Twenty years of selling online
Romain Brabant's entrepreneurial journey started about twenty years ago with an online store selling cell phone accessories. It was a simple e-commerce business, but it taught him the lesson that would shape the next two decades of his career: organic traffic was the biggest driver of sales. As he told the Uprankly interview in May 2023, he learned early that ranking in Google wasn't a nice-to-have — it was the channel.
That lesson pulled him toward SEO tooling. SEO Buddy began as a classic SaaS bet: a core product aimed at helping people do SEO better, backed by a founding team — Brabant alongside co-founders Krzysztof Janiszewski (Co-Founder & CTO) and Mateusz Kozlowski (Co-Founder & UX/UI Director), per seobuddy.com/about. The plan was the standard one: build a platform, acquire users, grow recurring revenue.
But the story that makes SEO Buddy interesting isn't the launch — it's what Brabant did when the core product didn't work. The plan failed. The side project didn't. And Brabant had the rare honesty to rebuild around what the market actually wanted.
The $90K AppSumo spike
On January 25, 2022, AppSumo published a case study on Brabant: he had generated over $90K in revenue from listing on AppSumo. The product that did it was The Link Chest — a database of easy-to-win backlink opportunities, sold as a lifetime deal to some 1,700 customers. One launch, one focused side product, more than $90K in the door.
That number deserves a caveat, and it's one the materials make explicit: it was one-time lifetime-deal revenue, not recurring MRR. Lifetime deals trade future revenue for upfront cash, and the $90K shouldn't be read as an annualized number. But as a market signal, it was deafening. 1,700 customers paid for a single, focused tool — while the 'real' SaaS product struggled.
The contrast between the core product's trajectory and the side product's launch was the data point that mattered. The market had voted, with wallets, on which one it wanted. The question was whether Brabant would listen.
The honest shutdown
In the May 2023 Uprankly interview, Brabant said something founders rarely say on the record: 'We quietly shut down our core SaaS product due to a lack of product-market fit but we hope to be able to make the necessary pivot in Q4 2023.' Two quiet words — 'quietly shut down' — carrying the whole weight of a failed flagship product.
Most founders spin this. Brabant didn't. The core SaaS — the thing the company was supposed to be, the product the team was built around — died, and he said so publicly, naming the cause: no product-market fit. That admission is the hinge of the whole story. It freed the company to stop defending the plan and start following the signal.
The signal pointed at the side products. SEO Buddy's portfolio narrowed to what customers had actually paid for: the SEO Checklist, the SOP Collection, and The Link Chest — the $90K database that had outsold the flagship. Three small, focused tools instead of one big platform.
Three side products, one signal
The Link Chest's $90K launch was the clearest demand signal of all, and Brabant's stated goals in the 2023 interview showed he had absorbed the lesson. The plan: launch a third side product and hire what he called 'the dream team' — building on small, focused tools rather than one big platform.
It's a strategy most startups arrive at only after burning serious money. Brabant got there cheaply: the AppSumo launch was both the proof of demand and the financing for what came next. The lifetime-deal cash funded the pivot the flagship's failure demanded.
The co-founding team's structure survived the pivot — CTO, UX/UI director, founder — but the product philosophy changed completely. Instead of asking 'what platform should we build?', the team started asking 'which focused tool will people pay for next?' Small bets, fast validation, public launches.
The pivot to AI content
Today SEO Buddy's flagship is the AI Content Engine: software that writes, illustrates, and publishes articles on autopilot, targeting not just Google but ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude — the full spread of where people now search. Pricing starts at $19 per month, a number that keeps the tool accessible to the solo creators and small teams who formed The Link Chest's original 1,700.
The engine is the logical endpoint of the pivot. The audience Brabant found through lifetime deals wants leverage — tools that do the work. An autopilot content engine is the scaled version of what The Link Chest was: a focused tool that does one job, for one audience, at a price that sells itself.
The arc of the story is the lesson: the product Brabant set out to build failed, and the side project he launched on AppSumo pointed the way forward. He listened to the $90K signal instead of the original plan — and killed the core product honestly enough to be able to say so.
The playbook
- Let one launch tell you what to build — The Link Chest's $90K AppSumo launch through 1,700 customers was the clearest demand signal — Brabant rebuilt the company around side products customers actually paid for.
- Kill the core product honestly — Brabant publicly admitted the core SaaS shut down 'due to a lack of product-market fit' (Uprankly, May 2023) — then planned the Q4 2023 pivot around what worked.
- Distinguish launch revenue from MRR — The $90K was explicitly one-time lifetime-deal revenue, not recurring. Honest unit economics beat inflated headline numbers.
- Start where the traffic is — Brabant's first business taught him organic traffic was the biggest sales driver — two decades later he built tools for the channel he learned first.
- Follow the platform shift — The current AI Content Engine targets ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude alongside Google — SEO Buddy moved where search itself moved.