In my journey as a founder, I've built close to half a dozen products, most of which have failed. The difference between the products that failed and the ones that succeeded was never something interesting like the scalability of our tech stack or the viral marketing schemes we came up with; it was always due to distribution or lack thereof.

For most founders (especially B2B SaaS founders), SEO is an enormous distribution advantage, but unfortunately, it's pretty unexciting work. This is partly due to the fact that "SEO Expertise" has been made to feel like it requires a Ph.D., and the large number of SEO Marketers who have convinced thousands of smart people that only they can lead you to success and if you "mess it up", your website's reputation may be forever tainted by the gods at Google. Before I dived into the bread basket of SEO, I truthfully considered paying for an expert myself, but I'm glad I didn't, and hopefully you'll see why you likely shouldn't as you read on.

Please note, as I just mentioned, I am not an SEO Expert.

The 80/20 for understanding SEO

The Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your work, and nowhere is this more valid than SEO. The general gist is that you want to rank on Google for high-intent queries that your ideal customers are making in relation to your product. That way these users discover your product, and some percentage of them convert into paying customers. Most founders understand this; the hard part is usually creating content and getting backlinks, which are the crucial elements to ranking for your search term.

You can and should compete against the big players

Many founders give up on SEO almost immediately due to the high domain ranking and backlink authority of their competitors; this is generally a mistake. We attained our results with a DR ranking of 10 on Ahrefs while most of our competitors had much higher rankings. You do not need to grow your DR strength to 60 or 70 to start attracting users, but you do need to find a way to stand out from the herd.

Also, just pay for an SEO SaaS. Products like Ahrefs and SEMrush et al. are some of the most expensive products a small startup can buy in the early days, but there is a reason these companies can offer such high prices across the board; they work. I did not want to pay $100 dollars a month for Ahrefs at the time, so I found some cheap knockoff that was 10x worse and essentially wasted a month of my time. Just do it. If you're serious about growth, it will pay for itself 10x over. You should also know that SEO is a long-term play. It should not be your immediate plan to grow, which is why you always start before you feel the need to.

The product we were working on at the time was an event app, so we had fierce competition from Eventbrite, Dice, and all of the other large ticketing companies. After doing some competitive analysis, we realized that Eventbrite's system was one of the most sophisticated in the world and we couldn't compete by trying to outrank them, but we saw that for our target demographic their system was lacking, so we decided to focus there.

There are only two ways to rank, and one is better than the other for technical founders

You either need to write blogs or create engaging dynamic content if you want people to find you through SEO. If you've been keeping an ear to the SEO world for any amount of time, you've likely read somewhere that you should write blogs to get your initial set of users. This is generally great advice for most business owners, but founders who are technical or have access to a technical co-founder have what I'd consider a better option — dynamic content. We initially started out by trying to write blogs in our SEO journey, but writing well is very time-consuming and slow.

Given that I understood that SEO would not start showing results for months, I wanted to invest as little time as possible into it and focus more on immediate marketing goals. The results we achieved were done almost exclusively with dynamic content. Dynamic content is essentially a webpage that uses a templated system to create multiple entries that can focus on different search terms.

Create aggregated dynamic content based on your unique data that speaks to your customers

You might be thinking that my description of dynamic content feels vague, and you'd be right. The general idea here is you create one page, which is powered by a single data source. This means you can create another data source and now you have two pages. If you create 100 unique data sources, you now have 100 pages. This is where the technical piece comes in and enables you to really create powerful content that speaks to your users. For our event app, we realized that our users were young people living in cities who were mainly looking for unique and urban types of events. From talking to these users and being our own app users, we realized there was an opportunity to annotate our events in a way that our ideal users would be more interested to click our link versus Eventbrite's.

So we scanned all of our data and annotated everything. We then created dynamic SEO pages for each event and each city, but we didn't stop there. We realized there were certain genres of events our community really enjoyed, so we introduced new columns in our events table to represent these data points. We also used the type of language that resonated with our audience, and the results showed that it worked. Even when Eventbrite was higher ranked than us, our ideal users still clicked our link and downloaded our app.

An example SEO page might have a title in the format:

Top {tag_name} events in {city_name} for {community}

You can see the large number of long-tail keywords such a templated system can provide and the beauty of having one page that can scale to 10,000 keywords.

A great examples of this is Wanderlog, which has some of the best SEO templating I've seen in some time.

I built an agent that can help you figure out your dynamic content strategy

Since setting up a good dynamic content strategy can lead to huge gains for certain companies, figuring out your unique IP and how to annotate it properly is extremely important. That's why I created an AI agent that can offer advice based on your product. Feel free to give it a try, and I hope it leads to some wins for you.

Overall, SEO became a huge part of our product, and after seeing the impact it had, I believe that every founder, especially technical founders, should learn how to leverage it to grow their products and reach more of their customers.

Thanks for reading. I'll see you next time :)

Looking back I was generally pretty good at school because to me it was a simple bargain. You go to this location every weekday, listen to someone older than you teach, then on your own time you optionally need to study the concept and apply them to tests. I was a straight-A student and it quickly became a point of pride for me and people who knew me. I was considered “smart”, but looking back I can see that I was mainly regurgitating facts and logic. Lucky for me, this all changed when I got to college and discovered the complex and intricate world of computer science and more importantly, the ability to build useful things. It was a brave and exciting new world waiting to be explored. It was a wild west where the only entry fee was the cost of a computer, but there was an issue. These pesky things called classes, homework, and tests kept getting in my way and taking up all my time.

So I made a decision. I decided to prioritize learning how to build real-world products over aiming for a high GPA. I still needed to pass my classes and graduate after all since I lacked a fallback cushion like some other famous tech dropouts. In the end, it enabled me to have a deeper level of appreciation and understanding of the exact topics I was learning in my classes and over the long-term paved a pathway to success and immense growth. Here are some of the lessons that came from it that still ring true today.

1. Doing > reading

I remember a surreal moment that happened in my Intro to Database Systems class. Our semester final basically entailed building and deploying a database and querying it during a presentation. That was it. If you could do that you would basically pass the entire class. This was funny to me because I had done this years ago while building a social network project leveraging Google’s Datastore with its GQL (Google Querying Language).

After joining a group with one of the students consistently acing the class, I was baffled when they claimed that this would be “hard” and we should get started right away. It was clear to me that although the individual had so much theoretical understanding, they lacked experience applying those theories. I on the other hand already had a DB instance with replicas running that I could connect to and query. Safe to say I and my team passed the class but instead of doing the extra credits, I again focused my intention on getting my hand's dirty. I decided to learn iOS programming to build an app and that app led to my first internship later that summer.

The information gained from reading about real-time processing techniques versus the amount gained from actually implementing said system is night and day. Reading a document that mentions the importance of pagination for creating stable APIs is great but you’ll likely forget it in a week as you have no context for its importance. You will never forget your API requests timing out due to latency spikes from trying to load 10,000+ fully hydrated objects in a response. Concepts in the abstract are great, but it’s when we ground them in our complex, ever-evolving world that we unlock a new level of insight.

2. Pedigree is overrated

Coming from a medium-sized Texas university that most people had never heard of, I was insecure about my knowledge and how it compared to some of my co-workers who went to MIT or Stanford.

To say that the university you go to has no impact on your career prospects is clearly wrong. Stanford students receive far more attention regardless of capability simply due to their proximity to so many tech companies and by virtue of the university’s legacy. The important thing is to understand is that once you graduate, its direct impact on your ability to learn and grow is negligible. After interviewing close to 100 candidates, I can safely inform you that I can’t remember the university or GPA of a single person the companies I’ve worked at have made offers to. The truth is very few people will care or notice it even in the new grad stage. I was only ever asked for my GPA once while in undergrad and it had no impact on the interview process.

The pedigrees that matter the most are your accomplishments and learnings. What have you built? What have you learned from those things? You improve in these areas by getting your hands dirty. The earlier you start the better at it you’ll be.

3. Accept failure and keep going

The very first time I read an article on AWS about spinning up a cluster of EC2 instances, I couldn’t get past the first three sentences. I remember throwing my hands up in exhaustion. “There’s too much to learn and I won’t be able to grasp any of this”, I thought to myself. Turns out I would get used to not understanding things as I continued my strategy of building products. That makes sense because it was something I had rarely done in the past. It was a skill I was barely a beginner at.

REST, APIs, push notifications, asynchronous programming, we’re all things I eventually learned in the first year of me going down this path. Between all these concepts, I had days, weeks, and sometimes months of failure (especially with Apple Push Notifications but that's another story) until one day the lightbulb switched on. These trials and tribulations helped me understand and honestly fall in love with the process of learning itself. The process of going from not having any idea how something works, to confidently explaining it to others became a beautiful and endearing art form in my eyes.

It’s this lesson that stuck with me the most and led to growth not just in my field but in all aspects of life. Now one could argue that I didn’t need to intentionally sacrifice my academics to have achieved these results but for me, that choice taught me the importance of prioritization and how by choosing to sacrifice some things, we can unlock new possibilities.

Until next time, you can follow me on Twitter at @cinematic_dev if you’d like to keep up with more stories and thoughts!

Some resources you might find helpful if you’re looking to improve your software engineering interviewing!

Finally if you enjoyed my writing, you’ll love my partners! Check them out.