Last week I shared that I was building my first SaaS product. I was hyped. I had the concept, I had momentum, and I was deep in the build.
Then everything came to a screeching halt.
Not because of a technical problem. I just let the pragmatic side of my brain shut down my ability to problem solve creatively.
And I almost walked away from the whole thing.
Quick context if you missed last week.
I’m building a tool that automates one of the most tedious parts of SEO: stealing your competitors’ backlinks.
The manual version of this process looks like:
- Buy an Ahrefs subscription
- Find your competitors and export their referring pages
- Write personalized outreach emails one by one, referencing the specific article and link
- Include screenshots so the person actually understands what you’re asking
- Repeat hundreds of times
One email takes about five minutes. Multiply that by hundreds of prospects and you’re looking at weeks of work. That’s why nobody does it even though it works.
I’m trying to fix that.
Then I talked myself out of it.
My original vision was that I’d provide the Ahrefs API credits myself.
I wanted people to get access to this data without needing their own subscription. Just price the tool lower and handle the costs on my end. That felt generous. That felt right.
The problem? Ahrefs Enterprise costs $1,500 a month. For an unvalidated idea with zero users.
So I did what I think a lot of builders do. I stopped working on it for a few days. Quietly moved on. Told myself it was too complicated right now.
Looking back, I think that’s a first time founder thing. You default to the most generous version of the product before you’ve even proven it works. And when that version turns out to be too expensive, you assume there’s no other way. You pigeonhole yourself. I know I did.
The 2 AM realization.
A few nights later I was up late, cycling through different pricing models. Nothing was clicking. And then it just hit me.
What if people just use their own Ahrefs API key?
A lot of people already pay for Ahrefs. Most aren’t using anywhere near their monthly API credits. If I let users plug in their own key, they get access to the tool without me eating enterprise costs. And I get to keep building without $1,500 a month hanging over an unproven idea.
It sounds so obvious in hindsight. But that’s kind of the point.
I woke up and couldn’t stop building.
Next morning I sat down and vibe coded for five or six hours straight. Built out the entire “bring your own key” feature. That one unlock led to the next problem, which led to the next feature, which led to me spending a couple of days pretty much all day building.
And then I saw a tweet from an SEO I really respect talking about the exact same concept. A client with 30,000 programmatic pages getting no results because their domain rating was too low. His takeaway? The best way to get backlinks is to take your competitors’ backlinks.
(Read the full tweet here)
I didn’t need that tweet to validate the idea. But it was a nice reminder that I wasn’t building in a vacuum.
p.s. I didn't even realize Ilias had his own tool for this! I took a deeper look and it looks like we're building two different solutions with a similar outcome.
Here’s what I took from this.
I think a lot of us go through this cycle. You have an idea that excites you. You start building. Then your brain finds all the reasons it won’t work. You stop. And if you’re stubborn enough to keep thinking about it, you come back a few days later and realize the thing you thought was a wall was actually just a door you hadn’t tried yet.
Sometimes you feel on top of the world because you have the greatest idea. The next day you feel like there’s no point. And then next thing you know, you’re like “hold on, maybe I shouldn’t trust that voice.”
I still don’t have a production version of this tool. I’m building it now and figuring it out as I go. But I’m glad I didn’t listen to the voice that told me to stop.
If you’re sitting on an idea you talked yourself out of, maybe sleep on it one more time. The bottleneck you think is permanent might not be.
Lastly, I know I usually talk about directories. This week I wanted to take you behind the scenes of my first SaaS build. Let me know if this kind of stuff interests you or if you'd rather I keep it strictly directories. Always curious what you think.
Until next time,
Frey
