On this week’s episode of the Niche Pursuits podcast, Francois Mommens and I discuss what it’s been like to build and grow three SaaS businesses in the SEO space over a decade. This talk follows the true founder journey from an early failed business to the launch of Linkody 13 years ago and the subsequent creation of IndexChecker and LinkStorm.
What makes Francois’ story so compelling is its honesty and measured tone. He shares how Linkody started as a simple backlink tracking solution and how 100% of his clients are organic traffic. He also discusses how he once doubled his prices without hurting conversions and how the competition is pushing him to new products for the SEO market.
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How Linkody went from rough MVP to business
After the first wave of attention, François rebuilt the product, added payments, and continued his work, launching a better version. When he saw paid users coming in, he decided to give it a go. The initial product was not polished and he said so himself.
Having strangers willing to pay for something he built in the evenings and weekends gave him the confidence to take the leap. However, growth did not explode overnight. He said the income was low to begin with and progress was steady rather than dramatic, but his personal situation gave him enough breathing room to stick with it.
- He kept the 9 to 5 while building the paid version.
- The first plan costs about $4 per month.
- He only quit after receiving an early payment.
- She didn’t have a mortgage, no kids at the time, and didn’t have enough tampons to shoot.
How Organic Search Became the Engine Behind Everything
One of the clearest themes of the interview was Francois’ commitment to SEO as a customer acquisition channel. He said 100% of his customers come from organic traffic.
This did not happen by accident. Francois started working on SEO early while still developing the product. He continued to invest in the basics like content, site structure, blog posts, internal links and backlinks.
He also tried other channels, including Facebook ads and Google ads, but said the math didn’t work out for him. As organic search continued to attract customers, it focused on a channel that delivered results.
- Francois said he does not rely on gray or black hat tactics.
- It focuses on landing page optimization, paid keywords, internal links, complete niche coverage and backlinks.
- He repeated the same SEO approach in all three SaaS businesses.
- He finds that reputation from one site helps others when it links well.
How the Price Has Changed as the Product Has Improved
Pricing was another part of the story that felt refreshingly honest. Francois said he started dirt cheap, then slowly raised his prices as the crop strengthened.
At one point, he tried to make a bigger leap. He doubled the prices on all plans to see what would happen, and conversions barely changed.
This experience changed his perspective on grades. Today, Linkody’s first plan starts at $15 a month, and he says some customers pay several hundred dollars for managing hundreds of websites and thousands of links.
- His price test showed that demand was less fragile than he expected.
- Linkody caters to both small users and heavy agency-type accounts.
- The product now includes backlink data, competitor backlink research and 24/7 monitoring.
- Customers can use it for link exchange, link gap analysis and competitor research.
How Competition Driven It to Move Beyond Linkody
Linkody reached a plateau around 2020, and since then Francois said it has declined slightly. He followed that up in a tougher market with around 40-50 competitors, including big names like Ahrefs and Semrush.
This change was significant because Linkody once benefited from a free tool that attracted strong traffic and conversions. Later, larger brands copied similar features, making it difficult to stand out and maintain momentum.
Instead of forcing one product to do everything, François chose to diversify. That decision led to his second and third SaaS business.
- According to him, Linkody has several hundred paying customers.
- The market became so crowded that he called it an “ocean of red blood.”
- Increased competition changed growth, but it didn’t end business.
- His response was not to panic, but to expand the product.
How IndexChecker Got Out of Traffic Mismatch
IndexChecker was born from a feature within Linkody. Francois added a way to check if a page with a backlink is indexed by Google, since a backlink on a non-indexed page has less value.
He later made this feature a free tool to attract more users to Linkody. The free checker attracted a lot of traffic, but it didn’t convert because viewers were looking for a narrow solution rather than a backlink-monitoring platform.
Instead of dropping this requirement, he built a standalone paid tool around it. That became IndexChecker, which he says has slowly but steadily grown as his business.
- The free version allows users to check up to five pages.
- Traffic was strong, but the audience was not closely aligned with Linkody.
- Francois used Linkody’s domain authority to help bring the new project to life.
- He still had to create content, links and search visibility for the new tool.
How LinkStorm Opened a New Chapter
A third business, LinkStorm, came from another recurring SEO pain point: internal linking. Francois noted how long it takes to link new blog posts to old ones and old posts to newer ones.
This problem seemed bigger than his own blog. He realized that every publisher deals with internal linking, and that broken internal links accumulate over time as teams merge articles, remove pages, or change the structure of the site.
LinkStorm is its newest and most ambitious product, and unlike the first two, it has a co-founder. Francois says he brought in Shyam (Verma), a developer and entrepreneur whom he first hired, then invited to become a partner after seeing how much ownership he took.
- LinkStorm focuses on internal connectivity capabilities and broken internal connectivity issues.
- Francois said it was the most innovative product ever.
- It still only owns Linkody and IndexChecker, but LinkStorm is a joint venture.
How difficult the daily routine is once you start
A helpful part of the interview was Francois pushing the fantasy that SaaS will become easier once the product ships. The harder part, he says, often begins after launch.
He listed the moving parts that builders had to manage:
- API changes
- Provider failures
- Higher data costs
- UI consistency
- Exchange features
- Customer support
- Server maintenance
- Backups
- Prevention of abuse
The operational load for tools built on external data sources only increases over time. This is even more important when one founder does most of the work. Francois said that solo founders face both decision fatigue and execution fatigue because they have to choose what to do and then do it themselves.
- He cited brute force attacks and data misuse as recurring problems.
- Provider changes can hit margins if replacement service costs more.
- A small product change can force a major UI rethink.
- Running three products increases these options every day.
How it manages three SaaS products without letting you hire them
Francois revealed that running three SaaS businesses is not easy. It relies on structure, prioritization and tools like Workflowy to keep track of what’s important across all three products.
His team is in India, about four hours ahead of him, so he starts the day by checking Slack and then managing overnight customer support. After that, he chooses the best task, which can be product work, testing, SEO, content, analysis or planning.
Most notably, he made an early choice not to build his life around endless work hours. He said he opted for normal business hours because the likelihood of a huge outage was low. He was not willing to trade his family and interests for a small change in his monthly income.
- She has a two-year-old child and wants to be with him as he grows up.
- He spends a full day on the weekend for his family.
- He sets aside one day for rock climbing and lifts weights three times a week.
- He also plays the piano and attends weekly jams.
How He Reverses “False Truths” About Business
One of the most memorable parts of the interview was Francois’ statement of “fake truths”. He used it for ideas that were repeated so often in founder circles that people began to treat them as fact.
It was the belief that the utmost hard work and clean execution would always lead to success. Francois said luck still plays a big role and timing is more important than many founders would like to admit.
He also questioned the rush to ship MVPs as quickly as possible. According to him, rapid releases don’t tell you much about the lack of distribution. This is because poor exposure creates weak signals, making it difficult to distinguish between a bad idea and a good idea shown to the wrong crowd.
- He pointed to false negatives as a major problem in early validation.
- A strong positive signal can be meaningful, but silence is harder to read.
- Distribution changes the value of feedback.
- Weekend delivery by itself does not make a product special.
How he sees SEO and AI taking the next step
Even with the big changes in search, Francois said his basic SEO approach hasn’t changed much. He still sticks to the basics and believes those basics will continue to work.
Where he sees change is how people discover brands. He expects AI-powered search to reduce blue link traffic over time. However, he also believes that clicks from referrals can be of higher quality because those users are deeper in the decision process.
It also makes heavy use of artificial intelligence within the business. François said he uses AI for almost every task, including coding, customer support in his two tools, and documentation work related to feature releases and GitHub changes.
- He believes that getting backlinks is more difficult than ever.
- He thinks that in a world of AI-shaped search, posts on platforms like Reddit and forums are more important.
- He said that he no longer writes code by hand like before.
- It uses artificial intelligence to update help center content in response to product changes.
How this Founder’s Story leaves a lasting impression
The story of Francois Mommens is a powerful reminder that the development of SaaS is much quieter and slower than the Internet seems. One product came from a personal pain point, another from traffic inconsistencies, and a third from recurring friction within content operations.
There’s no lesson here, and that’s part of why the episode works so well. It’s a story about patience, complex search traffic, price tests, product segmentation, family priorities, and the long time between an idea and a sustainable business.
Final Thoughts
This episode falls flat because it wasn’t built around the hype. This is a founder’s story in the clearest sense, with wins, stalls, experiments, failed side projects and the habit of building a market that Francois knows well.
For anyone in the SEO space, there’s added relevance here because these products are close to everyday work. The bigger takeaway for anyone thinking about SaaS is simple: start with a real problem, stay close to the channel that drives customers, and don’t confuse generic founder buzzwords with facts.
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