2. The network feed (viral play). Inside DemandBird, you can pull all your team's posts across all platforms into one feed for easy engagement. This makes it easy to engage with your business pages/posts from your own personal accounts (and vice-versa), but also your teammates' posts.

The interesting part: you can also invite DemandBird users who aren't in your account into your network feed. Once the affiliate platform is live, that invite earns you affiliate revenue and lets you add them to an engagement pod. So if I invite a non-team member, and he's on a different DemandBird account, his posts show up in my feed instantly and we can engage with each other's stuff. The more people you invite, the more revenue you make and the bigger your engagement network gets.

3. PDF branding (awareness play). Agency and team reports get exported and shared, as that's their whole purpose. We added DemandBird branding to those PDFs. Low-effort, but reports get passed around inside agencies and out to clients, so it puts the name in front of buyers we'd never otherwise reach.

4. The tweet pop-up (the simple one). Easy in-app prompt for users to tweet about DemandBird, probably post-onboarding or at another high-affinity moment. Not clever, but the bar to ship it is basically zero. I haven't done this yet, but I am thinking about where it might sit and also if Twitter's the right platform for it. I don't think this is easy to do on LinkedIn (reply and tell me if I’m wrong?).

What I like about this mix is that they compound differently. The public feed is a slow-burn SEO bet. The network feed has viral potential especially once the affiliate portion is live. PDFs are pure brand surface area. The tweet prompt is a quick win.

What I don't know yet is which of these will actually move the needle versus which just feel good to build. Curious what's worked for you, especially anything in the viral/referral category?

Hit reply and let us know.

Mac (and Alex)

Staring at a blank page sucks. What do I post today?

Or maybe you’re the opposite… a million ideas scattered everywhere, and you don’t know where to start.

And that’s before we even get going. Posting consistently is hard. Posting across multiple platforms is harder. What works on one won’t work on another — the topic might carry over, but the format won’t.

Your text is too long for one. Your image is the wrong format for another. You either bail or you’re hours in.

You go to find that perfect photo, but your assets are all over the place.

Want a teammate to review or approve? Track that too.

Want to actually be effective? Repost what works. Rewrite the same idea in different ways.

Oh, and now we need to integrate content creation and scheduling into our agentic workflows via API or MCP. Who does that well?

Overwhelmed yet? I’m tired already.

This is why Alex and I built DemandBird.

DemandBird handles writing, scheduling, asset management, approvals, and reposting across every major platform, from one place. A million tools promise to help, but they only handle one piece. We tried as many as we could and still weren’t happy. So selfishly, we built DemandBird for ourselves. Over time it became clear we’d built something worth sharing.

Between the two of us, we’ve built and sold social media products and a social media agency. We know the space, we know what people want, and we know exactly what’s missing.

We’re still early, with dozens of users. But people are saying things like “wow, it just works” and “this is so intuitive.”

And we already have people building complete content production workflows with Claude Code using our APIs and MCP.

We’re agentic-forward, but we still care deeply about intuitive interfaces and workflows.

As founders, we’re building with care. We respond to every customer quickly. We hop on calls all the time. We get to know many of them. We love it this way.

In an age where it’s easy to hide behind anonymity or an AI-generated facade, we’re here with faces forward, to help you be your authentic self, with wider reach, less friction, and maybe even a bit of fun.

We don’t believe the world wants AI-generated content. But we do believe humans can do better with AI, so we strive to make DemandBird your best content production assistant.

If you’re a team, an agency, or an individual who wants to try us out, give feedback, or hop on a demo call, we want to hear from you. Hell, I’ll hop on a call just to hear you vent about your content workflow, just cuz.

Start your free trial at demandbird.com, then reply to this email and I’ll apply a Wildfront discount.

Alex and I feel, more than ever, that we’re onto something. Personal brand and authentic voice matter more than ever to stand out from the noise.

Join us?

— Mac & Alex

P.S. We’re opening up our partner/affiliate program soon. Reply here if you think you’re a good fit. We’d love to talk to you.

That means you run a tight ship, cut costs wherever you can, you focus on marketing as much as on product, and try to grow MRR profitably.

Great. That’s us, too!

And now, what do most startup bootstrappers do, when looking for ideas? Well, we often start with what everyone likes to do: we solve our own problems first.

But here’s the problem:

Not all of them, that’s for sure: SaaS founders definitely still spend money. We certainly do, across the Wildfront SaaS portfolio.

But there are a lot more hackers now for whom the build vs buy equation has changed relatively quickly, mostly in the last 12 months. And when it comes to simple and overpriced tools, ‘build it ourselves’ has become a more appealing option than ever.

For many founders, this is resulting in higher churn numbers than ever. And in downward pricing pressure:

Alex is a very capable founder, so if he’s experiencing 14 months straight of net MRR losses? Dang, I can really feel that sting! Of course, I’m not saying his tools are simple or overpriced: I’m just validating this reality, if your business too is experiencing trouble with net-new MRR sales, or higher than average churn, if you sell to tech founders.

As always, though, there’s some good news:

Thankfully, most SaaS subscribers are not indie hackers.

I was in a group yesterday with seven people who own marketing agencies doing between $300k and $8M of annualized revenue.

I shared with them that we recently launched DemandBird, and I asked:

Would any of you consider building your own AI-coded social media tool in-house? Am I an idiot for putting a lot of my personal time and marketing effort into a scheduling and analytics tool?

To the former question: there was a unanimous chorus of, “absolutely not.” Shaking heads, and looks of exhaustion and despair rolled across the room at the mere suggestion of it.

Even moreso, they thought that a simpler, better, more affordable scheduling tool sounded sorely needed in the market!

So why aren’t these non-SaaS founders systematically vibe coding replacements for all of their tools?

Because their businesses are already demanding and complex enough as things stand, without increasing their workload and difficulty level further. The market remains tough enough for them, without adding more stuff to their plate.

They’re focused on finding another $500k-2M of annual revenue in the next six months in a difficult climate, not on getting lost down the rabbit hole of developing a whole new set of skills (UI, UX, CI/CD, Claude Code, API management, you name it…).

These people have personal incomes of at least $300k-1M/yr, often more than that when you count equity buildup. To them, saving $29/mo to have a worse experience and to be their own product support team, is frankly below their pay grade.

Personally, I fall into the income bucket I’ve just described. I am frugal. But I’ve spent $29 on a cup of soup and a piece of fresh bread (Iceland prices, anyone?! That actually is indeed what we paid, at a little cafe in Grindavik…). I’m just not vibe coding something, and committing myself to maintaining it, to save a couple hundred bucks a year.

The prize has to be bigger than that.

SaaS is becoming a mature business model, not a pool of easy money

Now, I’m not saying that all you have to do is “not sell to indie hackers” and you’re in for a smooth ride. No way.

It helps to sell to non-SaaS customers, that’s for sure. They’re less likely to take on, let alone enjoy, the process of vibe coding a replacement for your tool.

But now your competition has become other indie hackers wanting that same non-SaaS tool budget. And it’s easier than ever for them to build a simple tool that competes for it.

(The remaining difficulty, of course, is the customer side: sales, marketing, support, distribution, and all of that. We’ve written extensively about that.)

Things are different today. In the old days of 2012-2021: if you spent time building a complex enough product, that used to be a real moat. It was difficult for your competitors to catch up to you.

You could afford to slow down engineering velocity, allow meeting bloat to infect your product development pipeline, and just not ship very fast or care that much. And you could do this while cash-flowing at a healthy clip, and not have much to worry about.

To be fair: the beginning of getting a SaaS off the ground has always been hard… but it used to be smoother sailing once you were established and north of even, say, ~$50k MRR or so.

In 2026?

You can still win. Absolutely. But it’s a lot harder to win while sitting on your laurels than it used to be. Even when selling to non-SaaS customers. (But as I argue, this difficulty doubles if you sell to other indie hackers!)

So you just can’t really stop performing at a high level anymore.

If you stop listening to customers, if you stop providing world-class support, if you don’t innovate or build new functionality, if your UI looks like it’s from 2012?

You used to be able to make do with that.

But not these days.

It’s not a SaaSpocalypse, it’s a SaaS Cambrian Explosion

Far from the death of SaaS: instead what we’re seeing is an explosion of SaaS. And even when Claude pulls the subsidies and starts charging full price, it’ll always be cheaper than it ever was before, for people to make new tools to cover new use cases that were previously not worth the effort to cover.

Nevertheless, I firmly believe that SaaS is far from a lost cause. It’s a great business. (If it wasn’t, Mac and I wouldn’t be spending almost all of our time in it!) And yes, you can tip the odds in your favor by selling solutions to customers who aren’t nearly as interested in AI coding as you are.

But regardless of who your customers are: the bar has gone up. It’s easier than ever for others to compete with you. Your product quality must be high, and your company must be easy to do business with.

You need to be clever and strategic about who you choose to build for.

I don’t mean that I think you should give up: I just mean that the game has changed.

These days, you need to plan to keep giving it your all. Not just in the beginning. But for the entire lifecycle of the company. Or at least until you cash out and you’re no longer the owner.

But not before then.

Big milestone: a founder in our mastermind series sold his 10th customer this week. One of them found the product through AI search, signed up, and converted without ever meeting them. All in the same day. AI search is quietly becoming a real acquisition channel.

Join the thread

Claude Code: Replacing $10k/mo of SaaS and G&A costs

One founder vibe-coded an app integrating HubSpot, Zoom, sales coaching, web design, Eventbrite registrations, print materials, and more—all with Claude Code. What used to take a team of 5 and two months to launch a single page now takes 10 minutes solo. Add Wispr Flow for dictation at 180 WPM and the productivity is unreal. A smaller dev team can now do more, and excess legacy tool cost can be wiped away.

Join the thread

AI Overview: Much Easier Than You Think

“It is STUPID easy these days to get yourself into the AI Overview.” A founder shared how low-effort it still is to get your brand into the AI Overview. Read exactly how and see examples, in the community thread.

Join the thread

Next Monthly Mastermind Series

The first SaaS founder mastermind call was such a huge success that everyone unanimously wanted to keep it going. So we are. Taking applicants now for new mastermind entrants, too, so let us know if you’re interested in joining:

Apply To Join Founder Mastermind

Quick Hits

• Onboarding email sequence inspiration — A founder reshared what Mac & Alex have been doing and it challenged them to rethink their own. Thread

• Meta ads consultant needed — Looking for someone to help a multi-location gym owner grow their Portland market. Thread

This is what happens when you put a bunch of founders in a room together.

— Mac & Alex

Existing:

→ Wildfront+: Mastermind roundtable series & community for product founders (non-SaaS but a subscription)
→ RalphBlaster.com: Kanban style autonomous coding platform
→ ViewExport.com: Slack eDiscovery tool for IT and legal teams

Adding to that list...

Just Launched: DemandBird.com: Cross-platform social scheduling and repurposing tool

Mac and I are very pumped.

It’s taken us several months to rebuild the portfolio from scratch, since our last exit in August, to a low six figure or so run rate.

ViewExport has been a solid contributor, but the Wildfront+ community has been growing faster. RalphBlaster is still new but gained 30+ subscribers in the initial launch.

DemandBird, however, is shaping up to be one of our best yet.

Advantages of Our Social Media SaaS

Here’s why we think it’ll be successful right out of the gate:

1. AI defensibility moat. Claude can’t schedule your social media posts for you. Getting all of the details right (formats, platform specific stuff, even just getting approved to use the API) is tricky. And besides, this is one area where a UI does actually help: it’s a lot faster to see, at a glance, whether you have content scheduled for all of your time slots or not.

   

2. Huge latent demand. We exited our last social media tool, Aware, at ~30k MRR. There were 1000+ actively paid users, most of which were active at least a few times a week. Many thousands more had tried the product or even just seen it. This puts a significant audience within reach. Even just my “LinkedIn Job Update” auto-post started driving people in:

   

3. Buy Wins Vs Build. Our target customer isn’t trying to hack together and maintain their own relatively complex social media scheduling tool. Their time is worth more than that. And since we’re pricing at $19/mo out of the gate, it’s very difficult to make the argument for DIY-ing a copy of this. Even as we grow, I can’t see a non-technical social media team trying to Claude Code their way into a cross-member, cross-platform scheduler instead of just spending a few bucks. We’re not talking big bloated enterprise contracts here, after all.

SaaS Diversification vs Focus

We’re loving the portfolio model of our holdco. No plans to change that. But we’re also seeing the benefits of focus, too. That means we probably won’t (can’t, easily?) add new products to our lineup until we either (1) start hiring or partnering with product owners, which we are open to doing, and/or (2) sell non-core assets at fair market values.

How To Work With Us

1. Partners. Want to partner with us with one of our products and earn or buy ownership? Reply here and let us know. We’re open to marketing partnerships on RalphBlaster (indie hacker with X audience would be ideal), as well as DemandBird (marketer or something with marketing clout).

2. Masterminds. You can also join one of our SaaS Founder Mastermind groups, too. Send a quick application form here if that sounds like something you want to get in on. Next meeting for Groups 1 & 2 are on April 3th and 4th.

…and feel free to spin up a free trial of DemandBird, too, if social media scheduling is making your life hard :)

Thanks so much for reading.

-Alex & Mac

The honest postmortem: a small amount of bragging rights, a site badge, a decent albeit nofollow SEO link, and a possible signal boost for LLM citations. But IndieHackers itself barely drove any traffic, even from their large newsletter. 1-2 customers total.

Verdict: Fine for a very early-stage launch. Little point in doing this if you’re an established SaaS, unless you’re really going after an ultra-well-rounded SEO/AEO presence. The plan now? Add the badge to the site and see if it helps with LLM citations across the portfolio. Everything’s an experiment. → Join the thread

───

LinkedIn Algorithm Shift: Ditch the Stock Photos

A heads-up for anyone posting on LinkedIn: images that aren’t directly relevant to your post now seem to hurt performance. For literally years, it was the opposite — slap an image on everything. Now? Text-only posts appear to do better (and PDFs even better than those…) unless the image is genuinely necessary to make your point. → Join the thread

───

The $100 Directory Submission Shortcut

Shared a startup directory submission spreadsheet after using a $100 service to handle directory listings for LayoffAlert.org. Low cost, job done, results delivered. Planning to repeat this for other new projects in the portfolio. Sometimes the best move is to pay someone else to do the grunt work. → Join the thread

───

Mastermind Calls Are Happening

We’re launching community mastermind calls: structured sessions where every attendee shares what they’re working on and gets real feedback from other founders. Already 8+ founders signed up. The plan is to split into curated groups (likely by stage, i.e. under vs. over $100k ARR) so everyone gets meaningful time. First call has invites out. If you want in, speak up in the thread. → Join the thread

───

This is what happens when you put a bunch of founders in a room together. Launch postmortems, AI experiments, algorithm intel, and now live masterminds. Come hang out → Join the community

-Mac & Alex

→ If you would like an invitation to be in one of the mastermind groups, please reply back to this email to let me know.

The format we’ve been discussing in the community is roughly as follows.

Mastermind Call Format

This meeting structure has been very helpful for me in past mastermind groups: I propose that we go around the room in order, and each person:

• gives an update on how their business is doing

• presents challenge(s) they’re experiencing on which they want help, and

• we have some group feedback and challenge help time for each founder.

Example: if we have 5 people, we’d have maybe ~5 mins of each founder sharing an update on their business and requesting feedback, followed by 6-7 mins of group feedback and discussion on the issues raised.

Segmentation: Based on attendance and the richness of the discussions, we could further split these meetings into smaller ‘chapters’ so to speak, based on business model, ARR range, and/or industry.

Length: It’s also likely that one hour won’t be enough time and that we’ll all leave the meeting wanting a longer one—my past experience with this format is that 2-4 hours is especially helpful and rich for groups of 6-7, or 90-120 mins for groups of 4-5 people, especially in the $1M - $10M revenue range, once there is a more ‘stuff going on’ operationally. But let’s see.

What To Expect

To speak for myself: I have seen an enormous ROI on my investment of time, from participating in well-curated groups like this over the years. There has occasionally been ‘direct’ ROI—say, I found out about a tax credit that resulted in directly receiving $200k, or ended up actually doing business with someone in the group—but most of the return has been the quality of discussion.

In other words: the main thing we would like to get from these calls, as we hope you will get, is to engage deeply with other founders in a focused way that results in each of us growing our business more sustainably, rapidly, and profitably than without the support of the group.

→ If you would like an invitation to this mastermind group please reply back to this email to let me know. If we have too many people for one group, we will create multiple groups, so let us know if this time doesn't work with your time zone.

Thanks,

Alex & Mac

Top Of Funnel (Awareness)

1. Mac posted on Twitter. (This was the main tweet). We had no idea if it would perform well, since it was literally just “here’s this internal tool we made”. I tallied up the reach on his other relevant posts, too.

That’s about 0.2% conversion from “saw Mac’s tweets” to giving us an email address. Not bad actually, often we see lower conversion rates from social media.

Middle Funnel (Interest)

2. We then emailed the lovely folks who joined our waitlist a few times, to try to let everyone know in the meantime “hey we heard you loud and clear, we’re building! here’s what we’re working on “. After all, even using RalphBlaster to… build RalphBlaster… it still wasn’t instant.

That’s 7.6% conversion from total waitlist to product signup. This is lower than we expected. But my hunch is that because there was a ~3 week time gap in between the initial Tweet, and when we actually sent invites to sign up to the product (essentially just the development cycle of getting the product done and shipped), there might have been a loss of interest. Hard to say for sure.

Then, the ~53% conversion from signup to someone paying us a buck for the first month with the intention to auto-renew if they liked, it is quite consistent with our past experience for products of this price point. (With our last SaaS tool, this conversion rate hovered between 40-60% pretty much throughout)

Bottom Funnel (Revenue)

What really matters, though, is the actual projected financial impact. We didn’t expect a ton from the initial launch, since our experience is that getting to $10k MRR can often be a slow grind if you’re doing so profitably (although of course if you’re underpriced and hyper-allocated to marketing, you can get there unprofitably much faster!).

Here’s where we landed:

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To our members: thank you for being so supportive and inspirational.

If you haven’t yet joined us, we’d love to have you. Join here.

🚀 RalphBlaster Goes Live

The ralphblaster.com landing page went live — and someone signed up within two minutes, before anyone was even told it existed. This c…

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Instead, I love seeing something come to life that I created out of nothing. As I handed coding off …

Read more

Read more

Couple days ago I posted a video on Twitter about a workflow I created for automating my Claude Code process, and thousands of builders are piling on:

Click here to see the full tweet. The full video is at the end of this post.

Here’s what we’re building and why it’s getting so much attention among startup builders.

Before I begin, this is a little heavy on the technical side.

But it’s almost more interesting for non-technical people because what we’re about to see will enable non-technical folks to create tickets and execute them on their own without needing a developer until the final review. So while some of this is technical, I’ll try to put it in layman’s terms.

(If there’s something you don’t fully grasp, it’s okay. I think you’ll get the gist. Or you can reply and ask Qs.)

Within the last couple of weeks, something called Ralph Wiggum came out. Yes, it’s named after the Simpson character. What Ralph does is a basic bash script, which is just a simple system script that you can run to instantiate Claude Code over and over for several broken-down tasks that build a feature.

In other words: you define the feature, Claude helps you break it down into bite-sized steps or pieces, and then Ralph takes over and runs through each individual step to execute it. In the end, you’ll have your feature built and tested.

What’s cool about this is that until now, as we built features with Claude Code, we usually have had to “watch it go and approve” things.

You’re sitting there hitting the “accept” button, which is kind of mind-numbing.

Meanwhile, context windows build up and then max out if we forget to reset them. While this is great overall and an improvement over manual coding, as we keep striving for more and more hands-off processes, that’s where RalphBlaster comes in.

Last week, I started playing with Ralph and building features required much less of my time during the actual build process.

I was able to knock out so much so fast.

But then I quickly became overwhelmed trying to keep up with what I had started and where everything was in the cycle. So a couple of days ago, I decided to build what has now become RalphBlaster.

I initially built it as an internal tool. Then yesterday, I made a video of it and put it on Twitter, and it’s been going viral.

So last night, we bought the domain ralphblaster.com and I’m packaging it up to release the product.

In this newsletter is the demo video, but basically what it does is to give you a visual Kanban board where you can create tickets.

And this is where it gets exciting:

Not just developers can create these tickets; anyone with access to the Kanban can do so.

It’s as easy as adding something to a Trello board.

Once the ticket is in the Kanban, you can click a button to generate a PRD (“Product Requirement Document”).

A PRD clearly defines what the feature should do and shouldn’t do and creates user stories—real-world situations of what the user might be trying to do that this feature would solve.

So while “PRD” might sound fancy, it’s really just a text file definition of what the feature should be.

Once you click the generate PRD button, Cloud Code generates the PRD and moves the ticket to a new column in the Kanban for review.

When you’re happy with it, you can click Approve. At this point, RalphBlaster picks up the ticket and does all its work in the backend before executing it.

A side note for technical people: RalphBlaster does all of this in a git worktree. This means it’s an isolated environment that enables us to run multiple tickets on the same project without interfering with each other. We can review them individually and then move on to the next project or revert one if needed.

Through the UI, you can watch the status of the ticket or wait until it’s automatically moved into the Kanban column called “In Testing”. At that point, it’s ready for manual review. The user can choose to merge changes and deploy or make other changes if necessary.

What’s even more exciting is creating a queue of tickets or bug fixes and having Ralph knock them off one after another while you’re asleep—either sequentially or in parallel.

While this was initially intended for local use only, I was cajoled into posting a video of it online and of course, it blew up.

So because everyone is wanting to get a copy of RalphBlaster, I’m now working on getting it to run on remote servers so others can use it too. The idea is you’ll be able to manage your tickets on RalphBlaster.com with a connection to your local machine or whatever server you want this working on. It’ll be set up to use your own Cloud Code account, so you won’t need to pay for AI credits through us.

That’s all for now!

Let me know if you have any questions and head here if you want to join the waitlist.

And if you haven’t already, join our private Founder community by becoming a paid subscriber. If you like this, and all things product, marketing, SEO, and more, you’ll love it in there.

Mac

Here’s the full video:

Problem is: the “regular linkedin dot com feed” is usually pretty awful. It’s designed to keep you scrolling mindlessly, not engaging strategically.

Build An Engagement Feed That Helps You Sell More

Do this instead:

1. Go to …

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—

Several months ago, we acquired a product called ViewExport.

And, it’s doing well! Every month, we make almost as much in MRR from it as we paid initially (once) to acquire it.

Now, we have two main marketing challenges:

A. Keep doing more SEO, because that’s how this product has always won, and
B. Try to figure out another channel apart from SEO, to increase lead gen

A has been easy. B has been challenging.

Here’s how each channel is going:

Outbound: ⚠️ No Customers But Several Partner Opps

We’re early on in our outbound journey, and have sent around ~1500 cold emails. And that’s just to one customer segment (a test to the HR leaders at mid-sized professional services firms). So we have a long way to go:

In terms of our email infrastructure, we’re pleased with the setup we have and recommend both of these tools to other founders:
1. Smartlead for sending emails
2. Ocean.io for contact and account data + list building

When it comes to LinkedIn inbound, we’re doing better. In the last week, we’ve booked 3 partnership calls with people in the eDiscovery space, which is super valuable to us for getting feedback, building relationships, and finding other avenues for demand gen. Over half of the people who’ve accepted my connection request, have wanted to talk to us. That’s cool!

The only problem? Most eDiscovery services provider firm owners don’t have any sort of active LinkedIn presence, so very few of these folks even use social media at all. (We plan to follow up by email with the ones who didn’t respond via LinkedIn, don’t worry.)

Our next outbound campaign is going out today, to Employment Law Firms. We hypothesize that they’ll have the most direct use case for our tool, given the way they interact with their clients (and with opposing counsel during litigation discovery). Fingers crossed!

Ads: ⚠️ Nothing Yet

Not a huge test but thus far we’re in for ~$1300+ on ViewExport ads over the last few months. This has resulted in 887 clicks and an average of $1.47 CPC.

But… how much revenue? Well…

So far, we don’t think we’ve generated even a single lead 🙃

(To be fair, it’s actually debatable whether one or two leads denied marketing cookie consent but did come from an ad, so it’s possible we had ROI’d here, possible we haven’t, but we’re pretty certain it’s been a bust.)

Ogilvy’s famous quip about 50% of his advertising being a waste, is proving true for us. We don’t know ‘which half is wasted’ or if the whole thing is.

This hasn’t stopped us: the dollar amount is small enough, and the payoff from just one customer is large enough, that if we got one customer tomorrow, this could be our worst-performing channel and yet still a positive ROI.

SEO: ✅ Winner… Invest more!

Despite getting far fewer clicks from Organic Search than we got from advertising, 98%+ of our leads and revenue to date for the ViewExport product have been from SEO. That’s pretty hard to ignore.

As a result, we’ve spent 50% more money (and 500% more time!) on improving SEO than we have on advertising or outbound combined.

If you haven’t plugged in your site to Google Search Console, you gotta do that right now. For that matter, plug in Bing Webmaster tools too! They’re both free:

Verdict? Expand SEO, Continue Testing Ads/Outbound, Find Referral Partners

We (Mac and Alex) both believe that — when it comes to marketing — everything always works. And calling it quits after limited testing does not mean you have exhausted the potential of a channel.

To share wisdom from a friend of ours, on this topic:

“Marketing effects accumulate over time; stopping prematurely prevents the observation of those effects. It's like going to the gym twice and concluding exercise doesn’t work.”

While SEO has been our winner thus far, we know that:

1. The referral-generation engine is within reach if we continue to develop relationships in the industry - we just have to find the right initial ‘nodes of connection’, people who are excited about our product and willing and able to connect us to new customers on a regular basis

2. Advertising and outbound always work! It’s just a matter of figuring out how to execute it for one company or another, and then deciding if and how the motion is profitable or not (the jury is still out on this, for ViewExport. We’re figuring it out.)

3. We can’t rest on our laurels with SEO: in fact, we should be investing more in this channel than the other ones, since it’s already working. We should be expanding here, not maintaining.

4. Conversion rate optimization, specifically with our offer and our packaging, have become an enormous focus for us recently. We’re getting too much traffic to have such a small amount of net new customers coming in each month. To fix this, we first need to have more conversations with our ICP!

Overall, we are LOVING this game.

Over and out.

-Alex and Mac

P.S. Oh, and here’s the money… 😍

Appendix: The Specific SEO Keyword Rankings and Queries That Brought Us $5k MRR Last Quarter

Next, here are the exact phrases and keywords that have driven over $5k MRR of growth for ViewExport in the last few months. By the way, even within this group, the majority of the customers have come from just the top 1 single keyword alone (!!!):

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Product development velocity is through the roof.

1. AI coding tools progressed fast this year. Almost all of our code is written by Claude Code. (But this newsletter was not!) That means that for us and many others, product dev speed now dramatically outpaces marketing capacity. This creates new dynamics within SaaS teams.

2. Big companies still have trouble w…

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Take SaaS, for example. A common grandiose claim I hear is:

“SaaS is dead. By 2030, it’ll be all AI agents. Business software won’t exist.”

Often followed by ‘and now buy my LLM/vibe coding tool’.

But here are two things to remember:

1. Every major technological rev…

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The response was not what we were hoping for :(

Unfortunately, the product did not work well, the usability is not worth the cost. We made sure to try on different machines and browsers. Ultimately the tool did not work for us and we didn’t get anything out of it, we tried and I wanted it to work better than other solutions. Requesting a refund, I already cancelled online.

-Customer

Ouch.

For a moment, I sunk back into my chair and felt a little shot of despair: this is the first negative feedback we’ve got on usability for this product.

After a minute or two, I rose back up and wrote an email response to the customer. Nothing to lose, right?

Just four and a half minutes later, I refreshed my inbox and:

It worked.

We saved the customer:

Wow. One email that took me two minutes to write, to save $500 MRR.

But the six thousand dollar question is:

What was the churn-save email I wrote to him and why did it work?

First, here’s the exact text of my response to the customer after he initially requested a refund…

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Recently, I found myself creating some thought exercises that I shared with my co-founder Alex. They’ve been really fun to do, usually during our lunch breaks.

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Not so. Non-founder team members often create just as much value than those with the biggest stakes—if…

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Because it’s unusual to acquire a pre-revenue SaaS for $5K, rearchitect it, and monetize it almost instantly, with a payback period of less than two quarters, I thought I’d explain how we did that:

How the opportunity came to us, what we thought of it at the time, what we did wh…

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