I didn’t start by trying to build a SaaS.
I just wanted to stop doing something I hated.
Where It Started
It began with something painfully simple:
A PDF bank statement.
An Excel sheet.
And me… copying transactions line by line.
Date.
Description.
Amount.
Repeat.
At first, it felt harmless.
“Just 10 minutes of work.”
Except it never was.
Because halfway through:
Columns would break
Rows wouldn’t align
Totals didn’t match
And suddenly, I’m debugging my own financial data like it’s broken code.
Like anyone else, I Googled:
“pdf to excel converter”
“convert bank statement pdf to csv”
Tried a bunch of tools.
They all kind of worked.
But not really.
What I got:
Misaligned transactions
Missing entries
Completely unusable Excel sheets
So I still had to manually fix everything.
Which defeated the entire purpose.
So I Decided to Build My Own
At this point, it wasn’t about building a product.
It was just:
“There has to be a better way than this.”
I started small.
A basic parser.
A simple script.
Something that could just extract rows properly.
It worked… for one bank.
Then broke for another.
That’s when I realized the real problem:
Bank statements aren’t standardized.
Every bank has its own format.
Its own quirks.
Its own way of breaking your logic.
The Rabbit Hole
What I thought would take a weekend turned into weeks.
Then months.
Handling:
Multi-line transactions
Different date formats
Debit/credit inconsistencies
PDFs that weren’t even real text (just images)
Every fix introduced a new edge case.
Every “almost done” moment… wasn’t.
Launch Day (Or What I Thought Was One)
Eventually, I had something usable.
So I did what every indie hacker does:
I launched it.
Quietly at first.
Then I tried to push it harder.
I even put it on Product Hunt.
And…
Nothing.
No traction.
No users.
No “this is amazing” comments.
Just silence.
The Reality Check
That was the hardest part.
Because technically, the product worked.
But I made 2 big mistakes:
I assumed “good product = users”
I didn’t understand distribution
I built something useful…
but no one knew it existed.
What I Changed
Instead of rebuilding the product, I focused on:
Talking about the problem publicly
Sharing real use cases
Writing content around PDF to Excel conversion
Understanding what people actually search for
Things started to shift.
Slowly.
What BankConvert Is Today
👉 https://www.bankconvert.org/
It does one thing:
Convert bank statement PDFs into clean Excel files.
But more importantly:
It solves the actual problem — messy financial data.
What I Learned
People don’t care about your tool — they care about their problem
Distribution matters more than you think
“Simple tools” are rarely simple underneath
Failure is usually just missing feedback
Still Early
I’m still improving it.
Still finding edge cases.
Still learning what users actually need.
If you’ve ever dealt with:
Broken PDF conversions
Bank statement headaches
Excel sheets that don’t add up
I’d genuinely love to hear your experience.
Final Thought
This started as a way to save myself time.
Now it’s turning into something bigger.
Funny how that works.
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