SEO Testing

Nick Swan had already built and sold a SharePoint plugins business (2007-2013) that grew to 20 people. After the sale, he experimented with various ideas—a golf website (flopped), then affiliate marketing with a voucher codes website. That's where the real frustration hit: he was doing constant click-through rate testing on page titles and meta descriptions, and tracking results meant opening Google Search Console every day, copying data into Excel, and manually comparing numbers. "It was just taking ages," he recalls.

The Google Search Console API suddenly opened a door. He built an internal tool first to archive data (Search Console only showed 3 months at the time), then realized he could layer testing and reporting on top. He called it "Sanity Check" and, in classic scratch-your-own-itch fashion, shared it for free in SEO Facebook groups and Slack communities.

Nick ran a 5-month free beta starting in 2015-2016. He didn't over-engineer it—bare Bootstrap UI, minimal features, just the core archiving and basic reporting. But SEO communities are vocal and helpful. Feature requests poured in. "Can you do this in a report? Can you do that in a report?" People were exporting data and doing it manually in Excel; Nick's tool automated it away.

He had always signaled on the landing page that this would become paid. After five months, he was ready to flip the switch. He'd drafted pricing (starting at just $10/month per website—too low in hindsight), and had the launch email queued. Then, on a Friday afternoon, his 3.5-year-old daughter Isabelle was diagnosed with leukemia.

Everything paused. Nick spent 2.5 weeks in the hospital, then managed Isabelle's 2-year treatment regimen while still trying to grow the business. He kept customers updated on her recovery, which built genuine human connection. Three months after diagnosis, he turned on paid plans. The initial surge came from his free beta users, then it plateaued—the classic SaaS death ramp. He realized he wasn't just struggling to sell; he needed to clarify what Sanity Check actually *was*.

Customer interviews revealed the insight: people weren't using the archiving feature anymore (Google had extended Search Console data to 18 months anyway). They only cared about the *testing* functionality—comparing results before and after an SEO change. Worse, people kept asking "how does this compare to Ahrefs?" Nick was being lumped in with massive competitors.

In 2020, he bought the domain seotesting.com for $2,500 (a steal from a supportive seller who wanted to see it used well), repositioned the tool as a dedicated testing and reporting platform for SEO, and rebuilt the codebase from scratch. COVID hit the same week he launched paid plans on the new brand—yet another curveball.

The repositioning was transformational. Within 9 months, SEO Testing reached the same MRR that Sanity Check had hit in 2.5 years. The signals clicked: customers understood what they were buying, word-of-mouth accelerated, and he saw good traction from Twitter ads (the SEO community is concentrated there). Positioning away from competitors was the killer move.

What didn't work: over-reliance on a single platform dependency. He'd sworn off platform risk after his SharePoint days, but built on the Google Search Console API anyway. When Google added 18 months of free archiving, it threatened the core feature of his original tool—a good reminder that platform risk is unavoidable; you just manage its *degree*.

Nick brought on Phil as technical co-founder in 2020-2021 after running solo for years. At $18k MRR with 330 customers, they took a TinySeed investment to scale. Nick recently committed to stopping coding entirely and focusing on marketing—a big identity shift for a developer, but one he'd journaled about and knew was necessary. The team is lean (Nick, Phil, Tiago for support/content, plus freelancers) and focused on growth experiments with the TinySeed capital. Isabelle is now a healthy 9-year-old; the business is healthy too.