SaaS Leader Interview: Bootstrapping an AI SEO SaaS to $1M+ ARR in Less Than Two Years

Interview with Dominic Zijlstra, CEO of Adaptify.ai

Building a successful SaaS startup is no easy feat—especially in the fast-moving world of AI. Dominic Zijlstra, CEO of Adaptify.ai, has done just that, bootstrapping his AI-powered SEO platform to $100K MRR in under two years.

In this interview, Dominic shares his journey from a space engineer to a SaaS founder, his insights on finding product-market fit, and how he stays ahead of the AI competition. If you’re a SaaS founder, marketer, or AI enthusiast, there’s a lot to learn from his experience.

Interview with Dominic Zijlstra, CEO of Adaptify.ai

Who are you? Please tell us a bit about your personal journey.

I’m Dominic. Born and raised in Holland, I studied physics in Germany and Brazil, then worked as a space engineer for Airbus in England and France, and after that as a data engineer for a London fintech startup. At some point, I quit that job to pursue my first startup: a neuroscience-backed language-learning app, inspired by my own journey of learning Mandarin after meeting my Chinese wife.

ChatGPT came out around the time that I was doing SEO for this startup, and this inspired a whole new business that leverages AI to deliver SEO. This business soon outgrew my previous startup and is now my main focus.

What is your SaaS and its mission?

Our SaaS delivers SEO on autopilot for marketing agencies. Our mission is to automate all the boring and tedious work so that agency owners can instead focus on growing their businesses.

Are you able to share some success metrics? (non-confidential ones)

We bootstrapped from the first idea to $100K MRR within two years.

How big is your team? What are your hiring and management recommendations? Do you have specific challenges?

We are 8 people now. We are a completely remote startup with employees all around the world: the UK, the US, China, and the Philippines.

This has been challenging in terms of finding meeting times, which has forced us to become really strong at working async. One of our main values is to always overcommunicate. One way of doing that is sending Looms (short screen-share videos), which give more context and invite more empathy than plain text.

How was the process of finding product-market fit? Did you need pivots?

We actually started off as a chatbot, but everyone was building chatbots when ChatGPT just came out, so it was super competitive. However, we did learn from that how to really analyze and understand a website.

At some point, I decided to scratch my own itch (SEO is painful and hard work) and realized that this site analysis feature was very powerful for writing customized SEO content. That was our major pivot into SEO, and we’ve made smaller pivots along the way into full-SEO delivery (including backlinks, keyword strategy, and reporting), focusing on marketing agencies (who need less SEO education than individual businesses).

What was the main challenge you experienced along the way?

Staying up to date with AI developments, as new models are coming out every day, and customer expectations continuously increase. Figuring out how to best leverage these AI models is a continuing challenge.

One thing we’ve found working well is using AI to quality-control AI, which works surprisingly well.

What was the aha moment that made you unlock growth?

One aha moment was when we were doing SEO for small businesses and put up a pro plan on our pricing page. Initially, this was just to make our base plan look cheaper—we didn’t expect anyone to actually buy it.

However, we quickly discovered that marketing agencies loved this plan, as it allowed them to do SEO for multiple clients at a low per-site price. Once we realized this, we did a minor pivot towards only targeting marketing agencies rather than small businesses. This has resulted in a much more focused product, happier customers, and lower churn.

What were the key parameters to align to achieve growth?

Product, processes, and team.

What are your main acquisition channels and why those?

Paid ads have always been our main channel. We initially used paid ads to quickly run experiments for finding product-market fit when we started, and we’re still able to scale it now.

The main challenge is exclusively targeting our audience, which is now pretty niche.

What are your current challenges? What keeps you awake at night?

My wife and I are expecting our first child in two weeks, so my main challenge right now is to take myself out of the day-to-day busy work of the business so that I can focus more on working on the business instead of in the business, freeing up mental space and time to spend with my family.

What do you do to remain ahead of or different from the competition?

I’m part of a community of growth hackers that is really practical in how to use the newest AIs in reality. This is a major inspiration for coming up with new AI product improvements, as well as business improvements.

For example, we run an AI check on all inbound leads to see if they would be a good fit customer based on the info we have on them. This is a super innovative automated lead qualification system that I could well imagine one day becoming a business of its own.

What advice do you have for other SaaS leaders to grow their platform?

Now is still a golden time to build an AI SaaS—you can do things that were impossible a few years ago.

If you’re working on an existing non-AI SaaS, I would say that it’s often easier to launch a supplementary AI SaaS in parallel rather than trying to bolt on AI onto an existing product (which usually doesn’t work so well). I’d rather build something new quickly and iterate to find out what works.

Final Thoughts: The Power of Adaptability in AI SaaS

Dominic Zijlstra’s journey from a space engineer to a SaaS founder is a testament to the power of adaptability, experimentation, and leveraging AI to solve real-world problems. His story highlights the importance of:

  • Finding product-market fit through continuous iteration and listening to customer needs.
  • Focusing on a niche audience (in his case, marketing agencies) to achieve greater efficiency and customer satisfaction.
  • Leveraging AI in innovative ways—from automating SEO to filtering inbound leads.
  • Emphasizing async communication in a global, remote team.

For SaaS founders looking to build and scale their platforms, Dominic’s advice is clear: The AI revolution is just beginning—now is the time to build.

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