[bigiain]

' They also won't be seeking solutions to the problem I solve. Every last person I interviewed reacted in a "shit, I do waste time doing this. But what option do I have?"'

To me, that implies SEO is less likely to be a big payoff compared to paid advertising on subject-matter-relevant sites or publications. You need to work out where these designers "hang out", and how to get ads in front of them proposing your solution to them in an eye and mind-catching enough way. Maybe try advertising somewhere like SmashingMagazine – but carefully measure your costs and conversions, it's _very_ easy to spend way more pre conversion than your customer LTV if you aren't measuring things.

Another thing to consider, can you think of a bunch of keywords you could pay for (for example in Adwords/Adsense) or perhaps Facebook demographics you could target - which might let you get ads in front of designers while they're searching for information related to the existing solutions? I suspect finding keywords/demographics that convert at profitable rates is likely to be hard...