Volkan Kaya did not set out to build a website builder. He wanted a marketing site for a different SaaS project, a home page, a pricing page and a blog, and he could not find anything that made it easy. He looked at Wordpress, at Squarespace, at free and paid HTML templates, and concluded on his own site that this was a hard problem even for a developer. He settled on an HTML template and calls it a huge mistake. He spent days learning about SEO, metatags and page speed. The template had no CMS, so keeping two pages in sync meant copying and pasting code, and he ended up barely touching the marketing site at all.

When he shut that SaaS down he wrote a list of things he wanted to build next. A website builder was at the top. That became Versoly, run with his co-founder Kamil, and the two of them describe themselves on the company's own story page as Volkan in the UK and Kamil in Germany.

The start date is not something either of them announces directly, but two of Volkan's own posts pin it down. On 29 October 2019 he wrote on Indie Hackers that they had been working on Versoly for ten months. On 29 July 2020 he looked back and wrote that a year earlier they had just spent seven months building an MVP that should have taken two. Both statements land on late December 2018, and that is the anchor used for the timeline here.

The seven months produced software and nothing else. In his words they were struggling to get anyone to use it for free, let alone pay. That is the part of this story worth sitting with. A working product, two technical people, months of effort, and no evidence that anyone wanted it.

What broke the deadlock was a side project. While building blocks and templates for the builder, they kept needing examples of good SaaS landing pages, and there was nowhere good to look. So they spent one to two weeks making SaaS Pages, a free gallery of screenshots of SaaS landing pages, and launched it on Product Hunt on 25 July 2019. It was ranked number one for the week. Volkan later counted 1,885 upvotes, 10,000 visitors during launch week and roughly 9,000 more in the weeks after from blogs and newsletters that picked it up.

Out of all that traffic exactly one person became a paying Versoly customer. He does the arithmetic himself and calls it a 0.01 percent conversion rate, then adds "not bad". By the timeline above that first paying customer arrives about 212 days after they started building.

One customer from twenty thousand visitors sounds like a failure until you compare it with what happened when they pointed Product Hunt at the paid product directly. Versoly's own launch got 438 upvotes, about 3,000 visitors, 600 people into the demo builder and 60 email signups. It produced zero paying customers. Volkan's conclusion is blunt and rarely said out loud: paid products do not do as well as free products on Product Hunt. He kept the launch in the win column anyway, because certain keywords started ranking higher afterwards and customers began saying they had found Versoly through Google.

The third launch, a blogging CMS built into the product, landed in between. 460 upvotes, 3,000 visitors, 400 demos, 70 signups and a few paying customers. Across the three launches he placed first, third and third, and he credits a repeatable checklist rather than luck: images with text on them, a video, a tight one liner and first comment, about twenty supporters lined up to comment early, and going live at 00:01 San Francisco time.

Pricing at the time was modest. The archived pricing page from August 2019 shows a free tier with a Versoly subdomain and branding, and a Startup plan at 12 dollars a month billed annually that added custom domains and code export. In February 2020, after adding the blogging CMS, they doubled prices, and Volkan wrote about an existing customer choosing to move up to one of the new plans.

The growth after that was slow enough that he said so publicly. In October 2019 he posted that bootstrapped SaaS is slow and that they were adding a done for you landing page service to extend their runway, reasoning that they had learned enough about pages that convert to do it for other companies. By May 2020 he reported on Hacker News that the service had brought in a few paying customers and was easier than ordinary client work. Around the same time they added an affiliate program using Rewardful, prompted by customers asking for one and by word of mouth referrals they were already seeing.

By the first anniversary post in July 2020, more than 5,000 people had tried the builder. Versoly is still running and still his: in November 2024 he was answering questions about it on Hacker News as the founder.