Apr 12, 2023 · 1h 2m · news
Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of 20VC, Yoast SEO founder Joost de Valk discusses the creation and organic growth of his globally dominant plugin, the intricate economics of open-source and freemium business models, foundational SEO strategies for startups, and the disruptive impact of generative AI on both search engines and software development.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 25.3% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 4.4 Guest teaching 5.5 Guest disagreement 3.9 Harry pushing back 4.5
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 23:01 Dismissing pre-launch VC evaluations
Joost completely rejects Harry's premise about evaluating open source startups pre-launch, questioning why anyone would fund pre-launch when open source is built out in the open.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 5:26 Challenging the decision to bootstrapHarry forcefully pushes back on Joost's decision not to take funding, arguing that VC capital would have allowed them to accomplish in six months what took eighteen.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 26:56 Explaining transcript indexing and UI executionJoost dismantles Harry's assumption that podcast transcripts look ugly on a page by detailing scrollable divs and explaining how Google parses audio and text transcripts.
Harry holds his own ▶ 19:24 Deconstructing unit economics of freemium startupsHarry demonstrates strong market expertise by detailing how modern freemium startups adopt enterprise-level cost bases with SDRs and AEs without having the ACVs to back them up.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transitioning from Hobby to Real Business | 2 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Harry sets up the background of Yoast SEO and asks about the transition from side project to core business. Joost explains how his wife urged him to monetize or stop, leading to rapid initial revenue. | |
| Bootstrapping vs. Venture Capital and Hindsight Regrets | 4 | 4 | 3 | 6 | Harry repeatedly challenges Joost's decision to bootstrap, arguing that VC capital could have accelerated timeline from 18 months to 6. Joost resists the VC mindset, noting that software overhead was purely headcount. | |
| The Challenges of Open Source & Freemium Models | 3 | 7 | 3 | 2 | Joost educates Harry on the structural economics of open source, pointing out the discrepancy between web-scale reach and modest revenues. He highlights how VCs drastically underestimate WordPress compared to platforms like Shopify. | |
| Building a Brand and Avoiding Power User Traps | 4 | 6 | 4 | 5 | Harry questions Joost on why optimizing for power users is a bad idea. Joost corrects him, explaining that defaults matter most and product design should prioritize decisions over endless toggle options. | |
| Product Mistakes, Tracking, and Freemium Under Macro Pressure | 6 | 5 | 4 | 5 | Harry showcases SaaS financial expertise by pointing out the mismatch between bloated enterprise cost bases and cheap freemium ACVs. Joost agrees, sharing real-world telemetry lessons and pricing mismatches. | |
| The Nuances of SEO Strategy and Content Mistakes | 5 | 7 | 5 | 5 | Harry expresses skepticism about putting full podcast transcripts on site pages. Joost corrects him on UI execution (scrollable divs) and search indexing, while dispensing tactical SEO advice on category creation. | |
| The Threat and Opportunity of Generative AI in SEO | 6 | 6 | 5 | 6 | Harry pushes back on Yoast's plugin user experience, complaining about repetitive keyword prompts. Joost acknowledges the limitations of simplified scorecards while discussing AI's impact on content quality. | |
| The Future of AI and Joost's Angel Investing Strategy | 5 | 6 | 6 | 5 | Joost firmly rejects pre-launch VC funding dynamics and expresses strong socialist views on AI wealth inequality. In the quickfire round, he openly dismisses competitors like Webflow. |
Statements from this episode (22)
Yoast generated over $100K in its first month of monetization
“If I'm going to make a hundred K with this in the first year, then it's actually worth continuing doing this, and then I made more than a hundred K in the first month.”
Joost de Valk: Website owners want technical SEO abstracted away entirely
“There's basically two sides SEO, right? You have the technical stuff and you have the content side of things, and the technical stuff is not something that anyone wants to think about.”
Yoast reached one million active users as a free hobby plugin
“Is that the plugin became really big, so it had like a million users. WordPress was growing quite fast, and I suddenly had on this free plugin that I built as a hobby, a million users, and I was spending way too much time supporting it.”
Joost de Valk: Headcount is the only major cost in plugin businesses
“The funny thing about our sort of business is that you, the only cost that you really have is people.”
Joost de Valk: Had Yoast planned for acquisition, he would have hired less
“Had I known in the beginning that we'd be selling the company at some point, and how this all would go, I might have hired a bit less people”
Joost de Valk: Yoast powers 13M websites with ~120 employees
“In terms of, or any more, it's not, it's a hundred people, but if you look at, like, thirteen million websites having a 120 or so people is really not all that much people, right?”
De Valk: Freemium open-source brings web-scale problems with small-company income
“So what you get quite quickly with these models is that you have web skill problems and small company income.”
De Valk: Yoast reached €15M annual revenue across 11M sites at peak
“I mean, at its peak, Yoast was a fifteen million euros a year revenue when we sold. That's not a whole lot of money compared to the eleven million sites that we were running on at that time.”
De Valk: WordPress powers over 40% of websites versus Shopify's 2-3%
“More than 40% of websites on the web are WordPress sites. And companies like Shopify, and I heard your podcast with Toby, which was awesome, but Shopify has like two, three percent of the market, if that.”
De Valk: Over-allocating free features in open source risks project forks
“Putting too much in free early on is dangerous, because you can't really take it back. And ah, that, I think that's where open source slightly differs from SaaS, SAS, because in SaaS SAS, you can just take it back. And in open source, as soon as you've put it …”
De Valk: Branding is the most underestimated element in open source
“So the biggest underestimated thing in all of open source is branding, like actually building a proper brand for your company and thinking about, Hey, how, how do we want people to look at us?”
De Valk: Tech founders should stop optimizing software for power users
“Companies tend to optimize for the power user. And I think that's the thing that you don't have to do. That's like the exact opposite of what you should be doing. And it's very hard to do that well. So if you're just a developer leading a company like that, th…”
De Valk: SEO investment increases during economic downturns
“SEO is probably going to be invested in more instead of less in a down market because people look at their AdWords bill and they go like, oh, maybe we should do something about that.”
De Valk: Freemium startups build for scale they will never achieve
“A lot of those companies are also like, they're building for scale that they're never going to reach.”
Joost de Valk: Founders are stupid to use any CMS besides WordPress
“And honestly, WordPress is out there. So if you, 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.”
Joost de Valk: SEO cannot create demand, only capture existing search intent
“You can't really create demand with SEO. So that, I mean, that is the thing that, that is very counterintuitive to a lot of people, but SEO is very demand driven, just like AdWords is very demand driven. The demand has to be there. You can't create the demand.”
Joost de Valk: Series B companies should shift 10% of CPC budget to SEO
“So if you're already doing CPC, I take 10% of your CPC budget and allocate it to SEO.”
Joost de Valk: Google made tracking non-CPC marketing channels impossible
“Measuring the success of SEO is hard, because Google has very, very, very success, successfully, and I'm going to get shit for this Google has very successfully made it impossible for people to track the effect of anything but CPC.”
Joost de Valk: Yoast never spent money on ads before its acquisition
“So that's one of the funny things when you start selling your company, people start asking for things like your cost of acquisition per customer, and we were like, we never spent any ads, so it, ah, how, how would you calculate this?”
De Valk: Search engines will weight content authors more over next few years
“Search engines are bound to focus more on the author of the content than they have done for a while, because it's actually important for them to make sure that what's on that page is, is true and is good. So they want to make sure that they can actually trust …”
De Valk: Google will double down on E-E-A-T to combat AI content
“This is going to create a wave of very, very bad content on the web, and how are we going to surface the really good content? And that's why I expect them to be doubling down on things like the EA team, the things which they've had, expertise, authority, trust…”