
It was: take my experience and turn it into an engaging story. I had done so many startups, successes, and mistakes in the past, that I realized I have at least 500 stories to be told. So I started posting one story a day since then, the rest is the history :)
→4. Linkedin.
I mostly used LinkedIn until 2023.
Tbh, I didn’t like it at all. Very boring empty marketing posts & replies. I tried, but it felt totally like a waste of time.
I built AI agents that was running my acc there.
In November, one of my AI posts went viral, so I went to LN to check the comments and suddenly I saw good comments and posts.
LinkedIn suddenly turned into a good place.
I took over my acc from an AI agent.
I realized that the best content to go viral on Linkedin is the one that gives high value and lets the reader put a thoughtful comment.
If people can’t comment it, then it’s difficult to go viral.
→5. Reddit. Wow.
Reddit always was a place I’d just avoid going to.
If you open any post there are read comments, it feels like it’s a sh*tcomment competition among the bullers.
However, I was totally wrong.
I wrote my first Reddit post in Dec.
It was late at night, I posted it and went to sleep.
The next day I saw a spike on all my tools.
I didn’t know why.
I checked Reddit and my post was the top #1 post of the day with over 100k views & comments.
It turned out there are a lot of good people on Reddit. The thing is that they don’t comment stuff, they just read.
Perhaps I was lucky after this or maybe it’s my hard work, but I ended up posting 10 posts and 7 of them made it to the top #1 post of the day, week, months, year, alltime on subreddits with millions of members.
Compared to social networks Reddit is evergreen.
It gets indexed by Google and also people often search for “top of the year/month”.
So I’m still getting traffic from those posts. Even having zero links there. People read it, find it useful, check my profile, and check my products.
→6. Existing users
I set a goal in May, that I wanna chat with every user I have. I started sending emails inviting them to the chat.
DMing people on social media.
I had almost a 1000 chats in 2023.
It helped me to understand their pains, hear out their requests, and in general become friends with many.
It increased their loyalty to the product and the word-of-mouth effect.
I tried to help them with every way I could: free SEO audits , brainstormed ideas with them.
It completely changed my roadmap and priorities and users loved it. They started recomending unicorn to their friends .
→7. Pivot
Unicorn started as a simple landing page builder.
Most users’d leave us once they outgrow one page.
I wanted to do the impossible:
- be the easiest-to-use website builder on the market but also be very advanced and let users to also non-basic things.
Often this is the best way to fail. Because once you start adding features, the products become more complex and aren’t easy to use anymore.
But I found a way to do this, with the help of the users and hard work.
It worked. The churn decreased. Users could start with simple stuff and gradually discover more advanced features and still stay with us.
The way I achieved this
- I added 2 modes: basic and advanced
- In basic mode, I removed all complex features and made it super simple. In the old builder interface, we had 15 pages, and nested navigation. Now I removed all that, we had just one canvas, similar to how Notion does. And I removed most non frequently used features.
- I moved all nonbasic stuff into advanced mode. My idea was that users don't use all of it at the start, so the user who just signed up for my builder is just looking for ways to quickly play with it, and I should not scare them with anything complex. This worked so well, we had much higher retention, and users didn't bounce right after signing up. I also removed "guided onboarding".
- once users move further along, they would need more advanced features, and I added an "advanced tab" that had them all. Also, I added a way to manipulate code. The builder was primarily marketed as NoCode, but since the launch of chatgpt, most nocoder learned to write js/css code using chatgpt. So I let them do that. It suddenly turned the builder into a powerful one.
So basically this was the solution. Sounds maybe easy, but I spent many hours working on the UX to implement it.
→8. New Sub Products
In Nov, after the OpenAI demo day, I quickly bought allgpts.co to build a directory there.
First I was planning to build it using marsx and regular coding. But after an hour I felt like this would take too much time. So I went out to look for a boilerplate. I didn’t find any option that I really liked.
Then I tried to use a template inside unicorn for this.
I hacked existing landing page template using custom js and css to make it look like a directory. I did it all in one night and the next morning I launched http://allgpts.co.
In 24 hours it went totally viral, reposted by many AI influencers. It ended up being the top GPT directory in the world with 0.5 million visits just in Nov.
After this, a lot of people reached out asking how can they make a directory too.
So we prepared several templates for directories and launched them to the existing users and public.
It was the moment X.
We never had more masive spike on all the numbers.
It turned out the market really needed it.
It could have even been a standalone product, but I didn’t wanna launch it as a pure directory builder.
Why? Because any directory is a website afterall.
You need subpages, other regular web sections etc.
So having it inside unicorn let users use both the directory features and all the other website builder features we had.
I’d never have predicted this.
Now I wanna launch 20 more subproduct: marketplaces, ecom and etc.
→9. Affiliate Partners
This is the lowest hanging fruit for growth.
In September we spend a day and integrated FirstPromoter.
Then added a landing page that explains how it works and placed it both on nav bar and inside the builder.
It’s bringing us more users ever since. No work done after. You do it once and that’s it.
→10. Product Led Growth
All the things I mentioned above wouldn’t play out the way they did, if the product itself wasn’t great.
We put so much effort into all details.
I took over the job of chief product guy in September and spent every day on it.
The product team was just me and 1 dev.
We have so many things to do that even 10 person team wouldn’t deliver this quickly.
However as it often happens, the fact that we had very little amount of resources was the key.
We probably topped the world on using 1% for 90% of value tacktics.
Once we changed our system and started inventing 100x faster ways of delviering same value to the user, we started shipping crazy fast.
In last 50 days we shiped more feautes and fixes than in 2 years before that. With same team. I still can’t believe it, but it’s happening.
→11. Communicate Vision.
When chatting with users, most said product seems stagnant, the future isn’t clear.
I spent time on communicating my vision for Unicorn.
I did it on social media and personally with every user who replied.
Many churned users returned, some turned into our biggest fans who support us.
Our team got extended with many users helping me out, sending my their feature suggestions, ideas and feedack.
I share every new feature often personally with the biggest fans. It takes time, I have an insane number of chats daily. But the value of it is so big, both for their loyalty and for my own motivation to work hard. I hear good words from them, it pushes me forward.
→12. Sponsoring Directories.
I never liked paid marketing.
But In Oct I tried sponsoring the directories.
I tried Htmlrev and got good good ROI.
I plan to do more of this in 2024.
It’s double reward. Instead of paying to corporations for ads. I rather pay fellow indie makers.
→13. Assisted Transfer
I started reaching out to people who already run their site on other website builders and offer them to assist their transfer.
It was in fact fan job for me. Redesign, imporve and transfer the site.
We transfered a lot of webistes this way and gained users.
→14. Cross Sell
Most of my products share the same audience.
e.g. often the Seobot users had unsupported CMS.
I offered them a help on transfering their site to Unicorn Platform.
This was very often a “yes” from the customer. And we got plenty of new users this way too.
→15. Side projects
After viral succes of allgpts, I tried to reproduce it again.
I had no expectactions, but I was lucky again.
osssoftware.org went viral too. It topped hacker news, which never happened to me before.
It had 300k visits in that months.
This year I plan to launch 100 directories in total.
12 directories being launched in the next few weeks.
But here is what happened next.
We started getting tons of traffic from my directories to unicorn.
Now I opened all my directories for others to buy ads on. There was very good demand.
Already had number of sponsor ads on all, the latest one is running now on nextjsstarter[.]com from boilerbay.
I will use all the money I make on these ads to sponsor other makers in 2024.
The End.
P.S. I might have missed some details, so feel free to ask questions on every method I used.