How to Grow Your SaaS to 250K Users Without Spending on Ads

Most growth books are written backwards: someone succeeds, then builds a theory that explains it. This one is written from the numbers: every day of search data from first index to a quarter of a million users, the behavioural analytics beside it, and a dated log of what shipped showing exactly what was built and when.

38 chapters and 6 appendices on taking one product from zero to 250K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on ads.

Contents

• About this book
• Intercept Demand, Don't Create It
• The First 90 Days
• You Cannot Pick the Winner
• Lose the Head Term on Purpose
• What Their Business Model Forbids
• Sixty Doors, Not One
• Build the Page Backwards
• How to Take Up More Room
• Your Name Is a Distribution Channel
• How to Choose a Name You Can Own
• Files, Not Frameworks
• The Answer Engines
• How to Be in the Training Data
• Your Dashboard Is Three Months Old
• What Noise Looks Like
• Falling CTR Is What Growth Looks Like
• Impressions Are Not Traffic
• The Half You Cannot See
• What Happens After the Click
• Averages Describe Nobody
• Where You Rank Is Not Where You Sell
• Thirty-One Days of Zero
• Position 8 Is a Different Game
• Be Linkable, Not Promotable
• How to Reach DR 20 in a Weekend, and Why It Won't Save You
• How to Win a Launch With Nothing
• Teardown: Why the Other Guy Wins
• Fifty Emails, Two Links
• Five Expensive Mistakes
• The Playbook, and the Problem It Creates
• The Long Tail Ranks Better and Pays Less
• Nobody Has Data on Day One
• Measuring the Answer Engines
• What It Costs to Charge Money
• The Tools Are the Marketing
• What Survived the Second Look
• Programmatic Pages, and the 43% That Do Nothing
• The Page, Assembled
• Appendix A: The Complete Dataset
• Appendix B: The Five-Day Diagnostic
• Appendix C: The Change Log: Seven Rounds, and What Each One Moved
• Appendix D: Your Own Position→CTR Curve
• Appendix E: Glossary
• Appendix F: Five Predictions, With Dates

Free tools

• Search Console Analyzer: Drop your export, get a verdict
• SERP Audit: Paste a URL, get the fix list in priority order
• Schema Generator: Valid JSON-LD, with the guard rails on
• SERP Preview: Pixel-accurate, not character-counted
• Position Value Calculator: What is rank 4 actually worth?
• Schema Inventory: Which structured data is on which page
• Internal Link Graph: Which pages nothing points at
• OG Image Generator: And what it looks like once each platform crops it
• Noise or Signal: Did that actually do anything?
• Programmatic Set Analyzer: How many of those pages actually work?
• Crawler View: What lands in the HTML, before anything runs
• Log File Analyzer: What Googlebot actually crawled

Guides

100 free guides, each answering one question with numbers from this dataset.

• Average CTR by Google position, measured on real data
• What is a good click-through rate in SEO?
• Why is my CTR dropping in Search Console?
• Lots of impressions but no clicks: what it actually means
• Getting from position 8 to position 3 is a different game
• Website not showing up on Google: work through this in order
• How long does Google take to index a new page?
• Bing is not indexing your site, and it matters more than you think
• Pages are indexed but get no traffic
• Traffic dropped suddenly: how to diagnose it without panicking
• How to find keywords without paying for a tool
• Should you target high-volume keywords?

Beat the Bid

The one ranking on this site you can buy: a public pay-to-rank leaderboard where the highest bid is number one and every price is visible. It exists to make the argument concrete — every link on it is sponsored and nofollowed, and it measures nothing except what people paid.