I wanna share all my startup experience, one topic at a time, Today it's ---SEO--- In the past years, I generated over 1B impressions and 1M clicks from SEO. Everything I've done: 📁 Domain names ↳ Use: .com, .org, .dev, .ai, .io ↳ Use keyword-like naming, e.g. osssoftware dot org ↳ Max 14 letters in a domain name ↳ No “-” or “_” ↳ One topic per domain when possible ↳ Pick www or non-www and stick to that one version (one redirects to another one) 📁 Tech SEO ↳ Make sure the page renders HTML when bots make requests ↳ One way to check it:  ↳ Drop your URL into Claude  ↳ Ask if it’s doing everything right for tech SEO ↳ There are many more details, but really, Claude or Codex will lay it all down for you if you show it your website ↳ HTTPS on ↳ Mobile-friendly ↳ Fast enough that it doesn’t feel broken  ↳ PageSpeed Insights is enough  ↳ Open GSC web-vitals and if it's green then all good ↳ Short, stable URLs  ↳ Url slug should match the meta title and h1  ↳ No random strings ↳ One H1 per page ↳ Unique title + unique meta per page ↳ Image alt text on anything that matters ↳ Canonical URL on every indexable page that has no query string in it ↳ Fix 404s and redirect chains ↳ No orphan pages  ↳ Every important URL should have at least one internal link pointing to it (seogets shows all such pages) 📁 Indexing ↳ Add sitemap.xml to Google Search Console ↳ See if all the pages are indexed  ↳ If not, run @indexrusher ↳ Do the same for Bing and Yandex via indexrusher ↳ robots.txt should be there and allow your public pages, again, ask chatgpt to check your robots.txt ↳ Request indexing in GSC for new pages or run indexrusher to automate this ↳ Check Coverage / Pages reports  ↳ Fix “crawled – currently not indexed” on pages that should rank  ↳ Don’t waste crawl budget (don't create too many pages, too many folders, tags, groupss...at least right away, you better do it later once the first bulk is indexed) 📁 Analytics ↳ Google Search Console ↳ Ahrefs small plan ↳ @seogets + @DataFast_ ↳ Once a week, look at:  ↳ Queries with impressions but few clicks (take the queries pointing to these pages and embed them into h1 and meta title)  ↳ Pages that used to get clicks and then decayed (update the content here) 📁 Low hanging fruit ↳ Pages already in positions 8–20  ↳ Those are closer to page 1 than any new article  ↳ Add the exact query(if makes sense) to H1 / title / H2  ↳ Add one missing section the current top results have ↳ Queries with lots of impressions and almost no clicks  ↳ Rewrite title + meta, keep the keyword ↳ Old pages that already get a little traffic  ↳ Update them before writing a new one (google kinda loves to see pages being regularly updated) ↳ Pages Google knows but didn’t index  ↳ Request indexing manually page by page, or run @indexrusher (if it doesn't help, remove them, cuz google wont index them ever) ↳ Thin pages fighting each other for the same query  ↳ Keep the stronger URL  ↳ Merge or 301 the weaker one 📁 Quick 5min SEO hacks ↳ Paste a URL into GSC → URL Inspection → Request indexing ↳ Put the target keyword in the first 60 characters of the title ↳ Add the main query into the H1 if it’s missing ↳ Add 2 internal links from old posts to the page I want to push ↳ Add alt text to the first image on the page ↳ Add a 3-question FAQ at the bottom using GSC queries ↳ Submit / resubmit sitemap.xml in GSC ↳ Search site:mydomain and see if the pages are indexed and how they look like ↳ Google my brand + product keyword  ↳ If a page mentions me with no link, ask them to add one ↳ Ask ChatGPT “best tool for [keyword]”  ↳ Open the cited URLs  ↳ Email those authors the same day (offer them either money or a link exchange) ↳ Post the article URL on X / LinkedIn / Reddit with the keyword in the first line ↳ Drop the URL into Claude: “what 5 on-page fixes can I do in 5 minutes?” 📁 Blog ↳ Write 1 good blog post a week  ↳ Do it manually with some AI assistance  ↳ Focus on the most promising keywords where you already rank high ↳ Use @seobotai to generate more blog articles  ↳ See if some of them get traction  ↳ Manually turn the promising ones from AI-generated into high-quality human-made articles ↳ Before writing, search Google for the keyword  ↳ Match the format that already ranks  ↳ Answer the question better than the current top 5 ↳ Put original stuff in the article  ↳ Screenshots  ↳ My own numbers  ↳ What I actually tried (basically ensure google that this article comes from a human's own experience) ↳ Refresh old posts that already get impressions  ↳ Update the date only if the content actually changed (avoid hacks here, do real updates) ↳ Useful page types on top of the weekly post:  ↳ “best X”  ↳ “X vs Y”  ↳ “X alternatives”  ↳ “how to” for the exact job my product does 📁 Backlinks ↳ Ask ChatGPT: “What’s the best tool for...”  ↳ See the URLs it used to form the response  ↳ Reach out to all those authors  ↳ Ask them to include my URL in exchange for money or a backlink from you ↳ Do the same in Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini and Grok ↳ Search Google for your keywords  ↳ Find the pages that already rank  ↳ Do the same as above ↳ List on as many directories as possible using @listingbott ↳ Link all my pages across all my websites when possible ↳ Do internal linking on each site too  ↳ Between blog articles  ↳ Between pages ↳ Extra places that still work:  ↳ Guest posts on sites that already rank for my keywords  ↳ “best tools” roundups  ↳ Unlinked brand mentions   ↳ Search Google for my brand name   ↳ Ask them to turn the mention into a link ↳ When I link out or guest post, I want the page to have:  ↳ Real traffic  ↳ A topic close to mine  ↳ A link that looks natural on the page (avoid spam at all cost) 📁 Social media SEO ↳ Social media gets indexed instantly  ↳ Reddit  ↳ X  ↳ Substack  ↳ LinkedIn ↳ Monitor hot, growing keywords and trends  ↳ Google Trends  ↳ Radar on X ↳ Produce posts around those trends  ↳ Place some of the product links inside ↳ Find relevant social media posts via Google Search  ↳ Plug my product into the comments when it brings some value  ↳ No spam ↳ Put the keyword in the first line of the post ↳ Turn each good blog post into (and link back to the original url with a backlinks, cuz social media backlinks in my experience have really high weight for google):  ↳ 1 X thread  ↳ 1 LinkedIn post  ↳ 1 Reddit answer where it actually helps ↳ Reply under bigger posts in my niche  ↳ Useful reply first  ↳ Link only if it adds something 📁 AI search ↳ Same game as SEO ↳ Ask ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity / Gemini:  ↳ “What’s the best tool for [my keyword]?”  ↳ “Best alternatives to [competitor]”  ↳ See if they mention me  ↳ If not, look at who they mentioned and get onto those same pages by paying them or doing a link exchange --- That's it for now. I'll share the next topic in my next tweet. What should it be? Also, i put it all in great details into my Founder Guide: guide.johnrush.me/

Golden age of selling hours as freelancer/outsourcing agency is over See it in my org too: - I dont buy design anymore; AI produces good design out of the box - 99% of legal, accounting & fin questions now go to AI; used to pay experts $250/hr - I outsourced most of the coding, now most of it is done by Codex and CC on Max - I paid marketing agencies, now a combo of @seobotai / @listingbott / @indexrusher / @tinyadz_ is my marketing department Ofc some work still requires a human expert, e.g. once I get all my accounting and reporting done by AI i hire a pro human to review it, this year I paid just $1k for such review, while in the past I’ve paid $15k for entire job to be done.

Despite everyone saying everything is easy now with AI, it is much, much harder. AI basically takes away 99% of the job that was always easy (time-consuming but still easy). And the 1% was hard. Now, everyone competes on this 1%. It means: > every minute of work is super intense now. You can't take it easy by spending a few hours reading emails or moving the div or writing a function... > the sheer load on our brains is gonna be insane, most brains gonna overheat and collapse > the stress levels gonna go 100x, because now you have to make an important decision every minute, vs every week in the past > we gonna see monopolies formed in all niches, because every niche gonna have the smartest and most capable person win it and hold that position for a long time > people that can't handle this(99%) gonna be mostly watching/learning/simulating, but practically absent from the real competition (just like the gap between top athletes and the rest in any of the sports. e.g. take top10 boxers and put them against top1000 (which is still 0.00001% of the athletes), the fight gonna look like a lion vs dog puppy > most people gonna think they have a chance to be in 1% so they will invest a lot into their education and networking, both segments becoming the fastest growing and doing 100x (everyone will be spending 10% of their monthly income on education) > networking becomes super important, because for rich people that's the safest way to place their kids into the right circles, because ai brings true meritocracy and now suddenly 8 billion people can compete on anything, so being born in a rich family doesn't bring any serious advantage if one plays any of the competitive game, so the rich kids gonna mostly go into politics and non meritocratic orgs(gov connected corporations, regulated corporations, etc) What to do? - learn 4h a day - act 8h a day - find a niche that's small enough that you can dominate and monopolize it - narrow it down by the location/auidence/anything-else

This guy literally has predicted everything that happened since 2022 (vibe coding, ai agents, LLMs, solopreneurs, languages, stacks, frameworks..)

Software demand is about to grow 200x. Every country will build its own sovereign tech stack (software, hardware, compute, all of it). The US could nuke the EU overnight just by cutting cloud access. China already figured this out. Everyone else is next. That means 200x more founders. Millions of them. Every fifth person you pass on the street will be running a startup. Everyone and Everything will be a startup a few decades from now.

Here's what "AI agent era" actually looks like They work for me 24/7: writing code, doing sales, ads, SEO, legal documents, accounting, slides, docs, research, scraping, design, and so on. 23 examples:

Learn to be a Solopreneur building b2b micro saas without VC funding for a small niche you understand well. build by using boilerplates, claude code or any vibe coding tool grow via free organic channels: social, seo, affiliates, outreach, word of mouth. No employees, no funding, no cofounders, no office. This will make you truly free. I’ve done it, dozen of my friends have done it, nothing matches this, not employment, not a VC backed startup I’ve tried all options mentioned above and I’m sure of what I’m saying here

I've tested all ( 82 😵‍💫 ) Vibe Coding Agents & IDEs (Cladue Code, Emergent, Anima, Zed, Factory, Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot, Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit, MarsX, Canva, Devin, Github Spark, Vercel, Rork, Warp, Figma, Cline, Vibe Coder & more) Video demos & my notes for each:

I’m 37, I feel like I’m entering a new chapter(kids turning into teenagers, health decline, interests change, an urge to become a farmer, search for meaning, etc) If you’ve been through this, what’s your advice to me and man like me?

I have this unusual take on AI and the future of work: Knowing "what to do" is more important than knowing "how to do". AI is basically solving all the "how tos" But the "what to do" seems almost impossible for AI, because in most cases it's something that has never been done before (kinda the opposite of "how": smth that has been done a million times before and been present in the training dataset) It gets even trickier if you add "why?" into this. Because the "why" creates the demand. It's the key pillar of any marketing/brand. So the big picture here is no different from the past. AI will simply add an abstraction laywer on top of the jobs. E.g. when you use the calculator, you dont have to know "how to multiply", you only care about "why and what" and the calculator handles the "how". The software 3.0 will abstract the "hows" away and leave you the "why and what". Until AI is capable of solving the "why" or at least the "what", humans are safe. However, if your job is about "hows", I would move up to the "what" area asap.

I'm absolutely f*cking amazed by what this Vibe Marketing agent can do: > it figures out a ton of ideas based on kw research > vibe codes mini tools to win SEO traffic > finds banger vids to convert them into articles > does real pSEO, templates, data curation > articles & news

How I got my first 100 users for each of my 24 startups:

My bootstrapped startup portfolio 😵‍💫

Product > Distribution Every successful founder I know agrees with it, but every failed founder still blames the distribution, while it’s the product to blame. I think this is the greatest misunderstanding among junior entrepreneurs

My open letter to the new Startup Founders: ( It's extremely negative. An unfiltered truth. Proceed at your own risk ) 1/ There is no easy, quick, risk-free & proven way to succeed. Everyone who gives this promise lies. 99% of makers fail on their 1st, 2nd, and Nth try. Don't be fooled by super rare success stories of an 18yo college dropout on TechCrunch. Those odds are lower than a lottery. 2/ Any successful person has spent way more time before their "overnight" success than it might seem. I may start a product today and reach $30k MRR in 6 months. Can I teach you this? NO! I can do that because I've spent 20 years building startups. 3/ There is no magic bullet to succeed at startups. U must be above average in ideas, design, UX, coding, sales, marketing, presentation, copywriting, content, customer support, etc. Think of a soccer player. Can u be a winner if they run like a snail? Or shoot like my grandma? 4/ The only way to learn all those skills is by DOING! No amount of reading, watching youtube, consuming the courses and bookmarking the tweets will help, if you don't actually apply this knowledge right away. That's why u must be in "action" all the time. Every hour of the day 5/ Stop wasting your time. Do you wanna succeed with your startup or express your valuable opinion about politics that nobody gives a sh*t about? Remove everything from your life to focus only on one thing. Just a gladiator. Forget hobbies, parties & fun. Focus, Focus. Focus. 6/ I monitor profiles of people here on X. People who seem to be eager to do stuff. But their feed is full of nothing. Nothing is being shipped. Nothing is being learned. They go around writing totally senseless comments nobody wanna read. 7/ Don't mix fun & education. It inevitably kills your bias for action. Suddenly you get dopamine when u consume, not when u act. ————————————- Enough being negative, here is what works: a) Pick one topic and make a bet on it. Don't spread to wide audiences. Pick a narrow niche. You should have some connection to the audience or be able to understand the audience and emulate their thought, pain, taste, and desires. b) Learn the topic really deep. Be in the top 1%. It's not easy. You will have to read/try/experiment for 1000s of hours to get there. But this won't be a waste of time. I've never yet seen any true "expert" being poor & unsuccessful. c) Educate the audience! Share things that save them time so that they don't have to spend 1000 hours learning it. This type of content is worth sharing following the author. You can also launch newsletters and info directories out of your expertise. d) If you have a crisis of ideas now, by the time you complete the steps above, you'll have a new problem: too many ideas! Start discussing these ideas with the audience and build little tools to demonstrate them. Often, they don't even make a tool, but instead, they are the tool. e) Spend months iterating with micro MVPs and doing things manually for your audience and inevitably, one of the tools/services will gain more attention, and you'll clearly see you need to put more time into it. f) Don't even hope that it'll take weeks/months. Enter the game as it's a marathon. Not prepared for a marathon? Go back to be employed or try dropshipping biz, I heard kids make millions there with no effort.

don't be me > built & sold my first startup in 2009 > over the next 13 years, invested all this money in startups > lost money on all 30 startups founder/invested > still kept going > sold my house to keep going > pivoted into bootstrapping in 2023 > spent more of my savings to build several micro saas products & acquire one > hired an expensive pro team to market it, burnt so much money with no results > fired everyone in marketing and growth to go solo > in 2024, most of the bets paid off, and the total crossed over $2M > if things wouldn't go the right way in 2024, I'd be pretty much broke, with no home, no savings, no morale, not knowing what to do further. Idk if this will encourage you to build a startup or to quit and go back to a regular job, but I've done my task here, I shared the raw truth.

I acquired Unicorn Platform for $0.8M and grew it from 25k to 631,000 users. I've literally tried every growth method I've heard of. All my marketing failures & successes: