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Hi, I'm Philipp, 46y and new on this platform 👋 I'm strangely attracted both to 9-5 work, And building startups in my free time All while being husband and father of two teenagers My little story 👇

I'm a programmer who turned into a product manager over a career of 20 years. I enjoy working as PM a lot, but I missed something: the joy of building something from scratch. Thinking of something in my head and then crafting it into existence. I started with something (too) close to my 9-5 work:

I'm working in Swiss real estate marketplace. But we didn't cover shared flats - and the existing websites in Switzerland sucked. So I started with my B2C startup weegee.ch. Building was easy. I this did my whole life. But then I launched it and had no traffic. I never did marketing in my life.

I needed to go out. I found the #buildinpublic scene on Twitter and learned how to navigate social media. I always sucked at it and assumed this will be no different. But lo and behold half a year in I got 1000 followers and more importantly - some new friends, some of which I even met over lunch.

But Twitter was not where my users were. I had two options: paid ads or SEO. My friends at work were mocking me and said I will never get users as I didn't have the budget. Which was true, I didn't want to spend big money on my weekend project. So I started learning SEO.

The crucial part of my SEO strategy was to get backlinks from my niche. I looked at where my competitors got their backlinks from and wrote the owners of these websites asking them if they put a backlink. No incentive, no payment, no link-sharing, just "pretty please cause it's my weekend project".

Nah that's too humble - I had the biggest inventory and best search capabilities and the website owners understood this and linked back. Half a year later I got to page 1 on Google, another half a year and I was in the top #3 constantly.

But I had a problem: Despite the traffic I found no good way to monetize my website. That's why I stopped building and looked for a next thing. While talking to other founders I realized they were most curious about my backlink strategy. That's when I built a tool to automate my backlink outreach.

I launched my tool backl.io - super hacky, the frontend in Retool - and got some customers. The demand was good, I needed to limit to 10 seats, but the tool didn't really work for my customers - backlink outreach is hard. There's a reason we have SEO agencies doing it for you:

Warming up email domains, writing compelling messages, finding a good agreement. All this is hard. That's when I thought: "I want something which is fail proof. Something which is easy to implement and customers see success".

I researched backlink possibilities for 3 months and condensed it into a Notion template. Originally only thought as a sidekick to my tool customers I thought "why not launching it for public with a price tag?" I launched "SEO Kickstarter" it to an overwhelming success: backl.io/directory

I raised the price from $29 to $67 and soon had hundreds of customers buying, implementing and referring to their friends. It was a wild ride for some months but after some time I saw competition flooding the market and the novelty wore off. So my sales went down.

And that's where I am at the moment: I have a product which is still sold through word of mouth, but I know it needs to be better accessible, with more backlink possibilities (especially for some special cases), better impact predictions, etc.

That's why I'm working on version 2 of my SEO Kickstater which I hope I can launch in a month or two. So that's my little side builder story. And who are you? Would be happy to hear your story too!