2023·04·12 · 1:02:01
Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000
I cover the full arc of building Yoast: why I combined my small plugins into one, the moment my wife Marieke made it clear I needed to actually run it as a business, and what the green-light system was designed to solve. I talk about the founding story, the freemium model, the biggest product mistake we ever made, and how I think about when and how companies should invest in SEO. The second half of the conversation covers AI’s impact on content: why I think large language models will increase wealth inequality and what that means for creators who are trying to build authentic authority in their field.
0:02 had a small business plan for it I was like if I'm going to make 100k with this in the first year then it's actually worth continuing doing this and then I made more than 100K in the first months yoast I'm so excited for this I told you I was literally with chat last night hearing stories I've also heard from Brian Hale from mullinawag from Alex Schultz so thank you so much for joining me today it's an absolute pleasure to be here with all the people that have been here before me it does feel like you're incorporated into this this ridiculous group do you know what I'm very lucky is being graciated by such intelligent
0:33 people but I want to start at the beginning so you started the yoast SEO plugin as a hobby it's now used by 13 million sites according to the drafty Google what was the aha moment for like I have to create the yoast SEO plugin that even we use at 20vc I started as an SEO consultant having my own website doing some small things and I built a couple of different small plugins at its various specific SEO things and I was is a quite regular speaker at SEO
1:04 conference already by that time and I and people kept saying to me like yeah well we just want one plugin that does it all and um there was one plug-in out there that that tried to do that but wasn't really good enough yet so I just combined what I had the different plugins that I had into one thing um and then realized quite quickly that there's basically two sides SEO right you have the technical stuff and you have the content side of things and the technical stuff is not something that anyone wants to think about
1:37 so I what I try to do and I think we've quite successfully done over the years is take all the technical stuff away from people and just fix it for them and give them good feedback on their content I think that that is what well this pretty simple recipe that has actually helped it grow so much and I love it you have the the green red orange light system yeah which was like images needed uh meta description uh whatever whatever I I love it so I'm
2:08 totally I'm not technical person who loved that but there's a moment when it changes from like a hobby that's kind of cool and kind of working to like oh wow we actually have something what was that Catalyst for I need to go all in on this what was side hobby at the time so I started my own company in 2010 basically doing consulting I was working for Alex doing consulting for Facebook and and doing consulting for eBay and getting companies like that what happened
2:39 is that the plugin became really big so it had like a million users WordPress was growing quite fast and I suddenly had on this free plugin that I built as a hobby a million users and I was spending way too much time supporting it and my wife was quite clear Marika has been at the criminal at the premise of a whole lot of these smart decisions in life um she she was like I don't need to make money doing this all you need to stop doing it
3:11 and I'm like yeah you're probably right um and then I built I first started with an add-on so I built a video SEO add-on um I had a small business plan for it I was like if I'm going to make 100k with this in the first year then it's actually worth continuing doing this because I was making quite a lot of money as a consultant so it had to actually offset that money and that I made more than 100K in the first months and I was like oh wait there might be a bit more to this I absolutely love that
3:42 yeah um do you have that moment though then as the next moment you first have that Catalyst for oh [ __ ] this is something that's working and working well when you're doing 100K in a month pretty quickly listen Shannon taught me one thing well he told me many things but he told me VC gonna VC uh and what he means about that is you can't take the VC out of the vcn so when you're doing 100K a month you're having people chase you down to invest why did you never take external funding why would we so the thing is we were
4:14 growing quite so first of all I don't think that any of this was a plan up front I mean there was no plan to to sell the company there was no plan to grow to as big as we as we became because it just happened and we grew along with WordPress and um with Matt in many ways and and and we were very lucky in a way that I I picked the right platform in the beginning and and built on that um but
4:45 in the beginning it was very much about turning that hobby into a bit of a lifestyle business we have four children I was also spending a lot of time with them um and I didn't necessarily want to build a huge business in the beginning and then later on when we realized that we that we had quite a large business in their hands by that time it really wasn't needed anymore we were generating enough cash
5:16 to grow in into what we wanted to do um the funny thing about our sort of businesses that you the only cost that you really have is people uh so why why take money is there nothing that you could have done with cash that you didn't do be it marketing be it brand be it r d push the boundaries on how fast you're moving a lot of the times Founders will say the reason I took family is because I could could have done it in 18 months but with cash I can do it in six
5:47 yeah so I think I was blissfully unaware of that in the beginning and I'm very happy that I was I I think delusion wise you're absolutely right if you could turn the clock back 10 years or to 2010 when you saw it and Incorporated what would you do differently the thing is in with hindsight it's very easy to say that right it's very easy to say I would have done this or that differently had I known in the beginning that we'd be selling the company at some point and and how this all would go I
6:18 might have hired a bit less people and because we a whole lot of the things that we did we did just because we thought it was fun and not necessarily because we were thinking about how to like make the most money um if you if I look you know at it and back at it and maybe we hired a bit too much at certain points in time and and also right now we we're really not that big
6:50 Theo's as a company is not that big anymore uh in terms of or any more it's not it's a hundred people but if you look at like 13 million websites uh having 120 or so people is really not all that much people right uh so um I would probably say that I don't have any real big regrets in that regard lesson a life without many regrets is a good life I I want to start on the first major topic because when we chatted before you said
7:21 you know alongside Matt really it's the first time we've had an open source and kind of freemium uh OG on the show and I want to start with something you said which is open source slash freemium models are extremely hard to make work but when they do they lead to incredible potential which VCS are underestimating um let's break that down because I'm simple as a VC um why are open source and premium models so hard to make work first so there's two two sides to that on the
7:53 one hand freemium is always going to be hard because you have to decide about um what what to put in free and what to put in premium like how do you attract the most users and at the same time get have enough in premium to um you know to actually convert them into paying customers and the add-on thing that's hard there when you're in open source is that when people think that you're you've you've got a good product but too much of its premium is that it might just Fork your premium product uh and so so you have to be extremely
8:24 good at what you do and you'll also have to build like a sort of trust relationship with that with the customer so you have and the user uh they need to trust you to be better than the other options that are out there and what I said we have relatively few people compared to the number of people using your CEO so what you what you get quite quickly with these models is that you have web skill problems and small company income
8:57 uh I mean at its peak yoast was a 15 million euros a year Revenue when we sold that's not a whole lot of money compared to the 11 million sites that we were running on at that time I mean that is so you're solving problems for a whole lot of sites with relatively little people at the same time the open source Community controls a large part of the web like a very very large part I think
9:29 people still underestimate what Matt has done with WordPress and how I mean more than 40 of websites on the web are WordPress sites and companies like Shopify and I heard your podcast with uh with Toby which was awesome but Shopify has like two three percent of of the market if that so WordPress is way way bigger and and people underestimate that and it's under invested in I think what would you do differently if you on that
10:04 I wouldn't work so hard no I I don't think that's fair I think I have a tremendous respect for what a Matt has done with automatic so for me WordPress to project is super important to me as a person which I think Ma has to has as well like he he'd be happy doing that until he dies and for me it's just like whatever I'll do I'll be in the WordPress community and
10:35 I think that that is something that he's built that that is so much more powerful than all the other things it's that community and those people we we often say come for the software stay for the people uh and I think that's very true you mentioned that the challenge of putting enough greatness in the free that they convert to the premium and then I'm happy with it when you have Founders come to you with this problem I don't know what to do I don't know how much to put in how much Secret Sauce what do you actually advise them because I'm sure you see so many
11:08 um we do see a lot and I'm it diff it really differs it's there is no one-size-fits-all solution uh I will say that putting too much in free early on is dangerous because you can't really take it back and uh that I think that's where open source slightly differs from from SAS because in SAS you can just take it back and in open source as soon as you put it out there it's out there and and someone is going to Fork it if you take it out
11:39 and uh yeah that's going to be hard when you look at freemium and open source today that worked the Best in Class what are the commonalities in those that have worked well that you think are core to so the biggest underestimated thing in all of Open Source is branding like actually building a proper brand for your company and and thinking about hey how do we want people to look at us what are we
12:11 uh what are we putting out there how how are people perceiving us this is the hardest thing because you also about to develop a lad brand I mean that's that's what's the most challenging which is like dude I'm a branding guy I can brand all day give me a turd male brand at inguchi but um uh a developer-led brand [ __ ] that's hard well it is a great developer lab brand foreign so I think what makes a great developer lab brand is why uh Marika is the secret
12:42 source of our company in many ways is because it it's not just developer-led if I were to just do that if I if I'd been the only one building your SEO then we would have only optimized for seos and for for us developers who want very specific Niche features all the time to do very specific things and honestly nobody cares so um I think it was Brian who mentioned in one of your podcasts at some point that companies tend to optimize for the power user yeah
13:13 and I think that's the thing that you don't have to do that's like the exact opposite of what you should be doing and it's very hard to do that well so if you're just a developer leading a a company like that then it's really very important that you get someone on board who's not a power user who can help you like hey I'm a normal user of this product and when you think about doing automatic values I'm fascinated there because quite often they're the ones most likely to churn they're not the real lovers and actually I understand
13:44 optimize for the power user and for the super lover because they're your Champion they're the ones who are gonna espouse it to their friends in the community make the ones who love it love it more and they'll do the rest for you why am I wrong well you're not that's where it's super hard so um I think the thing that the fine line that I've always tried to do with yoast is that we we did the things automatically that the lovers and that like the really geeky seos really liked
14:17 so we fixed all the problems automatically and very cleanly and we try to keep the interface as simple as possible and at the same time we horribly feel that at times I mean it is super hard to keep a settings interface for an SEO plugin simple because there's so many things you can toggle and switch and change and and the thing is once you look start looking at some data and and one of the harder Parts is that you actually don't have
14:50 that much data uh in in our context um is that people don't look at settings so for an SEO plugin they turn it on and they expect it to do magic and that means that your defaults have to be incredibly good and at every setting you add is um so I I think that the uh that the
15:21 power is to make sure that you keep on doing the right things and and reacting quickly so one of the things we always did was whenever Google came out with new stuff is we'd be on that and we and we'd have a new release ready a couple days later or even on the day itself to to release like to add the features that were needed and luckily Google talked to talk to us sometimes and told us you mentioned kind of the default there and like settings people don't go to settings I think it was Dave Morin who said uh on a show like The Devil's in
15:53 the default when it comes to product and product expectations and actually it just destroys creativity do you agree or is actually the default is good it's what we know and it's what we're comfortable with I think the default is what 90 of your users will you will end up using so it better be damn good it's actually one of wordpress's core principles in it in its design philosophies which Matt came up with uh I guess so Props him again
16:26 um decisions not options and that means we're not going to add options for Stuff where we can decide the right thing for 95 90 of people we're not going to add an option for it there might be a filter in the code to change it so if you're a developer you can change it but for normal users adding more options just makes your product harder to use can I ask I think we learn a lot from mistakes when you look at kind of the product journey of yoast what do you
16:57 think was the single biggest kind of product mistake and what did you learn from it I think the biggest product mistake is thinking that people were using are features when we didn't know for sure so we spend a whole lot of time building features that done nobody used and that's the problem of building a WordPress plugin because you don't have Telemetry going back to your systems all the time
17:30 um so we literally didn't know and then we started building tracking to actually get send some Telemetry back and then we realize oh wait we're spending a whole lot of our time working on this and nobody's using it um at which point usually Marika says I Told You So and and so what do you change then you spend more time on branding you spend more time on distribution you spend no you spend more time on the parts of the interface where people actually do interact with your software
18:02 so for us that was we started adding features into the editor where you see the green bullet so we started adding readability features to actually make people write better texts a lesson phenomenally helpful for a Layman like me um I I do have to also I'm concerned when we look at the freemium model in particular especially as we enter a different macro climate because what you see is kind of the removal of the credit card from the bot from the user and actually reversing back to the CFO where it traditionally was and people don't have the same purchasing power on the
18:33 front lines are you concerned in the same way as I am about that removal of purchasing power and how does freemium look differently over the next few years to how it did over the last few years I am slightly concerned there uh depends a bit on the market so I'm not as concerned for yoast because SEO is probably going to be invested in more instead of less so in a in a down Market because people look at their AdWords Bill and they go like oh maybe we should
19:04 do something about that and um but yeah I think you're right and at the same time most of these freemium models are relatively cheap so while there's not purchasing power as much anymore on the on the front end I mean your SEO costs like 99 Euros a year a lot of Wordpress plugins have those kinds of price points those are not the hardest decisions in the world usually yeah no I I totally agree well worries me also with the freemium models honestly and the kind of the cohort of startups we have to say is you have the cost structure of Enterprise startups
19:37 you have sdrs you have A's you have CS teams you have this very bloated kind of org structure and then you have the price points of freemium and we have no knowledge that they upsell efficiently we have no knowledge of like large acvs at the end of the rainbow and so you have this inflated cost base and a small ACV with freemium and it just doesn't doesn't work no and honestly a lot of those companies are also like they're they're building for skill that they're
20:08 never going to reach so um I've actually seen this with Shaq together in a company you know we worked in um uh but yeah I think um that there's a lot of opportunity to just do Scrappy and and small and also to price reasonably because some of these things just get too expensive and then it's too easy to throw you away so something like calendly which I see a lot of people use and love Google rolls out a new feature and
20:40 suddenly calendly is gone and so I mean it's the three to five billion dollar company it is no yeah but it but it is I mean the risk of that is quite a big right I mean casually when I I no longer pay for it but when I used to pay for it it cost me more than my Google workspace account and and I was like why did these pricing Zone match I didn't use calendly I find it offensive that I should pick through your calendar to find time I'm gonna add a load of [ __ ] of How It's outrageous oh yeah I'll take my time to spend going through your time are you [ __ ]
21:14 getting the EA God unbelievable um anyway I always get in trouble for that one uh sure I I do just want to ask before we move on from premium and open source again I'm an investor for a living I you said before that VCS do not or VCS underestimate these models great how do you look at them how do you evaluate them is it you know Forks on GitHub what is the mechanism of
21:45 so I'm kind of lucky there in that I in terms of software I can just look at the code I'm developer enough that I can look at the code and see if it's any good I'm arrogant enough to say that I think I can I can actually determine that myself um and then it's just looking at what users are saying like looking at reviews looking at how people are talking about it and in in these communities what you what you really get is that you have like the WordPress Community is a is a very
22:16 it's a layered thing but the inside WordPress Community is relatively small group of people that goes to work camps and there goes to these conferences and when I say small that's a relative right I mean word Camp Europe will probably be a couple thousand people uh walking around talking about WordPress for a couple of days we're talking there and and at conferences like that and hearing people talk about software and like hey that's cool and this is this is useful for this and this and we this solves this problem for me it's actually very cool to listen to
22:48 that and figure out like hey these are the ones that are really gonna make a change so that's being in that community and actually caring about that community and being aligned with that Community how do you tell pre-launch this is my hard thing I I meet many many in my role why would you tell pre-launch you don't have to well why would you fund pre-launch no Isabel why would you need to yeah but also why would you want to tell pre-launch I mean most of these things exist already that's the so it's a very different building atmosphere it's very much built out in the open
23:20 yeah not many startups actually take that approach though no but that's what I'm saying like oh this is very uncommon to I think most VCS is that the the entire approach is different it is it is much more out in the open and and that also means that the quality that the output of what it is that you I mean when you sell yoast it's what you sell as a brand and and what you sell is not necessarily just the software because the software
23:53 everyone could just pick up and copy who do you think is the best VC for understanding the model Matt Maslow VC Master founder no no videos also funds a lot of companies oh he does but he has he has cash do you think any VC does it well yeah so I've spoken to quite a lot of them because they do reach out and eat it in mv's VCS are going to VC I don't think a whole lot of them get it I think there's a wide open market
24:24 well you know there are always a chance for you to become a VC as I said everyone wants to be a PC these days um I I want to talk about um kind of the highs and lows of SEO we met through Shaq really uh and he told me about the instrumental work that you did on coindesk so before we're going to start on uh a lot of the the dark arts so to speak um timing and budgets what does it mean to invest in SEO I often hear like oh we're going to invest in SEO what does it mean to invest in SEO it's a good question that doesn't really have a good
24:56 answer I think that every founder should understand the basics of SEO because it's going to help them in a whole lot of different things there's a reason that almost every OG growth guide is you've spoken to or girl as you've spoken to in the last uh end of your episodes so many of the mauricos by background because what you need to do when you do seos you need to look at a whole lot of data and you need to think about what do people search for how do I describe my product
25:28 in words that people actually use and when they have a problem what are they searching for what are these things what are the words that people use to describe the problems that they have and how can I tap into that I actually think that that's good to think about when you're building a product so investing in SEO starts there with actually thinking about what are people trying to what are we what are we solving which problem are we users are we solving that's very so as that's where SEO is in the beginning and where it's important I think
26:00 and then when you invest in SEO you need content and you need a good tag platform and honestly WordPress is out there so if you if you're gonna use another CMS I think you're pretty stupid because every other CMS is going to cost you more money and then you need content you need to write that content and in the beginning as probably you that needs to write that content so help me out here so we have we need content core pillar we have 3
26:31 000 shows they are very seoable and heavy seoable I'm told um I kind of run funds uh and you know a media business uh I'm not an SEO mask everyone's like you need to turn your transcripts into like like pages and you'll kill it on SEO I'm like really that'll just look really ugly like can you imagine a whole transcript on a website like oh am I missing something um yes nobody told you that the whole transcript needs to be like the whole
27:02 page so tell me more let's say that transcript needs to be on that page but it but this can be a scrollable div or whatever on that page where people can go through it and you can actually make it look nice but yes I the transcript needs to be on a page somewhere although Google is getting better at actually just listening to the podcast and doing and making the transcript themselves they've been doing that on YouTube for ages was her um but yeah so you
27:35 in the end all these search engines they search through text and if it searches through YouTube onto a specific minute in a YouTube video it's searching through the transcript of that YouTube video that it compiled itself before that because that's what they do so it needs to be in text on a page somewhere and under some more stuff you could do you're already doing half of it right you're already using your sister but yeah I do think that actually you could probably get more traffic I mean fantastic because we could absolutely optimize that if we go back
28:07 to like the Founder Hat of like what it means to invest in Sea the next question is like when's the right time a lot of fans like Harry I just need to get a couple of customers I need to build the base and then I'll think about it when's the right time to start investing in SEO so I think the first thing that if you pick the right platform to build your website on and make sure that it's relatively technically SEO friendly already um then you're good in the beginning and and then as soon as you start doing customer support you'll get questions
28:39 that you have more than one two or three times start writing knowledge base articles for those and it's as simple as that just start the things you're already writing anyway because you're answering those customers and you're you're you're fixing them reuse that content and put it on your site and and then just build on that so I think the right time to start investing in it is fairly early but that doesn't mean hiring an expensive SEO consultant it just means actually writing putting content on your
29:11 site and making sure that people can find what uh well what you're what you do you imagine how RNA expansive SEO consultant you see so many people attend SEO what are the biggest mistakes you see Founders make with SEO in the early days I think the biggest mistake is one come up with a brand that is not recognizable so even in search if people search through your problem area they never search Once right they
29:42 always have like a search Journey where they search for multiple words and for multiple things in over a period of time even if they don't click your result if they see your brand name a couple of times in that result you're slowly building up confidence for your brand so being recognizable in search is super important and I think that people underestimate how important it actually is to have a brand that people can remember and that doesn't become very vague very quickly that's
30:13 one the other is coming up with terms themselves for the say you think you're very clever and you and you create your own term for what you're doing and nobody else uses that so don't just use the words that everybody else uses that's so interesting so category creation may sound sexy to a VC but actually whatever a high intellectual word you're using it doesn't mean [ __ ] to anyone don't bother so category creation is I think super important but it's it's
30:46 almost always it's a category that so that the problem that you're fixing for people already has words attached to that and if you're if you're going to start using different words for that category then the people are using to search it for then you're gonna have a hard time getting people that search into your website you can't really create Demand with SEO so that I mean that is the thing that that is very
31:17 counter-intuitive to a lot of people but but SEO is very demand driven just like AdWords is a very demand driven the demand has to be there you can't create the demand so that's why the branding is important and you have to do other things as well and and well a holistic view on growth should absolutely include SEO but should also include a whole lot of branding should you have SEO Specialists within your growth team within your marketing team is this a matter skill that everyone should have how should that be distributed within your team
31:48 I think you should have SEO Specialists on your team if you're building a larger growth team because it's a pretty specific problem area to keep track of I mean it's quite a bit of time that it takes to just keep track of everything that Google does and the funny thing is I think as your company gets larger managing SEO gets a lot harder so you'll probably need an SEO team over time because what changes with time why does it get harder uh it's just me people as you move
32:21 quickly on your site and all these companies want to ship every day then it's it's hard to not make SEO mistakes every day so you need people that keep track of what you're shipping and and say okay maybe we can change this so that it's actually SEO friendly who did the SEO specialists in your team work closest with is it with the product team is it with the dev team is it with who are that consigliaries to ensure they have that seamless integration so you know what both these actually I think that they should probably be in that in
32:53 that triangle the whole time um and and the content side of things should probably also talk to your PR and comms tier people Etc so it is SEO is it has a nasty habit of being in so many different places at the same time like so many different things are important to the SEO you mentioned the kind of the centrality of content there I think one of the things I always say with content you know having done fa here's is the reason most people fail is because they give up like it just takes
33:24 a long time to [ __ ] work when you think about how long it takes to see the gains of SEO how long does it take to this depends a bit on where you are in your journey but if you're starting as a new company then then it's going to take um quite a bit of time because nobody's heard of you and you're not gonna get like a whole lot of clicks automatically suddenly because you've launched a new website um
33:56 at the same time if you're a bigger company and you've not invested in SEO but you do already have a brand and you could see results very quickly as soon as you start actually putting decent well optimized content on your site can I ask a bit of a weird one if you are a CEO or a CFO of a series B company and you haven't optimized for it already how do you allocate budget for SEO do I take it from marketing do I take it from product engineering is it a new budget how much should it cost if I was literally in an angel investment of
34:27 yours series B what would you advise me in terms of asset allocation towards SEO so if you're already doing CPC I take 10 of your CPC budget and allocate it to us here okay and and then start from there and see what happens I said you mentioned CBC I I did want to get to this but if we mentioned that it takes a decent amount of time especially if you're early how do you measure along
34:58 the way the effectiveness and success of your SEO strategy in those early days how do you advise me on that well not just early days measuring the success of SEO is hard because Google has very very very successfully and I'm gonna go [ __ ] for this Google has very successfully made it impossible for people to track the effect of anything but CPC so they every company out there either uses last click attribution or
35:31 something or an attribution system where the last click is important and the last click is in most cases going to be a brand search because you've convinced someone to buy somewhere in the process um we don't know which keywords people searched for anymore when they get to a site because Google has those and there's like so it's actually quite hard to say Hey how well does SEO work for us in our business the same way that it's hard to tell the results of a TV ad but that doesn't mean that TV
36:02 advertising doesn't work nor does it mean that SEO doesn't work it it really is a something that's going to blow up the rest of your uh um results and and it might be hard to attribute so I think actually that's one of the falsities that we have in the in the whole growth world is that we can measure everything that was challenging for a VC underwriting a lot of chat to get used for you
36:33 um when you go inside companies today you're investing you're advising what are the best SEO individuals and teams have and do and what are the worst so I I think the worst start looking at a very long list of technical things to fix and go from top to bottom and just spend months and months and months fixing things that really don't matter because the overall story is bad
37:05 uh the best go in and look at okay so what is our Brand Story what is the what is the thing that we're selling um and they fixed the biggest technical problems and then go into okay so how do we create a story around this how do we create like how do we together with comms and others make sure that people that land on our site do the right things and and find the content that actually addresses their needs so you said about Brand Story we're going to do this in real time because there's going to be a
37:37 load of Founders that listen to this and go oh like great I get it I get it but what does that actually mean for us so yoast yoast SEO for everyone that is that your Brand Story just so I understand like is that what you want so this is where it always gets because I think yoast as a company I I can still do this better than we probably do um and I still say we even though I'm not officially there for a bit now um
38:11 yes it is like I I do think that SEO for everyone it is the thing that yours does it is as literally making SEO accessible to everyone but the things that people search for are terms like WordPress SEO and if you search for WordPress SEO you'll either end up on our plugin page or on an article page that gives you a very long things list of things to do for SEO and it gives you it explains to you how SEO works so you know you get you get three ads yeah
38:45 well you would WP WP engine yellow ball SEO agency uh and WP beginner yeah you're the first non-seo ad no dude the first non-add where the yeah yeah we we we would be yeah I I think we so that's one of the funny things when you start selling your company people start asking for things like your cost of acquisition per customer and we were like we never spent any ads so it how how would you calculate this I
39:16 think the final thing on this switch I do have such it's really hard there when you have a horizontal tool say you have a notion say you have an air table so you have any of these kind of collaboration tools which are applicable across many different verticals how do you think that I'm an effective Brand Story that hits those very different use cases it's one short tagline at that point just you're going to want to start optimizing the use cases so so you you'll have a ton of use cases you want to tell that story you want to tell
39:48 the stories of how your customers are using it and and writing that down and and all the different ways in which they are using it and all the different verticals that you're thinking of where people could be using your product you want to be creating Pages for that and and actually telling people those stories I totally agree should you do that from day one or should it be integrated over time if you can do that from day one it's absolutely awesome yeah no I I agree you mentioned the centrality of content
40:20 again we're seeing um open AI uh change a lot about life uh but also change all about kind of low level content creation how does AI impact such an SEO do you think most significantly in the next couple of years so I think AI for Content generation is still problematic because it hallucinates too much so there's too much things that it that are in there that that are just not true why is that all right well that's pretty much down
40:52 to like how Transformer models work I mean it predicts the next word but it doesn't mean that the next word has to be true um so but at the same time I think AI can be tremendously useful in content generation it can it can help you create outlines that can help you create uh excerpts of longer articles very quickly it can actually it can help you distill your research very quickly because it you can say hey so I've got these 30 articles on this topic
41:23 um and you can use something like open AI to to make excerpts of those and summaries and and use that to write your own content very quickly but I do think that writing your own content and adding something unique is going to be more important over time and with a lot of these changes happening search engines are bound to focus more on the author of the content than they have done for a while because it's actually important for them to make sure that what's on that page is is true and
41:54 it's good so they want to make sure that they can actually trust the author so I think the author of our of an article is going to be more important over the next few years than it has been in the past few years does the price of content not go down if you think about what this does to a demand and Supply chart this is a supply shock at creating excess Supply or a massive increase in Supply which will inevitably increase the price by which demand is willing to pay do not worry about that
42:26 well I know I didn't worry about that at all I I in in terms of like more content being created yes there will be loads more content being created at probably very very low prices the thing is that most of that content will be not good so the content that will rank in search engines will very quickly be the content that is actually unique and and actually has value in it that is not given by a uh by
42:57 an AI solution do you feel we lose creativity in our content teams and what I mean by that is you mentioned like the outline side it can generate um and a lot of slow hanging fruit that it can take away is there a loss of creativity with not having to do this it's like you know our arithmetic skills went down dramatically when calculators were introduced do we lose that um I um some companies might lose that I think the winners will not lose that I think creativity is still what's going to make content truly good and truly
43:28 unique and shareable and the the thing is that SEO doesn't exist in a vacuum so if you land on a page that was written purely for SEO purposes and it doesn't have any value you're not going to share that page with your friends and at the same time the thing that you want for pages to that Rank and search and for them to be successful is that people will share them with their friends and we'll revisit them so we have to make better web pages we I we
44:00 and Google has been saying for years you need to make websites free users not for search engines and I think they're absolutely right in that like if you're if that page you land up on from search that you build for SEO is not something that I want to share with my friends then that page is not worth its money I get you but then I use yoast as a plugin and it's like hey you need to use your keyword more times throughout the power throughout the text and I'm like well it looks really weird to say used to Volk uh and uh it's just
44:33 like ridiculous when you put that four times throughout it's like it only works in the title yeah so this is where building a simplistic model like we have done with the green orange red bullets it's always going to bite you because it's never going to be perfect I think that we do a pretty good way of saying the overall score of a page when that turns green stop looking at the individual bullets at that point because that'll lead you to over optimization
45:06 it's the problem is that it's actually hard to write good content and I don't think that that skill is going away I mean yes AI will help in some of that and some of the things that AI can do are very useful right so you can be writing your very uh nice Posh English summary of which you think is something is and then you can throw it into open Ai and say say make this readable for people
45:37 that that have a reading grade of X and then it'll do that for you and it can actually help you do that very very well to well to make it simpler and to make it um easier for more people to read um so I think there's a lot of value and stuff like that you said about kind of you know not many people do it well but the importance of quality of content I agree but what concerns me is when you increase Supply you have discoverability challenge now where there's just [ __ ] harder to find that great quality content because it's in a sea of rubbish
46:08 content that's what concerns me I think that that concerns me and I think that concerns search engines even more uh I I think that that is one of the things I could Google is panicking about like this is going to create a wave a very very bad content on the web and how are we going to surf as the really good content uh and and that's why I expect him to be doubling down on things like the EA team of things which they've had expertise Authority trust they they've already talked to that about about that in quite
46:40 a number of occasions and I think they'll double down on that what elements have AIO in this year's concern you that you don't think enough people are spending time on or thinking about I think the biggest problem and this is where it shows that I'm very European um so we don't know what's in those large language models and though we I and we really should uh and and we uh sort of have a right to know as well like what did you train your model on what can I based on that I
47:13 can make a decision on whether I want to use it for a specific use case um and I would be very much in favor of some regulation that actually say hey you need to disclose these things about your large language model um in order to be able to to allow the general public to use it because then they can know I'm just playing Devil's Advocate do we have a right like when you go into a restaurant do you have a right to know where every single ingredient is from you know you could argue hey no you don't if you
47:44 don't like it go to the other sandwich shop I think every Michelin restaurant that you go to will I very happily tell you where they Source their beef because they're proud of it and and a lot of other things so so yeah I do think we have or maybe Michelin restaurants no yeah and everyone else I mean so so yeah I do think we have a right especially because a lot of those large language models are trained on content
48:19 which is a whole like big debate in itself I I've had the the pleasure of uh working with the team at the guardian for a couple of years uh about a decade ago so they should pay for access to that content which then enables them to provide their service better they're leveraging other people's work to make money off it yes yeah how does that work hey that is hard and I don't have the answer and and part of that is going to be licensing um but but part of that's actually also going to be SEO like how do we create
48:52 robust rtxt rules for its this sort of stuff that that like allow where you can say I want to be in in this type of large language model but not in that it's going to be super hard I don't think we have any good solutions to that yet how do content teams and the structure of them change with AI playing a much more Central role in the creation and planning of their content that they do today I hope it speeds them up so if they use it well it speeds them up
49:23 and you might need actually a few less people to do the same amount of work I I think there's there's very many ways in which AI can speed up not just content but development too I mean there's there's so many if it doesn't mean a step change in your productivity then you're using it wrong what worries me is actually like everyone agrees that it's going to create many billion dollar companies with 10 or 20 employees loyalty Engineers what that does to wealth
49:55 inequality is terrible even worse than what we have today do you not worry that we just usher in a new phase of income inequality and wealth inequality that we've never seen before um well yes um I so this is where I admit that I'm pretty much a socialist which I know is a bad word to most Americans um no yeah I do worry about that I do worry about the fact that uh that we that the wealth inequality we create is not something that's going to be able to
50:27 we're going to be able to sustain um so we need better systems for that and I also worry about like how how do we even make this understandable to politicians at some point like they they are they going to be too late at the the point where they start regulating this well we've already gone past everything that they could fix what is that point of being too late when it's already in the hands of consumers and bluntly there's riots on the streets when you take it out
50:58 that's a good question and I don't have the answer I think we I think right now I thought about it a lot with crypto which is like you can't just put crypto back in a bottle if you could offer it to politicians at the start to put it back in I'm sure they would take that yes um I do think this is different from crypto to be honest I think this big words I think this has a bigger impact on society than than crypto will because this will have a
51:30 a a bigger this has the the type of impact that uh that electricity and and the steam engine had in terms of productivity changes see so that's a fascinating so you don't think that burnly the funding hype is overhyped you think this is Justified do you think this is a fundamental platform shift like mobile was and of course yeah of course the funding hype is overhyped I I mean but that's it always is but it's also because a lot of money has to go into it and we have to try a lot of
52:01 different things to figure out which ones work I so I do really think that that AI can make a very very different uh what can can change where we go in terms of how big companies need to be to do things and how many things we can do on a day I think using machine learning to to do so much of the work that people are doing on a day-to-day basis could be very powerful but we need to get better at
52:33 actually understanding what is machine learned so we need explainable AI in a way we need to actually understand what it's doing so if we can train a model to say Hey you are getting credit you are not getting credit but in the end we actually have to be able to explain why why it's making that decision do we also need to train ourselves on my efficient prompting like we I think we take for granted that we are actually relatively good Google prompters do you know what I mean yes but that's over you know however many years of using Google we need to become more efficient like AI
53:05 prompters I feel oh yeah absolutely I'm and prompting in itself is already quite I like it's it's a thing that's hard right so it's it's funny in the mid-journey world you see all these people share prompts and and do that I I think that that's something we need to do everywhere or a whole lot more it's one of the next places where open source and uh and open models like that can actually help and you need to give it a lot of context you need to really be aware of what you wanted to do
53:36 it needs a bit of a develop a mindset but you don't necessarily have to be a developer for it you mentioned how it changes development Cycles currently I think it was GitHub posted the 41 of code today is AI generators five years time yoast 60 to 80. wow I I the thing is it allows you to focus on business logic a whole lot more it's unpack that what does that mean so
54:07 the hardest part right now of building software is often like at least the kind of software I've been building over the over the last decade is thinking about Dux and and then fixing the business logic but the business logic is almost almost always like only 10 of the time you spend on this whole thing everything else is all the other stuff and all the other stuff is relatively basic but it just costs a lot of time but the relatively basic stuff AI can do
54:39 fairly quickly so you need to under you need to create the processes you need to think you need to create the logic because the AI is not going to do that for you entirely and that's where you need to be but at the same time writing the this the individual functions is going to be easier and easier I already have like I'm a big fan of cloudflare if I if I describe to open AI like I need a cloud flare worker that does this this and this
55:10 it'll just give me the code I don't have to code anything anymore it'll just give me a working worker I've done this twice in the last few weeks where it just did exactly what I needed it to do and I didn't even have to write a single bit of code and I think that's going to be a lot more common and I think of an open AI interface on top of no code interfaces Etc connecting apis together is going to be tremendously powerful and it's going to
55:42 save a whole lot of time coding things Kyle's final one before we do a quick fire because I could talk to you all day um when you decide hey I'm going to Angel invest do you set aside a budget do you decide I'm going to write 25k checks 50k checks I'm always going to write the same shag when you moved into Angel Investing more and Advising more how did you think about the strategy there um I tend to write slightly bigger checks so the thing is I want a company
56:15 to be able to be self-sustaining as fast as possible so I really don't if if people send me decks with like yeah we're doing an angel right now and then we're gonna do an a a round in a year a year from now and then and then they've already planned like when they'll do their rounds but they've not planned one they'll build the product um I I sort of glance and go like no I'm not interested you see you like to write like 250k checks 200 100 200k is usually you know yeah okay how many do you want to do
56:48 uh probably another 20 to 40 in the next five years yeah I think okay it's how involved are you like is this very so we have a slack a shared slack Channel with each and every one of them and I talk to almost every one of them on a uh well not always daily but most of them on a weekly basis I I love that do you love Angel Investing I really really love uh working with Founders and seeing their energy and and being able to well help them grow do you mind where you invest
57:19 does it have to be pre-seed can it be a series a b round I'd like I think we're both Marik and I are better in the pre-seeds seed stage than them much later on um because if you're getting to later on then we've done most of the value that we can probably give you has already been been happening do you find most of your deals are in Europe no us or both but I don't care I want to move into a quick fire you
57:51 know so I say a short statement you give me your thoughts does that sound okay yes absolutely okay so what did you believe about growth five years ago that that it was easy which honestly was probably also a bit of an underestimation of what Marika and I could do together I always need a great partner tell me what life balance and what do you advise me yoast we spoke about it before um move out of London
58:24 uh don't so I think work-life balance is absolutely achievable um but I I don't think it all also don't think it means what people think it means I mean if it's if it's good for you then it works right um I will say that not being in a big city and and having to go to a fancy dinner three times a week does really help it changes everything um can I start that be built on free traffic as such in 2023 yes a single biggest mistake people make
58:56 when starting SEO strategies stay not considering branding from the get that girl in their entire strategy and not considering well per words people use to describe their problems what would you most like to change about the world of growth I would want people to stop thinking they can measure everything and that's mostly stolen from my wife who's a PhD in sociology and just says people think that they can explain behavior way too much and you can't
59:29 you are great at X name that X and why are other people failing at X um I think I'm pretty good at product and attack um why are other people failing at that I don't know it's just up to other people uh final one what one company growth strategy have you really been impressed by recently and why so the obligatory answer here right now is open AI Microsoft right I mean that's what everybody has been saying for the
1:00:02 last few few episodes but um I think that what Microsoft's doing with Bing right now is absolutely brilliant I really love it so Bing chat is is like it's very fun that well what they're doing there it's also like it's it's a bit cheeky because it doesn't really work yet but it's making everybody at Google so very like conscious of what they don't have so I I really like that but in terms of other companies that and that I really like I'm always impressed when companies do marketing towards developers very well
1:00:34 and grow on top of that because I do think that that's still an underappreciated way of going at the market so companies like algolia yeah and um well a lot of them liked it that actually do great developer Outreach provide absolutely awesome docs on how to work with this offer and how to solve your problems with it what makes awesome dogs or just good documentation of everything you can do with with your software and also copy
1:01:07 paste examples that actually work uh we mentioned Great Tech platforms earlier webflow good not good it competes directly with WordPress so I'm always going to say not good but like honestly I live like one to ten I don't know well enough to really say very good or not but um I I know people that are very happy with it the Squarespace reasonably good with good growth tactics at the moment they're really focusing on the SEO industry as one of their levels of
1:01:40 getting other people to install or use Wix I don't really like that product yes listen I cannot wait to do many more Angel Investments together thank you so much for putting up with my prying questions uh I I've got a lot more prying over the years they used to be very easy as an interviewer but you've been a star so thank you so much thank you for having me it's been an absolute pleasure