Building software & sharing the journey. Made @gummy_search @thehiveindex
Santa Monica
Joined February 2021
- Tweets7.9K
- Following1.6K
- Followers11.4K
- Likes11.8K
Pinned Tweet
What I've been up to past few years:
🤑 sold my first company
🧊 tasted corporate life for a bit
📈 grew @gummy_search to 40k MRR
😬 had to shut it down for legal reasons
🐣 had my first kid (want many more now)
😎 took some time off to recharge
Now I'm back to building again!
- Reviving @thehiveindex with the help of AI agents
- Launching a short form video insights tool soon
- Cooking up something new for AI SaaS builders
As always, grateful to be part of this supportive community, and the gift to build internet companies for fun & profit
Fed 🐻 retweeted
I'm getting a lot of questions on this Tweet
So fine, I'll spill the beans
Here's what I know about programmatic SEO
xitter.cf/foliofed/status/152009…
10 best moves I made for the @thehiveindex directory:
1. Thought-out internal linking from the start
2. Knowing which pages to spend crawl budget on
3. Making it fast, helpful to users, easy UX
4. Adding traffic stats to every page, detailed quotable reports for some
5. Experimenting with many monetization methods
6. Making it easy for agents to recommend the site to community owners
7. Thoughtfully giving external links with high DR, now sales leads come to me
8. Choosing freemium model
9. Collecting unique data (reviews) that no other site has
10. Automating data collection so its 99% on autopilot
Are you working on a new programmatic SEO project?
I'm looking to mentor a few folks that are looking for guidance on best practices, tools, workflows, indexing, etc
For context, I run several pSEO sites, pulling in over 500k organic clicks/yr. Plus I'm always experimenting with new formats for SEO/GEO these days
Not asking for anything in return besides insight into how you think about it, as I'm be building something in this space soon
If this is you, DM me!
Wow just set up bing webmaster tools
Its so much more useful than GSC...
Of course higher volume from Google but using the Keyword Research & AI Performance insights from Bing will probably carry over
Was thinking a cool product would be to do this 100x at once with different AI "personas" and come up with an aggregate report on what was confusing in your onboarding & UX
Every founder should do this today. ✋
Paste this into Claude:
"Go to [your site]. Sign up as a brand new user. Go through onboarding and use the product like a real customer would. Then give me the top 5 things to fix, with what you saw at each step."
It found our onboarding never asks you to create a booking type. That's the whole product. 🤦
Then it mocked up the fix. 👇
Super good 🌶️
pretty crazy that when you make a new site it instantly gets linked by hundreds of spam SEO service sites
Like does this actually work to get SEO clients??
You'd think this amount of outbound link spam would end up hurting their domains
Its easy to forget about iframetester.com
bc I literally built it in 20 mins, hosted the html file on s3, used it to debug the iframe cookie issue I was working on at my job, and then just moved on with my life
Once in a while I check in and now it does 300k+ pageviews/mo. Just a html page with an iframe on it...
Playing around with @tinyadz_ by @johnrush this month to see if it can be monetized
What's the lesson? I guess it's:
- don't underestimate EMD search queries
- if it's helpful for you, prob helpful to others
- just ship it
Fed 🐻 retweeted
Don’t lock pricing on day one. Evolve it with the product.
1. Open signup. Generous free tier. Watch session recordings. Beg for feedback everywhere. When someone pays or starts a trial, reach out directly.
2. Once you have traffic and the worst product kinks are gone, gate signup behind a free trial with CC down. They have to cancel with a feedback fom if they don’t want to stay. This is where you learn the gap between perceived value and received value.
3. After the UX and payment journey are actually dialed in, you can optionally open free signup back up if costs are under control. More people will convert now. Free users still spread word of mouth. But free becomes very basic, with paywalls around the features you already know convert.
Just what has worked for me. The product takes time to evolve. The payment structure should evolve with it.
Fed 🐻 retweeted
A good onboarding should be stupidly simple, insightful, and productive
Stupidly simple - few clicks as possible, just enough necessary text that it looks good on mobile
Insightful - through onboarding the user should learn about your app and how it works
Productive - when onboarding is complete the user should have their first useful artifact in your app. This helps with dropping them into your (probably complex) internal UI, and gives you something to email them about after their first session
most common question people ask is about getting indexed
For that I think it helps to be a bit more patient and incremental in the beginning
This is a 1k+ page site. For week #1 I put <20 in the sitemap. Then you see:
1. which types of pages you didn't include, but google thinks are quality and includes them anyways
2. any not getting indexed, fix issues on those main pages ASAP
Then scale up to 100 a week later, and 1000 after that
Some folks can send 100k/1M page sites right at once. It's possible. But if you haven't done it before, best to take a little time to get the basics right
When I shut down access to @gummy_search one of the first things I did was make an alternatives page
Saw the search term "gummysearch alternative" spiking. Figured if anyone would profit from the shutdown, might as well be me
15-20k of affiliate revenue so far. Plus every Reddit founder in my DMs which has been kind of fun
gummysearch.com/gummysearch-…
A good onboarding should be stupidly simple, insightful, and productive
Stupidly simple - few clicks as possible, just enough necessary text that it looks good on mobile
Insightful - through onboarding the user should learn about your app and how it works
Productive - when onboarding is complete the user should have their first useful artifact in your app. This helps with dropping them into your (probably complex) internal UI, and gives you something to email them about after their first session
Don’t lock pricing on day one. Evolve it with the product.
1. Open signup. Generous free tier. Watch session recordings. Beg for feedback everywhere. When someone pays or starts a trial, reach out directly.
2. Once you have traffic and the worst product kinks are gone, gate signup behind a free trial with CC down. They have to cancel with a feedback fom if they don’t want to stay. This is where you learn the gap between perceived value and received value.
3. After the UX and payment journey are actually dialed in, you can optionally open free signup back up if costs are under control. More people will convert now. Free users still spread word of mouth. But free becomes very basic, with paywalls around the features you already know convert.
Just what has worked for me. The product takes time to evolve. The payment structure should evolve with it.