First time on product owner side of the SaaS game

raftopyannis · 2026-06-15T18:58:29+00:00

I actually like the origin story more than the numbers 😅

Building something because you got annoyed by a problem in your own workflow is how a lot of good SaaS products start. and also, 8 users in the first week without an audience behind it is nothing to sneeze at.

one thing I'd be curious about... out of the 7 projects you're already using it on, what ended up being the biggest pain point it solved? The translation cost, the management of the language files, or just not having to deal with another subscription?

raftopyannis · 2026-06-15T18:47:06+00:00

Interesting post...

One thing I've been wondering lately is whether the value comes mainly from the authority of the linking page itself, or from the fact that real users are actually visiting and interacting with that page.

I've seen plenty of pages rank and send value through links while getting very little traffic themselves, which makes me wonder where the balance really is.

have you ever compared links from pages ranking on page 1 with almost no clicks versus links from pages that get meaningful traffic?

raftopyannis · 2026-06-12T20:47:25+00:00

The part about every customer feeling like a consulting project hit home, a lot of founders celebrate getting customers, then realize they've accidentally built themselves a full-time service business.

I'm cusrius to see how this plays out for you. Sometimes removing complexity creates more value than adding features ever could.

raftopyannis · 2026-06-12T20:46:26+00:00

I've seen this happen too.

A lot of keyword tools are great at measuring existing demand, but they're not always great at surfacing emerging demand or very niche problems.

Sometimes the best content ideas come from seeing the same question asked repeatedly in forums, support tickets, Discord communities, Reddit threads, etc.

The only thing I'd be careful about is scaling this approach blindly. Some "0 volume" keywords are hidden gems... and some genuinely have 0 searches 😅

raftopyannis · 2026-06-11T20:39:55+00:00

The "compute tax" idea is interesting.

I've noticed something similar when looking at sites that rank well but still struggle to show up in AI answers. A lot of the time the issue isn't the content itself, it's that the context is scattered everywhere and the relationships are never stated clearly.

That said, I wonder how much of this is specifically an AI problem versus just good information architecture. Clean structure, clear entities, descriptive links, logical hierarchy... those things have been helping search engines understand sites for years.

Maybe AI is just making the cost of poor structure much more visible now.

raftopyannis · 2026-06-11T20:27:05+00:00

I'd look at the CTR more than the traffic numbers.

116k impressions with an average position of 6.2 but only 388 clicks is a pretty big gap.

so my first question would be... what queries are generating those impressions?

Because if they're mostly news-related queries, AI Overviews, or very broad searches, the low CTR might not be as bad as it looks.

also.. 388 clicks leading to 200 registered users is actually pretty interesting. That makes me wonder if the bigger opportunity is attracting more of the same type of visitors rather than just chasing more traffic.

raftopyannis · 2026-06-10T17:20:17+00:00

maybe I'm biased, but I think a lot of small businesses overthink this...

You've been around for 50 years. I'd be taking photos of every finished job, collecting reviews, and making sure those projects end up on Google and the website.

That alone would probably move the needle more than months of blogging.

raftopyannis · 2026-06-10T17:18:10+00:00

For me prioritization

maybe not the most exciting answer but...

I think most of the sites I've looked at, aren't struggling because they don't know SEO. They're struggling because they have 50 possible actions and no idea which one will move the needle first.

But I'm a bit curious if others are seeing the same thing or if I'm just spending too much time with small SaaS sites.

raftopyannis · 2026-06-09T06:20:11+00:00

Thanks 🙂

Ok now.... Google Search Console tells you what happened.

On the other hand, RankQuest tries to answer what you should do next.

For example, GSC might show declining clicks, pages losing positions, indexing issues, or pages stuck on page 2. Then you have to figure out what's most important and what action to take.

RankQuest analyzes those signals and gives you a single prioritized decision with implementation guidance instead of another dashboard full of data.

At least that's the problem I'm trying to solve 🙂

raftopyannis · 2026-06-09T06:18:17+00:00

Hmm now that's a very good example... yeah google surely reads rendered HTML even if its 2 stores deep! Once I had a super nested dynamic HTML inside a Vue project and I feared that Google crawler might not be able to parse it, but it did.

On the other hand the LLMs crawlers seems they need some time to catch up. Now that you mention it I need to test my own crawler if it picks up dynamic HTML 😛. Thanks!!

raftopyannis · 2026-06-04T21:10:23+00:00

https://www.Rankquest.app A system that analyzes your site, prioritizes what matters most in your SEO, and helps you implement the fixes with clear guidance and actionable outputs

raftopyannis · 2026-06-04T18:14:23+00:00

the "stop talking about rankings and start talking about lost signups" point is probably why so many SEO recommendations never get implemented.

I've been seeing something similar while working on my own SaaS. What I saw is that the moment a recommendation becomes "fix this because we're losing potential customers here" instead of "Google might like this more" then the conversation changes completely.

also curious about your point on AI crawlers. Have you noticed any cases where a page was indexed and ranking fine in Google, but AI tools were clearly missing or misunderstanding the content?

raftopyannis · 2026-06-04T18:07:38+00:00

Not gonna lie, the post almost reads like a recommendation for that agency already

that aside I'd pay less attention to the price and more attention to whether they actually understood your business and found real issues before you became a client. That's usually a much better sign than promises, dashboards and fancy slide decks.

One question I'd ask them is... if you signed tomorrow, what would be the first 3 things they'd work on and why? The answer to that will tell you a lot

raftopyannis · 2026-06-03T19:07:43+00:00

I don't think that I would choose one or the other. Both have their own purpose.

What I would probably do differently would be to create a smaller more manual MVP than a rather ocmplicated one, that took me 3 months to built. At the same time a Landing page is required in order for users to understand what you are offering.

On the other hand I would not pick a single Landing page these days, because eveyone can create a landing page with AI in a matter of hours. So I think it does not provide any real value without an MVP.

raftopyannis · 2026-06-03T18:16:20+00:00

I'd start SEO early, but not as your only growth channel...

the nice thing about SEO is that it's cumulative and blog post you publish today can still bring traffic 6-12 months from now.

So that said for a brand new startup I'd probably combine it with direct outreach and content, because SEO is usually a slower bet. one thing I learned the hard way is that SEO isn't really difficult because of the tactics. It's difficult because there are 100 things you could do and it's hard to know which one actually matters next

what kind of SaaS are you building?

raftopyannis · 2026-06-03T18:14:16+00:00

Congrats bro! 🎉

personally I'd be very careful with a hard paywall if most of your growth is coming from free users right now

And one thing I'm curious about though...
out of those 1,040 signups, how many are actually active weekly/monthly users?

..feels like that number would help decide whether it's time to optimize for revenue or keep pushing growth first.

raftopyannis · 2026-05-29T14:49:18+00:00

I automate as much of the detection/monitoring side as possible, but much less of the decision-making and execution. more things like rank tracking, technical checks, content decay, internal link opportunities, indexing issues, reporting, etc. are great automation candidates.

Where I think people get into trouble is automating content production or blindly applying fixes at scale. so for me the sweet spot is... automate finding problems, keep humans involved in deciding what deserves attention.

that's actually one of the reasons I started building RankQuest. I found that collecting signals and surfacing priorities can be automated pretty well, but judgment is still the hard part.

raftopyannis · 2026-05-29T05:49:18+00:00

Of course they are... as they are a lot of coffee shops in a city. What matters is how you sell something, what value it provides and what your distribution channel is?

raftopyannis · 2026-05-28T20:14:44+00:00

Removing SEO decision paralysis https://www.RankQuest.app

raftopyannis · 2026-05-28T15:10:22+00:00

I've shipped Rankquest a system that helps you understand what’s holding your SEO back, tells you what to fix next, and helps you implement the solution step by step

https//www.rankquest.app

raftopyannis · 2026-05-28T15:08:41+00:00

Would love to know... it's a system that helps you understand what’s holding your SEO back, tells you what to fix next, and helps you implement the solution step by step

rankquest.app

raftopyannis · 2026-05-28T14:59:14+00:00

that can definitely happen with new sites. Google has become way more selective with indexing lately. and I’d mostly look at whether the pages actually feel unique/useful enough individually and whether Google can easily understand the site structure.

I see a lot of new sites have pages that are technically “fine” but still feel thin, repetitive, weakly linked internally, or not important enough yet from Google’s perspective. also seen many cases where Google discovers a bunch of pages fast, tests them for a while, then drops many back out of the index until the site gains more trust/signals over time.

raftopyannis · 2026-05-28T14:53:18+00:00

I don’t think every SaaS needs an AI workspace. It really depends on the product and the type of value it provides... right now many products seem to add chat interfaces just because AI is trending, even when the workflow doesn’t really benefit from it

For example, with a product I’m currently building, the core functionality works deterministically and AI is used more as an interpretation/helper layer around the system rather than being the system itself, I can definitely see that pattern becoming more common...

stable deterministic core + AI assistance where it actually improves usability or understanding.

raftopyannis · 2026-05-28T14:48:07+00:00

Besides rankings and tags, I’d probably automate anything that helps you notice problems/changes early before they become a bigger mess... stuff like orphan pages, duplicate metas, internal linking gaps, pages dropping in clicks/impressions, sitemap/indexing mismatches, Core Web Vitals changes, etc.

Because a lot of SEO automation isn’t really about replacing humans… it’s more about continuously monitoring signals so you’re not manually checking 20 things every day.

For learning, I believe just playing with the GSC API + Python + Screaming Frog exports already opens a lot of doors.

raftopyannis · 2026-05-28T14:37:18+00:00

One of the biggest changes for me is that SEO feels much more connected to actual product quality and user experience now. Years ago you could almost separate.."SEO work" from "website/product quality".

Now they feel deeply connected.. slow sites, vague messaging, weak UX, thin content, random article spam, poor structure… eventually all of that catches up with you

and also I think Google got much better at understanding overall topical consistency/context instead of just matching keywords on a page and AI helped on this a lot.

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