How WritePage Simplifies Blogging and Grows Traffic for New SaaS Publishers

A book author asked me to set up a blog for them. They needed very basic features just so they could get their blog online. At that point, I had talked to a lot of people who got new WordPress sites set up, and I had to train them just so they could make updates and posts. So, I decided to build something that's really simple to get started with and has the basics included, like analytics and a newsletter, so it doesn't need to be set up separately. Because of those previous experiences, I decided to code a simple-to-use blog from scratch on my own to start with, instead of setting up WordPress again. I built it just for them at first, and then I forked that app to create WritePage so anybody could use it. They started publishing consistently. It helped that they didn't have to deal with the technical side at all. I fixed some things after handing it over and added some AI features like a title generator and an SEO meta tags and description generator.

Worked, I was browsing SaaS-related communities on Reddit and posted the WritePage link and info where everybody posted theirs. It was mostly SaaS subreddits where people were offering feedback or some kind of marketing service and asked people to share their links so they would perform that service. I didn't see much engagement on the posts themselves, but I started getting 1 or 2 subscribers every day. I also started adding my link to directories. I only submitted to about 3 directories and didn't see much traffic from the directories themselves, but the backlinks helped. Most of the traffic comes from SEO and AEO. Traffic from Google and ChatGPT started picking up, and now I get about 4 to 7 subscribers daily. Flopped, I set up social media pages on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit and didn't get much activity there. I just made the initial posts about the app and didn't really get any followers from it.

Surprisingly, I haven't really had any complaints or requests. I haven't received any emails from contacts at all. I think I made it so simple that people just post and move on with their lives. I would like to get some feedback and requests, though. It's actually my priority right now to set up a feedback system and to email users asking them to provide feedback. I do know what is still missing without anyone telling me. AI image generation, imports from WordPress, and maybe an API to send posts from other systems are not there yet. I'm planning to add all of those. Full export from WritePage will be possible too, because my intent is to have subscribers own their content. So right now, I'm building from what I know is missing rather than from complaints, and I'd rather be hearing from people. What I want to find out is which tasks take more steps or time than they should, and how they would suggest I improve them.

I think people assume you need to learn a lot before you can set up a blog. When I was training people on WordPress, it was mostly overwhelm. They saw so much available with plugins and options that it just stopped them from trying to do anything. They were afraid they could break something easily. That's what WritePage is trying to fix. The other thing people get wrong is thinking they need all those plugins. Most people don't even know what a lot of the plugins do. Many times, free outdated plugins are just sitting there, either causing security issues or update issues that break the site. So, you end up paying for complexity you never asked for and never use. What you actually need is analytics and a newsletter, and I set those up first because they help grow the audience. Normally, that takes a lot of time because it requires signing up for different services and then setting up plugins with those accounts. An average publisher doesn't want to deal with that. They just want to publish their posts, let people subscribe, and be able to send newsletters.

I would like to add more AI features for content creation. I've already built a content calendar agent that generates a calendar and writes the scheduled posts, and I want to bring that into WritePage. For growth, I'd like to have 10,000 users by mid-2027. I also plan to ship WordPress import, AI image generation, an API to send posts from other systems, and full export so publishers own their content. And I want to get a real feedback system in place, so I'm building from what users actually ask for.

Over 120 publishers have published more than 245 blog posts so far.

I'd spent 20 years building websites and blogs for myself and clients, mostly with WordPress, so I already had the software engineering experience. I also ran my own Shopify store and several blogs, so I've been on the other side of it as well, actually trying to get traffic and publish consistently. WritePage is my first SaaS product, though. Before this, I only built custom software for clients, not something anybody could sign up for. I built and helped maintain WordPress blogs for clients and my own personal ones. I worked on about 20 different sites over the years, and 5 of those 20 were mine.

I added a lot of half-built features before getting any feedback. Later, I took all of them out and left the simplest version so I could build from feedback and demand instead. The biggest one was scheduling posts on a calendar. I didn't spend much time on it. It was just something I thought was a good idea to have, so I added the basics. Then I realized I needed additional functions for scheduling to actually work, plus more testing. At that time, I was focusing on getting subscribers and cleaning up anything that wasn't ready, instead of spending more time building more. I still plan to add it.