How Michael grew his blockchain based SaaS to 40,000 users

Meet Michael Sumner from the United Kingdom.

As a top web engineer, Michael has worked with several FTSE100 companies and have been nominated for web design awards at various institutions. His expertise spans content management systems like WordPress, futurism, and software engineering business management.

Michael is the founder and CEO of ScoreDetect, a pioneering platform that leverages blockchain technology to prove ownership of digital files and text.

The story told by Michael Sumner

What is ScoreDetect?

ScoreDetect is designed to help individuals and businesses safeguard their digital creations through verification certificates. The platform supports a variety of content types, including intellectual property, social media posts, images, videos, music, podcasts, blogs, PDFs, e-books, and online courses.

With seamless integration with Zapier and over 6000+ apps, ScoreDetect enables automated workflows and provides an additional layer of copyright protection without storing actual digital assets.

What’s interesting is that the business completely pivoted after 7 months of research; and with the rules of indiehacking: “your startup name is not that important”. I kept the domain name. From being an “AI detection scoring tool” to becoming an “intellectual property protection” tool.

The product went live in October 2023. I started partnering with platforms such as Zapier and the SKALE blockchain, so that I can follow all the features of what my competitors were up to. But do it more efficiently.

The business model is SaaS subscription service with fully bespoke solutions for my enterprise customers.

Marketing and traction

It took around 6 more months (by March 2024) of small daily pivots in landing page tweaks, new features, and getting to know the market. After that, I reached 100 customers.

Promotion has been fully bootstrapped and involved a mix of organic search, and manually speaking to customers on social media.

Organic search

The traffic has mostly come from organic search. It was an iffy moment the first 3 months but I understood that SEO takes 6 months to gain traction.

To attract organic search I’ve created a useful blog for others tailored to my Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). And internally linking resources within the website so that it is made useful for others to browse. If they wish to use my services, they are a click away from visiting my pricing page or main site for more information.

Today I keep focusing on building the ScoreDetect blog, as this has worked for me. Not much focus on “technical SEO”. I have instead focused on the usefulness of the content to human readers. I have done keyword research to aim for niche keywords and listicles.

Social media

I haven’t bought advertising on social media and have only used X for some announcements - coming from both the @scoredetect account and my personal account. See a few examples below.

I try not to spend too much time on X since most of my traffic is on the blog. That is working and I will stick with one marketing channel for now.

Marketing struggles

The main struggle in marketing is getting the message right. There are many similar tools out there. You created the tool, but how should it be used? What are the problems to solve?

I aimed for an authentic, premium approach when it comes to building trust in a customer relationship. This comes across in my messaging.

At one point I attempted to create hype by launching on blockchain app directories. However I have found that most of it was “gift giveaway”-style traffic which had no conversion rate. Which is what you see in the Google Analytics January traffic spike.

Also since most of my customers are B2B, it is better to focus on stability and authenticity rather than come across as “the next cool thing”. By focusing on creating a better product, the marketing comes naturally when I release improvements.

Current status for ScoreDetect

I now (September 2024) have 40,000+ users who are looking at protecting their intellectual property / digital assets. And growing!

I’m unable to disclose revenue numbers at this point in time due to competitors as this will help increase the business moat.

If you want to know more about ScoreDetect visit the website or book a demo with Michael Sumner.