SEO helped me generate over $350k in the last three years (over $200k in 2020 alone).

Indiehackers that focus on SEO tend to have more success than those who don't.

I'll break down what makes it so valuable.

THREAD

1. Demonstrated Demand 🗣

If people are searching for a solution to the problem they have, there's demand for a product that solves that problem.

There's no guessing. You can see the search volume for different markets to determine its size.

People want what you're selling.

2. Search Intent 🔍

SEO is so different from social media, simply because the people typing in keywords are warmer leads.

If you're on FB and see a promotion, it's mildly annoying. If you're on Google, you're looking for that thing anyways.

They're ready to buy something.

3. Ownership 👑

You hear it all the time - people say to write on your own blog, host your own email list, etc.

SEO allows you to do just that. It drives traffic to the most valuable assets you have. You don't need other platforms.

You can do whatever you want on your website.

4. Traffic Value 💰

I pay ~$2.5k/month for 3k clicks using Google search ads.

I also get an average of 250 clicks/day through SEO, working out to be 10500 clicks/month.

That's ~$8750 in free traffic every month.

10 ridiculously simple tips I wish I knew about building an audience when I first started:

I mostly winged it 🤫

Let me share my lessons so you don't have to:

(a thread 🧵)

1/ Switch from being a consumer to a creator

If your default is opening social media and binging on updates from others, there's a problem. The world needs to know what YOU can offer, and I believe everyone can add value. So first, switch to intentionally becoming a creator.

2/ Start very small and build "Atomic habits"

Most beginner creators people aim too far high and crash. It never works for me. Instead choose tiny habits like 2 tweets a day in the morning. Or 1 video for Youtube. Or 1 short essay each day on Substack. Optimize for consistency.

3/ Pick one social platform to create and stick with it

What comes naturally to you? Writing your thoughts, choose Twitter. Editing interesting footage and layering a voice-over? Choose Youtube. Short essays? Choose Substack. Pick one and stick with it for at last 1 month.

4/ Find your niche

Don't focus on big bold segments with hundreds of active prolific creators already fishing. Find specific audiences and move towards them.

I was a no-code maker in 2018 so that niche came naturally. Later, I expanded to the community niche. Now #buildinpublic

The contemporary idea in online business is that you need to build an audience, get to know their needs, and then build something they want.

It's focused a lot on *who* you serve. (Who are these people? Do they have money? Where do they hang out?)

But is this the best way? 👉

Last month, 250k people visited https://t.co/nkcmLxbhzC, mostly from Google search.

Here are some things I've learned about SEO:

1. Second-and-third-order consequences

SEO is a "mind game" of second-and-third-order consequences. The work you do today will not yield results immediately.

Write an article, publish it, and then get no results. This makes you think you "did it wrong". Most people quit here.

Just go in with the expectation that you won't see results for six months after publish.

Instead of getting discouraged, just write more and publish more. By the time you published your 20th article, you might start finally seeing the results of your first.

2. SEO industry is mostly BS

Try to avoid SEO experts and industry nonsense, they are mostly distractions.

*Examples of distractions*: Google algorithm updates, schema markup, page speed, meta tags.

Do you think you’re smarter than Google’s algorithm? Maybe today, definitely not tomorrow.

Write and publish compelling content that answers the searcher’s query. That’s it!

@Moz:

So—probability. Do we really need it? This has been on my mind since 2017, when I finally sat down to think through quantum theory. (/n)

One thing that’s always struck me is how *late* probability theory came in intellectual history. We had integral calculus before we had probability. And probability is insanely simple, mathematically!

I’m tempted to say that probability theory is not, in fact, Lindy. Frequentist probability is (for all the usual reasons) best understood as a heuristic. Bayesian interpretations, by contrast, take the remarkable step of tying it to mental states.

You have to work very hard to convince yourself that beliefs really are “degrees of belief in sets of events” (or whatever). It’s not natural—and I won’t rehearse the whole story about rational choice and decision theory...

So with those critiques in the back of my mind, when I read David Wallace’s decision-theoretic account of the Born Rule I was rather primed to say, hey, so what? Meaning...

How to get your first 1000 followers 👇

Start by taking notice of what people in real life ask you about. Chances are that if your friends are interested in something you're doing, the internet will help you find thousands more like them.

"But what if I'm not doing anything interesting?!"

Almost everyone is. It doesn't have to be anything spectacular. You might be:

- Learning a new skill
- Doing a side hustle
- Going for a road trip
- Remodeling your home
- Studying something obscure
- Losing weight
...

- Living frugally
- Moving countries
- Moving from the city to the country
- Homeschooling your kids
- Growing your own vegetables
- Leaving your job
- Looking for a new job
- Fighting an illness
- Volunteering

And so on.

Work backwards from what people ask you about.

Now, think about the answers you give when people ask you about the thing you're doing. Then write a short blog post answering a particular question. Example:

Title: Why I chose to grow my own vegetables

Body: Explain why, in under 5 minutes.

This is the blueprint I've followed to build my own business/income in ~4 years. This is how I learned to make websites + apps, learned SEO, learned how to write well, and how to grow my SaaS product.

👇

Get your time right by eliminating most entertainment and leisure.

Produce (work) more than you consume (watch/read/listen to entertainment).

Work intentionally, have fun intentionally, create a balance that you control. Free up a few (3-4) hours a day.

Use that new time to build new skills + knowledge by doing work for free for other people.

Do free work that helps save them time, make them money, or save them money (things that people will pay for).

Do a bit every day. Because it's free, there's less pressure to perform

Enhance learning by purchasing courses, reading books, and taking action to learn those skills by applying them to the free work you're doing.

Figure out what you like to do and what you don't like to do (do more of what you like to do and less of what you don't).

Figure out what works and what doesn't work (there's definitely a lot of advice out there that doesn't work or is contextual to the environment it works in).

10 ideas that changed my life: (thread)

Illustrations by @visualizevalue.

1/ Get more done by doing less.

2/ You can't get better unless you get started.

3/ Zoom out. It's getting better. (IP via @behaviorgap)

4/ 'Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.' — Charles Addams

Are We Alone? 🔭
(1)

For centuries, we have asked this question and attempted to make contact with another civilization. There is actually a fundamental equation that describes this question which was created by Dr. Frank Drake in 1961. It summarizes what scientists would need to contemplate...
(2)

when searching for extraterrestrial life. It is regarded as more of a hypothetical equation, since there is a large uncertainty in many of the variables within it. This means it does not attempt to find a precise number.
Let’s go through each of the variables individually:
(3)

N = the number of theoretically advanced civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy
R* = the rate of formation stars in the galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars with planetary systems
ne = the number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life
(4)

fe = the fraction of suitable planets on which life actually occurs
fi = the fraction of life-bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
(5)

There's a huge gap between what climate scientists are willing to say privately and what we're willing to say publicly, in terms of how dire a situation we're in. Colleagues, integrity demands we close this gap.

Tired of word clouds? Want to do better sentiment analysis? Not sure how to look at the words underneath your measures?

Our long overdue paper on generalized word shift graphs is finally here!
https://t.co/lIBXvbMJWX
https://t.co/vSL1REYT8V

So what are they?

1/n

If we have two texts, there are many ways we can compare them. Weighted averages are a particularly useful measure because they're flexible and interpretable

Proportions, Shannon entropy, the KLD, the JSD, and dictionary methods can all be written as weighted averages

2/n

But weighted avgs are also slippery. When we try to compress complex phenomena like happiness, surprise, divergence, or diversity into a single number, it can be unclear what we're measuring

If the measure goes up, what does that mean? Why did it do that? Can we trust it?

3/n

Very often, that's the end of the line and we're left with an uneasy feeling in the pit of our stomach that our weighted avg is actually picking up a data artifact or some other unintended peculiarity

Word shift graphs help us address those concerns

4/n

First, word shifts look under the hood of weighted averages to see what's going on

All weighted averages are a sum of contributions from individual words. We can pull out those words, and rank which ones contribute the most to the difference between two texts

5/n

In the passion economy, the real risk is that your job has to earn a living and meet the needs of your soul.

Six questions to consider if you’re thinking of leaving your job to pursue your passion.

A thread 👇🏽

1/ Will you use this opportunity to grow and evolve or will you use it to beat yourself up?  

The best way to control your emotional capital is to fine tune your internal monologue and replace your hunger for approval with a desire to grow.

2/ How will you avoid insecurity work? 

Insecurity work doesn't move the ball forward, but you can do it multiple times a day without realizing.

Deep work requires being unencumbered by the day to day.

Your objective is to ride the waves of your business with serenity.

3/ Can you learn to enjoy the process as the end in itself?

You have to fight the temptation to strip the future of its surprises.

4/ Will you default to the norms of your industry, or will you be original? 

Your business exists in the context of a marketplace, but also in the context of your life.

You have to be willing to overcome the defaults and orient your business around the things that define you.

Cancel culture is real.

But what distinguishes legitimate criticism from an illegitimate attempt to cancel someone?

@Jon_Rauch offers what is, to my mind, the best explanation anyone has come up with so far.

It should become the

There isn't a single characteristic that all attempts at cancelation share.

So instead of a litmus test, we need a checklist of warning signs. The more signs you see, the more certain you can be that you are looking at a cancel campaign.

Here are the six most important.

1) Punitiveness

Are people denouncing you to your employer or your social connections?

Are you being blacklisted from jobs and social opportunities?

Does what is being said to or about you have the goal—or foreseeable effect—of jeopardizing your livelihood?

A critical culture seeks to correct rather than punish. In science, the only penalty for being wrong is that you lose the argument.

Canceling, by contrast, seeks to punish rather than correct. The point is to make the errant suffer.

2) Deplatforming

Are campaigners attempting to prevent you from publishing your work, giving speeches or attending meetings?

Are they claiming that allowing you to be heard is violence against them or makes them unsafe?

For 3 years, I highlighted a lot of cases where phone makers or app developers uploaded user data to their servers without their consent. You can't be more paranoid than me.

But still proofs are needed. Accusing someone without any proofs is plain stupidity.

Show me facts that proove:
- TikTok is a spy app
- TikTok is taking personal data from their users without their consent

Then, I will be happy to do my job and expose them as I always do.

Following my 1st article, I continued my research and I discussed with a lot of skilled researchers who worked on TikTok.

Truth is:
- TikTok is doing A/B testing and so collect info about how the users used TikTok. This is a common practise, not specific to TikTok

- TikTok is taking a lot of info about your device. This is a common practise, not specific to TikTok. During this collection they are a little bit borderline on some aspects but nothing crazy and I hope they will fix that (#TikTok: we see you)

I reversed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. The data collection made by TikTok is equivalent to these apps.

Is it a good thing? Damn no!

But the truth is very far from what you can see on the news

10 fast-growing companies you've (probably) never heard of.

Thread 👇

1/ @Cubii

Ultra-portable elliptical trainer.

Why the 📈?

-Part of growing workout @ home trend
-Super small (fits under a desk or table)
-Proprietary tracking app
-Smart "fit while you sit" branding
-Sizable community of Cubii users

2/ @undraw_co

Open source illustration library.

Why the 📈?

-1000s pro-level illustrations
-As illustrations replace stock photos, demand for illustrations=📈
-Part of growing open source media libraries (music, images and icons)trend

@unDraw_co 3/ @flodeskinc

Email service provider that focuses on design.

Why the 📈?

-No-frills UI
-Appeals to Shopify stores
-Attractive email templates
-Designed for ecommerce marketing

@unDraw_co @flodeskinc 4/ @pushpay

Venmo for church donations.

Why the 📈?

-7900+ churches use it
-Disrupting cash donation baskets
-Taps into cashless payments meta trend

67 Lessons on Marketing Strategy

Inspired by the conversation between @mkobach and @rachelmercer

Notes 👇

What is Strategy?

• Strategy is defining the problem you are trying to solve and the plan to get there
• Many people put strategy on the backburner
• Without strategy, it's hard to know if what you are doing is successful

What is Strategy? (Part 2)

• Strategy is like running
• You can't just start running
• You need to decide where you are going to run to and if you have the stamina to get there

What is Strategy? (Part 3)

• Strategy is the rock, pebbles, and sand in a jar story
• Is it the new shiny object (eg. TikTok) a rock?
• Or is it unnecessary and just taking up space you don't

What is Strategy (Part 4)

• Strategy is the foundation for which success can spring from
• The strategy is the GPS, the destination is tactics
• No right way to do strategy

Nobody talks about failure in Silicon Valley, yet 90% of startups fail.

Why?

3 yrs ago, @neerajberry and I shut down @Sprig, which raised $60M from @GreylockVC + @socialcapital & grew to $20m revenue.

Then, it all fell apart.

For an honest story about failure,

**Read on**

In 2013, I was @lyft, envious of how fast it was growing!

What about @lyft for food?

We looked @Postmates + thought:
- the food arrived sloppy / restaurants don't care about delivery
- it took forever (1hr)
- too expensive

We struggled through product iterations until we found "magic":

3 taps and $15 for a healthy meal delivered in 15 min

To make it possible, we had to run the restaurant ourselves; it would be expensive but worth it

We recruited @n8keller, Morgan Springer + @mattkent as founders

We launched and had immediate success. The buzz was unbelievable. Within months we were on track to do $1M revenue/year.

Our Series A was a hot round. I did 4 partner meetings on the same day. Raised $10M.

Great investors, great team, off to the races - @omal and @simonrothman

2 challenges arose:

1) Govt. SF health + planning made our lives hell. They didn't like our innovations. We had to bribe officials ("lobbying").

2) Gross Margins (GM). As we grew, our burn rate grew too. We were losing money on every meal. If only we could get to critical mass.