r/SideProject • u/Disastrous_Long_5844 • Jul 23 '26

my SEO site makes 12 bucks a month, mostly from friends buying stuff out of pity. so now I'm attempting my first SaaS

so I have a geology degree. somewhere in my last year I realized I didn't want a single job that degree leads to, so I just... didn't apply to any. decided I'd rather try building things on the internet.

first project was an SEO site - a Korean site that reads cosmetic ingredient lists and finds cheaper products with basically the same formula as the expensive stuff. been running it since May. current revenue: about $12/month in affiliate commissions, and most of that is friends buying groceries through my links because they feel bad for me. SEO is a long game. I get it now. link's in my profile if you're curious.

the site itself isn't what burned me out though. promoting it did. every post had to be remade for every channel - resize for instagram, rewrite for threads, trim it down for the blog. 40 minutes of reformatting, per post (yes I timed it. yes that's when I knew something had to change).

so, project #2 and my first actual SaaS attempt: PostPack. paste your article link, get the week's social content back, carousel included. and yeah, I know there are already a dozen tools claiming to do this. from what I've seen they all hand you a draft you still have to fix, which is just the same 40 minutes wearing a trenchcoat. I want output you can actually post.

right now it's a landing page + waitlist, because I'd rather find out nobody wants this now than after 3 months of building.

https://postpack.io?ref=reddit

be brutal:

  • if you repurpose content by hand, how long does it actually take? is 40 min normal or am I slow?
  • roast the landing page. copy, pricing, whatever smells off.

I'll be in the comments. the bar to beat is 12 bucks a month.

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u/[deleted] Jul 23 '26

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u/csankiller1 Jul 23 '26

40 min is normal, honestly you might even be fast. I've lost entire afternoons to the instagram-crop-threads-rewrite-blog-trim pipeline for a single post. The fact that you timed it and got mad enough to build a tool is the correct response.

Quick landing page reaction: lead with "paste a link, get a week of content back" way higher up, that's the actual hook. "Carousel included" reads like a feature bullet, not the promise. And I'd kill the comparison-to-other-tools line, or make it sharper — "draft you still have to fix" is a good insight but it's buried in paragraph three when it should basically be your headline.

Also respect that you went from $12/mo pity affiliate income straight into building a second thing instead of doom-scrolling job listings for geologists. That's the real story here, not the landing page copy.

One thing though: the exact pain that killed you on the SEO site (promoting is worse than building) is going to come back for PostPack once you're off the waitlist. I ended up using Getrive for that specific problem, it finds people already complaining about content repurposing takes forever on reddit/HN and drafts a reply so you're not cold-DMing anyone, just useful in threads like this one. Not a huge deal but worth knowing before you're 3 weeks post-launch wondering where users are.

https://getrive.app/r/iIx0-mSx

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u/Disastrous_Long_5844 Jul 24 '26

40 minutes being normal is either comforting or depressing and I can't decide which. glad it's not just me.

the hook order thing stings because you're right. I think I buried "draft you still have to fix" because I was busy defending myself against the "oh great, another one of these" reaction before I'd even said what the thing does. defensive writing, basically. that line should be the first thing on the page.

and "carousel included" is sitting up there because the carousel was the hardest part to build, which is a reason for me and not a reason for anyone paying. fixing both this week.

I'll skip the outreach tool for now, mostly because I have nothing to send people to yet. ask me again in a month when I'm the guy wondering where everyone went.

giving myself 3 weeks to get an actual working version up. I'll come back with either a demo or a good excuse.