Winning SEO by building free AI tools

Sveta Bay is a marketing expert who built a product in a month, validated it in two weeks, then quit her job. Two years later, she and her partner are making $20k/mo doing what they love: building marketing tools for solopreneurs.

I caught up with her to get some marketing wisdom. She shared what she has learned about growth, all the way from the idea to having multiple successful products. 👇

Don't throw spaghetti

James: What's on your mind?

Sveta: “Launch and see what sticks” is a bad strategy.

James: You don't think it allows ideas to validate/fail faster?

Sveta: It’s easier to achieve good results faster with a good strategy and research.

Before launching FounderPal, we spent a month interviewing solopreneurs so that we could understand how to solve their problems effectively. Before finding the right solution, we had a couple of ideas that failed during the beta process.

James: What goes into starting with a good strategy?

Sveta: The first strategic decision concerns the audience you want to build products for. We build products for one audience (solopreneurs), so we don’t need to research and test the market all the time.

James: Heck of a time saver.

Sveta: I don’t even want to imagine how much time we would spend if we decided to build products for different audiences every month.

The advantage of building for one audience is that you never start from zero. Even if one of your products fails, you get niche knowledge that you can use in building the next product.

James: What else?

Sveta: Another important strategic decision is how you will grow the product. There are thousands of products made by indie hackers that never made a dollar.

The reason is simple: Makers have a product idea and start building right away without any strategy in mind. After months of building it, they finish and realize they have no idea how to sell it. “If you build it they will come” doesn’t work.

James: 🤯

Starting from zero

James: So how did you get started?

Sveta: I started my entrepreneurial journey with my co-founder (and husband), Dan, in May ’22.

At the time, my work was relocating me to Ho-Chi-Minh, Vietnam. I realized that I didn’t enjoy working on the project, and relocation sounded like a big commitment.

James: So you quit?

Sveta: Quitting our jobs without any proof that we could make money online was too risky. so we launched a simple product while working 9-5.

We decided that if we could make at least $1, then we would quit our jobs and double down on indie hacking. It took us a month to build and launch the product. We monetized it with a no-brainer one-time payment ($19) and made around $2K in 2 weeks.

At that time, our ramen profitability was $1.5K/mo, so it was an easy decision to quit our jobs.

James: Was that Makerbox?

Sveta: Yes, our first product was MakerBox, which was marketing guides, courses, and templates for Solopreneurs. Over the course of 19 months, total revenue has been $126,180

But our core product now is FounderPal.ai — AI-powered marketing tools for solopreneurs. We started to work on it in April, made a couple of pivots and launched in September. Since launching, we’ve made $57,325

James: You have a newsletter too, right?

Sveta: We exited with SponsorThisNewsletter in March. We had earned $6,737 with it. I can’t share how much we sold it for.

James: Why did you sell it?

Sveta: The newsletter niche is very complex and it needed full-time capacity. So we sold it on acquire.com. The whole process was very smooth and fast. It took around 1 week from listing to selling and 1 more week to get the money in the bank account.

James: You started from zero with Makerbox. How did you grow?

Sveta: The only thing we could leverage at the beginning of our journey was our expertise, and I wouldn't change a thing.

We started by choosing our target audience and then found the places where that audience hung out and found information. We became active on Twitter (build-in-public community), Indie Hackers, and Product Hunt.

James: Do you have a process?

Sveta: This growth formula works like magic:

1. Choose your target audience.

2. Build a simple product — not a SaaS. It can be a digital product, e-book, community, directory, email course, or any other content-based product.

3. Grow your brand on the platforms where your audience spends time. Just share your learnings and expertise and connect with people to gain more insights about your audience.

After that, you’ll probably find a SaaS idea you’re excited about because you’ll know your audience and their pains very closely.

15 hard-earned marketing tips

James: Your products are all tailored toward marketing. What are your best marketing tips for indie hackers?

Sveta: Here’s what I’ve learned by growing our products. Would love to give more details on each tip in the comments, so feel free to ask!

1. Keep launching products for one audience.

2. Upsell customers with high-ticket productized service.

3. Build free AI wrappers to promote your paid products.

4. Focus on nailing one acquisition channel before adding a second one.

5. Shoot TikToks or write tweets instead of publishing boring blog articles.

6. Ask 20 users to roast your landing page.

7. Give your product to 5 people for free to collect positive testimonials.

8. Launch on Product Hunt only when you are 100% sure about your funnel and pricing.

9. Know when to charge one-time payments versus monthly subscriptions.

10. Forget about brand marketing, design systems, and multiple social media presences.

11. Build products that you understand how to grow (not just how to build).

12. Don't target the Twitter bubble, focus on regular people with money.

13. Spending one hour on unique positioning will be more important than any product feature.

14. Write marketing copy that sparks emotions (even if you sell B2B SaaS).

15. Avoid commodity design (photo stock images, illustrations, basic templates).

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Win SEO with free tools

James: Let’s talk about free tools.

Sveta: SEO was our weak spot during the first year of building. It takes a long time to catch up. Plus, writing articles all day long is not the most exciting task.

So we decided to win SEO with another approach — building AI-powered free tools (aka ChatGPT wrappers).

James: What is the process?

Sveta: The process is quite simple and takes us 3-5 days:

1. Choose a product idea and find a relevant keyword.

2. Launch on Product Hunt.

3. Get featured for free in AI-related newsletters.

4. Get featured for free by TikTok and Instagram influencers. They LOVE talking about free tools!

5. Enjoy SEO traffic thanks to the backlinks.

6. Collect emails to nurture people into buying our products. You can collect them by giving some extra value.

I talk more about how to do it in this course.

James: What are some examples?

Sveta: Within one month, our value proposition generator brought in 8,981 unique visitors and 1,589 emails.

Our business idea generator was #1 on Product Hunt, bringing in 16,255 visitors and 1,027 emails in 3 months.

It has been a core driver for our growth.

James: Why are they so powerful?

Sveta: They have a high potential to go viral in short-format videos.

There are a lot of AI influencers on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. They love featuring free tools, and I’m 99% sure they find them mostly on Product Hunt and AI-related newsletters.

The real magic happens when one big influencer starts talking about your tool. After that, you can get hundreds of features from other influencers. Absolutely for free and without any effort from you.

One influencer got 1M views on a post about our user persona generator.

James: Not bad!

Sveta: Also, if the keyword is chosen correctly, it can have a huge SEO impact. Marketing for our marketing strategy generator on autopilot now.

That's actually the most important step. Launching on Product Hunt will only give you traffic for a week. But if you choose the right keyword, you will enjoy SEO traffic much longer.

James: How do you choose the right keyword?

Sveta: We use keywordseverywhere.com for the analysis. The goal is to find the keyword that can be the name of your tool and match the following criteria:

1. 500-1,000 monthly traffic

2. On the first page in Google, multiple websites have DA below 40

3. On the first page in Google, the tools are mid to low quality

If done right, you can rank on the first page in just 2 weeks.

Don't sleep on email marketing

James: You also mentioned capturing email addresses.

Sveta: Solopreneurs sleep on email marketing, but it’s one of the best user activation tactics.

James: Why?

Sveta: First of all, it helps you gain trust. As soon as you get the email address, you can start nurturing users with valuable free content. When they have enough trust and the right opportunity, they will buy your product.

Secondly, it’s much more reliable than a social media account. Both Dan and I have 20K+ followers on Twitter now, but it doesn’t guarantee any exposure when we launch. Any tweet might get either 1K or 100K impressions. Relying on algorithms you can not control is too risky.

When you have an email list, you know that your audience won’t miss your launch or important update.

Thirdly, you will benefit A LOT during Black Friday. Some people buy only when there’s a discount. If they don’t find a discount right away, they will leave and forget about your product. But if you collect their email and nurture them with free content, they will eventually convert.

James: Make sense. Any tips for effective email marketing?

Sveta: Of course:

1. Don’t be annoying. Long storytelling emails are not for everyone. Writing in a "straight to the point” style and including links with extra info for curious readers works best for us.

2. Provide value. Don’t just talk about your product and the amazing features it has. Instead, talk about the problem you solve and how your solution has helped others.

3. Focus on segmentation. Start small and segment paying/non-paying customers so that you don’t annoy people who have already purchased.

Subscriptions are a problem

James: To wrap up, I want to circle back to payments. Most of us want recurring revenue, for obvious reasons. But you seem to have a different take.

Sveta: You have to know when to charge one-time payments versus monthly subscriptions:

1. One-time value = One-time payments

2. Recurring value = Recurring payments

90% of MVPs fall into the #1 category and promise to become the #2 category soon. That promise is usually not enough for people to make a purchase.

James: What category are your products in?

Sveta: All of our products are one-time purchases.

Focusing on growing recurring revenue is stopping a lot of solopreneurs from being profitable. In most cases, one-time payment is a much better option.

James: Will you ever opt for a subscription model?

Sveta: This April, we plan to launch our first product with a subscription. It took us around 2 years to find a product idea with a good recurring potential.

Subscriptions are not the problem. The problem is charging a subscription for a product with bad retention.

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