John Rush did not set out to build SEObot as a product. He runs a large portfolio of small software projects and directories, and keeping all of them ranking in Google was eating his time. So in late 2022 he and his co-founder Vitalik May started building an internal AI agent that could handle the repetitive parts of SEO: keyword research, writing articles, internal linking, and pushing posts straight into a CMS. For nearly two years it stayed a private tool he used on his own sites.

Because he was the first user, the validation question answered itself. The agent was either driving traffic to his projects or it was not, and he could see the numbers daily. Once it was good enough that other founders who saw it asked to use it, he opened a closed beta with friends and early adopters in September 2024, then ran hundreds of small releases to harden it. He has called it one of the hardest things he has built, mostly because publishing content automatically leaves no room for the agent to be sloppy.

SEObot went public on Product Hunt on December 27, 2024. Rush did not start from zero attention. He had spent years building a large following on X by posting openly about his projects and revenue, and that audience gave the launch immediate reach. The pitch was simple and concrete: turn it on, and it produces an article a day for your blog while you ignore it. Busy founders and marketers who did not want to hire an SEO team were the obvious buyers.

From there the growth was fast for a bootstrapped tool. Rush kept marketing it the way he markets everything, through his own posts and the trust he had already built, rather than paid ads. SEObot crossed seven figures in annual recurring revenue within roughly nine months of the public launch, and its revenue is Stripe-verified publicly through TrustMRR at around $55k MRR with several hundred active subscriptions. The whole thing was built on his own software stack, so the cash cost to start was effectively nothing beyond his time.