Ninety-five percent of Snappa’s early signups came from two things: one blog post and one free stock photo site. Christopher Gimmer would not bet a new product on that today, and he is the one who says so.
Christopher co-founded Snappa in 2015 after a background in finance and accounting, and he has since launched Goodmetrics, a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. Two products, ten years apart, no outside funding either time. The gap between how the first one grew and how the second one has to grow is the most useful thing a bootstrapper can look at right now.
How the first one actually happened
Before Snappa there was Bootstrap Bay, and before Bootstrap Bay had traffic there was a post about where to find free stock photos, published right as the CC0 movement got going.
“it went viral on the site called Stumble Upon out of all places… next thing you know, we had the we were ranking number one in in Google for free stock photos”
— Christopher Gimmer, Unscripted SEO
They parlayed that into their own stock photo site, StockSnap, then launched Snappa into an audience they already owned.
“ninety five percent of our sign ups were just coming from that one blog post and our free stock photo site.”
— Christopher Gimmer
Two assets. That is the whole acquisition story for the first six months, in which they went from roughly two to four thousand MRR in month one to a much larger number by month six. Note what it is not: it is not a content calendar, and it is not a funnel. It is one page that happened to own a query, plus a free product that fed it.
What the same page is worth now
Snappa still ranks. Organic is still a primary channel. It just returns less:
“our organic traffic has definitely gone down. Even though we’re ranking number one for some of these keywords, the AI overviews are are kinda answering some of those things”
— Christopher Gimmer
On commercial queries the arithmetic is worse, and he does the maths out loud: with four paid placements above you, “even if you’re ranking number one… your link is actually the fifth one on the page. And if you’re ranking, you know, like number three, you’re now like eight links down.”
Position one is not position one. It has not been for a while, and if you are modelling a new product’s growth off a rank-tracking chart you are modelling something that no longer exists.
So he stopped writing blog posts and started writing docs
This is the strategic shift, and it is the part worth copying:
“I think the kind of top of the funnel is more or less dead. a lot of the a lot of those queries are kind of being answered with with AI overviews. but I do think that it’s pretty important to be publishing pretty in depth content on your site to make sure that the LLMs have as much detail about your product as possible.”
— Christopher Gimmer
For Goodmetrics that means the documentation, not the blog. Comprehensive feature docs, landing pages describing specific parts of the product, and explicit comparison pages against GA4. His words: “we’ve focused more on kind of like the landing page and docs side of things, not as much on the what you know most people consider as content marketing with the the blogging and stuff.”
If an assistant is going to recommend your product, it needs to be able to state what your product does. Most SaaS documentation is written for people who have already bought. That is now a distribution problem.
Tools earn links. Walls of text do not.
“it’s it’s hard to do kind of traditional link building now just because like everyone’s inboxes are full of spam and stuff like that. And so I think people are more willing and likely to link out to a really good tool that actually solves a problem versus a yet another you know, blog post with you know, a wall of text.”
— Christopher Gimmer
StockSnap was a free product that fed a paid product. That pattern still works, and it is one of the few link acquisition strategies that does not depend on a stranger opening your email.
The question he left open
I ask every guest to hand a problem to the next one. Christopher’s is the one every bootstrapper is sitting on:
“organic was always a channel that was kind of tried and true to bootstrap software founders. and for all the reasons that we discussed, it’s it’s definitely getting more challenging… the challenge going forward is like how do you evolve beyond this tried and true content marketing playbook”
— Christopher Gimmer
Some partial answers from other guests on the network:
- Affiliates are still a real marketplace with real upside if the terms are structured properly.
- Free tools over free posts. Christopher’s own point, and the thing that built StockSnap.
- Documentation as distribution. Cheaper than a blog and read by the systems doing the recommending.
- Podcast guesting and community. Slower, harder to attribute, and not gated by an algorithm you do not control.
He is also actively looking for feedback on the AI-first Snappa editor they are rebuilding, and said on the show that anyone doing AI design work can email him directly. That is a rarer offer than it sounds.
Quotes are verbatim from the raw Riverside transcript, trimmed for false starts and filler only. Full episode at Unscripted SEO; more SaaS interviews at Unscripted SaaS.