After 48 Failed Attempts, This Founder Makes $8.5k/mo Selling a Single-Feature Tool

Imagine the fear of being stuck in a cycle of frustration—apps that crash, drain your battery, or fail to solve the real struggles you face daily.

What if you could build solutions for those moments that your potential customers can’t even admit that those problems bother them?

The gaps are there: unspoken needs, hidden inefficiencies, and fears of wasted time or money.

Today’s issue is about a founder who found one such gap and is making $8.5k/month.

Business Model

PDFshift cleverly solves a very specific problem—converting HTML to PDF via API. This tool helps developers convert website HTML into a high-quality PDF.

Here’s what exactly PDFShift can do 👇🏻

SEO Lessons To Learn From [Business Name]:

#1 On-Page SEO:

PDFShift has spread like wildfire.

The SEO isn’t that strong; in fact, a lot can be done on the SEO front. However, word of mouth has helped PDFshift become the go-to tool for developers to convert HTML into PDF.

#2 Off-Page SEO:

The off-page has been the backbone for PDFshift’s explosive growth.

The tool’s unique usecase has attracted natural links from across the web.

The tool has received attention from Reddit, DigitalTrends, WonderShare, and more.

Nearly 60% of 4.3k backlinks are DoFollow, which has helped dominate the domain authority game against the competitors.

There are several API directories like APIdeck, Postman Network, RapidAPI.

Submitting to such API directories can bring a lot of positive attention from potential customers.

#3 Technical SEO:

I found the following schemas implemented on the site.

1. Organization

2. Person

3. FAQ

Each of these schemas has helped search engines understand more about the founder and the product. However, like Ezyzip, even PDFShift should implement the SoftwareApplication & Utilities schema.

Areas Of Improvement:

PDFShift can attract huge search engine traffic by creating content around the following topics:

1. Security blind spots in document processing for devs

2. The hidden costs of in-house PDF solutions

3. The Mobile-First Gap in PDF Workflows

Furthermore, topic clusters around dev topics can be created, like:

Cluster 1: Framework-Specific Integration Guides

• Real-Time PDF Previews in React

• Next.js PDF generation with dynamic routes

• Serverless PDF generation on edge networks

Cluster 2: Vertical-Specific Use Cases

• HIPAA-Compliant Medical Report Generation

• E-Commerce Order Summaries at Scale

Cluster 3: Performance Optimization

• How to reduce a PDF file size by 60%

• Parallel processing for batch PDF jobs

• Cache invalidation strategies for dynamic PDFs

These clusters will bring several organic visitors from search engines and Google search console will suggest several keywords the pages can rank for.

Furthermore, finding keyword gaps can reveal a lot of keyword ideas that can be targeted to attract more developers organically.

Since PDFshift is a niche tool, it’s easy to rank for long-tail keywords that are usually highly converting. Furthermore, ranking for such keywords is easy in terms of SEO. Also, the solution for the target keywords is helpful enough for the search algorithm to place the PDFShift pages at the top.

This way, PDFShift can dominate the SERPs for high-intent keywords for a long time. Pivoting to more features in the future will be favored by this strategy as internal links will pass SEO Juice to new pages, instantly making them rank for the target keyword.

That’s how important matching the search intent is, right from the beginning.

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