‍What's your personal background? What motivated you to start your own company?

I have been dreaming about building cool things on the internet since I discovered Product Hunt. But I never had the skills until I learned about No-Code. I started launching my first side projects and being active on twitter and in no-code communities. That is how I met my co-founder Lee Launches. 

‍What no code tools did you use to build Build the Keyword and what purpose did each play in the final product?

Build The Keyword is made with:

• Bubble for the front and backend of the app
• Loops for marketing emails
• Substack for newsletter 
• Bloghandy for the blog

What were the initial costs to get Build the Keyword off the ground?

The first month we paid for:

• Bubble starter plan ($29 per month) 
• ahrefs subscription for 2 months ($119 per month) to curate untapped keywords
• Domain name

We use a lot of free tools:

• Crisp chat widget for customer support
• Substack for newsletter
• Microsoft Clarity for analytics 
• Taskmagic for automation
• Logsnag for product analytics

What was the process of building your product from idea to launching?

We were inspired by this very popular tweet from Danny Postma, a very successful serial IndieHacker. He shares his strategy on how to build products around keywords with low competition and decent volume so it will get you customers without the need for a big audience or advanced marketing tactics.

We tried to follow his strategy but noticed that finding such a keyword is not that easy. The free keyword tools don’t give you all the data you need and the paid tools are expensive and have a steep learning curve with 1000 features you don’t need. 

It inspired us because we thought there should be an easier way to do this.

We defined that our MVP would be a library of keywords that fit the criteria which we manually curated with ahrefs. But Lee couldn’t hold himself and quickly build a little tool that checked the values of a keyword and gave you a BUILD IT / DON’ BUILD IT in line with the criteria Danny Postma recommends. 

10 days later we launched on Product Hunt. It resulted in Product of the day and some sort of validation. People were excited for this, buying the library, giving feedback, using our tool, … 

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We decided to focus on it for one more month and we never looked back. In the last 6 months we have been improving the product and doing the boring stuff that it takes to grow it into a stable biz. 

How do you attract customers?

We have been trying a lot of different things to see what sticks. 

• Category pages targeted at relevant low competition keywords 
• Plugin Build The Keyword under relevant tweets 
• Sending a branded newsletter to stay top of mind
• Posting on relevant indexed Quora and Reddit topics 
• Recycling our newsletter content on Indiehackers 
• Organising a Build The Keyword challenge
• Partnership with communities 
• Partnership with platforms
• Getting featured in newsletters 
• Idea tweets / building in public 
• Publishing on Medium 
• Affiliate program 
• Reddit articles 
• Hackernews 

What are the biggest challenges you've overcome building Build the Keyword?

I think the biggest challenge that we overcome is to ignore new shiny ideas. We both really enjoy working together and it helps us to keep each other accountable and level up.

How much money is Build the Keyword making per month?

At the moment it is part-time income as we have to split the revenue between 2.

What's your advice for non-technical people who want to start a company?

‍I would start with multiple small bets by:

• Finding some keywords with decent volume and low competition
• Build a landing page with an email capture for each
• Optimize for SEO 
• Get backlinks
• Wait for traffic to flow in
• Start building a product for the one that get the best results 

What are your future plans for Build the Keyword?

We are staying away from new shiny objects, keep improving the product and are focussing on more long-term marketing tactics like:

• Writing blog articles around long-tail keywords
• Creating free tools around relevant low competition keywords
• Publishing more YouTube videos focused on low competition keywords (still so much to learn here)

We will also organize a second Build challenge, starting on Oct 1. It’s free to join.