Yash From Momentum (00:00)
Hello and welcome back to Building Momentum, the show where we peel back the curtain on the exciting and often chaotic world of building a successful SaaS business. I am Yash, your host for this show, where every episode we bring you the stories and strategies of founders who been in the trenches conquering churns, scaling their teams and building products that people and businesses love. In this episode, we will be chatting with Bryan from Spider Now.
Spider Now is an AI platform that helps you discover and improve your on -page SEO and performance issues. They're excited to hear their stories and the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll be dissecting the wins, the losses, and everything in between. So buckle up, grab your headphones, and get ready to dive in the world of SaaS. Hey, Bryan. Thank you for doing this. How are you doing today?
Bryan Williamson (00:44)
Yeah, pretty good. How are you doing today?
Yash From Momentum (00:47)
I am doing great as well. And so let us start with understanding a little more around Spider Now what is the big problem that Spider now is solving at this point of time
Bryan Williamson (00:58)
Well, Spider Now was designed for a purpose to solve issues with technical SEO, on -page SEO issues, and page performance. We basically started out looking at designing it to be kind of like a similar to companies like Screaming Frog, where their desktop were more web -based, web app platform.
And so when we looked at what we were doing and we said, well, let's take what we have and take what everybody else did really well and let's make it better. And then add AI on top.
Yash From Momentum (01:34)
got it, got it interesting and if I want to sort of try and understand a little bit around the size and scale of Spider now, can you share with us a little bit around the status quo as to where have we reached up until now?
So, if I want to get an estimate and understanding of the size and scale at SpiderNow, would you be able to share with us some amount of details on status quo where are we today?
Bryan Williamson (02:00)
Yeah. So right now we've been building the platform for a little over two years and it started out with me and my partner. and we came from a previous company that I owned and we decided we were going to start building this platform. And as we were building it, we started looking at, finding, developing an automated way for people to find issues with technical SEO and on page issues and page performance, speed issues.
And we have an AI that we've incorporated into it that looks for issues and assist people that can't solve the problem. So one of the big things that we saw as we were going along is that we were pretty much focused on people that are developers, people that are SEO experts or people that are web developers. But we saw a very big market in people that are not developers. So one of the things that we've been working on is focusing on AI that would go...
across somebody's website look for these issues, but not only identify the issues and show you the solution for it, but actually create the code. So we use a meta -Llama that we're using for building our AI. And what it does is just basically rewrites the code and we still got a long way to go, what does it fill, it creates code that's filled in the middle coding. So it allows people that are not coders to be able to say, you know, I don't know what the solution is, but.
If you go ahead and give it to me, I can download the file and upload it to my server. So that was kind of the point of Spider Now.
Yash From Momentum (03:33)
Interesting and where are we today? How many customers, users, like what is the scale?
Bryan Williamson (03:39)
Right now we have a little bit over 6 ,000 users on our platform and we have, we've developed extensions through Chrome extensions and Microsoft Edge add -ons that we're getting many users from also. We are getting users from AppSumo. We've been on that platform twice and we're going to be on there in February of next year also once we have our AI completed.
Yash From Momentum (04:05)
So I want to understand that piece a little more, which is sort of around the go -to market. Most SaaS founders, when we talk to them as to how are you going to acquire users and customers, one, they expect that they will build a great product and somehow magically the users will appear. Second, one level more than that or one level deeper than that is almost everyone just ends up saying,
SEO, PPC, stuff like that. But there are other distribution channels as you've explored yourselves, which is launching onto extensions or like building Chrome extensions or marketplaces, and then also launching on platforms like AppSumo, which is where customers might already exist. So how did you sort of go about it? When did you start thinking about building such extensions which can
end up being distribution channels for Spider.
Bryan Williamson (05:05)
Well, one of the things that we saw is that we have a tool that we want to give partially free to users to use to be able to find issues. And then we also have a paid version that takes a little bit more in depth with our AI and grammar. We have grammar checks and spelling checks, for example. But what right now we have a Chrome and a Microsoft Edge extension. building a Safari one right now.
And we're also, within about two weeks, we'll have a native apps for the Google Play and the Apple Store. So there's a lot of challenges when you're building these apps out to make everything very robust, but keeping up with the technology that we're doing at the same time.
Yash From Momentum (05:45)
So, let us talk about pricing a little bit. So, there are two sort of factions that I have seen in SaaS, where there are some founders who come in a very strong opinion that you should have a 7 day, 14 day or a 21 day free trial and then that is it. After that you either pay or you shut the access and then because their fundamental belief is that if you give away something for free, it will not be valued
On the flip side, there are other sort of faction of founders who are like, hey, I'll give you free access up to a certain extent. And then you'll want to do more value discovery and that is why you will upgrade. But the challenge with that, so challenge with having a free forever plan that is capped on features or limits is that it's extremely difficult for you to project your cash flow, right? Project how much will you grow?
month on month because you might acquire more users but they might continue to use it for free. So, what are your thoughts on that?
Bryan Williamson (06:50)
So it was really interesting. So we got the idea for a free forever subscriptions from Mouseflow when they originally were doing it. It was actually a really interesting concept. And we did do originally the 14 day trial, but we looked at it and we're like, well, if we want to keep progressing users into using our platform more and adding more add -ons, because we have add -ons in our system for.
you can add AI and more safe scans and things like that. And there's some things we're doing in the future that we're like, well, if we cap them at 14 days and take their credit card right away, kind of a brushes them aside and they might not want to continue. But adding the free forever account, we give them just enough that they want to be able to see. then, but we, at the same time, we continue to be able to keep them the momentum going by emailing them and saying, Hey, we got some new updates. got new,
products that will come. We have over 100 pages of features that we're actually building right now that will become more more usable for these people. while they may not subscribe now, they might see some of the features that we have and go, wait, I like that. So one of the features that we have coming up in the next two weeks is we have a project management tool that's completely customized. like most of the people that we have are developers and SEO marketers.
So we came up with a customized project management system that will allow them to manage their customers, to be able to do quotations automatically. It's completely robust. We actually have our own chat feature inside there and a video feature. So they can basically do kind of like what we're doing. You can record the videos and chat and upload files and things like that, but it keeps it within their system forever. So say if you have 50 employees.
Well, everybody's on different chats sometimes, and you're not really recording all that. Well, what happens is, is if you're talking to a client, then you can, every single document, every single file that's uploaded, every single video or chat is completely kept within that file for that customer. So it keeps everything a little bit easier. for example, if somebody is working on a customer and they have to go on vacation or they go on sick leave, then you can have 10 people walk in and pick up exactly where they lost foot off.
instantly. So instead of having to go through their emails or going through their videos or finding out what was being said, everything is kept in one single place. So that was something that we thought about for a while that would be helpful for people. And it's that that should be launching in about two weeks.
Yash From Momentum (09:25)
Correct and the people who are using the platform for free, do you like their usage of the product, do you consider that as a customer acquisition cost or is that like cost of services?
Bryan Williamson (09:39)
no, they're not like you're talking about for a cost acquisition. No, we don't really count them because they're pretty much will free right now. But when we come to the people that are free, what we're looking at is that, yeah, OK, we may have a lot of customers in there right now. But as we keep adding these features, we will be looking at trying to convert them. Like one of the features we have right now, we API'd into Google Analytics and Google Console.
Yash From Momentum (09:42)
Yeah, yeah.
huh.
Bryan Williamson (10:07)
And now you can get all your data within one place. So the idea we're doing too is being a lot more robust for people to get all their information for performance, not just marketing for SEO. Cause I've been a marketer for 27 years. So I've been around the industry for a long time. But one thing that people miss the most is the development side. If you do not have a really well written code or high performance website, you're not going anywhere in rankings, no matter how well you think you have the website.
Yash From Momentum (10:37)
Yeah, so and that's really true. Even at Momentum when we are talking to our clients and before Momentum I used to run a SaaS company myself called ClientJoy which was a CRM for freelancers and agencies. And we were serving about 13 ,000 odd customers. We got acquired earlier this year by a US based firm which was also serving similar target market. And we ran that for about four years and I can...
actually remember the time when the graph started pointing up and there was no other marketing activity that we did. just moved in our case, we moved from a slow WordPress site. was not it was not WordPress's problem. It was our problem, but we moved away from a slow WordPress website, the exact same design, the exact same copy onto an extremely fast web flow site. And there was no other change. So the blogs were the same, the keywords were the same.
the website, site map, everything was the same and we just because of the performance improvement, we saw the graph pointing up our conversion rates improved from website visitor to signups, our amount of time spent improved, our bounce rates, people say that you should not look at bounce rates and I not really sure whether to look at it or not, but whether you look at it or not it reduces.
On- page optimization is often overlooked or it is not very done or it is very done the first time you deploy the website and then everything sort of move goes downhill from there for the next three or six months and this is actually really meaningful. But what are the other things that you also mentioned Bryan? Sure.
Bryan Williamson (12:23)
to say, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to
interrupt you. So I was going to say that bounce rate does play a really big part into your rankings without a doubt because it really measures whether the content and what you have, anything that's above the fold is really worthy to that customer. And Google does measure that. But I was going to make a comment you were saying about the page performance. You know, we have a law firm that used our software and they were ranking way past a hundred on every single category they had.
Yash From Momentum (12:30)
Okay.
Bryan Williamson (12:53)
And within a couple of months, they were ranked in top five for every single category they had. And it was funny, I got the lawyer called me up one day and he's like, Hey Bryan, you know, it's great. went from two to three leads a day to 33 leads on average a day. I'm like, okay, so what's up? And he goes, well, we're getting too many leads that have more to do with not just what we do, but other services that we don't. I'm like, did you just call me up and complain about getting leads? And he started laughing. He's like, okay, good point.
Yash From Momentum (13:20)
Hahaha.
Bryan Williamson (13:23)
So the point was like, you know, performance makes a big difference in your leads, not just how you optimize the page, how fast you make the page, how well it's designed, what you put the call to action above the fold, how you work on that. Everything factors into getting your conversions up. And if you don't have that together, it doesn't matter how pretty your website is. You're just going nowhere.
Yash From Momentum (13:45)
Yeah,
no absolutely that is true. so I wanted to sort of shift gears a little bit and try and understand this a little bit more in the sense that you have 27 years of professional work experience. Most of that I would say and please correct me if I wrong has been in hardcore ops, right, hardcore operations driven organizations.
I think you ran a company, you owned and ran and founded a company which was into logistics for airports. Like why shift into an engineer like SaaS product? What attracted you to SaaS?
Bryan Williamson (14:30)
Well, that's interesting question. So when I ran the company for 20 years, we did airport rides, very similar to Uber and Lyft, but we did 3 ,000 airports that we had vehicles in. And so we were basically a very strong, organic type of company. ranked organically. Well, at first we didn't. mean, when we first started the company, we're paying just in Google alone, we're paying $36 ,000 a month in ads when we first started out.
And, know, as a new company in the early 2000s, that was a lot of money. And so as we built the momentum for our rankings, our organic rankings started literally, we hit number one, two, three, you know, the, the, it works. And people started, we started seeing a shift from paid ads to organic. And so we brought that down to about two to 3000 per month and we started gaining our profitability.
Yash From Momentum (15:04)
Yeah.
Bryan Williamson (15:27)
So as you're running a business, you start to really look at what's important and how to grow. We never had investors. We had some small investors, but we had not very big investors at all. And as we ran that company for 20 years, my current partner in Spider Now was a software engineer and he came to work for us and he's amazing. I cannot say how amazing, he's the most honest and best developer I've ever met in life.
And so we started developing our own web apps through the company that we were at and that I own. And we developed a web app that actually created a self -management tool that managed people's rights for not just large companies, like you had the big companies like Greyhound and Super Shuttle. We had all those companies, right, in our system, but we wanted to manage smaller and medium sized companies, but they just didn't have the technology to do this. It's very expensive.
Yash From Momentum (16:20)
huh.
Bryan Williamson (16:26)
So we developed a platform that allowed them to have their own booking engines. could modify widgets on the fly. They can change the colors, the look, what airports they service, what vehicles. We gave them free affiliate systems where they could resell affiliates, coupon system, APIs. We even gave them a ride share app that API'd into our system where they just plug and played and they had a ride app inside for their company that they could launch into the
the Google Play and App Store. So it was a really great system, but we developed these apps and we started developing SaaS towards the end of the term of that company. And as we were approaching it, we're like, you know, my partner and I always laugh. like, you know, we feel like there are a lot of really good companies in this sector for SEO tools, especially when it comes down to performance.
But we felt like there were things that major aspects of it that were being missed that we could capitalize on. And so it was always kind of a joke between him and I. And as that company was acquired, we sat there and said, you know, maybe a joke should just turn into something real. So let's just try it. So we started building that company, him and I, completely for about a year and a half, just him and I building this technology. And we built some really great technology going into there. one of the, I think one of the best features we have in our SaaS tool is
that when people crawl, you're going to suck up a lot of resources when you're crawling websites and you're gathering that information. And when we started launching it, we started seeing that very quickly. I mean, once we got to a thousand pages with a thousand users, our load balancing was just horrendous. So we, my partner, the brilliant guy that he is said, well, why don't we treat our web app like a desktop app? And I was like, can you do that? So knowing my partner, he says, yes, let's do it. So we spent probably about four or five months building it.
Yash From Momentum (17:55)
Yeah.
Mm
Yeah.
Bryan Williamson (18:20)
And right now, Spider Now does not use the resources off of our servers to crawl and to gather information. use the resources off the person's device. So our web app actually acts like a desktop app, therefore allowing somebody to crawl 10 ,000, 30 ,000 pages without really flinching our servers. So that gives us the ability to have thousands of people crawling their sites and gathering information and run AI without
Yash From Momentum (18:21)
well.
Bryan Williamson (18:49)
our servers being just bogged down completely. So that was one of the best features I think that he ever came up with.
Yash From Momentum (18:53)
Yeah.
nice, that is interesting and that sort of also highlights how important it is to not just strike upon a great idea or an opportunity but also to find the right partners or find the right people to sort of build whatever opportunity that you identified as well. And so that sort of brings me to another question which is, you mentioned that you built out
the first version of the platform for about a year and a half, a year to year and a half. How do you build a conviction for so long that once I finish building this product, I will get customers or users at the end of it? So why the product is being built and some products have a longish gestation period where you cannot launch an MVP in three weeks or four months or you cannot use a no code platform to...
to test out the market. Some products do have a long gestation period. In one and a half years, like how would you like were there other things that you tried to build conviction or figure out some early signs of of like a PMF or like early signs of fitment that you that you tried working on?
Bryan Williamson (20:13)
Well, on the last company we had, we didn't make money really well at all for a long time. So it took us a while to get there and the momentum to get there. One of the things that my partner and are really good at, we're good at persistency and we see a vision. So we know you have to build what you have first to really get there. And sometimes it just takes a lot of rugged work. Like we worked this full time. We didn't do any other jobs. We focused on this primarily.
And just like the other business, it was the same thing. You know, we had to build that momentum. Like we are first in industry to do the business that we were doing. So it was very interesting to be come up with a point to point system that actually works. Same thing for Spider Now. was basically coming up with a system of what we were trying to do that was much different. And we have a few things that are launching soon, which people will see very quickly that there are things now that we got the
core base of our logarithm and everything that's really running well. The features that we have coming out, especially there's a couple of them. then by the end of this year that are so unique to the industry, it's never been developed before. And there's two of them in particular, I'd love to discuss, but we're not finished with it yet. So don't want to go into it too, too details, but you'll see the difference on how to take something that's with experience with SEO and software engineering and mix them together.
So you come up with a really great product. And that's what we're trying to do at Spider now is come up with technology that people haven't developed yet. Right now, the first year and a half was, we're kind of building what a lot of people built already. We already knew that, you know, going into it, we are going to be building it, but let's build that part better. So that's what we are aiming for, which we believe we have. And then the next year we've been building out some supporting tools that are going to be going with our AI and our main software.
Yash From Momentum (21:48)
Yeah.
Bryan Williamson (22:03)
And then for the next year, it's really going to be AI driven and a lot of these new features that haven't been done yet. And, you know, it's interesting. I have an advisor that I've been talking to who's really well known for SEO. And I was kind of discussing them with the ideas and he's like, wow, if you guys really finished those products, people, people flock to it because one of the features we have, and it's exciting to say, but like I said, I don't want to go too far, but one of the features we have.
Yash From Momentum (22:27)
Yeah.
Bryan Williamson (22:33)
literally takes most developers a couple days to a week just to fix. And our system will fix it within a couple seconds. And so that's something that's really, that's important to people, especially in performance. So there's some of the things that we're working on, but the AI feature I think is one of the most important features is because we want people to be able to, you know, when you do performance, you know, people look at it they're like, well, you know, my,
Yash From Momentum (22:38)
Okay.
wow.
Bryan Williamson (22:58)
my page performance, know, I got my pages shifting, I got how a fastly customer interacts. These are factors that most people don't know how to code. And some of it can be very complicated. I mean, it can be extremely complicated, especially if you're doing used and unused coding, it's very complicated. So with developing an AI that will say, don't worry about it, we'll do it for you. We'll give you the solution and you can do it for you, or we're going to do it for you, design it.
Yash From Momentum (23:09)
Yeah.
Bryan Williamson (23:24)
And we're designing it for not just, you know, people that are just, you know, who have static code. We're designing for WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Django, you have, you can think of. We're developing it for those platforms so people can use those plugins and just push a button. So the idea of Spider Now ultimately is that we don't have to do, people don't have to worry about it. We will do all of, our system will automatically find all the issues you have every week or every month, whatever you set the scheduling to.
Yash From Momentum (23:42)
that.
Bryan Williamson (23:54)
it'll correct it for you and then it'll have the file there for you to download or upload, or we can FTP on Macly and upload it to your dev server so you can test live. That's really the ultimate goal of Spider Now. And then at the same time, every time Google or say Bing does a logarithm update or core update, we take those changes and we put them into our own system and our own logarithm and start updating it to the clients and say, hey, by the way,
Yash From Momentum (24:04)
nice.
Bryan Williamson (24:21)
Google just came up with this new concept that you need to update on your website and don't worry about it. Here's the solution or here's the file. Just upload.
Yash From Momentum (24:28)
Got it. That's interesting. so this brings us towards the end of the episode. At the end of the episode, one of the things that we do is I ask you a question that our previous guest has asked for you and then you also have an opportunity to ask a question to our next guest. And this typically the question that you ask to the next guest is something that you are trying to solve for at Spider Now as of now. And so you'll have
couple of minutes to think about it while I ask you the question that I have from my previous guest. And so my previous guest was Kevin. Kevin runs a platform that offers agencies an ability to build client portals for their clients. It's sort of unified one place for all the agencies to create portals for all the clients that they have, the products called Ahsuite.
One of the questions that he's currently trying to solve for at ahsuite is how do you maintain balance between the requirements that your customers have today versus the things that you as a founder want to build and you know that they will address latent challenges that your customers have and that it is going to be like 4x more valuable than what they are asking for today.
Essentially, how do you as a founder decide between building or offering faster horses versus building a car? How do you sort of maintain a balance given that engineering teams at the early stage SaaS companies specifically is going to be very tight, it's going to be very small and a tight unit.
Bryan Williamson (26:10)
Okay, so you're saying is trying to decide which features we're going to offer first before others.
Yash From Momentum (26:17)
And prioritization between things that your customers are asking versus things that you want to build at Spider.
Bryan Williamson (26:23)
Okay. Yeah. So that's a great question. it's interesting when you develop this, you think, okay, I know exactly what my customer wants first. And we do, some of it we got right, but some of it we got wrong and we found that out when we went to AppSumo. And we would get a ton of questions from the customers and they would go, hey, do you have anything that does your tool in other languages?
And that was something that really, that we never really put a lot of thought into as being something that on top, but we found out like 80 % of the people inside AppSumo wanted that feature. So that's another feature that's actually coming out here in the next two months is we've already built most of it is where you can write the whole tool and say German, for example, or Italian, but then it crawls it based on the language that's on the page itself. So.
customers want to be able to use the actual language where they have rather than English, but then keep the spidering going properly for what it is. So you might turn the language into Italian, for example, but the crawl might be in Japanese. And so that was something that we're like, that was actually a really great idea. It's something that we really never thought about, but then we had 80 % of the people come in there and say, yes, we want that. Another feature was, well, we want to be able to save the scans and go back to it. And we're like, well,
That just seems like a good feature, but not really topping our priority. And then as people kept going in there, like, no, we want this, we want this, we want this. So we did that. We actually added that. And so even the reporting that we had, same thing, we thought it was at the bottom of the list and it actually became the top. That was the third one that the AppSumo people wanted. So we went out there and finished that. And now we have reporting inside there where they can download CSV files and things like that to be able to download that information for their own use. So.
It's interesting when you go into it, you think you know one thing, but the customers always tell you something very different.
Yash From Momentum (28:21)
Correct, correct interesting and so Bryan what is your question for my next guest? What is the challenge that you are currently trying to solve for at Spider now?
Bryan Williamson (28:31)
I think probably one of the best questions I can ask is a question that I've learned the hard way and the easy way. So this is a good one for anybody that's especially starting a SaaS company is when to get an investor and when to bootstrap are out. think that's, and I recently had a, I was part of a pitch that where one of the people that was doing AI also called me the next day and he said, asked me the same question. When do you make that move?
And so for my previous business, we, at the beginning, we got a few small investors, but we bootstrapped it the entire way. Well, we got to COVID and of course, as they shut down every airport in the world, we got destroyed. So we went from really growing fast to zero overnight. And I was like, man, if I had an investor, that would have been a totally different story. So going into this business, my partner, I said, let's make this business COVID proof, which that was the point of Spider Now, let's make this develop a business that would
Yash From Momentum (29:14)
Yeah.
Bryan Williamson (29:28)
if there was ever another COVID or something like that, we could survive it. But then when do we pull this, when do we pull the, pull going for an investor or continue to bootstrap? And I think at this point, when we started seeing that we started solving a lot of the people's questions and the problems that they had through AppSumo and we're about to finish some of the major features we had, we're like, okay, I think we're getting close. And then we saw two of our competitors start grabbing a
ton of money, like when I say money, I'm like they're in the like, you know, $100 million range. And we're like, okay, if you don't start getting investors, then it doesn't matter how good we are. We're never going to catch up to them because, you know, seven people versus somebody that has a thousand people, you just can't compete. I think knowing when to do it, but if you do it too early, then you're giving away too much. And that's a real question. think when people go looking at going to go get
Yash From Momentum (30:02)
wow.
Yeah.
Bryan Williamson (30:25)
investors, you don't want to go too early because then you're going to have everything you have because you don't have much to offer. But then if you bring a lot to the table, then you don't have to give as much as you want. You have a little bit more leverage to say, well, I like what you have to offer, but I'm going to hold out for somebody else who's going to give me what I want. So I think it's just, I think that was one of my biggest challenges is knowing when to let go and go get the investors and how far you hold back the bootstraps.
Yash From Momentum (30:43)
Yeah.
That's an interesting question. I like it when our guests make it even harder for the next guest. It's a great question and it's going to be fun for me and for all the people who have joined in to sort of try and understand and get perspective on that as well. And so that brings us towards to the end of this conversation for all the people who joined us on YouTube or Amazon Music or Spotify.
Thank you for joining in. Do consider subscribing. Do ask your questions in the comments. And if you want to check out Spider Now, we'll be linking that in the description over here as well. Do check out the platform. It will help you optimize and identify issues that you have with performance on your website as well. Thanks again, Bryan, for doing this. It was a pleasure speaking with you. And thank you all for joining in. Until next
Bryan Williamson (31:45)
It was great speaking to you too.
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