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SEO -- It's crucial, so let's make it easy (also, how to make friends)

SEO -- It's crucial, so let's make it easy (also, how to make friends)

Among other topics, we'll cover how to run your SEO on autopilot so you get more, easier-to-close leads.

John Hancock
November 09, 2023

Before we dive in: How are things?

Are you hitting your goals?

Meaning: is your startup growing/performing as well as you think it should?

👆️ The above poll is a trick. Both answers will take you to a survey that I created to help me keep my finger on the pulse of startup challenges today. If you’ll do me the favor of filling it out honestly, I’ll send you a t-shirt 👕

This Week:

Search Engine Optimization “Autopilot”
One Question — Go-to-market edition
This is not an AI newsletter but COME ON!!
How to make friends 👈️ IMPORTANT

Next Week:

Deep dive on cold outbound email at scale (including a look at my actual numbers from my new agency 🚀 )
Interview with someone famous in Silicon Valley (I haven’t decided who yet)

SEO — Ya Gotta Do It

I don’t feel like spending too much time trying to convince you to take SEO seriously. I’m not selling you anything so you can go look that part up yourself 😃

I’ll share some stats (factoids?) about SEO that might help me convince you of its necessity, but don’t miss the Loom video below that I recorded, showing you how to put your SEO on “Autopilot”.

I guess I’m okay with you sharing it, but would you mind also sharing a link to this newsletter as well? it’s http://founders-only.org. Thanks!

Fun SEO Stats:

Inbound Effectiveness: 60% of marketers say that inbound (SEO, blog content, etc.) is their highest quality source of leads.

Lead Conversion: SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, per HubSpot. Not bad, but I’m sure yours will be higher 😃

B2B Traffic Source: 76% of B2B traffic comes from search. This is a real stat I stole from this Bright Edge 🤯

Traffic Comparison: SEO drives 1,000%+ more traffic than organic social media.

SEO Salaries: The average salary for a US-based SEO professional is $61,000/year…so I’m about to save you AT LEAST that much. Check out this 3-and-a-half-minute video:

Fun SEO Autopilot Loom Video:

Too long; didn’t watch?

The gist of it is: Byword now has WordPress | Webflow | Zapier integration, making it PRETTY easy to set your SEO on “autopilot”. However, if you’re like me and enjoy setting things up manually (and saving some money), I’ll walk you through my very simple Airtable <> Zapier setup that does the same thing.

Learn From Your Peers!

This week’s “One Question” is about Go-To-Market.

In last week’s poll, I asked “What is the top challenge for your startup at this moment?” and the top answer was “Go-to-market”. So I asked some founders I respect a single question:

“In the early stages of market entry, Founders often face a 'chicken and egg' dilemma where they need real traction to attract funding, yet require funding to build and market their product to potential customers.

If you’re like me, you probably find it really fascinating to hear about how your fellow founders make things work. Their stories are always a great reminder that there’s really no “right way” to do things, but rather an infinite spectrum of optionality.

Adam Lawrence
Co-Founder & CEO @ Boom & Bucket
(Formerly COO @ Bolt)

Over the past dozen years I’ve solved this in a few different ways.

At two SaaS companies, we would do a complimentary installations and data migrations for early customers. This was often dozens to hundreds of engineering hours, but it ensured that the customer would be up and running and start to see value as possible. In most cases, this free work was actually a good deal for us as it exposed us to the set of problems that we’d have to automate or solve to have a scalable solution.

One of the more interesting solutions to bring early traction and revenue was a strategy of aligning early customers through equity as advisors and investors. With skin in the game, those early advisors were incentivized to buy, deploy, use, and become reference customers for your software. You can’t do this every time, but if their brand name carries a lot of value as a reference customer it’s likely a worthwhile trade-off for a few basis points of equity.

Adam Lawrence

Rockwell Shah
Founder of Rockwell Ventures
(Formerly CEO @ Pzizz)

Like many founders, I came from nothing. So I’ve had to consistently find creative solutions to do the most on a shoe-string-and-bubble-gum budget.

In 2015 I saw that the sleep industry was building a lot of momentum. At the time, mobile consumer subscriptions were still in their infancy. The idea that someone would pay for a subscription sleep app was crazy to most. But not to me. I was convinced it would work.

But there was a problem: I had no money and didn’t know how to build an app. So I did some digging and found a sleep app that had a decent size user base but wasn’t monetizing well. I acquired the app for $0 up front, under conditions that if we didn’t hit performance targets it would revert back to the original owner.

We spent time re-kindling the relationship with the user base, and understanding what they wanted out of a revamped paid subscription product. We used the data to paint a strong picture for investors, ultimately leading us to get into an accelerator and raise a good chunk of money. This allowed us to buyout the original owner’s remaining equity and fund launching the first of a series of successful apps in the wellness space.

Rockwell Shah

GPTs are a GPTease so far

Introducing GPTs

In case you missed it, Sam Altman’s Keynote at Open AI Dev Day introduced the world to “GPTs” which are like plugins but better. The best part is that anyone will be able to create them with natural language by giving your GPT instructions and even a custom knowledge base.

I don’t have access yet but you can Click Here to see if your account has been given access. Best of luck 🤞

Oh and BTW, they’ve promised marketplace participants a revenue share opportunity. So, creating GPTs with viral applications could be a legitimate business one day VERY soon. Interesting 🤔

How to Make Friends

I’ve said it a number of times: I want you to be happy and healthy. For most of us, a picture of “Happiness” is going to include a healthy social life. My recommendation: Become a “Connector”.

Sure, “Networking” is a bit of a swear word now but that’s not what I’m talking about. I want you to connect with people… and then connect those people to other people. I know it sounds like networking but here me out!

The Book That Inspired Me:

“The 2-Hour Cocktail Party” Inspired me to become a “Connector”

My wife, Angelina, and I moved to Austin from the Bay Area and didn’t really remember how to make friends. We were in our mid-thirties and now separated from our friends, family, and even co-workers.

Luckily, someone who knew of me from my last startup invited me to a cocktail party and I met an interesting guy there named Nick Gray. Here’s a picture from that night:

Nick, after selling a few companies, decided to devote his life to the art of the cocktail party and what it means to be a people connector. He wrote an amazing book on the topic called “The 2-Hour Cocktail Party” which walks you through the WHY and HOW of hosting your own networking event at your house.

I’ve now hosted my own cocktail party and a LOT of cool stuff has happened to me and some of my guests as a direct result of that single 2-hour event. Relationships were formed, business transactions have happened, I’ve made a good handful of new friends, everybody wins.

Here are my new friends! Thanks, Nick :)

My Proposal:

I’m so overcome with joy about the results of hosting my own 2-hour cocktail party that I’m willing to buy this book for anyone who wants it. If you think you will give it a try, just reply to this email and tell me where to send your book and I’ll buy it for you. It’ll be my pleasure 😃

Founders Only Sports Drink

The End

I never know how to end these things but that’s all I wanted to write about this week ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thank you so much for reading again, even though the “Unsubscribe” button is just RIGHT there 👇️ 😅 . I love you all.

Sincerely,

John Hancock

Follow me on Clubhouse

P.S. — If you haven’t yet filled out my Startup Founder Challenges Survey, I would be eternally grateful if you did 🙏

I might use the data gathered to make some aggregate graphs and other visualizations but information won't be linked to you or your startup!

Fill it out and I’ll send you a t-shirt!