#4 Founder's letter: Revenue is flat, but we're getting better

At first, I positioned Bankstatemently very simply as "convert your bank statement PDF to CSV". It was to build muscle - see a lot of statements, improve on the product. That worked - The core product is now technically solid, and I know the remaining gaps.

But that positioning is limiting. The "PDF → Excel" space is crowded, and I won't win it by brute-forcing AI SEO. Instead, I've been building high-quality, bank-specific SEO pages targeting the long tail. Almost all clicks now come through these pages.

I was wrong about "Chat with your bank statement". There have been 0 queries so far. The feature was too generic. People don't want to "chat" - they want answers like "can I lend this person money?" or "how do I upload this into Xero?"

So I'm sharpening the positioning around specific ICPs, their pain points, and intent.

Bing traffic (and thus ChatGPT) completely collapsed on Feb 17. I'm learning the hard way now how delicate the SEO game is.

Two causes: 1) I reorganized the bank directory and used 308 redirects instead of 301. 2) I created pages for banks Bankstatemently hadn't processed yet, which Bing interpreted as thin content.

Since then, I've been pruning aggressively: cleaning internal links, noindexing weak pages, and tightening the sitemap.

Now the focus is getting Bing to re-index the site properly and to slowly build backlinks.

Bankstatemently is currently being evaluated by a B2B customer. One moment I'm proud of: in the morning they asked if there was an API, and by the evening there was :)

I'm extremely bullish on MCPs and agent interfaces, because that's how these B2Bs will want to interact with Bankstatemently going forward. As I mentioned in positioning, it's not about integrating an API, it's about "analyze this bank statement" and that's exactly what an MCP can enable.

I was looking at adding trust signals to the landing page, but it's tricky. Some competitors claim to have processed millions of statements. The tiny numbers Bankstatemently has processed so far might actually scare people.

I believe in fake-it-till-you-make-it, but not in outright lying. I see products displaying 5-star Trustpilot reviews that evidently aren't real. These days, it's even easier to "blame" it on your AI coding agent generating that content. I'm not doing that. It might be slower, but I'm building an honest business.