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Being a solo founder myself here are a few tips I would like to add: 1. Solo founders are most often devs, which means they focus 90% of their energy on dev an

Being a solo founder myself here are a few tips I would like to add: 1. Solo founders are most often devs, which means they focus 90% of their energy on dev and what little remains on marketing. Unfortunately this is a easy trap to fall into and you should invest equal if not more time doing/learning SEO, content marketing (which you've done here very successfully btw) and building an audience. 2. Making a product without any user feedback. You work 1 year on a product and realize people don't get your idea. That's why it is essential to get feedback every step of the way and your spouse doesn't count :D 3. The good news is being a solo founder is no longer very unique thing. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are doing this and hang out on online communities like indiehackers, makerlog, etc. 4. After trying out hundred tools I've found that nothing beats trello. To each his own though but you really need a todo tool when working alone to keep on track. I've actually written a local trello for myself with one twist - the tool assigns me a task daily and as soon as mark it as complete it assigns me the next item from the list. But at any moment there is never more than 1 item on my "doing" list. It was because i was spending inordinate amount of time bike-shedding when i don't have one single todo.

JohnStrangeII 6y ago
I have a question about this. Is SEO really still relevant and necessary? Is it really effective? I've been wondering about this for a while. It seems to me that everybody is doing it anyway, and that in the end what counts is that many pages link to your page. Meanwhile, search engines heavily penalize certain "optimizations". If you have a page that loads instantly and contains all the standard meta tags and keywords, does additional SEO really make a difference? Are there really any "tricks" that work?
- yread 6y ago
  I would also like to know, but SEO is also about the backlinks. Quantity and what anchor text they use, where are they etc.
- jchook 6y ago
  sitemap.xml can cause your search result to appear with sub-links. Keyword density (just the right amount) and total word count seem to have an effect and I’ve seen targeted landers work very well for specific search phrases. Backlinks will probably always be relevant to rankings as they were the original bedrock principle behind PageRank. If you get prominent blogs to link to you, that can help a lot. Inversely, use rel=nofollow on anchors to avoid seeping relevance to other pages. Ever since Mobilegeddon your site MUST be mobile friendly or you will get penalized. Also other UI stuff matters (E.g. don’t put ads above the fold) Not an SEO expert here but I would consider those effective and small things you can do for SEO.
  - aledalgrande 6y ago
    Also performance - make sure you use this tool https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- graeme 6y ago
  A lot of people don’t do technical SEO right. It sounds like you’re asking about whether there is something other than technical SEO and links to do right? Not really. If you write good content, with relevant keywords, and people link to it, that is good SEO. Not clear what distinction you’re trying to draw. There may be some scammy stuff with short term results, but you’re always one step away from an algo change or a manual penalty. Edit: I forgot good internal linking/url schemes. Those matter.
  - tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
    There's gotta be like a github repo somewhere that lays out the actual technical aspects of SEO, without any of the bullshit. Anyone know of a project like that?
    - wolco 6y ago
      It would change based on google rollouts. A forum would have more upto date information.
- superasn 6y ago
  Yes SEO is still very much relevant and effective IMO. Regardless of the paid ads, Google sends a lot of organic traffic when you rank for the right keywords. If you were to buy this traffic you would spends thousand of dollars doing it. Same for Youtube. A good video is amazing source of targeted prospects. Just think about how you find a new service, chances are you googled it and tried the 2-3 results. Now as for the question - is it necessary? The answer is yes. Because if you don't do it your competitor will and as the joke goes "The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google". > Are there really any "tricks" that work? I'm no SEO expert and so I don't care for meta tags, keywords. Title and page description are still important I think. I believe the most relevant things are the time user a spends on your page and social signals (shares, etc) and unfortunately backlinks from high authority pages (this is the worst part of SEO). The good news is that you don't have to do anything sneaky to do SEO anymore. Make an excellent page on which a user spends a lot of time (so good that he actually bookmarks or shares it) and it starts ranking. For all its evilness Google is still doing something right here.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
One thing I disagree on is that you should spend equal time on everything, at least at first. The way I see it is that product development should still come first, but marketing and building an audience should be tied into that process instead of being an afterthought. When you're building the product out initially there's just so much shit to do, I think if you don't dedicate most of your time to building it takes too long to get anything done. Perhaps I'm biased as I'm trying to juggle a full-time job and building my product. I barely have enough time to build stuff, let alone get distracted with things like SEO.
jahbrewski 6y ago
While I agree with the sentiment of #1, I would argue that sales are more important than marketing at this stage. You can spin your wheels “learning SEO” and “creating content” with very little tangible results. In the beginning, sales + product are just about all that matter.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wolco 6y ago
  Sales without marketing isn't the best strategy, it literally turns you into a one man[selling machine where everything is based on your time. Marketing develops channels of customers.
  - jameslk 6y ago
    This really depends on the stage your company is at. If you haven't found product-market fit, you need to spend a majority of your time in sales mode talking to potential customers/users so you can figure out who your ideal market is and what your market wants. If you try to start marketing without finding product-market fit, you may end up wasting a lot of time and money without knowing whether anyone even wants your product. It also depends on who you're selling to as well. Consumer/SMB customers may require less sales efforts than enterprise customers. You will always want to start with talking to users regardless, which is sales.
  - jahbrewski 6y ago
    Well, you sort of described the position I'm in :) Given that, do you have any recommendations for developing channels of customers? I haven't really hired for marketing before - what should I be looking for in that role?
    - bushido 6y ago
      Outsource parts of it: - Content writers: Helps with Long tail SEO and building thought leadership; Ask within your network if they know someone. - Website design and branding: Make a good first impression - Banner and booth design for Conferences: Hopefully the folks from the design and branding can do this. caveat: Once this becomes a viable channel again. - Ranking etc: Sign-up for a subscription of SEO Moz or something similar - Adword: DIY Honestly it's much much harder hiring for Marketing. If you do hire someone – find someone good at Project managing external resources.
lambdatronics 6y ago
Hey, I'd be interested in your local trello. I was meaning to write a todo-app based on best psych best practices, especially only presenting the highest priority ( = urgent * important) item at any given time. I also wanted to add ordered sub-tasks, due-date, and time estimate features so that the urgency ramps up automatically as the remaining time to complete a task approaches the estimated length of the task.
- capnorange 6y ago
  You should look at Taskwarrior for some inspiration! I use TW and it has the features you mentioned(and I use them regularly). Urgency is derived from certain coefficients[1]. [1] https://taskwarrior.org/docs/urgency.html https://taskwarrior.org/docs/urgency.html
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    The problem I have with Taskwarrior is that (from a layman's point of view, i.e. mine) there's a lot of new information you need to learn just to get to the point of a simple TODO. Whereas Trello has the massive benefit of being intuitive and you're up and running in seconds after making the board without even having to read any docs. Anyway I'd be interested in learning Taskwarrior, but in my day job I work in a team and I can't make them use that kind of tooling.
- superasn 6y ago
  Sure thing. It's open source and you can find it here (1). Unfortunately it's very badly written (sorry) because I wrote it just for myself on a weekend and is very limited, just enough to get the job done for me. (1) https://github.com/san-kumar/kanban https://github.com/san-kumar/kanban
- MavropaliasG 6y ago
  Try this open source project, I set it up on shared hosting and it's amazing and full-featured https://github.com/kanboard/kanboard https://github.com/kanboard/kanboard
- 6y ago

JohnStrangeII 6y ago

I have a question about this. Is SEO really still relevant and necessary? Is it really effective? I've been wondering about this for a while. It seems to me that everybody is doing it anyway, and that in the end what counts is that many pages link to your page. Meanwhile, search engines heavily penalize certain "optimizations". If you have a page that loads instantly and contains all the standard meta tags and keywords, does additional SEO really make a difference? Are there really any "tricks" that work?

yread 6y ago
I would also like to know, but SEO is also about the backlinks. Quantity and what anchor text they use, where are they etc.
jchook 6y ago
sitemap.xml can cause your search result to appear with sub-links. Keyword density (just the right amount) and total word count seem to have an effect and I’ve seen targeted landers work very well for specific search phrases. Backlinks will probably always be relevant to rankings as they were the original bedrock principle behind PageRank. If you get prominent blogs to link to you, that can help a lot. Inversely, use rel=nofollow on anchors to avoid seeping relevance to other pages. Ever since Mobilegeddon your site MUST be mobile friendly or you will get penalized. Also other UI stuff matters (E.g. don’t put ads above the fold) Not an SEO expert here but I would consider those effective and small things you can do for SEO.
- aledalgrande 6y ago
  Also performance - make sure you use this tool https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
graeme 6y ago
A lot of people don’t do technical SEO right. It sounds like you’re asking about whether there is something other than technical SEO and links to do right? Not really. If you write good content, with relevant keywords, and people link to it, that is good SEO. Not clear what distinction you’re trying to draw. There may be some scammy stuff with short term results, but you’re always one step away from an algo change or a manual penalty. Edit: I forgot good internal linking/url schemes. Those matter.
- tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
  There's gotta be like a github repo somewhere that lays out the actual technical aspects of SEO, without any of the bullshit. Anyone know of a project like that?
  - wolco 6y ago
    It would change based on google rollouts. A forum would have more upto date information.
superasn 6y ago
Yes SEO is still very much relevant and effective IMO. Regardless of the paid ads, Google sends a lot of organic traffic when you rank for the right keywords. If you were to buy this traffic you would spends thousand of dollars doing it. Same for Youtube. A good video is amazing source of targeted prospects. Just think about how you find a new service, chances are you googled it and tried the 2-3 results. Now as for the question - is it necessary? The answer is yes. Because if you don't do it your competitor will and as the joke goes "The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google". > Are there really any "tricks" that work? I'm no SEO expert and so I don't care for meta tags, keywords. Title and page description are still important I think. I believe the most relevant things are the time user a spends on your page and social signals (shares, etc) and unfortunately backlinks from high authority pages (this is the worst part of SEO). The good news is that you don't have to do anything sneaky to do SEO anymore. Make an excellent page on which a user spends a lot of time (so good that he actually bookmarks or shares it) and it starts ranking. For all its evilness Google is still doing something right here.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

One thing I disagree on is that you should spend equal time on everything, at least at first. The way I see it is that product development should still come first, but marketing and building an audience should be tied into that process instead of being an afterthought. When you're building the product out initially there's just so much shit to do, I think if you don't dedicate most of your time to building it takes too long to get anything done. Perhaps I'm biased as I'm trying to juggle a full-time job and building my product. I barely have enough time to build stuff, let alone get distracted with things like SEO.

jahbrewski 6y ago

While I agree with the sentiment of #1, I would argue that sales are more important than marketing at this stage. You can spin your wheels “learning SEO” and “creating content” with very little tangible results. In the beginning, sales + product are just about all that matter.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wolco 6y ago
Sales without marketing isn't the best strategy, it literally turns you into a one man[selling machine where everything is based on your time. Marketing develops channels of customers.
- jameslk 6y ago
  This really depends on the stage your company is at. If you haven't found product-market fit, you need to spend a majority of your time in sales mode talking to potential customers/users so you can figure out who your ideal market is and what your market wants. If you try to start marketing without finding product-market fit, you may end up wasting a lot of time and money without knowing whether anyone even wants your product. It also depends on who you're selling to as well. Consumer/SMB customers may require less sales efforts than enterprise customers. You will always want to start with talking to users regardless, which is sales.
- jahbrewski 6y ago
  Well, you sort of described the position I'm in :) Given that, do you have any recommendations for developing channels of customers? I haven't really hired for marketing before - what should I be looking for in that role?
  - bushido 6y ago
    Outsource parts of it: - Content writers: Helps with Long tail SEO and building thought leadership; Ask within your network if they know someone. - Website design and branding: Make a good first impression - Banner and booth design for Conferences: Hopefully the folks from the design and branding can do this. caveat: Once this becomes a viable channel again. - Ranking etc: Sign-up for a subscription of SEO Moz or something similar - Adword: DIY Honestly it's much much harder hiring for Marketing. If you do hire someone – find someone good at Project managing external resources.

lambdatronics 6y ago

Hey, I'd be interested in your local trello. I was meaning to write a todo-app based on best psych best practices, especially only presenting the highest priority ( = urgent * important) item at any given time. I also wanted to add ordered sub-tasks, due-date, and time estimate features so that the urgency ramps up automatically as the remaining time to complete a task approaches the estimated length of the task.

capnorange 6y ago
You should look at Taskwarrior for some inspiration! I use TW and it has the features you mentioned(and I use them regularly). Urgency is derived from certain coefficients[1]. [1] https://taskwarrior.org/docs/urgency.html https://taskwarrior.org/docs/urgency.html
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  The problem I have with Taskwarrior is that (from a layman's point of view, i.e. mine) there's a lot of new information you need to learn just to get to the point of a simple TODO. Whereas Trello has the massive benefit of being intuitive and you're up and running in seconds after making the board without even having to read any docs. Anyway I'd be interested in learning Taskwarrior, but in my day job I work in a team and I can't make them use that kind of tooling.
superasn 6y ago
Sure thing. It's open source and you can find it here (1). Unfortunately it's very badly written (sorry) because I wrote it just for myself on a weekend and is very limited, just enough to get the job done for me. (1) https://github.com/san-kumar/kanban https://github.com/san-kumar/kanban
MavropaliasG 6y ago
Try this open source project, I set it up on shared hosting and it's amazing and full-featured https://github.com/kanboard/kanboard https://github.com/kanboard/kanboard
6y ago