AI in SEO, User-centered strategies, High-quality data, Subscription growth tactics, Open source innovation

"Today, my guest is Eli Schwartz, a growth advisor specializing in SEO, who has helped companies like Quora, Coinbase, Tinder, and LinkedIn to develop and execute their SEO strategies." [00:57]

"I think step one is the step that almost everyone misses on SEO, which is understanding the user's journey and what they are searching for in the first place." [00:46]

"Google claims to have invented the concept of LLMs, and some of the early OpenAI employees were Google employees, showcasing the intertwined nature of tech developments and competitive pressures in the industry." [04:20]

"The discovery step of search is going to be swallowed up by LLMs that give you a direction. Users will have access to AI-summarized information, which alters how they engage with search results and expectations." [14:50]

"What you’re referencing is the structured data. In contrast to older SEO tactics, now Google uses this structured data to answer questions more directly, allowing for user experiences that are built around what users truly want." [16:55]

"The product needs to align with what the user is searching for. If marketers create connections between products like Gmail and Salesforce, they can offer solutions that users are naturally pursuing." [19:30]

"SEO work isn't just about content; it's really a product challenge that requires user understanding." [31:15]

"It's important to understand who your users are and what they're searching for to effectively drive SEO strategies." [31:50]

"Just because users search for something doesn't mean they'll buy your product. The sales journey is complex and involves multiple stakeholders." [35:00]

"SEO is not an opportunity for every business. Companies need to critically assess their market and determine if investing in SEO aligns with their customer journey and revenue generation strategy." [00:25]

"Many startups are not considering the demand for their services before jumping into SEO. It's essential to evaluate your audience's behavior and adjust your strategy accordingly to drive effective lead generation." [01:05]

"If you're in the B2B space, leads coming in through SEO should be clearly tracked to ensure that the tactic is building real business value, rather than just driving traffic for vanity metrics." [01:20]

"AI is a tool, everyone says AI is a tool. It's not a solution. So you can use AI to create content if the content you're creating is a part of that journey." [35:56]

"Companies want their content to show up because they're giving away their content for free. They want to be showing up in a way that benefits them." [40:46]

"Many people believe that the secret to SEO success lies solely in link building, but this couldn't be further from the truth. The actual effectiveness of SEO is tied more closely to building a strong brand and creating relevant content that resonates with users." [06:30]

"Look at how companies like TripAdvisor have leveraged their dataset, combining user-generated content into useful pages for users, instead of writing unique content for every hotel. This method is indicative of modern SEO strategies that rely on aggregation over traditional methods." [08:15]

"The reality is that DuckDuckGo's market share is so low—less than 1%. This shows how difficult it is for alternatives to gain traction against giants like Google." [08:59]

"If you have a large website with tens of millions of pages... technical SEO is probably going to be less important, whereas if you have a hundred-page website, it's crucial." [10:05]

"Google is now giving away for free the information that you aggregated and curated and gave away for free in return for clicks on ads." [10:40]

"Many companies are able to unlock significant value through basic SEO strategies, often underestimated or ignored. Companies that invest heavily in complex SEO may overlook simple actions that drive traffic." [01:50]

"When constructing an SEO strategy, it's vital to sync up the understanding of market demand with realistic user engagement strategies. This means that the numbers should support actionable steps rather than theoretical assumptions." [04:00]

"The tools used for SEO forecasting often do not accurately reflect reality. For example, Google Search Console may yield data that shows increased traffic, yet other tools can mislead by suggesting competition is stronger than it is." [06:10]

"I realized they basically like reverse engineered the way they sell networks work to allow what they allowed. This was really fascinating because it illuminated how underlying technology facilitates new user interactions." [01:49]

"It was so useful, like eight years ago when I was there and I had to like buy a SIM card, and my phone didn't really work and I couldn't make payments. It changed my entire experience." [02:06]

"I just upgraded to their pro plan. They're like the best product at upselling you on their paid plan because they're just like right there in your face all the time. This highlights how effective marketing strategies can convert free users to paid subscriptions." [02:55]

"As an industry, we can either choose data abundance or data scarcity. This choice will influence how we develop future AI technologies." [00:56]

"The only model that we have in the world for the level of intelligence that we seek to create is humanity. Thus, the production of frontier data combines human expertise and algorithmic techniques to generate valuable insights." [02:28]

"I think there'll be a lot more divergence between a lot of the labs in terms of what research directions they choose to explore, which ultimately affect the breakthroughs they make at various times." [06:28]

"You can look through, this is before all this generative AI work, but at one point, Meta did some research that utilized basically all the public Instagram photos along with their hashtags to train really good image recognition algorithms. They had a lot of regulatory problems with that in Europe." [10:43]

"There's this whole question in the industry is like, are they over-investing? And if you listen to their earnings calls of the big tech companies, they're like, look, our risk is under-investing, not over-investing." [12:58]

"I think in a lot of industries where there's a lot more manual interaction with customers, you should be able to drive much better customer interactions if you had more standardization and you were able to use more automation." [19:33]

"I think that a lot of the frenzy around small use cases and sort of the more marginal use cases, I think that’s good. I think it’s exciting." [20:16]

"I think most of the benefit is on the cost-saving side, then that’s not really enough to disrupt large incumbents that have already begun to push their way through." [21:01]

"You know, investors believe that founder-led companies are going to out-innovate the market, so your job is to out-innovate the market." [27:40]

"We need incredibly smart people to be able to do this and we need the best people to be able to accomplish this." [30:30]

"I think there's obviously this became this big question of like how much social responsibility do companies have in what they do?" [30:46]

"It's not like imminent. It's not like immediately on the horizon. So on the order of four plus years, but you can see the glimmers." [31:06]

"Retention is about user case, meaning that even if you create the perfect app for the gym, you'll have terrible retention because gyms themselves have terrible retention." [16:00]

"Never take general advice. General advice is always bullshit. If you look on the history of any company, you would see that everything is so nuanced and unique. There are thousands of ways to be successful, and you should choose your way." [26:00]

"Simplicity is the key to success in consumer-facing products. It's much more significant than the number of features, and perhaps, it's more significant than anything." [10:31]

"When we look at Flow, you break many rules... you have to choose a problem that you've personally felt and can really empathize with." [11:00]

"Retention is about user case. What many people don't understand is that retention is not about the product; it is about the user's needs." [11:31]

"But again, if you ask me what's prerequisite of organic traffic, I would say retention is a prerequisite of organic traffic. Because first you need to get an active audience." [22:18]

"Do you think that made your job much more difficult? Because of my origins, my accent. And because I am not a right profile. And I was pretty weird type for investors." [34:43]

"And what's the most difficult for founders is that he has this mindset. Every day you are getting no, no, no, no. And it's soul breaking. It's really difficult." [35:23]

"When you start monetization, you're getting revenue and you may use this revenue to build product or to raise a big round and then you create a better product. This flywheel starts to work, and then you invest more and more and more." [46:29]

"My advice to you is to choose one business model and be really focused. I learned this lesson and have been very focused since." [48:06]

"With the super app mentality, you are building multiple products simultaneously, rather than solely focusing on one product at a time. It creates a challenge in maintaining unity across the different parts." [48:18]

"Simplicity is the most popular answer when assessing what users want from our product. For seven or eight years in a row, it has consistently ranked at the top. It distills our ultimate goal into a single focus." [49:40]

"Retention in the consumer space doesn't reflect commitment to a product as it does in B2B. Customers in B2C often cycle through applications, making it vital to focus on revenue retention instead." [52:18]

"It's essential to reflect on our strengths and weaknesses as CEOs. One cannot aim for perfection; we should instead strive to work efficiently within our capabilities." [01:05:30]

"Trust is the most significant. They should trust you. You should be a really trustful person or a company to convince 90% of your employees to take family and belongings in today and to move to another country. You should be really trustful for that." [01:15:04]

"Many millions. It's very expensive, but it was significant to do because it's a tech company and it's about people and this company would not exist without people." [01:20:18]

"I believe that when war started in 2022, we had 70% of our employees in Belarus. It was more than 290% of them were relocated with families in several days." [01:02:39]

"As discussed during the podcast, 'Anytime you increase the number of notifications or emails you send, in the short term, it's like the sugar high. It’s going to lead to a short-term pop in your metrics. But if you do that too many times, you kill the channel.' This highlights the importance of sustainable engagement strategies rather than quick wins." [00:22]

"It was pointed out that 'The average consumer subscription app is losing more than 50% of its annual subscribers in the first year and more than 50% of its monthly subscribers in the first three months.' This stark statistic emphasizes the challenges faced by subscription models." [00:14]

"'So if you want to improve your LTV CAC ratio before your next board meeting, start by heading over to voyantis.ai slash 20VC.' This statement underscores the proactive approach necessary for growth leaders." [01:15]

"I learned to focus less on these specialized skill sets and more on just finding really smart, hungry generalists who are ready to roll up their sleeves and figure it out." [12:15]

"They need to be strong generalists. They need to be able to flex to whatever the demands of the business dictate in any given quarter." [11:56]

"If we just deconstruct that, why are consumer subscriptions easy to launch? They don't require sales teams and they tend to have high gross margins with low marginal costs." [12:30]

"The average consumer subscription app is maybe $10 a month, $60 to $80 a year versus B2B where you've got contract sizes in the thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions." [23:22]

"Consumers are starting to experience some degree of subscription fatigue, and all of that puts a lot of downward pressure on their unit economics and makes it really hard to build a sustainable business." [23:55]

"I'd emphasize that ARPU tends to be relatively low for consumer subscription apps, and churn tends to be much higher compared to B2B SaaS businesses." [24:00]

"I want to feel like I've learned something new on Duolingo. Accomplishment. I want to feel like I'm learning the language, and I'm learning it faster and better than my peers." [00:22]

"There's a little bit of social status, like social influence. So this is where leaderboards come in, right? I want to be viewed as somebody who is one of the best language learners in my language and in my peer set." [00:55]

"I think there are two things that these companies are doing really, really well to make sure that people continue to use their products over time." [02:30]

"Luis von Ahn, the CEO there has multiple times talked about their approach to notifications. They are so overused; we have such notification overload. This indicates a need for refinement in how and when we communicate with users." [45:15]

"If you increase the number of notifications or emails you send in the short term, it's like the sugar high. It's going to lead to a short term pop in your metrics, but if you do that too many times, you kill the channel. This reinforces the idea of sustainable engagement practices." [46:00]

"On tiers, I think the vast majority of consumer subscription businesses should only have a single tier, at least until they become very large, mature businesses. The implication here is that simplicity can often lead to higher user retention." [47:00]

"Often, companies don't realize how crucial pricing adjustments are, and many customer subscription apps will set a price and then won't revisit it for years. Famous examples highlight that this lack of revisiting pricing leads to stagnation and potential losses in revenue." [34:06]

"Consumers have short attention spans, and the more complexity you introduce in the paywall, the worse your conversion rates are likely to be. Simplifying the user experience can lead to noticeably higher conversion rates." [34:15]

"One thing that's becoming more and more important for any business is understanding how human attention spans are getting shorter. This necessitates that companies focus increasingly on refining their onboarding processes to grab user interest immediately." [37:10]

"'Quizlet started as a digital flashcards app. When it first launched, that's what it was. Now, many years later, Quizlet's one of the largest online education platforms in the world...' This emphasizes the transformation and growth a startup can achieve by evolving its product offering." [06:57]

"'What this company, Ladder, figured out over the last 18 to 24 months is they realized their product was perfectly tailored to TikTok...' This highlights the importance of adapting product marketing strategies to specific platforms for optimal growth." [06:16]

"'A lot of the underlying things that you need to do to be really successful in SEO are the same things that you need to do to be really successful with these LLMs...' This underlines the parallel between SEO strategies and adapting to new technologies like AI." [12:16]

""Oh, and the best part, Voyantis are not only increasing ROI by 20 to 40 percent and improving the quality of your customers... their solution has already improved unit economics for leading companies such as Miro, Rappi, Moneyline and many, many more."" [06:09]

""So if you want to improve your LTV CAC ratio before your next board meeting, start by heading over to voyantis.ai slash 20VC. That's V-O-Y-N-T-I-S dot A-I slash 20VC to get a free value assessment."" [06:43]

""Canva helps your team go far together with their collaboration tools. Your team can work together in real-time on the same presentation, doc, whiteboard and more."" [07:03]

"Diego Oppenheimer states, 'If you think about what MLOps is and what really it encompasses, it's really like the automation to getting to faster, better, higher quality kind of machine learning throughput pipelines.' This emphasizes the importance of automation in achieving quality in ML operations." [01:31:23]

"Oppenheimer also mentions, 'I think we’re still in the phase where a thousand flowers are blooming and some of those are not going to work out, but I don’t think we actually know what this space is going to look like in 10 years.' This reflects uncertainty and potential in the evolving AI landscape." [08:53:10]

"Seeing open source is truly having its amazing moment in AI, with tools and communities flourishing to tackle various applications." [12:03]

"The total cost of ownership of open source software might turn out to be higher than companies anticipate due to the lack of support and the need for maintenance." [14:35]

"This idea of building a strong foundational layer and allowing for extensibility through plugins is not just a technical challenge but a business strategy for long-term viability." [16:30]

"The letter from Google stated that they don't have AI boats, nor does OpenAI, which highlights the questionable landscape of AI development and competition in the open-source realm." [03:45]

"It's interesting how the narrative shifts when you consider that the technology is available for everyone, yet the models produced are dependent on the community's contribution and innovation." [05:12]

"What I think the author means to say is that Google is capturing foundational work and is capturing essentially none of the value and is not on track to capture any of the value if things continue going this way." [37:00]

"The better the distribution mechanism for software, the easier it is to build the stuff. So the faster that you can ship that stuff to people, the higher fidelity, the more that you can learn from it, the better off, like all things equal that you're going to be." [46:31]

"And I think that it is almost certainly the case that's going to be true for pretty much any revolution in software, but especially like AI where the factors that you use to get into production quicker, the accessibility of that stuff, the more people that can actually use the technology, the more places that it's practical means that the more use cases are going to be, it's going to wedge itself into more use cases." [54:40]

""When you look at freemium and open source today that have worked, the best in class, you have to define what to put in free and what to put in premium."" [10:39:00]

""At its peak, Yoast was generating 15 million euros a year in revenue when we sold, which is not a lot compared to the 11 million sites we were servicing."" [09:22:00]

""I think people still underestimate what Matt has done with WordPress, more than 40% of websites on the web are WordPress sites."" [09:44:00]

"The biggest product mistake is thinking that people were using our features when we didn't know for sure. So we spent a whole lot of time building features that then nobody used." [14:08]

"When you think about doing an optimized power user, I'm fascinated there because quite often they're the ones most likely to churn. They're not the real lovers." [11:54]

"If you're going to use another CMS, I think you're pretty stupid because every other CMS is going to cost you more money." [19:15]

"The demand has to be there. You can't create the demand. So that's why the branding is important and you have to do other things as well." [22:07]

"I think the author of an article is going to be more important over the next few years than it has been in the past few years." [29:06]

"Some companies might lose that. I think the winners will not lose that. I think creativity is still what's going to make content truly good and truly unique." [30:53]

"SEO doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you land on a page that was written purely for SEO purposes, it doesn't have any value. You're not going to share that page with your friends." [00:02]

"What Google is panicking about is the quality of content on the web. The rise of generative technologies is leading to a flood of low-quality information." [01:05]

"If that page you land on from search is not something that you want to share with my friends, then that page is not worth its money." [01:31]

"The single biggest mistake people make when initiating SEO strategies today is not considering branding or the language that users utilize to describe their needs." [03:36]

"‘Miro acts as a single source of truth across teams, meaning you can get buy-in much faster from teams like marketing, engineering, sales,’ highlighting the collaborative advantages Miro provides." [00:56]

"‘Funnel is the world's first and only marketing data hub that takes all the manual effort out of data collection and lets you blend data from different platforms to unlock new, deeper insights,’ addressing the importance of modern marketing tools." [01:00]

"‘Jasper is an AI assistant for business that helps marketers, sales reps and other creators accelerate their writing process and repackage content into different formats, languages and tones,’ emphasizing Jasper's specialized utility for professionals." [01:04]