u/wemmbu_mace

There's a point in early SaaS where you're checking three different tools just to answer one question about whether your acquisition is working. Traffic in one tab, Stripe in another, some half-finished spreadsheet trying to connect them in a third.

The real question you need answered is simple: which channel is sending visitors who become paying customers. Everything else is noise until you can see that clearly.

A few tools worth knowing at this stage. Plausible if clean traffic reporting is all you need, it's the best at that specific job. ChartMogul free tier if you want subscription metrics without paying anything. Faurya if you want traffic and revenue attribution connected, it sits at $7/month and integrates with Stripe so both datasets live in the same dashboard.

The cookie-less tracking is what makes the traffic data reliable on Faurya. No consent banner drop-off, no chunk of your audience disappearing because they declined cookies. What you see is closer to what's actually happening.

Pick the one that matches the question you're actually trying to answer right now. Most founders at the early stage need the revenue attribution layer sooner than they think.

I have been documenting the product journey but I realized I have not been transparent enough about the distribution side. So here is an honest look at how I am approaching SEO and backlinks week by week without turning it into a second full time job.

The first thing I accepted is that SEO is not something you set up once and forget. It is a background process that needs consistent small actions over a long period. Trying to do everything at once leads to burnout and abandonment. So I broke it down into simple weekly habits.

Week one was purely technical cleanup. I set up Google Search Console, checked for crawl errors, made sure the main pages were loading fast, and set up basic analytics. Nothing glamorous but necessary before any link building makes sense.

Week two I focused on getting the product indexed and visible. The fastest way to do this is directory submissions. Instead of waiting for Google to discover the site organically, I used this tool to submit the product across 500+ curated SaaS and AI directories. This pushed early backlinks into the profile and got the site indexed within days. For a bootstrapped project where time is limited, automating this part was a straightforward decision.

Week three I started showing up in relevant communities. Not dropping links but genuinely participating in conversations, answering questions, and building familiarity. The goal is not immediate traffic but slow trust building that compounds over months.

Week four I wrote the first piece of content targeting a specific long-tail keyword my users are actually searching for. One article, properly structured, internally linked, and genuinely useful. The plan is one piece per week going forward.

None of this is heroic. But doing these small things consistently puts the project in a very different position six months from now compared to ignoring SEO entirely while focusing only on features.

If you are building in public, how are you handling the SEO and distribution side? Would love to see what others are doing at similar early stages.