$10K+ From a Product “Nobody Would Buy”

Last June, Philipp Keller posted on X about a “Backlink Harvester Tool” he was building, to see if anyone was interested 🤨

He had about 2000 followers at the time.

Philipp recently revealed what happened next 👇

Lots of people wrote to me: Yes they’d use this product…

Two months later I had an MVP [Minimum Viable Product] ready. I released it at a 10$/month price point, but only allowed 10 customers to use it (because it was still too much MVP).

The tool lets you do email outreach to get more backlinks.

Then…

Though I was thrilled that I found 10 customers (and had a lot more customers in the waiting list) I saw that they struggled with the outreach tool

Basically, the tool still required you to send emails asking other site owners to link to you.

🤔 That got Philipp thinking…

I was looking for an easier way to get first backlinks for solopreneurs who had no prior knowledge of the subject.

While developing the SaaS solution I stumbled over lots of great places to post your startup, where you don’t need to send an email but instead can register on the website directly…

There were already MANY lists out there which promised you “100 great places to list your startups”. I had a look at some of them and found the quality lacking at best.

So…

I investigated 200 startups [websites, directories, businesses], using 4 different SEO tools (Ahrefs, Semrush, MOZ and Majestic) investigating backlink those 200 startups had in common and organized them by backlink strength, achievability and categories.

🛠️ After spending a couple of months building this…

I wrapped up my research and at Xmas sent emails to around 15 people asking them to review my resource… nobody seemed interested.

Philipp was devastated, but decided he’d give it one more shot by tweeting out a 4-minute video explaining the product, which he called SEO Kickstarter for Startups.

He didn’t expect much 🙈

But…

over the course of the next 48 hours I made 134 sales (I raised the price two times, in the end it was 2.5x the original price). In total around $6000.

I gained 2000 additional followers on Twitter.

Over the course of the next 30 days I made more revenue than at my day job

(context: I’m having a well paying salary in Switzerland).

Given Philipp’s resume, he’s likely earning $10K/month from his day job, so it’s safe to assume he earned more than $10,000 from his product in those 30 days 🤯

His takeaway from all of this…

I needed to do a landing page and launch with a video with the proper pitch before my product was credible. Sending a person a link with “hey, can you have a look” is not validation.

Philipp’s story also illustrates the winding nature of the path to success.

He spent 2 months building a tool that didn’t really work. But that led him to creating SEO Kickstarter… which flopped a couple of times until he figured out a better way to market it 💪