How Zain Shoaib Took His SEO SaaS to €500 MRR in Just 30 Days

Meet Zain Shoaib.

Zain is a seasoned digital marketing consultant from Helsinki, Finland with over 8 years of experience helping enterprise customers and SMB’s improve their growth.

He started his career as a Drupal developer but quickly shifted focus to digital marketing and SEO.

Zain has seen all the struggles and pain points in the industry. Now he sees the same massive opportunity in AI search that he saw in SEO at the beginning of his career. To capture this, he launched SEO Agento, a SEO AI agent SaaS that helps founders and SMBs increase traffic and conversions from Google and ChatGPT.

SEO Agento is not Zain’s full-time job. He also runs his own agency.

Everyone is talking about AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and AI search.

It is being discussed even more than SEO was during its rise in the last decade. Founders, Business Owners, CEOs, and Marketing Managers have all been experimenting with LLMs. They trust ChatGPT like their best friend, so getting recommended and mentioned by an LLM is the new gold standard.

Initially, I created a service to help large businesses get more AI search visibility.

I built internal tools to handle keyword research, topical models, content clustering and strategy. The first versions were rough.

Even the most advanced LLMs still hallucinate frequently, especially if you rely purely on their own training data. This was particularly true for SEO tasks. The top models synthesized fake keyword volumes, made up technical SEO issues, and suggested strategies that sounded good in theory but were inefficient when looked at closely.

To fix this, I built systems where verified, real-world data was gathered first and then fed to SEO AI agents. With the help of LLMs, these agents then accurately orchestrated keyword research, topical models, content plans, and technical SEO audits.

As these internal tools proved successful, I started experimenting with creating shippable products using Bolt, Lovable and Replit.

I shipped around 8 apps. Many failed in distribution, or simply attracted free users who weren't willing to pay.

Then I launched SEO Agento. That was in October 2025. I built the first version in only 3 days.

I didn’t want to build just another content creation and auto-publishing wrapper, as the market was already flooded with those.

I wanted to create a team of autonomous SEO AI agents that handle keyword research, content planning, optimization and technical SEO, and lead generation all in the same platform. While I included the popular features of calendar planning and auto-publishing, the core value was the agentic workflow.

I chose a "paid marketing first" approach.

Since organic growth takes time, I needed immediate users to validate the product and to identify my Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). I focused on 3 primary channels: Google, Meta and TikTok.

Here are my learnings:

Meta

I launched a CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) campaign and fed it around 10 to 15 creatives (example below) with different marketing angles, including both still images and video ads.

With CBO, you don’t worry about manual targeting. You let the creatives do the targeting work for you.

If a creative didn't generate a signup in 2 days, I swapped it for a new angle. SEO Agento got first signups hours after launch and first trial signup the next day.

I validated that this was the right channel for traffic but was careful not to scale spend too early.

Google

I set up a Google PMax (Performance Max) campaign. It’s an AI-powered goal-based campaign type that lets advertisers run ads across all of Google’s channels (eg. YouTube and Gmail).

I skipped traditional search ads because the CPCs (Cost Per Click) were too expensive.

Since I already had a strong batch of creatives from Meta, I fed them into PMax. Although PMax usually has a longer learning phase, signups started rolling in after just one week.

TikTok

I also experimented with TikTok. While it drove high engagement, it didn’t convert to traffic and signups as efficiently as the other two channels.

SEO Agento gained around 2.6k signups, 50 active trials and reached €500 MRR in the first month post-launch.

Paid ads often get a bad rap. Many founders boast about reaching four or five-digit MRR without them, usually because they already had a large following or spent months building organic traffic.

However, paid marketing can be your best friend for validation. After all, the most successful dropshippers hit six or seven figures solely because they learned how to find the winning product using paid ads. With the same method, you can "vibe code" prototypes and ideas to find your winning product faster.

For me there is still room to grow, but I am now shifting focus from paid acquisition to customer feedback to improve the product and drive organic growth. I will be working on:

For H1/2026 my target is 10k MRR with some outsourcing but mostly as a solopreneur. I’m looking for good long-term partnerships for growth beyond 10k MRR.

You can find him here:

To ensure your website performs in the AI search era, check out Zain's consultancy agency, Virtual Waves AI.