What we would've done differently in the first year of bootstrapping our company
The founders reflected on their first year, emphasizing the need for early content marketing, targeted SEO, user experience insights, compliance, and financial management to improve their business strategy and success.
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In their first year of bootstrapping their company, the founders reflected on several key areas for improvement. They wished they had started content marketing earlier, recognizing that building an audience takes time and can inform product development. They learned the importance of targeting specific keywords in their SEO content, as their initial articles did not align with user search behavior. Understanding individual user experiences through qualitative data was another area they identified for growth, as they realized that relying solely on quantitative data could lead to misinterpretations of user needs.
The founders also noted the value of one-on-one tutoring sessions with users, which helped them gain insights into user struggles and preferences. They emphasized the necessity of taking compliance and financial management seriously, as neglecting these aspects led to fines and confusion. They acknowledged that starting a business involves significant paperwork and that understanding the financial state of the company is crucial for survival. Overall, the founders recognized that a more proactive approach to marketing, user engagement, compliance, and financial oversight could have significantly improved their first year. They concluded that building relationships with users and maintaining a focus on compliance and finances are essential for long-term success.
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4 commentsWon't LLM businesses steal this SEO attempt in an instant?
More likely, keep that know-how as a black box service, maybe with some IT automation.
For advertising that with SEO, you could make the SEO text LLM-aware, and lean harder on not just providing enough information for someone reading it to think "these people seem to know what they're talking about; I should give them my business", but crafting the article in such a way that the desired conclusion is preserved in the output of the robo-plagiarist.
If you decide either that you owe it to Martin to help him succeed, and/or you want other people like Martin to succeed... you could dedicate a team of some of your best people to high-touch determine whatever is required to help Martin specifically to succeed. Validating it with the success of the original Martin. (Preferably constraining the approaches to things that might conceivably scale. But if necessary doing things that you initially don't see how to scale.)
Instead of roadmap phase "No More Martins", it could be "No Martin Left Behind", "Martin Tiger Team", "360 Degree Martin Experience", or "Martin of Oz".
I worry a lot of these "what we learned" posts sidestep the real issue: the problem being solved isn't really that big of a deal to most people or it doesn't actually solve it in a measurably better way.
Most searches are filled with large paragraphs of AI responses at the very top of the page now days.
Then everyone doing content marketing is using the same AI to spew out massive spam sites of worthless content.