I grew an SEO agency to $20k/mo. Now I want to hit $10m ARR with backlink automation.

Ilias Ism already had two startups (and 20+ failures) under his belt when he co-founded a successful SEO agency, MagicSpace SEO.

Next, he wants to grow an indie-hacked link generation tool from an MVP to a major player in the SEO market. He's set his sights on a cool $10m ARR.

He took me through his journey so far 👇.

An early viral hit

I started learning design really young, then learnt web development. I began freelancing when I was about 16 or 17.

I liked to tinker online and made little side projects. I’d post about them on Reddit, Product Hunt and Hacker News.

One of these apps — Reddit Music Player — really blew up after getting 100,000+ impressions on Reddit. That was like 10 years ago.

Next, I started a pretty big SaaS with a friend and another co-founder. We hired 10 or 20 staff and grew from $0 to a few million in four years, 100% bootstrapped.

I was chief technology officer doing everything frontend. But after a couple of years, I stepped back from the role and dived deep into marketing.

I had around $20k to play with, which you don’t often have as an indie hacker. I could spend $5k trying out Google Ads or Facebook ads.

I got an Ahrefs subscription to figure out what people search for, what pages worked well and what needed improving. I also focused on cold email, landing pages and writing, as well as building free tools for marketing.

But we were growing so fast, I soon had to become CTO again. Then we got acquired and I took a sabbatical.

Don’t forget marketing

I was 100% on my own again, so I decided to build a few of my own apps again. It was when the AI phase was starting and I built a chatbot for Telegram called MagicBuddy.

I coded all the time for maybe six months, thinking I’d do marketing later. But no-one was coming to the app and I realized I needed to learn about SEO again.

SEO encompasses everything to do with marketing: authority, getting a brand out there, making authentic content, content marketing, blog posting, social media and so on. And it produces very sustainable results.

So, I learned how to get backlinks, how to write good blog posts, how to do some Twitter (now X) marketing.

I started my own Twitter account and stopped being the quiet tech founder I was at my old startup.

About six months later, I decided to try and build a marketing agency with a co-founder. To make a team that outsourced these services for indie hackers and SaaS founders.

Building an SEO agency

I run MagicSpace SEO with Lewis Carhart. It does SEO audits, gets backlinks and produces high-quality blog posts for clients. It’s currently our biggest service.

It works well for fast-growing, well-funded startups. It’s cheaper than hiring a full-time marketer, who will try and figure out the same stuff we do.

We also started SEOAudit.me, where we roast apps and their websites for founders in 15-to-20-minute videos. We spot SEO issues and recommend strategies we think could help.

It’s cheaper to get a public audit, which we post online and package as part of a library other people can learn from.

We’ve also started a course to help people learn SEO, alongside some directories, ideas, blog posts, resources and tools for founders.

We want to focus on building really good training material instead of just doing individual audits. Sharing everything we learn from our clients and all the good work we see around us — in-depth, real-world experience and expertise.

Automating backlinks

We’re now working on a link-building tool called LinkDR.com. It helps us do backlink campaigns for our clients at MagicSpace SEO, looking at keywords on Google and the websites that rank for them.

We contact those websites and see if they’d like to do a partnership of some kind, like writing linked blog posts for each other’s websites.

We’ve also built a cold email tool that finds potential partnership opportunities and sends out those opening emails for you.

Automating this process saves a lot of money. Right now, we’re onboarding our first 10-20 customers and we’re growing extremely fast.

Leveraging social media

Ironically, it’s difficult to compete on SEO when you are an SEO agency. You can’t compete on the “SEO” keyword because there’s too many expert, well-funded agencies out there.

Instead, social media marketing has really worked for us. It can also be a way of leveraging SEO by proxy. We used Reddit, LinkedIn, Medium, Youtube and X to get traffic.

If you write a really good X post, it can blow up. But you need to be active regularly.

Building an ecosystem

It makes sense to build complementary, connected products, as you can refer people from one tool to another.

We often recommend customers start with an SEO audit instead of asking for a full $5,000 agency service.

With the audit, we can get you started on SEO, and tell you what we could do for you for you as an agency.

We can also share links to our different tools across our platforms, in the footers of pages, in emails or in written content online.

Scaling up

Lewis and I want to build a small team to scale our agency. Maybe this will let us move away from just SEO to an all-in-one, general-purpose marketing agency.

It will also help us take a step back. In July, we took our first holidays since starting out and we had to pass on clients because we were both gone.

For LinkDR, we want to grow faster and scale to a much higher level than a normal indie hacker business.

Imagine you could get to like $10m ARR. How do you do that?

Right now, we’re looking at things like partnerships and figuring out if other people can do sales for us. Maybe we’ll hire referral-based marketing teams paid on a percentage basis.

Payments first, solutions later

You sometimes see people building an app for years. Hiring a development agency. Spending $100k or $200k on something with hardly any users. It’s so painful for me to watch.

If you have the budget, you should spend at least $20k or so on marketing rather than just building in the dark.

With LinkDR, we made like $20k in our first week and we don’t have a finished app yet. We have an MVP, but it’s not built out.

We also have 30 people in our Slack waiting on the final product, which means we’re building it exactly for them.

Seriously, payments first

Like most indie hackers, I’ve had so many failures in the past. I’ve started at least 20 projects that just never worked out.

But sometimes you misjudge things and give up on an idea that could have been successful if you’d stuck it out a little longer.

I built a similar tool to Typing Mind by Tony Dinh around the same time as him called SlickGPT. I kind of abandoned it before putting in a payment link. But he kept going and now he’s making like $45k a month from it!

I mean, sh*t. I should have kept going with it. 

Sometimes you get demotivated after building for a while. That’s why it’s so important to get payments in as early as possible. It turns something into a real business.

Get traffic from your competitors

Start doing campaigns early on. Do a wait list to prove there’s demand. Learn who your potential customers are and ask them what they want.

Then find out who else is in the market and use them to get traffic.

Make a Youtube video or a high-quality SEO blog post about your top ten competitors. Add affiliate links so you’re getting a percentage when you send people their way.

When you’ve established a good level of traffic — and your app is ready — put yourself at the top of that list.

Don’t put off marketing week

That classic indie hacker idea of marketing week is a really good idea. Start doing it right away and you’ll save a lot of pain later on.

Marketing can be anything. Write a blog post. Figure out the right keywords. Think about the angles and narratives you can share on X.

If you're a technical person, look at marking in a strategic, system-building way so it doesn’t feel wishy-washy. SEO is great for that because it’s very technical

If nobody’s really looking for something, maybe it’s not worth spending time building. If there’s a huge market, it should build itself.