Visibly

Chris Dickey didn't set out to build a software company. Four years before launching Visibly, he was running a successful PR agency when his clients started asking the same frustrating question: "How do we get more impactful PR hits?" As an agency owner deeply embedded in the PR and marketing world, Chris realized the most valuable service his team provided wasn't traditional PR work—it was winning placements where brands couldn't rank organically. He noticed a massive gap: brands could see how their website ranked, and they could track paid ads, but there was no way to answer the simple question: "Where does my brand actually exist in search?"

Chris spent a year and a half engineering a solution. He raised $700,000 from three angel investors who believed in his vision and the product-market fit he'd already proven at his agency. He also received a $50,000 grant from the Wyoming Blockchain Initiative and invested another $50,000 of his own money, totaling around $800,000 in funding. The product needed heavy lifting: a team of four engineers (one focused on machine learning and AI) to catalog millions of websites and automatically classify them as earned media, e-commerce, paid, or owned brand assets. The breakthrough was his patent-pending approach to analyzing every link on a search results page and identifying whether branded content appeared there.

Visibly launched its beta in July 2020 completely free. Within three weeks, Chris had signed up 1,000 free users by leveraging his existing network of marketing directors and fellow agency owners, then amplifying through strategic partnerships with B2B PR outlets like PR Week, PR News, and PR Daily. He also started conversations with the SEO community (Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal) and appeared on podcasts discussing search visibility strategy. His agency background gave him instant credibility and access to an audience that deeply understood the problem.

The product resonated immediately with the PR and marketing communities. Chris's years of doing this work manually for agency clients proved there was real demand—clients loved the visibility it gave them and how it helped them identify gaps in their search presence. However, the business model was still forming. At the time of the interview (fall 2020), Visibly was pre-revenue, deliberately keeping the product free to build the freemium user base. Chris was intentionally minimizing costs, not paying himself and having one engineer work for equity only, burning $30-40k per month. He had enough runway until spring 2021 to prove the paid tier could work.

Visibly had achieved early product-market fit through Chris's agency work before ever building the software. The beta launch with 1,000 free signups in three weeks validated the market demand. The team of six (four engineers, two marketers) was laser-focused on launching a paid product in fall 2020 and converting some of that free user base to premium customers. Chris's plan was to raise a Series A or Seed 2 round if growth warranted it, but he wanted to stay as financially independent as possible. The fundamental insight—that brands need to understand their multi-channel presence in search, not just organic rankings—gave Visibly a clear competitive moat against tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush.