MarGen has shipped its first software product. SaaS-SEO is a curated directory of vetted backlink opportunities for SaaS companies: £49/month, one plan, 7-day free trial. This post is the honest version of why an AI visibility agency is now writing software, and what we learned building it.
The itch we kept scratching
Almost everything we do for clients comes back to one question: who does the web say you are? Rankings, AI citations, entity trust. Underneath all of it sits the same unglamorous input: links from sources that matter. We have written before about how to build backlinks that earn AI citations, and the advice holds. But watching SaaS teams try to execute it exposed a bottleneck we could not unsee.
The work of link building is not hard. The sourcing is. Every team we spoke to was prospecting from the same rotting inputs: scraped spreadsheets, resold “premium” lists, cold databases where half the sites are dead and the other half have hidden placement fees. Teams were spending more hours disqualifying junk than doing outreach.
That is a product-shaped problem. So we built the product.
What SaaS-SEO actually is
A subscription directory of backlink opportunities for SaaS companies, where a human has vetted and graded every entry before it goes in:
- Four opportunity types: guest posts, niche edits, directories and resource pages.
- Free and paid, clearly labelled, with the host’s price shown up front. No surprises three emails into outreach.
- A placement tracker: shortlist, outreach, in content, published. Your link pipeline stops living in a spreadsheet.
- One plan, £49/month, 7-day free trial, cancel any time. The first 100 subscribers get 50% off their first three months with the code First100.
Deliberately, it does not do your outreach. Links you earn through your own pitches and relationships are safer and better matched to your brand than anything bought in bulk. SaaS-SEO gives you the vetted targets and the pipeline; you keep control of the rest. The full detail is on our product page.
Why an agency ships software
Three reasons, in honesty order:
1. Proof beats promises. Any agency can publish advice. Shipping a working product to paying users means being right in public, every day. If our thinking about links, authority and AI visibility is wrong, the product fails visibly. That pressure sharpens the agency work too.
2. The jobs repeat. Agency work keeps surfacing the same repeatable problems: sourcing authority links, auditing AI readiness, tracking citations. Our free AI Visibility Score came from the question every prospect asks first (“where do we stand?”). SaaS-SEO comes from the job every SaaS marketing team struggles with first. Where a job repeats, we productise it. Where it needs judgement, the agency does it.
3. Products earn their own authority. Tools get discussed, listed and recommended in ways agencies never are. Every product we ship builds surface area for the whole MarGen ecosystem, and everything we learn shipping them feeds straight back into client work.
What we learned building it
The MVP went from brief to live, taking real payments, in two days. The things that actually took care were not the code: they were pricing honestly (one plan, no tiers-for-the-sake-of-tiers), grading the launch catalogue by hand rather than importing a scraped list, and refusing to show metrics we could not yet stand behind. The directory launched without domain-rating data because we would rather show a blank field than a fabricated one; enrichment comes when we can source it properly.
That last principle is house policy across everything MarGen publishes: real numbers or no numbers.
What happens next
SaaS-SEO grows on a simple loop: more vetted opportunities in, junk kept out, and features added only when subscribers ask for them twice. More MarGen products will follow it. They are all collected on the Software by MarGen page, and new launches land on this blog and the newsletter first.
If you run a SaaS company and links are your bottleneck, start the free trial. If your problem is bigger than links, that is what the agency is for.