How Katt is growing her cool keyword tool

Meet Katt. She lives in Leuven in Belgium with her husband and two little ones.

Before creating Build The Keyword Katt used to work for a big cooperation in different roles in the marketing team.

The story told by Katt

I always had an interest in entrepreneurship. I was reading the classic startup books, admiring products on Product Hunt and listening to the podcast How I Built This.

There were a few failed ‘startup' attempts of me and some friends thinking we had struck gold with this crazy unique cool idea. Most of the time the motivation simmered away after a few weeks of creating business plans, mockups with 1000 features and creating a fancy logo that we didn’t need yet.

We never talked to a single user, always saw it too big and oh yeah we couldn’t code.

It’s only later that I learned there is an other way to do it. I discovered the Indiehackers forum and podcast and absolutely loved these stories of founder bootstrapping their products. That together with the discovery of no-code opened up the doors to my entrepreneur dream again 🙂

Then a journey of lots of fails and some small wins followed over a period of two years.

In short:

• I built an internal solution for my team with no-code. Yes, finally solving our own problems without needing to wait for the engineering team for 6 months!
  

• I created a first fun side-project that later was acquired for a small amount. OMG, people pay for what I created!
  

• I started a newsletter on no-code success stories after a tsunami of likes and replies on the tweet of my mini acquisition (still running this today, 10k+ subscribers)
  

• Then there was a period with some failed or ‘not successful enough’ attempts. The learning; It’s not because you can build it that you should. You should think about marketing and monetization from day 1.

The most recent product I have been working on together with Lee Launches is Build The Keyword

After these failed attempts I was intrigued by online products that have visitors on auto-pilot. And I was not the only one. The tweet below from Danny Postma had so many bookmarks and likes. It was something me and my friends referenced a to a lot.

It seemed everyone was dreaming of building a product optimised to be found by search engines. So it could get traffic on auto-pilot and you don’t need to worry about building a huge audience or spending loads of time (or money) on marketing.

But we noticed when we tried to follow this playbook it was still hard ☹

Danny recommends ahrefs to find a keyword with >500 monthly volume, <20 keyword difficulty and plenty of related keywords but:

• The free version doesn’t show all the necessary information

• The paid version is expensive (even for just one month) and comes with a steep learning curve

So we decided to build an easy to use solution to make it easier to find these golden keywords you can build a product around.

The first version was built in two weeks. It was built with no-code using bubble.io which enabled us to move fast.

The initial idea was to go live with a library of curated ideas. But my co-founder Lee created this amazing tool where you can check if the keyword you have in mind has decent volume, low competition and enough related keywords.

We launched on Product Hunt the first of March 2024 and that went well. 800 people signed up to try out the tool for free. And we became Product of the day!

We currently have 2511 users.

Last week we added a new feature (smart search) which makes finding these golden keywords 10 x easier. And this week we will add a curated Idea Database 💡

So what have we been doing in terms of marketing? We are a young product so at this moment we are just trying different things to see what sticks;

• Launching on Product Hunt
  Results: good - but disclaimer as we each have an audience we could ask for support

• Setting up a branded newsletter where we share 5 golden keywords every two weeks
  Results: Great - people love it and this is basically free retargeting

• Experimenting with different tweets like this one and this one and this one

• IndieHackers posts like this one

• Building in public

• Posting on Reddit and Hacker News (see screenshot below). I keep trying with different angels. I want to get some views but my posts often get removed or just don’t get a lot of views.

• I have been answering relevant indexed Quora questions (too early to tell the results) - see example

• Listing in directories (too early tell the results). So far my website has been approved in directories like make.rs, ctrlalt.cc, insanelycooltools.com, launchingnext.com, startupstach.com, and pitchwall.co.

Our next step will be to focus on some long-term marketing channels (instead of algorithmic) like SEO or YouTube.

You can find both Katt and Lee on X. Also remember to check out Build The Keyword