Alex stared at his coffee cup, trying to ignore the email notification still glowing on his phone. Another feature request from his corporate job. Another meeting about the meeting. He looked across the table at Jordan, who was sketching something in a notebook.
“What if we just built something ourselves?” Alex said.
Jordan looked up. “Build what?”
“I don’t know. Something profitable. Something we could actually ship.”
That conversation, on a Friday evening in late November, would lead to RankTrackr generating $100,000 annually within six months. But let’s back up.
Friday Evening: The Spark
The Market Validation
Alex had been thinking about SEO tools lately. His freelance clients kept complaining about how expensive rank tracking was. Semrush wanted $120 a month. Ahrefs and Moz both charged $99. These weren’t enterprise clients with big budgets—they were small agencies struggling to justify the cost.
“SEO rank tracking,” Alex said. “There’s definitely a market.”
Jordan closed his notebook. “How hard could it be to build?”
The API Discovery
They spent thirty minutes researching. The technical challenge wasn’t building a web scraper—that would take weeks and constant maintenance. But SearchCans offered a SERP API that handled all that complexity. You send a keyword, they send back ranking data. Clean, simple, reliable.
“We could build this in a weekend,” Jordan said.
Alex raised an eyebrow. “Actually build it? Like, launch it?”
The 48-Hour Commitment
“Why not? What else are we doing this weekend?”
They shook hands. The project had a deadline: Sunday at 6 PM. If they had paying customers by then, they’d keep going. If not, well, at least they’d have tried.
Saturday: Build Day
Morning Sprint: The Foundation
Saturday morning started at 8 AM with terrible coffee and determination. Alex handled the backend—user authentication, database setup, the API calls to check rankings. Jordan built the frontend—clean dashboard, simple keyword input, email report templates.
The beauty of modern development is that you don’t actually build everything. Supabase gave them a database in minutes. Stripe handled payments with a few API calls. SearchCans delivered ranking data without the nightmare of maintaining scraping infrastructure. They weren’t building from scratch—they were assembling pieces that already worked.
By lunchtime, they had something you could call functional. You could sign up, add a keyword, and see where your website ranked for it. Was it pretty? Not really. Did it work? Yes.
Afternoon Crisis: The Bug Hunt
The afternoon brought the inevitable problems. Rankings weren’t showing up for positions beyond the first 100 results. The email system kept failing. Stripe webhooks weren’t firing correctly. And somehow the mobile view was completely broken.
Alex wanted to give up around 4 PM. “This is never going to work.”
Jordan kept typing. “We’re 80% there. We just need to fix these bugs.”
Late Night Victory: Going Live
They fixed them. One by one, testing after each change. By 10 PM Saturday, RankTrackr actually worked. You could sign up, track keywords, and get weekly email reports. The interface was basic but functional. The data was accurate.
“Should we deploy it?” Alex asked.
“Might as well.”
They pushed to production. The site went live. Now they just needed customers.
Sunday: Launch Day
Morning: The Final Polish
Sunday morning was about polish. Not redesigning everything—just making it presentable. Jordan added a pricing table, wrote FAQ answers, created a simple comparison chart showing why RankTrackr was better value than competitors. Alex set up analytics so they’d at least know if anyone visited the site.
By noon, everything was ready. There was just one problem: nobody knew RankTrackr existed.
Noon: The Launch Push
Alex tweeted to his 500 followers. “Built a rank tracking tool this weekend. $49/month vs $99 elsewhere. Check it out.” He added the link, then closed Twitter before he could obsess over likes.
Jordan posted on Indie Hackers with a more detailed explanation. A carefully non-promotional post on Reddit’s r/SaaS community. A Show HN submission to Hacker News that probably wouldn’t go anywhere.
Then they waited.
The First Customer Arrives
At 1:15 PM, Alex’s phone buzzed. “New signup.” He refreshed the dashboard. Someone had created a free trial account. Real person, real email address.
1:47 PM. Another signup.
2:30 PM. The notification they’d been hoping for: “New subscription created.” Someone had just paid $49. A complete stranger had looked at their hastily-built tool and decided it was worth money.
The Validation Moment
Jordan actually stood up. “Holy shit. We have a customer.”
“We have A customer,” Alex corrected. “Singular.”
3:45 PM. Customer two.
5:20 PM. Customer three.
The 48-Hour Milestone
By 6 PM Sunday—exactly 48 hours after their coffee shop conversation—RankTrackr had three paying customers and $147 in monthly recurring revenue. Not enough to quit their jobs. But enough to prove the idea worked.
The Next Six Months
Feature Development Strategy
Here’s what happened next, though it’s less dramatic than that first weekend. They added features slowly. Bing ranking support took two hours to implement because the SearchCans API already supported it. Historical data charts took a weekend. Competitor tracking took two weekends.
They raised the price to $79 for new customers in month three. Existing customers kept their $49 rate. Churn stayed under 3%.
Operations and Support
Customer support was mostly Alex answering emails at night. Eventually they built a FAQ section. Then a chatbot for common questions. The product basically ran itself.
The $100K Milestone
Six months after that Friday evening conversation, RankTrackr served 187 paying customers. Monthly recurring revenue hit $9,163. After paying for APIs and infrastructure ($850/month), they netted $8,313 monthly. That’s about $100,000 annually.
They kept their day jobs for four months. In month five, Jordan quit to work on RankTrackr full-time. Alex followed two months later.
What Actually Mattered
The Success Factors
Looking back, a few things made this work.
Solved a Real Problem
They solved a real problem that people already paid for. They didn’t invent a new market—they just offered better value in an existing one. Validation came from seeing competitors successfully charge $99 monthly. The market clearly existed.
Used APIs for Everything
They used APIs instead of building everything. This is the entire story, really. Building a SERP scraper from scratch would take months. Maintaining it would be a full-time job. SearchCans handled all of that for a few dollars per customer. Same with Stripe for payments, Supabase for the database, Resend for emails. Every API was work they didn’t have to do.
Kept the MVP Brutally Simple
They kept the MVP brutally simple. Four features: add keywords, check rankings, show historical data, email reports. Everything else got cut. Competitor tracking? Future feature. Backlink analysis? Future feature. Keyword research? Future feature. They shipped the minimum that solved the core problem.
Strategic Pricing
The pricing was strategically low but still profitable. At $49 monthly with $5 in API costs, they kept $44 per customer. That math worked. Being 50% cheaper than competitors made the decision easy for customers. They could always raise prices later once they’d proven value.
Zero-Dollar Marketing
Zero-dollar marketing worked because they targeted the right channels. Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, Twitter—places where their exact audience hung out. No paid ads. No SEO campaigns. No cold outreach. Just showing up where potential customers already were.
The Mistakes
Common Pitfalls They Encountered
No Analytics Initially
They launched without analytics. For three days they had no idea how people used the product. Adding tracking should have been day one, not day three.
Over-Promised Features
They over-promised features on the landing page. “Coming soon” became “constantly asked about.” They learned to only promise what already existed.
Manual Support Bottleneck
Manual customer support doesn’t scale. Alex answered every email personally for the first month. This created a bottleneck that almost killed their momentum. The FAQ and chatbot should have come earlier.
Could You Do This?
The Realistic Requirements
Probably, if you have intermediate coding skills and a free weekend. You don’t need SaaS experience—Alex and Jordan had none. You don’t need design skills—TailwindCSS handles that. You don’t need marketing expertise—you just need to show up where your customers are.
What you do need: a real problem people already pay to solve. APIs that let you skip the hard parts. The discipline to keep your MVP ruthlessly simple. And the willingness to ship something imperfect.
The hard part isn’t building it. Modern development tools make that surprisingly easy. The hard part is deciding what not to build. Every feature you skip is another day closer to launch. Every complexity you avoid is another hour you can spend making the core product actually work.
RankTrackr succeeded because Alex and Jordan made the right cuts. They didn’t build the best rank tracking tool. They built the simplest one that solved the problem. Turns out that was enough.
Resources
Want to build something similar? Start with the APIs. SearchCans handles search data so you don’t have to scrape. Stripe handles payments so you don’t have to deal with credit cards. Supabase handles data storage so you don’t have to manage databases.
The technical details matter less than you think. What matters is solving a real problem for people who already want to pay for a solution. Find that first. The rest is just execution.
Learn More:
- SearchCans API Documentation - Get started with search data
- Building Profitable SEO Tools - Technical guide
- API-First Development - Why it works
More Stories:
- Small E-commerce Success - Another weekend project
- Market Intelligence Platform - B2B approach
- 10x Developer Mindset - Productivity principles
Start Building:
- Free Trial - 100 credits to test
- View Pricing - Scale as you grow
- Get Support - Documentation and help
RankTrackr is still running today, serving over 400 customers. Alex and Jordan work from wherever they want. The 48-hour build turned into a real business. The APIs made it possible. The execution made it profitable.