Episode 725 | SEO in the Age of AI, Freemium, When Brand Becomes Important, and More Advanced Listener Questions (with Ruben Gamez)

Rob Walling:
You’re listening to Startups For the Rest of Us. I am your host, Rob Walling, and in this week’s episode, I bring Ruben Gamez back on the show to answer Intermediate and advanced listener questions. I made a call for questions on the show and on X/Twitter a few weeks back and asked for questions that weren’t aimed at beginners, at people validating and pre validating and trying to find ideas, and received great questions about how to think through freemium, when should you start to really, really care about brand, revisiting your sales and marketing funnels, SEO in the age of AI, and I couldn’t think of a better person to bring on the show to hammer through these than Ruben Gamez, founder of SignWell. He’s a super knowledgeable, super successful, bootstrapped, and now mostly bootstrapped founder, and I think this episode turned out great. We dug deep into the questions that we answer today. 

Before we dive in to those questions, I have been hard at work on a video course called the SaaS Launchpad. It’s everything I know today about the early stages. So in contrast to the listener questions we’re going to answer today, this is about coming up with ideas, how to pre validate, how to validate, how to build a launch list, and all types of things that you’ll experience in the early stage. And this video course is going to go live here in the next couple of months, but if you want to get on the list and be the first to hear about it, as well as receive a bonus if you buy the course early, you can head to SaaSLaunchpad.co. 

I’m actually really stoked about this course, it’s everything I know about how to get those things done. And I’ve teased on the podcast a few times that I have a mostly written book on this topic, and basically have sidelined that. And I took all that content and turned it into this video course where I felt it is much more easily consumed and I think it will be more effective for folks. So SaaSLaunchpad.co, if you’re interested. And with that, let’s dive into listener questions. 

Ruben Gamez, welcome back to the show.  

Ruben Gamez:
Thanks for inviting me.  

Rob Walling:
Always great to have you, man. Really good listener questions today. I keep calling them … I’m trying to figure out the name. These are intermediate or later stage questions, because it’s not about idea validation and building an MVP. And the reason I wanted to have you on is there’s a bunch of questions I feel like are right in your wheelhouse, things like freemium, SEO. I don’t know, there’s a few others, so it’s a really good docket today. And our first question is from MicroConf attendee and man about Twitter, Val Sopi.  

Val Sopi:
Hey, Rob. Val Sopi here, founder of Blogstatic. Thanks so much for everything you do for us bootstrappers with your podcast, the MicroConf Conference, and now TinySeed. My question is about freemiums, as Blogstatic is a B2P product and I’m looking for ways to grow faster. After listening to episode 717 with Marie Martens of Tally and how they’ve succeeded with their freemium approach, I started to think about how freemium could work for Blogstatic. 

My biggest concern is fighting spam, as Blogstatic is a front-facing app and not something companies use internally. This means I have to comply with my hosting provider’s rules and having content on my service that doesn’t comply could get me in trouble. Yes, I can use AI, but I currently don’t have the time to re-engineer the sign-up flow as I’m fully focused on sales and outreach. 

The goal is to have a generous free plan, so it’s not just a gimmick, with premium features requiring an upgrade. By now I know which features trigger an upgrade, so I think I can create a useful free plan that doesn’t hinder growth. The purpose of this would not be to convert more free users, as they don’t convert as much, but to use the freemium model so more people talk about Blogstatic and it becomes known as the go-to solution for blogs. 

With all that said, my specific question is this, should I do it? And if so, what’s the best way to tackle this? The only way it would make sense is if it helps Blogstatic grow 10X from here, which means $200,000 ARR. Otherwise, it would be an added burden for me and the business. And when I say 10X growth, I don’t mean the freemium alone doing that, but hoping at least it would assist the other outreach efforts I’m currently undertaking such as social, SEO, paid ads, and direct outreach. 

It’s worth mentioning that Blogstatic is already a super low cost product starting at $19 per year, with a fully featured plan at $49 per year, which most customers buy. At the time of this recording, there are 430 active paid accounts bringing about $20,000 in ARR almost two years in come October. Year-over-year growth is at 200%. Visits to trial are 10%, and trial to pay are whopping 26%. Year-over-year retention is not that great at only 56%. Thanks again, Rob, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this.  

Rob Walling:
For those listening, Blogstatic is everything you need to run a professional blog, no code, fully customizable, SEO ready, this is his H1 and H2 obviously fast loading, fully featured, and as he said in the voicemail, it is a very low-priced tool. What do you think?  

Ruben Gamez:
I think we mostly think about this in the same way. Usually if you’re bootstrapping, it’s a tough way to go. I almost default to no freemium unless there’s an opportunity here. So I think … I was recently talking to a friend about this. There’s a side to where your business needs to be the right type of business where freemium can work, and the space, and we’ve talked a little bit about this before, to where if you have a high support app or a high cost app to serve customers, then it’s going to be really tough to do freemium. 

If you have an app to where it has some viral component or not even that, beyond that, if people using it in some way, shape or form make it better or easier for you to convert other people, whether they expose other people to the product or they create content and that content can get you more traffic or whatever it is, there’s something there that Brian Balfour talks a lot about growth loops, it creates a growth loop there. Then that has potential. It has to be big enough, the space needs to be usually big enough, if you’re doing true freemium. 

One of the things that I think a lot of people overlook when it comes to evaluating freemium is whether there’s an opportunity in the space for it. Meaning if everyone in the space or a lot of people in the space are offering freemium already and you’re just going to be one of those, then what makes yours different? What makes yours special? Why are people going to talk about it or promote it or anything, especially if you’re new coming in. So I think that’s one of the underrated things that people don’t look at. If no one is offering freemium and then you see at the low end there’s an opportunity there and there’s some sort of almost demand, then that’s potential, I think, in that situation. 

The other thing is not just creating freemium, you have to promote it too. You have to do something. It’s not just create the free plan and then you put it out there and that’s it, you’re done. It’s not going to get picked up because of it, just because you have something that’s free. So there are multiple things in here that I’d take a look at.  

Rob Walling:
Cool. So you’ve set the stage of freemium, and what I like is you have these criteria and it’s like if most or all of these are not present, it’s probably not worth it. Like you said, you default, I know, with bootstrappers because freemium kicks revenue down the line, and when you’re bootstrapping, revenue is just so critical because you need it to survive, you need it to market. If you had buckets of money in the bank, you raise half a million, $5 million, whatever, you can kick revenue down the line because you have that bucket of money. But when you’re bootstrapping, it’s riskier. 

And I like that you pointed out it’s not just “Go freemium,” and it just markets itself. Even we were talking about how Marie from Tally was on the show a couple of months ago, and how they had a free plan, but she sent thousands of DMs, cold DMs and warm DMs to get people to use it. How did you … I guess your freemium with SignWell, the marketing of it is the SEO engine you’ve built.  

Ruben Gamez:
Yeah, that’s a big part of it, but we’ve also been deliberate with certain segments that we have to where we’ve actually gone into communities and promoted the freemium plan and actually in some cases given a different version of the free plan to where we’re giving away more because we know it works in those communities and it just helps overall. 

So you have to be deliberate about it, you can also just run the math and know, okay, if you’re planning on saying that, “Because we have this powered buy or we have some other thing that’s going to expose people to our product and that’ll help create some of the word of mouth, some visits that will eventually convert,” things like that, then you could just run the math and see, “How many of these websites do we need? How many of those pages need to be out there?” and then “What, roughly speaking, will be the conversion rate? And then from those, how many of those will be free?” And you start to see that you need really big numbers, a lot of times, to make freemium work. It gets tricky in that when you just run the math.  

Rob Walling:
Absolutely. And you have big numbers, Tally had big numbers. It was 100 … I forget. It was a lot. And then the conversion rate was low. And same with Dropbox. Anybody who’s ever talked about this, it’s like 2% every year convert to paid and 3% … It’s some number I typically hear in that range, I’m sure it can be higher or lower. 

But something that Val’s asking about is he’s saying, “I’m not really looking to convert the free users. I’m trying to do this so word spreads so that more people talk about it so that it becomes the de facto.” I’m not sure how I feel about that. What do you think about it?  

Ruben Gamez:
So we did a little bit of that. I’m okay with that approach as long as you understand what you’re looking for. So you can’t say, “Well, in a year we’ll know whether this is working or not.” That’s just way too long. But there are things, especially a lot of times people just look at MRR or the number of people who converted to a paid plan or whatever, something that’s more of almost a lagging indicator in a lot of ways. And you can look at things that are early predictors of whether this is working. 

So one of the things that we looked at a lot the earlier days, for freemium, was our branded searches, “Are those increasing?” And even basics. The basics of, “Are people using the free plan?” If they’re not using the free plan, then it doesn’t matter how many sign-ups you’re getting, if the usage on it is low, if the repeat usage on it is low, then it’s probably not going to work. If you’re seeing … Even if you just have a form, on your sign-up form, if you have a field that says, “How did you hear about us?” and you start to collect a little bit of that and you’re like, “Oh, okay, we’re starting to see it pick up.” 

So something that I saw a long time ago that I really liked from Sean Ellis back in the day, remember when he bought KISS Insights from Heaton? And he renamed it Qualaroo. And it was already freemium, and I had a conversation with Sean at the time because we were from time to time talking about freemium, and he told me that he didn’t think the freemium was aggressive enough, so he wanted to test that. So then he took three months, and I really liked his approach. He said, “The next three months, I’m just going to open it up heavy.” He did that and then he just looked at not the conversion numbers or anything, but at other signals that told him that this is starting to work. Not that it worked, but, “This is actually starting to have the impact that I think.” And he didn’t see the impact that he wanted, and then after three months, he just went the other way. He stopped freemium completely and raised prices, just as I said, the other direction.  

Rob Walling:
I like what you’re saying here, which is, “Hey, you can’t wait a year to see if it’s going to work. You have to have these early signals, and do you know what signals you’re looking for?” Right?  

Ruben Gamez:
Exactly.  

Rob Walling:
And in Val’s case, I think something that’s … I’m a little worried about, is he said, “My goal is to have a generous free plan so it’s not just a gimmick, where any premium features require an upgrade.” So how much is this going to cannibalize … His existing revenue is not a ton. I think he said it’s $20,000 ARR, but if that cuts your MRR in half, this is what we’re talking about, it’s a struggle, with bootstrapping, if you need that revenue. 

What do you think? Separate from freemium, I don’t know, Val. Val and I, I met him at MicroConf Europe in Lisbon, so I feel like I’m talking to him directly, but what do you think of him just 5X-ing his pricing? Because right now it’s $20 a year, $50 a year, $100 a year. And I want to see $100, $250 and $500, or even $100, $500 and $1000, and just figuring out what you have to add to make that work. Just make the pricing change, see what happens to the business. Doesn’t sound like it’s growing like wildfire as it is. I know Val’s working on it, but will anyone sign up? 

If it cuts it to zero for a month or for two weeks, it’s like, “Okay, I did the experiment,” but then also, “What can I build to make this worth it?” And what other options are people using? Do I have to be this cheap because it’s a commodity space and there’s a bunch of other options and I really need some differentiator? But I almost personally … if he wants to kickstart growth, I think of going in that direction rather than freemium. What do you think?  

Ruben Gamez:
Right. If we’re talking about speeding up how quickly he’s growing, then we just know that companies that basically charge more money tend to grow the fastest. And you’ve mentioned this about TinySeed companies and the patterns that we’ve seen in the recent survey about SaaS as well, and just from founders that I know, the ones that charge more tend to grow much faster. So I do like that. But I think you’re right. It’s really easy just to say, “Well just raise prices,” and sometimes that works because so many founders under-price. But if you entered the market as a certain type of product and cost savings is a big part of it, or it being cheaper, it might not be that straightforward to just raise prices because we have a little bit of this problem as far as if we decided to kill freemium and raise our prices, there are a lot of references over on the internet and a lot of different places that basically push us as a really great free e-sign tool, a good alternative at 20% the price of DocuSign or whatever. 

So if we were to do that with SignWell, we’d have to account for that and have a strategy for it. I like how you paired, yes, raising prices, but also changing the product, maybe changing some of the positioning and accounting for some of that stuff, like the expectations of the existing traffic that you have coming in. And it’s easy to say, “Well, the price increases didn’t work,” and it might just be because the people who are coming into your website are expecting something and you’re not matching up with that. And that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. It just means that if you’re going to do it, you’re also going to want to have a way to bring in the people that have the right types of expectation on the pricing side.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. So to answer his ultimate question, if you were in his shoes, would you try freemium the way he’s proposing it?  

Ruben Gamez:
I would look to see if there was opportunity to feed the freemium engine. If I saw an opportunity and a way to get big numbers, then I would experiment three or six months like Sean did, and really look for some of those signals and then be decisive. If I’m not liking what I’m seeing, shut that down and then go in the other direction that we were just talking about and know that yes, if we position our product to where people that are coming in are expecting really low-priced products, then I’ll raise prices, but it’s also probably going to take time to correct that.  

Rob Walling:
And you were saying if there was a big volume of potential top of funnel, typically SEO, right?  

Ruben Gamez:
Right. Yep.  

Rob Walling:
You heard it here first, folks. That is Ruben’s recommendation for Val Sopi. So I think if you were to ask me, because you just know so much more about freemium than I do, having been doing it for the past several years. I have secondhand exposure to it through you and other TinySeed companies that do it, and other TinySeed companies that have shut it down because it’s not working or have had to adjust it. And my gut … I think I already made my recommendation. If I were in his shoes, I would do the price increase. And as you said, it comes with positioning. There’s a bunch of stuff that comes with that. It’s not just as simple as, “Oh, raise your prices,” and it fixes it magically. But that would be my own personal leaning. So thanks for that question, Val. Hope it was helpful. 

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Next question is from Josh Ho, he’s jlogic on Twitter/X. And I had asked a question. This is … I have a couple dozen really good mid-level, more advanced questions. And Josh responded to that and he says, “When do you start to really, really, really care about brand?” And I like this question because 12, 15 years ago, I would’ve said, “If I’m doing SaaS, I don’t really need to worry about brand because I build a tool that gets in the way of traffic of people who need the tool. And if the tool does the thing they need, like the long tail keyword tool or the invoicing tool or whatever, I have SEO, I have ads, I have whatever else, and that’s it. No one’s buying it because of my brand.” 

That was when I was a young wide-eyed early stage … it was someone who had a bunch of little six-figure businesses, some five-figure, and I didn’t really need brand. And then I started realizing, “Oh, Startups For the Rest of Us is a brand, MicroConf is a brand, Drip became a brand, TinySeed obviously is a brand. There’s the books, SaaS Playbook becomes a brand.” And I realized the power of that. And branding always turned me off because every book you read about branding, every example, it’s Colgate toothpaste and it’s Intuit. And I was just like, “Well, I’m not that. I don’t give a (beep) about this.” 

But what I’ve realized is that, even people in our space, is the bootstrappers that get to that, I don’t know where, sometimes it’s mid to high six-figures, sometimes it’s at low millions or whatever. But you do start to get a concept you introduced me to where Jason Lemkin calls it a mini brand, where you’re not a brand like Target or Colgate, I guess, but people know your name and people are talking about you on the internet, on Reddit, on Quora, in private Slack groups. 

And the moment that your product is being referenced by name, that’s when you start having a brand, because what are they saying about you? That is your brand. I like to think of brand being what people say about you when you’re not in the room. And by you, I mean your product. Like you were saying earlier, SignWell, in some forums, in certain spaces, it’s, “Oh, it’s a really great alternative and it’s a fifth of the price.” Well, that’s part of the brand. And whether you controlled that and did it intentionally or not, that just becomes part of the brand. 

So with that preamble, what are your thoughts on when should you really, really, really start caring about brand?  

Ruben Gamez:
Yeah, this super interesting topic, I think a lot of it depends on how you interpret the question and how you even interpret brand, really. I would normally … in the way that a lot of people talk about brand and interpreting the question to mean, “When do you spend a significant amount of money, time, energy on things that are not meant to directly convert customers?” I would in the past, a lot of times just say, “When you have no idea on how to spend your money.” More of a hot take, when you don’t know what you’re doing.  

Rob Walling:
Zing.  

Ruben Gamez:
Yeah. I like the examples that you brought up with TinySeed and MicroConf and things like that. I think those are way more practical, and I would really ask you, because I think of these as very significant brands, the brands in the spaces in which they’re operating in, but you didn’t do this with VC funding or anything like that. So from a very practical point of view, how much time, energy, and money did you spend on activities that had to do with the brand versus other things that got you in front of audiences, got you customers or the people that you were intending to get?  

Rob Walling:
It’s an interesting question because since it’s not SaaS … If I was running a SaaS company, you are focused on generating leads, closing deals, marketing funnels, and this and that. So the majority of your time, for me, it was always product or marketing, sales. MicroConf is a brand because we have 724 episodes of this podcast. And if you say, “Oh, it only took me an hour per episode,” so that’s 724 hours over the last 10 years. It’s been a lot more than that. I think it’s like building the audience built the brand, and this is what I recommend people don’t do. If you’re going to build a SaaS company, don’t build an audience, build your network and build marketing channels, not a brand.  

Ruben Gamez:
In a very similar way, I’ve talked about it before as far as brand, you build the brand as you build the business, as you build your customer base, as you get your email list and all this stuff, your brand is built. But that’s a very different thing than what some people refer to or think about when they’re thinking about investing in the brand.  

Rob Walling:
Like hiring an expensive designer and redoing the positioning and the copy and-  

Ruben Gamez:
And spending a whole bunch of time on that sort of thing.  

Rob Walling:
… media company, “I’m going to start a YouTube channel and a podcast because that’s what brands do,” that type of stuff? That’s not a good use of your time in the early days, there’s no chance. So I like what you just said. You build the business and the business builds the brand, and that is exactly what happened with MicroConf and with Drip and, well, TinySeed was able to piggyback on my existing brands, but think about each of these. MicroConf, the entire focus … MicroConf was just a landing page. Take a step back. You said earlier, is it brand building or is it direct response in it, direct conversion? Those are the two types of marketing most people throw around. 

MicroConf started as a landing page. I have a screenshot of this black background. Dark mode before dark mode was a thing, because it was 14 years ago, and it had some headshots of Heaton Shaw and Noah Kagan and myself and Mike Tabor, and it was an email capture form. And it said, “Come to this play in Vegas on this date,” that’s all it was. It was direct response. And then we tried to sell tickets to that email list and tried to sell enough tickets that we could then afford to pay for the venue. There was no brand building and in fact there was no logo. The MicroConf was some font and we just typed “Microconf” on a thing. 

We sold tickets to the event first. To me, that’s building the business. We ran an event, we showed up, we executed, we operated. None of that was brand building. You know what built the brand the most? Was running a really (bleep) good event. And we got lucky with that. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we just put … You remember. You remember how stressed I was, and I was putting … I was like, “This has to be the best event I’ve ever attended.” So I was stressed about it and it turns out it was a really good event. And I think that alone, that created word of mouth and that created the brand of, “Oh, Microconf is a new thing and it’s different than anything else.” 

So what does that mean for SaaS founders? What does that mean for them?  

Ruben Gamez:
Yeah. Well, I think there are a couple of times when you start to invest more in things that are less related to directly building the business and directly converting customers and things like that. And you might spend in areas to where it’s thought of as brand building or enhancing the brand or whatever. If you’re in a really commoditized space and brand is how you get customers, that is it. Or as you get more and more established with the brand, you went back and you redesigned things and all … Right? Once-  

Rob Walling:
Oh, yeah. Like MicroConf, all that stuff. But that was when we were doing almost a million dollars in revenue through the business and had tens of thousands of people on an email list. And to your point, we built the business and then went back and designed a logo. The videographer every year would say, “Oh, can you send me your logo so I can put it in the videos?” And we were like, “We don’t have a logo.” It is weird in retrospect. I probably should have gotten a logo design before-  

Ruben Gamez:
A little bit earlier than that?  

Rob Walling:
Six years, seven years in. But to our point, you can build a business. We didn’t spend time building Drip’s brand. We didn’t spend time. We had a Derek who’s a full stack developer who designed the first logo, and I did hire a designer to put the colors together, but it was nothing … It was just, “Let’s make it look neat. Let’s make it look nice and attractive and make the UX great.” And my whole goal was to get people into it because I guess reinforcing once again that … What I found is the more customers we had, the wider our brand got by default. Because again, I define it as, “Hey, people talking about you when you’re not in the room.” That’s not the definitive version of brand, but it’s a big part of it, I think. And the more people who used it who said, “Oh, this is so much better than the other tools,” “Oh and it’s less expensive and it’s better? Whoa!” That became part of the brand. 

Is that how you think about it too with SignWell? Because obviously you have tens of thousands of users.  

Ruben Gamez:
Yes, that’s exactly how I think about it. Building the brand is just getting known in a space, and the amount of time that we put into the brand is not that much, really. It’s really mostly because there’s just so much room. If you’re in a space where you have a lot of room to grow still in the market, there’s so many other things that we could spend that time, money, and energy on than brand, still. And I think a lot of SaaS products are in that space. 

Even Josh, he’s got a significant business, he’s super sharp, he’s in a space to where he’s at a good level of revenue and growth and all that, but there’s probably still a lot of space ahead of them to go. So the thing that we do, it’s always about, how are we best going to use the resources that we have, the money, time and energy? And mostly for most companies, it just makes more sense to invest on growing the business and building the brand that way, I feel like.  

Rob Walling:
I would agree, especially with SaaS. I can make not even a counter argument, but an auxiliary to that, of, but if you’re building a conference or a creator-type business where you’re creating video and you’re more, “We really are information marketer,” and you are more of a Rob Walling or a MicroConf or a TinySeed, none of those are SaaS companies, I would say the brand can be important. I think it’s more important, probably, for those, because people have to know and trust you to buy in, but SaaS is a tool solving a problem. And yes, brand can have an impact on that, but as you said, where do you rank that in terms of priority? And usually it’s going to be pretty low for me until I really feel the need. I think people use it as an excuse to start a “media company,” because brand is fun. I like printing T-shirts with my logo and witty slogans, and I want to be … It’s fun, but that doesn’t move the needle.  

Ruben Gamez:
And it’s not measurable, it’s not a lot of times. So it’s easy for people to spend time there and effort and just be like, “Oh, I’m doing something, you can’t measure everything.” They tend to have this attitude of, “It’s all or nothing,” but it’s not really all or nothing. And just because you’re building the business doesn’t mean you’re completely ignoring the brand, right?  

Rob Walling:
Right. And that’s the thing. And I’m the person who, the moment I start a new thing, I print T-shirts with logos on them, but I will 100% say to anyone I’m talking to, “This is not the best use of this energy right now, but it’s a luxury that I have and a thing I want to do”. And to me it’s like eating ice cream, and I’m going to eat ice cream sometimes. It is not necessarily that … I should eat spinach all the time, but sometimes I’m going to eat ice cream. To me, some branding is really fun for me. And I do remember, I will say when we launched TinySeed, the first website, not … there was a landing page that I threw together in a couple of weeks, but the first website, I invested some money into it because I wanted it to be really, really sharp. I want it to look really good and feel very professional and right in line. 

Now is your visual identity your brand? No, but it is a component of that. It’s a component of how people view it. Anything I would launch these days, I would want to look really, really good. And again, it’s not identical with brand, but the brand of the SaaS Playbook, the yellow cover with that design, it stands out. So I don’t want people to listen to this thinking that you and I don’t care about brand or think brand is unimportant because we both know that it is, but it’s that caution of, “Don’t get too stuck in it. Don’t do it too early.” It’s not the best use of most entrepreneurs’ time. So thanks for that question, Josh. Hope it was helpful. 

Next question is from Lane at Boot.dev. He is wagslane on X/Twitter. He says, “Which parts of your sales and marketing funnels do you revisit most often, and on what frequencies? For example, only myself and one other team member work on marketing stuff and we can only get around to landing pages, drip campaigns, onboarding, sequence copy, et cetera, every so often.” How do you think about this?  

Ruben Gamez:
So I guess I think about it in a different way. If I’m thinking about growth, I don’t tend to think about, “Okay, what are the parts of my sales funnels and marketing funnels, and is it time to revisit those?” I think about it more in terms of, “What type of growth are we looking to get? What are the bottlenecks? Where are the opportunities for that growth?” and then focus in those areas. So that could mean that there are certain parts of funnel that we just don’t look at very often or almost ever, because they’re not the bottleneck, they’re working really well in other areas. Again, it’s really about efficiently using the limited time and money that we have. And usually that means just going after the biggest opportunities and focusing there.  

Rob Walling:
I think of it the same way you do. I remember I would launch … We’re going to launch SaaS app and I’m like, “I’m going to do some stuff manually and then I know I need at least an email sequence for onboarding and I need a landing page and some copy,” and I would just crank out in a day all of that stuff. And it was very much V0.9. It was not great, but it was 75% of what it needed to be, and we would launch with that. Then I would at some point make the time to circle back. I would either see conversions were really low or I would see a flag in my funnel where I’m like, “I’m off here, so what’s happening?” And I would go back and I’d reinvest in it. But then I remember leaving the onboarding sequence alone for a year or 18 months, the email onboarding, and I’m sure it could … needed an update. I’m sure it was crafty by the time I got back to it, but it wasn’t the most pressing thing. It wasn’t a bottleneck. 

And conversion from onboarding and trial to paid were also high for us, that I just didn’t circle back to it even though it wasn’t the best and it got outdated and all this. So I think you and I think about it the same way where I’m trying to do the most pressing thing and rather than it being, “Oh, in a perfect world every three months I would revisit all this stuff and I would optimize it.” I don’t know that that’s the best way to do it, or at least in the way I work on things. I’m always thinking, “What’s the biggest bottleneck? What’s the most broken or will provide the most results?” And sometimes that’s revamping an old thing and sometimes it’s doing a new thing. Often it feels like it’s doing a new thing if I think it can work.  

Ruben Gamez:
Yeah. Especially the earlier you are, and the more you have to increase numbers, usually it’s not about optimizing existing things, it’s about just getting more into the funnel and often that means doing new stuff.  

Rob Walling:
So thanks for that question, Lane. I feel pretty good about that answer. We’ll move on to the next question from Anders.  

Anders:
Hi, Rob. My name is Anders and I’m the co-founder of ShopLevers, a data analysis and aggregation tool for business coaches who work with auto repair shop owners. Until now, we’ve grown primarily through outbound efforts and word of mouth. We are looking to expand our offering beyond coaches and sell directly to shop owners. As that market is much larger, I’ve thought about basing the top of my funnel around SEO and content. I don’t have much experience in digital marketing and I found myself hesitant to get started. It seems like AI could be changing the playbook that has worked well for others. Am I overthinking this? Do you foresee a moment in the not too distant future where people abandon their search habits? Are you adjusting any of your own marketing strategies for this new reality? Thanks for all you do, listening to your podcast is a highlight of my week.  

Rob Walling:
So this is another question where I really wanted to get your take on it. How are you thinking about it? Because you are one of the founders in the world I know who knows the most about SEO and who also has a lot to lose if SEO goes away, because it’s such a big component of SignWell’s success. So how are you thinking about this?  

Ruben Gamez:
It’s funny, I don’t think we’ve ever really talked about it, so I’m interested to hear your take as well. So I think in the near term future, yeah, it’s worth doing. SEO takes time, so it’ll take a few months, but I don’t see this going away in a few months, so there’s no real danger there. 

I think there was something that I saw recently on Twitter, this founder of an SEO agency that … I think Will Reynolds is his name. And he talked about … he said something like, he won’t write content nowadays. He won’t write content. And I think this is a little extreme, but the thinking is interesting and I think it’s in the right direction in some cases as far as where to put your time and energy when it comes to SEO and how to think about the future. 

It’s going to have an impact, it already is starting to have an impact, but the way that he put it was, if AI can write it, he won’t write it, basically is what he said. Which is, if you think about that, there are already a lot of things that you could just type in, “Write me this,” into an AI and it can create an article that just … the feel might be a little bit like, “Oh, this is written by AI,” in some cases or whatever, but it’s essentially the same information. It’s very close to what a lot of people are already putting out there. 

So if that’s the majority of your content, or somebody else, Ian Howells as well, he does a lot of stuff in the SEO space, Traffic Think Tank, he’s one of the founders there. I like the way that he’s put it in the past and it’s just more of the same, which is, if you can just hire writers, like an agency, like a generic writer, an SEO writer, a writer to create and just list out a bunch of topics and then have them without knowing anything about your space or without knowing anything about your business, just create those articles, shoot them out really quick, then you don’t really have anything that’s defensible or really that valuable there. 

The more you can move away from just content like that and tools, that’s why engineering as marketing, you still have to promote it, you still have to build tools, but things that people are searching for that are not just basic, especially “How to this,” or whatever, more and more of that stuff’s going to be answered by AI. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it initially, just know maybe you invest less time on that sort of stuff if there’s an opportunity there and you can rank and you can get traffic in the near future, but then devote more of your time towards other more unique content or tools or resources.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. I like that advice a lot. And I agree with you. In the near term, AI is not going to kill SEO, but if we look out years, is it going to have a major impact? It’s obviously going to have an impact. 

There’s another potential impact of AI on SEO, and it’s the thought that Google, when you go type a search term into it now, above the fold is an AI answer. There are not 10 blue links anymore. It’s a big wall of text for most things, then it’s all you’re sponsored … your AdWords, and then it’s organic. And I wonder if Anders is not referencing that, of, what if all the 10 blue links, what if you went to Google homepage and you type in a search and all it is an AI answer? There are no 10 blue links anymore, they’re completely gone.  

Ruben Gamez:
I think for some terms, it’s already … there are few terms that are basically like that already.  

Rob Walling:
So what does that do, then? So how do you survive in that case if you’re so reliant on being one of those links that people click through? My impression was that, how does Google create the answers? Well, they do it by scanning the top 10 blue links, probably. They do the whole internet, but you get the idea, and they’re giving answers from that material, but then you don’t get the click through. So is it stealing clicks from your site that could potentially convert? What do you think about it?  

Ruben Gamez:
I think this has already been going on. Really, they’ve had that. It wasn’t AI, but they’ve basically given you the answers, and they had-  

Rob Walling:
The zero click box at the top, right?  

Ruben Gamez:
Right. So for some content, that game’s been over for a while, for certain types of content. More and more, there are just a higher percentage of zero click searches that have been happening. 

But there are other types of content where that’s not enough. Just going back to where you focus your time, and I’m going to focus more of my time on those types of things. And that’s if we’re talking about things that people are searching for. So you still have paid, you can do AdWords still, and they need to make money. So in the short term, at least in the next couple of years, I don’t think they’re going to just instantly … they need a replacement for that. In some way, shape or form, they’re making a ton of money off of a lot of companies and people, and what would they be as a business if they just got rid of that? They give that ability for people to get in front of searchers by paying.  

Rob Walling:
Right, 78% of Google’s revenue is AdWords. That’s the whole company, basically. To your point that they’ll … So you were saying that SEO is going to change, but people will still search for stuff. This is what I was saying the other day. They’ll still search, so there’s still ads. You know what else? People are also going to search … they’re either going to search on Reddit or get redirected to Reddit. They’re going to search on Quora if that’s even still a thing. I always mention it, but it’s less important these days. They’re going to search in whatever private Slack groups, so that’s where word of mouth is a little more important. They’re going to find stuff in Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange type sites. 

It’s spreading, it’s getting towards maybe not so concentrated in Google. I know that when I search a lot of stuff that I search, the top result are Reddit threads, especially when I’m looking for … if I’m not using AI and I’m looking for answers around any type of hobby thing that I do, like tabletop games, Dungeons & Dragons, playing the guitar and that kind of stuff, Reddit’s up there. And there are Reddit ads and there are … whatever, there’s a bunch of approaches. 

So I think that piggybacks maybe on what you’re saying in that SEO is going to change, but there are still … it’s not like it’s going to go away overnight and AdWords, specifically, is still going to be around for quite some time and that there are other options there for you.  

Ruben Gamez:
Yeah. And showing up in those places, finding a way to show up in all those places that you mentioned is a good approach. Even if you’re creating … a lot of people treat SEO as like, “I have to create all the content myself, and I have to rank that content.” But a lot of times you get really good results by showing up in content, in places, communities, forums, other articles, whatever, that you didn’t create. And I think the more you can do that, the more likely it is also that you’ll show up in some of the AI-written answers because they’re picking it up from more references they see. You’re obviously meaningful in some way, so you’re worth mentioning as well.  

Rob Walling:
Right. If I would’ve typed, “Best email marketing tool for realtors,” and there’s probably going to be a bunch of top 5, top 10, top 20 posts, or it’ll be a Reddit thread or a Quora thread of what’s the best. And it’s like, “Well, how do I get in those?” That’s exactly what I was going to say, was AI is scraping those and using them for answers. So if you go to ChatGPT or Google’s equivalent, is it Gemini? Is that what Google’s-  

Ruben Gamez:
Gemini, yep.  

Rob Walling:
… AI thing is? And Baird is someone else’s? I haven’t kept up-  

Ruben Gamez:
Plexity, just the other day I looked up and in the last 30 days, we’ve gotten … not a ton, it was 40 or something like that, unique visitors from Perplexity, which was interesting.  

Rob Walling:
So that’s it, it’s what we’re saying. It’s crawling those, and then if I go into ChatGPT or any of these tools and say, “What is the best email service provider for realtors?” that’s where they’re getting the info. So it’s changing, and that means for incumbents who are getting a lot of traffic from it, they might see their business slowly get squeezed out. And for upstarts, there’s probably opportunity here because it’s shifting. When you have this type of paradigm shift, this is when you can figure out, you can be at the bleeding edge of it, of, “Well, how do you get mentioned in all these AI answers?”  

Ruben Gamez:
Yeah. I think it’s also harder to make SEO, and this game has also been over for a little while, making it the only way in which you grow your business. Not just your primary, it should be thought of more as supplementary. So in the affiliate space, they’re freaking out right now because a lot of sites have been hit and are doing poorly because they don’t really have a business model. There are no products. So it’s funny in a way, they’re going about it almost in the reverse way. They’re like, “Okay, now we have these sites that are content, they’re getting traffic. We need a product on here so that Google likes it so that it’s not just a content site or whatever.” 

So they’re trying to come up with products, but in what we do inherently, we sell products, and we have content tools or resources or whatever that help us get traffic. So we already have that problem solved, but it speaks to just that thinking about, it’s more of a supplementary thing and it’s not a bad idea to diversify a little bit. Not a ton, because in reality it’s going to be one channel or two channels that are going to work really best for you, and you can’t spread yourself out too thin. But it does pay to invest some time and money into something else and experiment with other stuff.  

Rob Walling:
So thanks for that question, Anders. I hope our answer was helpful. Ruben Gamez, it is always the utmost of pleasure to have you here on the show. If folks want to keep up with you on X/Twitter, you are earthlingworks, and of course SignWell if they want to use the best electronic signature app on the internet. Thanks again for joining me, man.  

Ruben Gamez:
Thank you.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Ruben for joining me on the show today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you have a beginner, an intermediate, or an advanced question for me or for a guest, send it in to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com, or click Ask a Question at the top of our website. Thank you for joining me this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 725.