i remember being at $0 mrr a few months ago wondering if i would ever even get a sale

now its crazy to think i have 30+ people committed to paying me nearly $1k monthly for something i built with just my laptop and a wifi connection

for context my saas is a youtube automation tool for faceless channels. There's a good amount of competition but i've still been able to compete in my own way

i went from hoping to ever get a sale to now projecting when mrr will be enough for me to quit my day job. my entire paradigm has changed.

to anyone still at those early stages with no customers, these are key parts of my journey I'd advise you dont ignore:

- increase your prices; you'd be so surprised at how much better you convert
- add an annual plan asap; it does wonders for churn and cashflow
- use reddit and small communities to your advantage for your first few customers
- be shameless with marketing. seriously, distribution is the biggest moat left in saas now. technical proficiency means less every day
- turn up everyday. your efforts are a lagging measure of your results. what you do now is what you'll see the benefit of down the line
- dont neglect seo. start now, the time will pass anyway
- bring your churn down. high churn means you have a leaky bucket, replacing customers each month isn't the way to scale
- onboard your users properly; the job isn't done with the sale. that's only where it starts.
- dont spread your attention; no point having 3 saas that all aren't earning. pick one thing with potential and take it as far as you can go

I can't wait to keep growing this. It's amazing that an idea and product I coded myself has the potential to change my life situation. Good luck to all solo founders out there, it's hard but so worth it!!

Quick story for anyone running a faceless page and wondering why million view posts aren't translating into actual money.

I started a TikTok page in Jan 2023 called Raivolution. AI illustrated short stories, slideshow format, the stories were mine, the images were ai. By my third post I had hit 230k views. Tenth post hit 2 million. I qualified for the Creator Rewards Program in a week and was 100% convinced I was about to get rich.

I was not.

A strong month was about $150. Most months were closer to $50. And this was despite hitting million-view posts multiple times a week. It was better than nothing of course, but a post could take me 4-6h to make, and I was posting 4+ times a week at a time. It was stretching me thin for almost no reward. The platform was happy to use my content to keep people scrolling, it just wasnt going to share the spoils.

It took me longer than it should have to clock that I was running the wrong play.

What changed my mindset was the comments. Every post had people asking how I made the videos, how I came up with the stories, what tools I used. Sat right there in my notifications. Free demand research and i was ignoring it.

So I made three guides. Two technical ones for $8 each (anime workflow, movie workflow) and a story writing one for $13. Took me maybe 3 hours each. I added a soft CTA at the end of every post that said "Stories are mine. Images are ai. Guides in bio".

I started selling in May 2023. Even after I slowed posting down, the guides did about $600/mo on their own. More than the platform had ever paid me. From three PDFs I made in an afternoon.

Heres the tactical bit, because if youre running a faceless page and you havent set this up yet, its the thing.

The funnel breaks down into three pieces.

1. Content as the hook. Your posts have to stand on their own and never feel like an ad. People land on your page from the For You feed. 96%+ of my views above 10k came from FYP, which means almost every viewer was meeting me for the first time. You cannot open with a product.
2. Demonstrated value. The product has to match the curiosity your content creates. This is where most creators mess it up. If your page is comedic deepfakes, dont sell a trading course. The comments literally tell you what to sell if you actually read them. People asking "how do you make this" want a workflow guide. People asking "where did you get that shirt" want merch. Match the offer to the question your content is making people ask.
3. Call to action. Light touch always. Mine was "Guides in bio" as a final slide on relevant posts. Thats it. When i forgot to add the CTA on bigger posts the sales were noticeably lower for those videos. A one line CTA matters more than you'd think.

Some quick notes from running this:

Where you sell doesnt matter much. Gumroad, etsy, stan.store, payhip, all fine. Pick the one with the lowest friction for your audience and move on. I used etsy because PDFs do well in their search.

Price for impulse. Low price PDFs convert way better than $50+ premium guides. Id take ten $8 sales over one $80 sale every time, the marginal effort to upsell isnt worth the conversion drop at the top of the funnel.

Match the CTA energy to the content. I know of a big faceless page making anthropomorphic AI candlestick characters in soap opera scenarios (you heard that right LOL), big numbers, sells forex strategy. The hook attracts entertainment seekers, the offer demands serious traders. Conversion almost certainly suffers because the curiosity gap is wrong. Its worth checking your own page for this.

Build a recognisable visual format before launching a product. Viewers need to know its your video before they trust an offer from your bio.

And the one that matters most. Platform payouts are a rented house, your funnel is owned land. YouTube has shifted its stance on AI content multiple times in the last 2 years. TikTok Creator Rewards has changed payout structure repeatedly. Instagram scaled bonuses back hard. If your monetisation depends on a payout program youre one policy change away from zero. Build the funnel underneath the channel before you need it.

I eventually built a tool for the production side (taletok.io, since 4-6h per video was crushing me) but honestly the funnel is what i actually want anyone reading this to walk away with. A tool only matters once you have an audience and an offer. Production tool first is the wrong order, ive seen people try to start there and they always stall because they have nothing to point traffic at.

If anyone wants the exact CTA i used, the etsy listing structure, or the bio link setup that worked best drop a comment. Also happy to write up the longer version (i broke down 8 different faceless creators including where one big one is leaking conversions).

Good luck out there.

Many founders neglect or continually defer SEO, thinking it's too complicated or that the results will take too long to register.

Don't make this mistake.

SEO is the most evergreen traffic source a SaaS can have. The work may seem daunting, but once it's done and you start reaping the rewards, you will only ever wonder why you didn't start earlier.

I find that most founders defer SEO simply because they don't know where to start. The truth is it really isn't hard. You just need to know what needs to be done. I'm making this writeup because I've been there, and coming out on the other side feels eye-opening. I have nothing to sell and I believe the pie is big enough for all of us. These are actionable steps for you to start your SEO strategy today.

For context I'll be using my current SaaS, taletok.io which is a faceless youtube automation tool, as the running example throughout. It currently sits at a DR of 6 and is in the faceless channel automation niche which is highly competitive, yet I still compete and receive organic traffic for my target keywords. So this isn't theory, it's what's working for me right now.

SEO is split into two major rudimentary categories: on-page and off-page.

On-page SEO is comprised of the technical structure of your site. In broad categories:

• Content and keywords -> "What is this page/article/site about?": keywords, search intent, quality, etc.
• User experience -> "Is this site responsive enough for users?": load time, image sizes, element interactions, etc.
• Accessibility -> "Is it accessible?": alt tags, H1/H2/H3 tags, semantic tags, metadata, etc.
• Crawlability -> "Is it well-structured for users and crawlbots?": internal linking, H tags, sitemap, canonical urls, etc.

This is your foundational baseline, but only about 30% of your time will be spent here.

Off-page SEO is everything regarding "why should your page rank for this search term?". Essentially split into:

• Link building -> backlinks, backlinks, backlinks.
• AI Engine Optimisation (AIO/GEO) -> brand mentions, UGC marketing, intent-matched content, etc.
• Local SEO -> directories, google business, etc.

Since we're on r/SaaS, I'll focus primarily on SaaS-applicable elements (won't go over local SEO). The sector is infinite so I won't cover everything but here's a baseline of what you need to get started.

1. Sort out your on-page SEO

Create an Ahrefs account (or whatever your preference, SEMrush works fine too). I have a paid plan, well worth the money.

Perform a site audit and drill through all the issues reported. This will mainly cover the accessibility, user experience, and crawlability of your site.

Common accessibility issues:

• Not using alt tags. Ensure all images are correctly labelled.
• Using incorrect semantic tags. H tags exist to define the structure of content. Any given page should only have a maximum of 1 H1 (which should include your lead target keyword, will get to this later).

Common user experience issues:

• Poorly optimised assets. Compress your images and videos and serve them correctly, generally from a CDN if possible. Use framework tools like nuxtimg or equivalent to resize and serve optimised formats like WebP. Pages that take longer to load have higher bounce rates, which google perceives as poor user experience and so does not rank your pages as well. Use Lighthouse to evaluate your LCP and technical performance. Drill through all major issues.

Common crawlability issues:

• Canonical URL redirects. Ensure your site is consistent with your urls (usually a trailing slash vs no trailing slash problem).
• Dead links.
• Orphan pages (no internal pages link to them).

Ahrefs has made it quite easy to copy and paste individual issue reports, so you can just feed them to your AI (Cursor, Claude, etc) and work through them. With a day's work you can likely get yourself to a healthy score (70+).

Onto the juicier work, still within on-page SEO. This is critical.

2. Keyword research

Too many of you have website copy that no one is searching for. The entire point of web pages is to match user search intent, not the other way around. Adapt your content to what your potential customers are searching for.

- Brainstorm your ideal customer profile (ICP) and what they might be searching for.

For my tool, my ICP is faceless channel creators. My tool automates content creation with AI. Potential search terms they're using: "faceless channel ai", "faceless channel automation", "faceless shorts generator".

- Start searching for the terms.

Even if you start with a rubbish search term, Ahrefs does a good job of supplanting relevant search terms and keywords. You should soon be able to find highly relevant search terms for your niche.

- Collect your keywords.

At a low DR, you won't be able to compete for high keyword difficulty (KD) terms. Start small. Group all the highest volume, lowest KD keywords you can find.

There's a distinction to be made here. There exist short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords. Think of them as parent keywords and children keywords. Short-tail might look like "faceless channel automation", while the long-tail equivalents are "faceless channel automation for IG reels", "how to start faceless channel automation", etc. This distinction is important.

- Segment your keywords into short-tail (parent) and long-tail (children).

Short-tail keywords are the blockbusters featured in the forefront. These go in your H1s, your URL slugs, your landers, your blog post titles. Long-tail keywords populate the supporting content within those pages.

- Create different page types for your parent keywords (important, read this step at least if nothing else).

Keywords are split into 3 categories of intent: informational, commercial, branded. The category of intent generally tells you which stage of the funnel they're at (top of funnel [TOFU], middle of funnel [MOFU], bottom of funnel [BOFU]), and based on this there are ideal pages to create to best capture, nurture, and convert them.

A rule of thumb:

Alternatives pages for branded intent keywords:

Say I have a much larger competitor [Y]. A potential customer searches on google "Y alternatives" or "Y reviews". I can create an alternatives page like taletok.io/alternatives/y-vs-taletok, satisfy the search intent of the user by providing genuine information on Y, then propose my tool as a potential better solution. These tend to be BOFU customers who are ready to convert, and as such are high quality leads. This technique is wonderful because branded search terms in smaller niches generally have low KD, so you can steal a lot of traffic away from competitors who haven't bothered to defend it.

Blog posts for informational intent keywords:

"What is faceless channel automation?" -> taletok/blog/what-is-faceless-youtube-channel-automation. Seed the page with related long-tail keywords to capture as much relevant traffic as possible. These tend to be TOFU customers but are still important to capture for brand awareness for when they return with more purchase intent. Or you can funnel them directly into a sale with expert copy, value prop, and a good product.

Landers for commercial intent keywords:

Commercial intent keywords are people who know what they want and are evaluating tools. "Faceless channel automation software", "AI shorts generator", "youtube automation tool". These are the highest converting search terms after branded ones, and they deserve their own dedicated landing pages.

Each lander should target one parent keyword and be built around it. For taletok.io/faceless-channel-automation, the H1 leads with the keyword ("Software for Faceless Channel Automation"), the H2s and H3s use related long-tail variations ("How does faceless channel automation work?", "How to start a faceless youtube channel"), and the body copy directly answers the questions someone with that intent is asking. The page also needs a clear CTA, social proof, and ideally a demo or product visualisation. Treat each lander as its own mini funnel. They are essentially homepages customised for other keywords your homepage couldn't prioritise.

The mistake most founders make is shoving every keyword into their homepage. Your homepage can only realistically rank for one or two primary keywords. Dedicated landers let you compete for many more.

- Populate your pages with the long-tail keywords.

For my example taletok/faceless-channel-automation lander, the H1 leads with the parent keyword, then my H2s and H3s look like "What is faceless channel automation?", "How to start a faceless youtube channel automation", etc. Each section answers a real question someone searching that term would have.

That's essentially what you need for on-page SEO. Choose your keywords carefully.

3. Link building (the behemoth)

Link building is your answer to google asking "why should we rank your pages over the rest?"

The first part of that answer is content quality and search intent match, which we covered with keywords. But the heavy mover is backlinks.

Backlinks are inbound links to your site from other websites. It's google's trusted mechanism for recognising "people think this is quality content". The problem is, getting links is not straightforward.

Quick distinction: backlinks are split into dofollow and nofollow. Nofollow links mean google's crawlers won't pass authority to your site when they encounter the link. They're not entirely useless though, they can be syndicated (picked up by others with dofollow links), or contribute to brand mentions (which is essentially when people search for your brand directly instead of clicking the link, which can sometimes be more beneficial). Either way, both are worth picking up, although dofollow are the standard.

Here's how to actually get them:

- Directories:

Probably the lowest hanging fruit. These are a good way to get a couple of backlinks when you first start out and have nothing. Plenty of free ones, especially in the AI space, and some quality paid ones too. One of my first SaaS' I submitted to many free directories, the link got syndicated and pushed to a huge paid directory for free where it stood on homepage for 5 days. Got me loads of traffic and subscribers. Not the biggest thing to move the needle, but worth doing nonetheless.

Good directories include aidirectori.es, this airtable, and https://webdirectorycenter.com/

- Link swap outreach to similar DR sites:

You can find sites in your niche that have blogs with content related to your keywords. Find these by using google search operators like faceless channel automation + "blog post" or faceless youtube + intitle:blog. Find the site owner's contact and send them a personalised, genuine message about their content and how it may help you both out to refer to each other with a dofollow link to relevant content.

Some may charge, but at similarly low DRs it should really be a help-each-other-out thing. Most won't reply. The ones who do are usually founders in the same boat as you, which makes for some of the easiest links you'll ever land.

- Paid guest posting on high DR sites

This is where you can get serious link juice if you've got something genuinely interesting to write about. Most outreach for guest posts is generic and gets ignored. What worked for me was pitching a unique angle from my own experience, a tiktok faceless channel I had grew to 100k+ followers, which landed me a high DR guest post for way under market value. Editors are people, and people respond to actual stories that nobody else has written. If you've done something specific in your niche that others haven't, that's your angle.

Don't pay for generic AI-written guest posts on link farms. Google's caught on. The links are worthless at best and toxic at worst.

- Niche edits

Paying to have a link inserted into an existing high-DR article that's already ranking. These are powerful because the page is already aged and has authority, so the link passes value almost immediately rather than waiting for a fresh page to index and rank.

Find these through reputable link brokers in your niche, or by reaching out directly to site owners with relevant articles. Costs vary wildly. The key is making sure the article is genuinely topically relevant. A niche edit on an unrelated site is a waste of money.

3.5 Parasite SEO (a cheat code at low DR)

This one deserves its own section because it's how I started getting real traffic before my domain had any authority at all.

Parasite SEO is the practice of hijacking the existing authority of high-DR platforms (Reddit, Quora, Medium, YouTube, LinkedIn) to rank for keywords your own domain has no business competing for yet. You're not trying to outrank Reddit. You're trying to be the post *on* Reddit that ranks.

Google trusts Reddit. ChatGPT and other LLMs lean on Reddit heavily for recommendations. A Reddit thread that ranks for your target keyword can outperform a dedicated landing page on a low-DR site by an order of magnitude.

The case study:

Last year I made a post on r/ContentCreators called "I made a completely free faceless reddit video generator". It got around 22k views. That single post brought me hundreds of signups and pretty much all my first subscribers, ranking for a keyword combination my domain couldn't have touched at the time. I was nowhere on google for "free faceless reddit video generator" through my own site. The Reddit post was on page 1.

Do not spam. Do not be disingenious. The post has to genuinely deliver value first. Mine was a real free tool with a real walkthrough. People upvoted it because it was useful, not because it was promotional. Reddit algorithmically pushed it because of the engagement, and google indexed it because of the dwell time and external interest.

A rough playbook:

- Pick a keyword you can't rank for yet but your ICP is searching
- Find the subreddit (or Quora topic, or YouTube niche) where that audience actually hangs out
- Make a post that genuinely answers the question or solves the problem the keyword implies
- Include your tool/site naturally as part of the story, not as the headline
- Title the post with the target keyword phrased as someone would actually write it

Things that kill parasite SEO posts:

- Titles that read like SEO titles ("Best AI tool for X in 2026")
- Burying the useful content behind a signup wall
- Posting in subreddits where you have no history
- Doing it once and abandoning the thread (engagement post-publish is what keeps it ranking)

Why this works especially well right now:

LLMs are increasingly used as the first stop for product research, and they pull disproportionately from Reddit, YouTube, and forums when answering "what's the best tool for X" type queries. A high-engagement Reddit post for your target keyword is doing double duty: ranking on google AND being surfaced when someone asks an AI for recommendations.
It's the highest leverage activity for a low-DR SaaS founder.

4. AI GEO (the new frontier)

Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of getting your brand surfaced in AI-generated responses (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, etc). It's increasingly important because more and more of your potential customers are starting their research with an AI rather than a traditional google search.

The good news is GEO and SEO are heavily intertwined. Most of the on-page and link building work you do for SEO also helps with GEO. But there are some specific levers worth pulling:

Reddit, Quora, and forum presence

AI models lean heavily on Reddit and Quora when answering recommendation queries because the content is human, recent, and discussion-based. Being mentioned in threads where people are asking "what's the best tool for X" matters more than ever. This doesn't mean spamming, it means actually being a participant in your niche's communities and letting your tool come up organically when relevant.

If you've never posted to Reddit before, start by genuinely contributing. Posts like this one (writeups, breakdowns, lessons learned) tend to perform well and naturally surface your tool without being promotional.

- YouTube content

AI models also index YouTube transcripts heavily. Having someone do a walkthrough or review of your tool, or even doing one yourself, creates a high-signal mention that AI systems can pick up. Bonus: it's a backlink (although nofollow) and a brand mention rolled into one.

- Medium and substack

Lower priority but still worth it. Long-form content on these platforms tends to get crawled and surfaced by AI. Write the kind of post you'd want to read about your space and cross-post it.

Make your content AI-friendly

This doesn't mean writing for robots. It means writing clearly. Use proper H tag hierarchy, include direct answers to questions early in your content, use lists where appropriate, and make sure your most important claims are backed by specifics. AI models are pulling answers, not vibes, so clear structured content gets surfaced more.

To summarize, SEO is fundamentally about best satisfying a user's search intent. Technical user experience, content quality, keyword strategy, backlinks, and now AI surfacing all play a part in that.

A rough sequence if you're starting from zero:

1. Audit your site and fix technical issues
2. Map out your keyword universe and segment by intent
3. Build out your alternatives pages, landers, and blog posts (ongoing)
4. Start submitting to directories and doing link swap outreach (ongoing)
5. Layer in AI GEO activity once your foundation is solid (ongoing)

The biggest mistake I see founders make is treating SEO like a one-time project. It's not. It's a compounding asset. The page I built 8 months ago is now ranking for terms I never targeted because of the long-tail variations it picked up over time. That doesn't happen if you don't start.

I've left a lot of stuff out and could go deeper on any of these sections. Happy to do other writeups focused on specific segments if there's interest, just let me know in the comments.

Good luck out there.