Alpesh

I spent $2,800 on an agency and an ASO freelancer to market a 6-year-old app. Nothing moved. Then I rewrote the website for Google. 3 months later: 84 paying subscribers, 90% from search, and ChatGPT cites us with almost no backlinks. Full story: medium.com/@and.alpesh/284-m…

I expected to find a study on how many visitors a bought backlink sends. There isn't one. Nobody has measured it. What has been measured, and what it says about $500 links and "backlink networks": medium.com/@and.alpesh/the-5…

$284 MRR in 3 months from an app that was dead for 6 years. Last year we moved from service business to products. First experiment: a Flutter app we published in October 2020 as a portfolio piece. Good app, zero marketing. Spent $2,800 on an agency and an ASO freelancer. Nothing. This year we built our own distribution tool and used KidKarma as customer #1. Now: 84 paid subs, $3K ARR, 90% of users from Google, and a DR 6 website cited in 107 AI answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot. Most dead products aren't bad. They're invisible. Full story: medium.com/@and.alpesh/284-m…

What the f**k is going on in IT? Employees are looking for exits. Companies are cutting teams. Newcomers regret choosing IT. AI ideas are starting to look the same. Human expertise is being replaced by AI judgment. Does anyone still believe in the future of IT? I do.

I’ve never made a demo video by myself before. But I’m trying to win a lead, so I’m doing it. It’s been tougher than I expected. Already 8–10 retakes. I’m finishing it today.

I never really did cold email for my service business, and never spent much on it either. Now I’m trying it myself for PilotDeck. Started with a small list. Not sure how it’ll work, but I’ll share the results as I go.

This screenshot is from one of the websites we manage through PilotDeck. They joined us early in beta, and within 3–4 months, we started seeing strong organic progress without paid marketing. Good early signal.

How long after publishing does a new page start getting cited by ChatGPT or Claude? Google indexing I understand. AI answers feel like a different game with different rules, and I can't find a straight answer anywhere. If you've actually measured this on your own site, I want to hear it.

$443 MRR. Stripe says 28% growth. The honest version: that's 3 customers. At this size the percentage means nothing. One customer is a great week. One cancellation is a crisis. The chart just doesn't know it yet. Posting it anyway, because I said I'd share the real numbers.

I spent 10+ years building software for other people. Ran an agency that grew to 35+ people. Last month I launched my own product. PilotDeck.co. It does the SEO and content work for founders after they launch. Here's the uncomfortable part. I know how to build. I'm still learning how to market. So I'm treating distribution like an engineering problem: break it down, measure it, improve the system. What I'm running right now: Cold email: ~2000 sent, 7 replies so far Daily posting on X and LinkedIn, month 1 done Publishing against researched keywords on our own site I'll share the numbers here as they come in, including the bad ones. Especially the bad ones. If you launched something and Search Console is still mostly your own brand name, say hi. That was every product I ever built until I started taking this seriously.

Hand over a domain. Research runs. First article within the hour. 7-day trial. Cancel any month. Your content stays on your site if you leave. pilotdeck.co

Ask people what businesses have the best odds of making money and you hear the same answers. Commercial refrigeration. Pest control. Plumbing. Gutters. Nobody says "the one with the best product." Private equity has been buying these boring businesses for years. HVAC companies. Pest control routes. Plumbing shops. Why? Three reasons. You need a license, so competitors can't flood in. Customers pay every month, so you don't start from zero. When something breaks, people call you. You don't chase them. None of that is about the product. All of it is about not fighting for the next customer. I built software for 10+ years. Fitness, finance, real estate, tourism, government. Four failed businesses before 25. The failures were not my worst products. They were the ones where I had no answer for "how will strangers find this?" The category never decided it. Distribution did. Building keeps getting cheaper. So the real question is no longer what to build. It's how people will find it.

Technical founders study databases and architecture deeply. Marketing gets treated like it should happen by itself. I made that mistake for years. Now I treat distribution like an engineering problem. Break it down. Measure it. Improve the system.

Search Console snapshot — a site early in the process. 22 clicks in 28 days. 1,210 impressions. Average position 46. This is normal for month one. The mistake is waiting for it to fix itself.

Do you need a new website to use PilotDeck? No. We work on the one you have. Most founders don't have a design problem. They have a discovery problem.

Hour one with a new PilotDeck site: Research runs. First article is written. Not a deck. Not a call next Tuesday. Something you can read and judge today.

65 appearances in AI answers for KidKarma. Domain rating 6. We structured pages to be quoted, not just indexed. Google and the AI layer on top are not the same game anymore.

87% of KidKarma's organic clicks came from people who weren't searching the brand name. That's the difference between a site that exists and a site that gets discovered.

Last 28 days in Search Console for KidKarma: 800 clicks. 21.7k impressions. 3.7% CTR. Avg position 6.4. Still a small app. Still low domain authority. Movement comes from matching content to what people actually search.