A SEO SaaS that pairs sales and engineering to grow subscriptions
A low-ticket SEO SaaS for website owners that combines sales and technical work.
Problem it solvesLow-priced SaaS is hard to sell with long relationship-based sales.
A small SEO SaaS in the Netherlands is run by a commercial co-founder and a technical co-founder. The maker reports it is past €5k MRR and used by around 100 websites.
How they grewOutreach, demos and content
Contentking-0411
u/Contentking-0411
AI made building easy. It didn't make selling easy. How our commercial + technical co-founder setup got us past €5k MRR I'm the commercial co-founder of a small SEO SaaS in the Netherlands. My co-founder is the technical one. My background is sales, but in a completely different market. One where everything was about relationships. Long conversations, meeting people in person, building trust over months. Now I sell a SaaS with subscriptions for a relatively low monthly price. And I quickly found out my old way of selling didn't fit anymore. You can't spend weeks on one customer when the subscription is a small amount per month. The math just doesn't work. So I had to change how I sell. That took time. A lot of trying, failing and adjusting. But now I really see it working. Less about long relationships with a few people, more about reaching the right people fast and making it easy for them to start. The trust part is still important, but it has to happen quicker and at a bigger scale. We're now past €5k MRR and it's starting to really pick up. Not huge numbers yet, but steady growth and it feels like things are finally moving in the right direction. And this brings me to something I keep noticing. A few years ago the hard part of starting a software company was building the product. You needed developers, time and a lot of money. Now? With AI tools a lot of people can build a working product in a few weeks. New tools launch every day and many of them are actually pretty good. But most of them get no users. Because building was never the only problem. Distribution is. Who is going to find your product? Who is going to trust it? Who is going to pay for it? AI didn't solve that part. Maybe it even got harder, because everyone is launching and the noise is bigger than ever. That's why I think the combination of a technical founder and a commercial founder is stronger now than it ever was. In our case it works like this: - My co-founder builds and improves the product. He doesn't have to think about how to sell it. - I talk to customers, do demos, run outreach and write content. I bring back what people actually ask for. - We're developing a lot right now and almost everything we build comes from customer feedback. People tell us what they miss or what could be easier and we use that to keep making the product better. That loop is honestly the biggest reason it's working. We don't guess what to build. Our customers tell us. It's not always smooth. We sometimes disagree about priorities. He wants to fix something technical, I want a feature a prospect asked for yesterday. But those discussions usually lead to better decisions than either of us would make alone. And to be honest, sometimes I'm the problem. I want too much. With AI it feels like everything is possible and everything can be done tomorrow. But in the end someone still has to actually build it, test it and make sure it works. AI speeds things up, it doesn't make the work disappear. Being careful has become really important for us. Our tool is now used by around 100 websites. That means we can't just push something out and hope it works. If something breaks, customers notice right away. And with a low-priced subscription they don't complain for long. They just leave. So we started planning a lot more seriously. Every week and every month we decide what we're actually going to do. Not everything we'd like to do, but what's realistic and what matters most. That keeps us from wanting too much at once and running ahead of ourselves. Sounds boring maybe, but it's one of the best changes we made. What I see with solo technical founders is that they build for months and only then start thinking about marketing. And commercial founders without a technical partner often depend on freelancers or agencies and lose speed. So my honest take: if you can build, find someone who can sell. And if you can sell, find someone who can build. Building got cheaper. Selling didn't. And whatever you do, plan it and don't try to do everything at once. Curious how others see this. Are you a solo founder or did you split roles like this? And for the salespeople here: did you also have to change your approach when moving to low-ticket SaaS?
- MRR
- €5K
- Websites
- 100
