I built a blogging platform (5 years in, struggling with distribution)

Hacker News

Share card

I built a blogging platform (5 years in, struggling with distribution)

A bit of context… I've been building https://blogmaker.app since April 2021, 5 years now. The launch tweet: https://x.com/BlogmakerApp/status/1383742023627247630 I had built it initially as a personal challenge to see if I could have a working product for 20 hours worth of work, and I did it. This was way before AI tools. A few months later, I included a Stripe button and the first payment came immediately in. In September 2022 I decided to focus (give up my contract gigs as a designer/dev). I took out a personal loan for $20K and then an angel investor handed me another $30K, so I could fully focus on Blogmaker (blogstatic then). And that's what I did. Night and day. Mostly working on the product and getting it to where it is now. It was super basic in the beginning, with one theme and non–SEO advanced features that it has now. Up to the end of 2024, prices were yearly only with $19/year and $49/year being the bestsellers. Throughout this time, I was constantly told (by good meaning friends) that I am charging too low and I should charge more. Combine that with my restlessness to make it a real monthly MRR (yearly prices kinda skew MRR), so at the end of 2024, I took the dive and changed the pricing to monthlies. First starting with $25/month, which I think due to January being a "new year's resolutions" month, got me a solid few upgrades, but it turned out to be a false positive, because sales stalled after that. Then throughout 2025, I flailed with various monthlies: $12, $19, $29, $39, and even $49/month at one point. The $12/m and $19/m seemed to be working fine, but customers would stay a few months and then leave. In the back of my mind, I always wanted to go back to yearlies because, in all honesty, I felt "yearly prices" were "the brand" and I loved the kick I would get from customers saying: "WOW! What a product at this price!". I loved being the face of accessibility and running a product that is filling a real gap. To test my assumptions that "yearlies" are great, throughout the "monthlies" period in 2025, I would run flash sales with $19/year and $39/year plans, and they'd sell like hot cakes. So after 16 months of not really being convinced on the monthlies, this April I happily reverted to the original yearly prices of $19, $49, and $59/month, and I've already sold a few, as expected. Changing back to yearlies, feels like a huge burden has been lifted off my shoulders. Customers really loved the yearly Blogmaker and I'm 100% happy to be that! I strongly believe Blogmaker is an amazing product at an insanely great price, but I'm banging my head against the wall not knowing how to get everyone wanting to start a blog to know about it. If you look at the showcase of current customer blogs, you'll see what I mean: https://blogmaker.app/showcase An important note: Historically, yearly prices have converted 10% visits–to–trial, and 15% trial–to–paid (sometimes insanely more), and this was all done with just 40 visits/day, some of those visits were actual customers coming back to the website to login, so % were clearly higher. I've tried most marketing things, short of paid ads, which there was never a real budget for AND the yearly prices didn't really allow for much wiggle room as far as CAC goes. Currently there are ~250 active paying customers with blogs ranging from business, SEO, product, services, journals, culture, hobbies, and everything in between. The peak it's ever been was circa 500. There are two individuals currently interested in buying it out and the money would somewhat help to focus on another SaaS, but I'm crying inside not wanting to let it go. The ideal outcome would be to convert 5 payments/day which would make it a $5K/month revenue business, and that's completely fine. Which statistically means roughly about 300 visits/day. Technically, not sure how to get there. Please, feel free to ask me anything. I've been super open throughout.