The Power of Parasite SEO (Oct 2024 Update)

B2C Conversions, Parasite SEO, & Native-ifying Web Apps

This is the October 2024 issue of my journey growing a SaaS product.

Aside: I’ve renamed this newsletter from Road to 10k MRR to SaaS Journey.

In this issue, I’ll discuss how my poker training app has inexplicably strong free user growth - now 4000+ users despite no marketing the past few months , but terrible conversion to paid users with just 6 new paid users across the last 3 months, and my plans to improve that.

I’ll discuss parasite SEO and why it’s probably my primary growth channel.

I’ll also discuss my journey in launching a React Native version of my web app.

Finally, I’ll discuss my biggest challenges going forward.

Highlights

• There is tons of free user growth (3000+ new free users, bringing to ~4000 total split between web and native) which I believe indicates good word-of-mouth marketing

• iOS and Android app both shipped and with monetization coded. Having a small audience before launch was helpful as several critical bugs were found that would not have been noticed without a feedback channel.

• New designer on the project which helps with my biggest weakness (design). He is a poker-lover and design-agency owner that is excited about the app’s potential and helping me with Figma UI design for free in hope we can build a future partnership

Lowlights

• Very poor conversion to paid users as only 6 out of 3000+ new users have converted. While native monetization was just launched a few days ago, so far there have been 0 conversions

• Poor velocity due to some factors out of my control (health issues) and some factors in my control (poor habits)

• Underestimated the timeline of building a React Native version of a React app

• Worked on poker book but did not finish or do other marketing work like YouTube

• Did not start any other new product experiments

• Did not write my monthly updates several months in a row

Gameplan for Oct / November 2024

• Make a best effort to talk to more of my registered users and reach out to various poker content creators for feedback on the direction of the product

• Finish book, implement some new designs, do another marketing pass for both book and app.

• Get started on a small experiment for a new project (AI-related info product)

Parasite SEO

I averaging about five web signups daily despite zero marketing - why? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect at least some of my users come from something I learned is called parasite SEO.

Parasite SEO is a general term for creating content on someone else’s website that ranks higher on Google than your own but then sends users to your website. In my case, the website is Reddit.

The basic idea is that about 20% of Google searches now include the word Reddit. Users seek more authentic discussion than web results, which are often SEO-optimized spam.

This means that if you write many articles and comments on Reddit, they will appear in Google search results. At least two paid users told me they found me by searching for “poker term + Reddit” on Google.

I’ve written extensively about how underrated Reddit is as a marketing channel. Parasite SEO is a huge reason for that, and it might explain some growth. However, I don’t think it’s enough to account for everything. I suspect the rest is some form of “word of mouth.”

B2C Conversion Rates

It’s unfortunately possible that I’m getting users for my free tier precisely because it’s free. In this case, the traffic is low quality if the users have a very low willingness to pay.

Many SaaS writers warn about B2C because conversion rates can be as low as 1%, and unfortunately, mine is significantly worse at under .3%.

The considerable challenge is determining whether there’s simply a low willingness to pay, whether my app doesn’t have enough value to justify the conversion, or whether the funnel to convince users to pay is too poor.

While my poker trainer has a few unique angles, the market leaders in the space are much more feature-rich than me. It could simply be that I need to improve my product more. The product is less than 1% done.

But as is often the case with small players vs. big market leaders, catching up to feature parity with the big players doesn't seem realistic. It’s also highly risky to go into a void and code a ton to ultimately have what will still be a “me too” project at a marketing disadvantage.

While some aspects of my app are unique, it’s unclear if my different approach to poker pedagogy is an appealing enough to differentiate from more established products.

Next Steps in Improving Conversions

My plan is to talk to more users and poker content creators and determine whether there’s a viable path forward.

Reaching out to content creators could be doubly effective because I might get product feedback and possible marketing partnerships. I think many small-time content creators don’t make much money from ads and could be an affiliate partner and provide product feedback to help me understand if there’s a viable path to more revenue.

One thing I’ve been asked about in this newsletter is whether I’ve run many ad campaigns. Ads are not just expensive, but I feel as if I’m already successfully acquiring users and the problem is that I’m not converting them. So I’d rather spend time improving the broken conversion funnel than the working acquisition funnel.

Journey Launching a React Native version of my web app

The initial version of my trainer app was a web app. It was designed responsively to work on phones, but my gut instinct was that it would feel nicer if there was an actual native version, which feels slightly slicker than a web app in a browser tab. A friend also told me he subscribes to iOS apps more easily since it’s once click subscribe and standard cancellation.

I also thought that given that I had written a React app, a React Native app wouldn’t be too much more work.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be false, and the native app took me much longer than I anticipated, and I had to rewrite much more of the app than I initially hoped. React and React Native have the same mental model of app building but a million minor differences in the details.

Sharing code between the web and native versions is also more complex than I expected. For example, I used CSS grids quite extensively on the web, but they are not supported in React Native.

Given that I’ve finally put together a decent template for having a React + React Native codebase, I’m considering creating a boilerplate for these types of projects as I’ve frequently seen boilerplates for React or React Native but not a boilerplate for both with code re-use.

The other option I considered and discarded was Capacitor, which wraps your web app in a native shell and lets you publish it in the App Store. In my experience, these apps perform poorly and feel almost as bad as the web app, with the only advantage being that they appear in the App Store.

However, in hindsight, Capacitor may have been a better starting point to validate interest if I had known how long the React Native version would have taken. On the upside, I believe React Native is a much stronger mobile technology as proven by Facebook, Discord, Coinbase and Shopify using it for their flagship apps, and I have now have experience shipping a complete app with it.

Given 0 paid conversions thus far, it might not have been the best use of my time, and my gut instinct that native was mandatory may have been wrong. Of course, I just released monetization a week ago, so there’s a lot of time and room to grow. But given a time machine, I’d have stayed focused on improving the web version of my product rather than split myself into two mostly separate efforts.

Biggest challenges

My two biggest challenges are staying productive and motivated in the face of poor revenue results, and realistic planning around priorities.

On the one hand, I tell myself that I’ve spent too much time on Live Poker Theory with too little financial ROI , that working on it is coming at the expense of opportunity cost of projects with more potential, and that there’s low willingness to pay in the space and it’s better as a side project than a business.

On the other hand, I could argue that pursuing too many new projects is “shiny object syndrome”, that building one great piece of software could outperform many small products with less effort behind them, that several well-monetized competitors validate the market’s willingness to pay for more complete products, and that thousands of users and email address and a partner that fills in my biggest weakness is enough momentum that it would be foolish to abandon it in favor of starting a new project from scratch.

I don’t have an easy answer to this conundrum and I’m open to advice on the topic. Let me know if you have any ideas by replying to this email or commenting on Substack.

Thanks for reading this month’s update!