For these founders, the key to creating a successful SaaS wasn’t building – it was listening.

Muntasir Rashid, Moin Uddin and Mohiuddin Sarker Siam grew their SEO content analysis software Contentpace — and landed a 6-figure acquisition after three years.

It started when they were working remotely from their homes in Bangladesh in 2020. The founders wanted to help content marketers understand what helps search-optimized content succeed, and which keywords are best for driving traffic.

They introduced their MVP (minimum viable product), which was originally called Postpace — and then got to work listening to their users.

They collected hundreds of instances of feedback each week, compiling and studying it intensely. But translating user suggestions directly into action would have been a mistake, Rashid said. Instead, the key was identifying the pain points behind those user suggestions.

“It is very easy to fall for the perpetual cycle of building random features,” Rashid said. “Our focus was to identify the problem from the proposed solution, and then design a solution which is suitable for everyone.”

For example, during their beta, a lot of users asked that the software analyze competitor headlines. Rashid said they figured out that what content marketers were really looking for was how to structure their own content, based on inspiration from what already exists.

Thus their most used feature was born: The content brief builder, which streamlined the process of outlining content based on research of existing highly-ranked articles.

“Everyone loved it,” Rashid said, adding that their efforts helped them find product-market fit in what was a crowded software category. “Our feedback to use-case development loop helped us grow faster.”

From Bangladesh to Paris and back again

Rashid and Uddin met through a mutual friend in Dhaka while studying at separate universities in 2008. Rashid’s interest in SEO and digital marketing and Uddin’s passion for programming and online databases formed an easy synergy, and the two set about starting and failing and starting again.

The pair built a video editing software that failed, Rashid said, because they didn’t yet understand how to build a startup, and because major online payment services like PayPal weren’t available in Bangladesh.

But in 2016, their entrepreneurial projects turned into an opportunity: They won a “French Tech Ticket,” as part of an initiative by the French government to draw innovators to the country by providing a grant, residency permit and pairing with a tech business incubator for a year.

During that time, they created Shopify app development agency Hektor Technology, and according to Rashid’s X account, had multiple products acquired from under that umbrella.

Growing Contentpace through a focus on people

When building the software that would become Contentpace back in Bangladesh during the pandemic, the two decided to do something differently: build in public, and build a community.

They started a Facebook page (which had 1,500 followers as of April 2024) and shared detailed updates and lessons learned from growing the company publicly through social media and online communities like Product Hunt.

Through these reports, Rashid wrote about growing to $146,000 revenue within the first 188 days as a bootstrapped business. At the one-year mark, the company’s revenue grew to $255,000, with 2,100 customers, Rashid wrote.

Part of the plan to draw attention and users was to launch repeatedly — more than 50 times, according to Rashid, and even more for each version and feature.

“There is a common misconception that you can launch only once,” Rashid wrote on a Product Hunt build update.

“You don’t have to be a genius growth hacker with the greatest growth story of all time,” he wrote. “All I did is document all our failures and wins. Follow this format: Keep doing, keep telling.”

How Contentpace was acquired

In 2022, Rashid and Uddin earned a spot in a founder’s program at Parisian tech incubator Station F and brought along a third co-founder to focus on operations. There, they renamed their company Contentpace, as Postpace was already trademarked in Europe.

In Paris lifetime revenue hit $1.5 million, as they served a total of 4,000 teams around the world, according to Rashid’s final build report on X. Contentpace also earned runner up on HackerNoon’s Startup of the Year.

But as AI grew prolific, Rashid said, the founders eyed selling. “My goal was to help users write and publish the best piece of SEO content to ever exist for the target keyword,” Rashid said. “I lost the inspiration when AI heavily disrupted the content marketing space.”

So they listed Contentpace on acquisition marketplace Acquire.com in 2023. They fielded several inquiries within days, Rashid said, and they closed with Content at Scale, an AI-based SEO software, within a month, in June 2023.

The buyer “has the exact same vision as us but larger resource pool and team for scaling it to the next level,” Rashid shared on X.

Then the entrepreneurs pivoted to AI themselves, building AI product studio Wit Works, as well as AI add-ons Promptmatic and Liveware AI.

“I personally believe AI is the new electricity,” Rashid wrote on X. “It’s not here to replace us, but make us better at what we already do.”