Reflecting on the Journey of Building an SEO Browser

Last month, Sam and I reached a major milestone in launching our web browser for SEO named SERP Lens. I wanted to write this blog post to reflect on the journey as transparently as I can and hopefully encourage others to also challenge themselves and try something new.

The difficult truth is that it was much more difficult than we imagined and took longer to build than we expected, with many setbacks along the way. We both have our own separate businesses, where I’m an independent SEO consultant, and Sam runs his own successful SaaS, so finding the time to dedicate to it was a challenge in itself.

In reality, it took us just under 2 years from the time that we agreed on the business name to when we were able to launch the product. I wish it could have been shorter, but we at least went about it in a way that was somewhat within our original budget, and I’m very proud of the final product that is currently in its public beta.

Within this post, I will be giving a breakdown of what SERP Lens is, the importance of finding the right co-founder, the tech stack behind the application, the major challenges we encountered, some of the iterations we’ve completed based on feedback, and how launch day went.

What is SERP Lens?

We want SERP Lens to be known as the web browser for SEO. We want to ideally carve out our own niche within the SEO tool market, like how Screaming Frog is known for website crawling, Keyword Insights is known for keyword research, and SEO Gets is known for SEO analytics. We will never be an all-in-one solution like Semrush or Ahrefs, but we do want it to be a tool that SEOs are using for their day-to-day work. 

The SERP Lens positioning is heavily geared towards being the ultimate SEO productivity tool, with a primary focus on technical analysis for the AI era. The application has a clean and consistent UI that you can customise how you like, with an in-built VPN and the ability to document findings and track performance. The tool currently has a base of useful tools, with our plans being to launch an MCP (Model Context Protocol) that will bring it all together and make insights even more actionable.

Finding the Right Co-Founder

Sam and I have known each other for many years through the online SEO community, both originally being independent SEO consultants. I met Sam in person about 4 years ago at BrightonSEO where he shared some of the projects he had been working on behind-the-scenes. One of his projects (a SaaS he had acquired) ended up being very successful for him, which he then went on to work on full-time, allowing him to leave his consulting work completely.

Here are some of the reasons why Sam is an awesome co-founder:

Even though Sam’s background is in SEO, he is a brilliant product designer, with everything that you see within our browser being designed by him. Our team of devs (backend and frontend) are the same group that is used for his other businesses, meaning that they are able to work very efficiently on product iterations.

Tech Stack

SERP Lens is a Chromium-based Electron application that uses Payload as the headless CMS with Vercel and PlanetScale for cloud-based storage.

We then use Mintlify for the management of our dev docs (Sam used Claude Code to develop ours based on our GitHub repos), Resend for product and marketing emails, and a combination of Sentry and PostHog for error tracking and analytics. Stripe is our payment processor, with Airwallex being used to manage our international accounts.

Overcoming Challenges

Getting a Trademark

The most time-consuming and challenging of all, which ended up costing much more than we anticipated, involved getting our trademark for the name “SERP LENS” through the UK IPO. The process took 8 months in total, with our team needing to involve IP attorneys both in Australia and the UK.

We did not want to risk launching under our name and being at risk of trademark infringement, so we decided to go down the official path before launch to ensure we were in control of our own IP. Thankfully, we were able to get the result we wanted out of the process and have learned a lot along the way.

While it took 8 months, this didn’t necessarily slow down our design and development efforts, though it did mean that there was a chance that we would need to rebrand after already investing in aspects such as the domain name serplens.com (which ended up being quite inexpensive compared to other costs), alongside the logo and potentially the icon used for the application. Also, we love the name, so we didn’t want to have to feel like we were downgrading.

Apple Developer Account

In the lead-up to our launch, which was meant to be in February instead of April, we realised that we were using the incorrect Apple Developer Account that was attached to our app. At the time, we didn’t consider this a major issue, because all we would need to do was open up a new account under SERP Lens Ltd and make the transfer… how wrong we were.

Simply getting our new developer account verified took 2 months in total. Normally, this process would take around 7 days, but Apple’s automated systems have apparently been under strain of late due to an increase in vibe-coded applications, which has meant that the entire process can now take much more time. The difficult part of this entire process is that the communication from Apple’s end is effectively nonexistent, so you’re stuck with the thinking that “next week it is” for the entire time.

Even though the account creation in itself took 2 months, we were at least still able to make improvements to our systems and run a closed beta testing period for a group of users, which ended up being very necessary for fleshing out onboarding issues and more. This 2-month period was extended by an additional 7 days while waiting for the app notarisation period for our first update under the new account, which was again meant to only take 24-48 hours.

Windows App Development

An aspect that needed to be balanced when developing desktop applications is the creation and maintenance of versions for different operating systems. Right now, we have only launched on MacOS (m-series and Intel) and have made a form available to submit interest for Windows and Linux.

While the Windows application is almost complete, we have the challenge of understanding how we can get around obtaining the EV Code Signing, which should essentially prevent the pop-up warning when installing the application on Windows. This isn’t something that we want for users, but the requirement for obtaining the USB drive is that you are to supply a utility bill at the registered address for the business, which isn’t something we’re able to do with having a virtual address in London (like the vast majority of SaaS startups will have).

There are some alternate options that may help with reducing the pop-up warning appearing for new installations, such as Microsoft Artifact Signing, but this option isn’t currently available to our location. We are now looking into other options for how to get around this issue and welcome feedback from anyone who has had success with earned reputation challenges when developing for Windows.

Launch Video Creation

The creation of our launch video was quite an important part of our launch strategy, being the most effective way that we could quickly communicate what our product is and who it is designed for. Here is the video if you wanted to take a look at it:

For the creation of the video, I worked closely with a motion designer for around 6 weeks. The biggest challenge in developing the video was the requirement that any product previews needed to be within our Figma files, so essentially everything you see in the video (aside from one scene) required me to replicate a live view within the app using Figma.

Thankfully, Sam had managed our files well over time, even when there were major restructures to be made to comply with constraints for the Chromium installation and the Electron app. Our Figma files were very useful for both this process and the product idea validation phase, where we had an interactive Figma view that looked like a real product that had each design component patched into what looked like a live app.

Launch Day

We received some great exposure from the SEO community in our first week, managing to pull in just over 4K visitors to our Marketing Site. Here’s what this looks like in PostHog, with the traffic being primarily based on my posts on LinkedIn, Twitter and through my newsletter SERP Alert.

The major driver of a lot of this was from my LinkedIn, which is by far the most important platform to be on within the SEO industry. Here’s a preview of my LinkedIn post:

Following launch week, we received another big week of visibility thanks to people like Aleyda Solis (through SEOFOMO), Cyrus Shepard (runs an awesome SEO newsletter), Chris Long (runs a great AI Search/SEO Agency), Nick LeRoy (creator of the SEOForLunch Newsletter), and many others.

While there are constraints to getting users to install a desktop application that is only available to macOS, we were able to gain a lot of interest in our first month of operation and now have a meaningful base of paid users, which we’re very thankful for. At the moment, we have a free 7-day trial in place for the ‘Lite’ plan ($29.99 p/mo after), where we will be looking to revise our approach over the coming weeks as we release several new features that have been available within our closed beta app.

Iterations Based on Feedback

Receiving feedback is extremely important for us to reach the point that we want to get to. After you’ve tested the application, we greatly appreciate anyone who takes the time to tell us features that they liked, what they didn’t like, and any ideas for any valuable features that they would like us to add to our roadmap (there are many awesome releases to come which can be tracked on our changelog).

For instance, a question that came up during our initial release related to how we manage privacy, which we take very seriously at SERP Lens, where we don’t collect anything that we don’t need to, and we take extra measures to ensure your browsing experience is kept private. We wrote this blog post that lays everything out in a transparent way based on the information we collect, what we don’t, and why.

Another example of the many changes we have made based on feedback relates to the VPN integration. Under every paid account, users have access to 7 VPN locations (across the UK, the US, and Europe primarily), but we realised that many users weren’t discovering this due to our UI:

We have now laid this out more clearly, with a ‘free’ and ‘all’ tab which includes the premium locations that can be purchased for an additional $15 p/mo. Personally, I get a lot of value out of having a VPN integrated in the way that it has been within SERP Lens for various purposes, so I was glad to see how the team quickly made these changes so users could experience the free locations under their existing account and also within the trial period.

Final Thoughts

While I’m still working full-time as an independent consultant, primarily working with sites within the eCommerce and Marketplace segment, along with some news publishers, I’m looking forward to continuing to improve the product with our team and growing the business. SERP Lens fits in well with how I operate as a consultant, and I’m looking forward to seeing the community catch on to the idea and see the value that I receive from the app for my day-to-day work.

If you would like to test out the application, you can do so by first downloading the app for macOS here and creating your account. If you select the ‘Lite’ plan, you can make use of the 7-day trial without credit card details being required. If you’re a Windows or Linux user, you can add your email here, and we can let you know once the app is available for your operating system.