Cecilia Razak founded Slides With Friends, an interactive presentation tool, and told Indie Hackers it crossed $40K MRR. The channel she credits is a blog, but the ordering of the work is what makes the story useful. The research happened before the writing, and it was scored.
The strategy
She describes doing "deep research into what constituted buying-intent, bottom-of-funnel, perfect-use-case-match search terms", using SEMrush, SurferSEO and GA4 alongside "heavy actual searching in incognito mode" to see what was ranking and what people actually clicked.
That produced "a spreadsheet of over a hundred of these high-potential terms, rated by best match for our tool". Not rated by volume, rated by how exactly her product answered the search. Then she worked down the list writing a post for each.
The result is the number worth remembering. "We ended up with about a hundred posts, and 5-20 of them made us a huge portion of our total growth." Roughly one post in ten did the work, which is only tolerable if the other ninety were cheap to produce and if you had no way of knowing in advance which would land.
Underneath the content sits a distribution loop she did not have to build. The free tier lets anyone host unlimited live events, and every event puts the product in front of a room: "their whole group experiences that 'aha moment' during their live event." The more events people run, she says, the more marketing they do for her.
She is also honest about the ceiling. She says recent shifts in AI search caused revenue to fall, and she is now steering toward higher lifetime value sales to qualified inbound accounts rather than chasing organic volume.
Why it works
Buying intent terms have small volumes and small competition, and the people typing them have already decided to solve the problem. Scoring by product match rather than by volume keeps you off keywords that bring traffic you cannot convert. And because one in ten posts carries the channel, the spreadsheet is really a way of buying enough lottery tickets on purpose.
How to do keyword research for a SaaS blog
Write down every search someone makes in the hour before they would buy your product. Score each one from one to five on how precisely your product is the answer. Search the top ten in incognito to see who owns them. Then write the top of the list first and keep going, expecting most of them to do nothing.
Credit: Cecilia Razak on Indie Hackers