The Exchanges

Q uh, meta description, uh, whatever, whatever, whatever. Uh, I love it. I, so I'm, totally, I'm not a technical person who loved that, but there's a moment when it changes from, like, a hobby that's kind of cool and kind of working, to like, oh wow, we actually have something. What was that catalyst for, I need to go all in on this? What was side hobby at the time?

A So I started my own company in 2010, basically doing consulting. I was working for Alex doing consulting for Facebook and, and, and doing consulting for eBay and getting companies like that. What happened 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. And my wife was quite clear, uh, Marika has been at the, well, at the premise of a whole lot of these smart decisions in life. Um, she, she was like, I don't need to make money Doing this. Oh, you need to stop doing it. And I'm like, yeah, you'll probably write. Um, and then I built, I first started with an add-on, so I built a video SEO add-on. Um, I had a, a small business plan for it. It was like, if I'm gonna make a hundred K with this in the first year, then it's actually worth continuing doing this because I was making quite a lot of money as an, as a consultant. So it had to actually offset that money. And then I made more than a hundred K in the first month. And I was like, oh, wait, There might be a bit more to this.

AI assessment note: “And then I made more than a hundred K in the first month.”

Q uh, meta description, uh, whatever, whatever, whatever. Uh, I love it. I, so I'm, totally, I'm not a technical person who loved that, but there's a moment when it changes from, like, a hobby that's kind of cool and kind of working, to like, oh wow, we actually have something. What was that catalyst for, I need to go all in on this? What was side hobby at the time?

A So I started my own company in 2010, basically doing consulting. I was working for Alex doing consulting for Facebook and, and, and doing consulting for eBay and getting companies like that. What happened 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. And my wife was quite clear, uh, Marika has been at the, well, at the premise of a whole lot of these smart decisions in life. Um, she, she was like, I don't need to make money Doing this. Oh, you need to stop doing it. And I'm like, yeah, you'll probably write. Um, and then I built, I first started with an add-on, so I built a video SEO add-on. Um, I had a, a small business plan for it. It was like, if I'm gonna make a hundred K with this in the first year, then it's actually worth continuing doing this because I was making quite a lot of money as an, as a consultant. So it had to actually offset that money. And then I made more than a hundred K in the first month. And I was like, oh, wait, There might be a bit more to this.

AI assessment note: “then I made more than a hundred K in the first month.”

Q source and kind of freemium, uh, OG on the show, and I want to start with something you said, which is open source slash freemium models are extremely hard to make work, but when they do, they lead to incredible potential, which VCs are underestimating. Um, let's break that down. Because I'm simple as a VC. Um, why are open source and freemium models so hard to make work first?

A So there's two, two sides to that. On the one hand, freemium is always going to be hard because you have to decide about, um, what, what to put in free and what to put in premium. Like, how do you attract the most users and at the same time get, have enough in premium to, um, you know, to actually convert them into paying customers. And the Add on thing that's hard there when you're in open source is that when people think that you're, you've got a good product, but too much of its premium is that they might just fork your premium product. Uh, and so, so you have to be extremely good. At what you do, and you also have to build, like, a sort of trust relationship with the, with the customer. So you have, um, and the user, uh, uh, they need to trust you to be better than the other options that are out there. And what I said, we have relatively few people compared to the number of people using EOS SEO. So what you, what you get quite quickly with these models is that you have web skill problems and small company income. Uh, 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, uh, eleven million sites that we were running on at that time. I mean, that is, so you're solving problems for a whole lot of sites with relatively little people. At the same time, the open source community controls a large part o…

AI assessment note: “freemium is always going to be hard because you have to decide about, um, what, what to put in free”

Q Do you know what? I'm very lucky to be ingratiated by such intelligent people, but I want to start at the beginning. So you started the Yoast SEO plugin as a hobby. It's now used by thirteen million sites, according to the trusty Google. What was the aha moment for, like, I have to create the Yoast SEO plugin that even we use at TwentyVC?

A I started as an SEO consultant, having my own website, doing some small things, and I built a couple of Different small plugins that did various specific SEO things, and I was a quite regular speaker at SEO conferences already by that time, and I, and people kept saying to me, like, yeah, well, we just want one plugin that does it all, and Um, there was one plugin out there that, that tried to do that, but wasn't really good enough yet. So I just combined what I had, the different plugins that I had into one thing, um, and then realized quite quickly that 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. So I, what I try to do, and I think we've quite successfully done over the years is take all the technical stuff away from people and just fix it for them and give them good feedback on their content. I think that that is what, well, this pretty simple recipe that has actually helped it grow so much.

AI assessment note: “people kept saying to me, like, yeah, well, we just want one plugin”

Q get in trouble with that one. Uh, I do just want to ask before we move on from freemium and open source. Again, I am an investor for a living. I, you said before that VCs do not, or VCs underestimate these models. Great. How do you look at them? How do you evaluate them? Is it, you know, forks on GitHub? What is the mechanism of determination for quality?

A So I'm kind of lucky there in that I, in terms of software, I can just look at the code. I'm developer enough that I can look at the code and see if it's any good. I'm arrogant enough to say that I think I can, I can actually determine that myself. Um, and then it's just looking at what users are saying, like looking at reviews, looking at how people are talking about it. And in, in these communities, what you, what you really get is that you have like the WordPress community is a, is a very It's a layered thing, but the inside WordPress communities, relatively small group of people that goes to WordCamps and that goes to these conferences. And when I say small, that's relative, right? I mean, WordCamp Europe will probably be a couple thousand people, uh, walking around talking about WordPress for a couple of days. But talking there and, and, and at conferences like that and hearing people talk about software and like, hey, that's cool. And this is, this is useful for this and this, and we, this solves this problem for me. It's actually very cool to listen to that and figure out like, hey, these are the ones that are really gonna make a change. So that's being in that community and actually caring about that community and being aligned with that community.

AI assessment note: “I can just look at the code... looking at what users are saying”

Q You mentioned hiring an expensive SEO consultant. You see so many people attempt SEO. What are the biggest mistakes you see founders make with SEO in the early days?

A I think the biggest mistake is one, come up with a brand that is not recognizable. So even in search, if people search through your problem area, they never search once, right? They always have like a search journey where they search for multiple words and for multiple things over a period of time. Even if they don't click your result, if they see your brand name a couple of times in that result, you're slowly building up confidence for your brand. So being recognizable in search is super important. And I think that people underestimate how important it actually is to have a brand that people can remember and that doesn't become very vague very quickly. That's one. The other is coming up with terms themselves for the, say you think you're very clever and you, and you create your own term for what you're doing. And nobody else uses that. So don't. Just use the words that everybody else uses.

AI assessment note: “I think the biggest mistake is one, come up with a brand that is not recognizable.”

Q doing a hundred K in a month pretty quickly, listen, Shaq told me one thing, well, he told me many things, but he told me VC gonna VC. Uh, and what he means by that is you can't take the VC out of the VC, and so when you're doing a hundred K a month, you're having people chase you down to invest. Why did you never take external funding?

A Why would we? So the thing is, we were growing quite, so first of all, I don't think that any of this was a plan upfront. I mean, there was no plan to, to sell the company. There was no plan to grow to as big as we, as we became, because it just happened. And we grew along with WordPress and, um, with Matt in many ways. And, And, and we were very lucky in a way that I picked the right platform in the beginning and built on that. Um, but in the beginning, it was very much about turning that hobby into a bit of a lifestyle business. We have four children. I was also spending a lot of time with them. Um, and I didn't necessarily want to build a huge business in the beginning. And then later on, when we realized that we, that we had, uh, quite a large business in our hands by that time, it really wasn't needed anymore. We were generating enough cash to grow into what we wanted to do. Um, the funny thing about our sort of business is that you, the only cost that you really have is people. Uh, so why, why take money?

AI assessment note: “We were generating enough cash to grow into what we wanted to do.”

Q because we could absolutely optimize that. If we go back to, like, the founder hat of, like, what it means to invest in SEO, the next question is, like, when's the right time? A lot of founders are like, Harry, I just need to get a couple of customers, I need to build the base, and then I'll think about it. When's the right time to start investing in SEO?

A So I think the first thing that if you pick the right platform to build your website on and make sure that it's relatively technically SEO friendly already, um, then you're good in the beginning. And then as soon as you start doing customer support, you'll get questions that you have more than two or three times. Start writing knowledge base articles for those. And it's as simple as that. Just start the things you're already writing anyway, because you're answering those customers and you're, you're, you're, you're fixing them. Reuse that content and put it on your site and, and then just build on that. So I think the right time to start investing in it is fairly early, but that doesn't mean hiring an expensive SEO consultant. It just means actually writing, putting content on your site and making sure that people can find what, uh, Well, what you, what you do.

AI assessment note: “the right time to start investing in it is fairly early”

Q That was challenging for a VC underwriting a large check to get used for you. to. Um, when you go inside companies today, you're investing, you're advising, what are the best SEO individuals and teams have and do, and what are the worst have and do?

A So I, I think the worst start looking at a very long list of technical things to fix and go from top to bottom and just spend months and months and months fixing things that really don't matter because the overall story is bad. Uh, the best go in and look at, okay, so what is our brand story? What is the, what is the thing that we're selling? Um, and they fix the Biggest technical problems, and then go into, ok, so how do we create a story around this, how do we create, like, how do we, together with comms and others, make sure that people that land on our site do the right things, and, and find the content that actually addresses their needs.

AI assessment note: “the worst start looking at a very long list of technical things to fix”

Q get in trouble with that one. Uh, I do just want to ask before we move on from freemium and open source. Again, I am an investor for a living. I, you said before that VCs do not, or VCs underestimate these models. Great. How do you look at them? How do you evaluate them? Is it, you know, forks on GitHub? What is the mechanism of determination for quality?

A So I'm kind of lucky there in that I, in terms of software, I can just look at the code. I'm developer enough that I can look at the code and see if it's any good. I'm arrogant enough to say that I think I can, I can actually determine that myself. Um, and then it's just looking at what users are saying, like looking at reviews, looking at how people are talking about it. And in, in these communities, what you, what you really get is that you have like the WordPress community is a, is a very It's a layered thing, but the inside WordPress communities, relatively small group of people that goes to WordCamps and that goes to these conferences. And when I say small, that's relative, right? I mean, WordCamp Europe will probably be a couple thousand people, uh, walking around talking about WordPress for a couple of days. But talking there and, and, and at conferences like that and hearing people talk about software and like, hey, that's cool. And this is, this is useful for this and this, and we, this solves this problem for me. It's actually very cool to listen to that and figure out like, hey, these are the ones that are really gonna make a change. So that's being in that community and actually caring about that community and being aligned with that community.

AI assessment note: “I can just look at the code... looking at what users are saying”

Q You mentioned hiring an expensive SEO consultant. You see so many people attempt SEO. What are the biggest mistakes you see founders make with SEO in the early days?

A I think the biggest mistake is one, come up with a brand that is not recognizable. So even in search, if people search through your problem area, they never search once, right? They always have like a search journey where they search for multiple words and for multiple things over a period of time. Even if they don't click your result, if they see your brand name a couple of times in that result, you're slowly building up confidence for your brand. So being recognizable in search is super important. And I think that people underestimate how important it actually is to have a brand that people can remember and that doesn't become very vague very quickly. That's one. The other is coming up with terms themselves for the, say you think you're very clever and you, and you create your own term for what you're doing. And nobody else uses that. So don't. Just use the words that everybody else uses.

AI assessment note: “I think the biggest mistake is one, come up with a brand that is not recognizable.”

Q doing a hundred K in a month pretty quickly, listen, Shaq told me one thing, well, he told me many things, but he told me VC gonna VC. Uh, and what he means by that is you can't take the VC out of the VC, and so when you're doing a hundred K a month, you're having people chase you down to invest. Why did you never take external funding?

A Why would we? So the thing is, we were growing quite, so first of all, I don't think that any of this was a plan upfront. I mean, there was no plan to, to sell the company. There was no plan to grow to as big as we, as we became, because it just happened. And we grew along with WordPress and, um, with Matt in many ways. And, And, and we were very lucky in a way that I picked the right platform in the beginning and built on that. Um, but in the beginning, it was very much about turning that hobby into a bit of a lifestyle business. We have four children. I was also spending a lot of time with them. Um, and I didn't necessarily want to build a huge business in the beginning. And then later on, when we realized that we, that we had, uh, quite a large business in our hands by that time, it really wasn't needed anymore. We were generating enough cash to grow into what we wanted to do. Um, the funny thing about our sort of business is that you, the only cost that you really have is people. Uh, so why, why take money?

AI assessment note: “We were generating enough cash to grow into what we wanted to do.”

Q lows of SEO. We, we met through Shaq, really, uh, and he told me about the instrumental work that you did on CoinDesk. So before we start on, uh, a lot of the, the dark art, so to speak, um, timing and budgets, what does it mean to invest in SEO? I often hear like, oh, we're going to invest in SEO. What does it mean to invest in SEO?

A It's a good question that doesn't really have a good answer. I think that every founder should understand the basics of SEO because it's going to help them in a whole lot of different things. There's a reason that almost every OG growth guy that you've spoken to or girl that you've spoken to in the last, uh, uh, in your episodes, so many of them are SEOs by background because What you need to do when you do SEO is you need to look at a whole lot of data, and you need to think about what do people search for? How do I describe my product in words that people actually use? Um, and when they have a problem, what are they searching for? What are these things, what are the words that people use to describe the problems that they have, and how can I tap into that? I actually think that that's good to think about when you're building a product. So investing in SEO starts there with actually thinking about what are people trying to, what are we, what are we solving? Which problem of our users are we solving? That's very, so that's where SEO is in the beginning and where it's important, I think. And then when you invest in SEO, you need content. And you need a good tech platform. 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. And then you need content, you need to …

AI assessment note: “So investing in SEO starts there with actually thinking about what are people trying to”

Q because we could absolutely optimize that. If we go back to, like, the founder hat of, like, what it means to invest in SEO, the next question is, like, when's the right time? A lot of founders are like, Harry, I just need to get a couple of customers, I need to build the base, and then I'll think about it. When's the right time to start investing in SEO?

A So I think the first thing that if you pick the right platform to build your website on and make sure that it's relatively technically SEO friendly already, um, then you're good in the beginning. And then as soon as you start doing customer support, you'll get questions that you have more than two or three times. Start writing knowledge base articles for those. And it's as simple as that. Just start the things you're already writing anyway, because you're answering those customers and you're, you're, you're, you're fixing them. Reuse that content and put it on your site and, and then just build on that. So I think the right time to start investing in it is fairly early, but that doesn't mean hiring an expensive SEO consultant. It just means actually writing, putting content on your site and making sure that people can find what, uh, Well, what you, what you do.

AI assessment note: “I think the right time to start investing in it is fairly early”

Q That was challenging for a VC underwriting a large check to get used for you. to. Um, when you go inside companies today, you're investing, you're advising, what are the best SEO individuals and teams have and do, and what are the worst have and do?

A So I, I think the worst start looking at a very long list of technical things to fix and go from top to bottom and just spend months and months and months fixing things that really don't matter because the overall story is bad. Uh, the best go in and look at, okay, so what is our brand story? What is the, what is the thing that we're selling? Um, and they fix the Biggest technical problems, and then go into, ok, so how do we create a story around this, how do we create, like, how do we, together with comms and others, make sure that people that land on our site do the right things, and, and find the content that actually addresses their needs.

AI assessment note: “I think the worst start looking at a very long list of technical things”

Q Do you feel we lose creativity in our content teams? And what I mean by that is you mentioned like the outlines that it can generate, um, and a lot of the low hanging fruit that it can take away. Is there a loss of creativity with not having to do this? It's like, you know, our arithmetic skills went down dramatically when calculators were introduced. Do we lose that?

A Um, I, 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 and shareable. And the thing is that SEO doesn't exist in a vacuum. So if you land on a page that was written purely for SEO purposes, and it doesn't have any value, you're not going to share that page with your friends. And at the same time, the thing that you want for pages to that rank in search and for them to be successful is that people will share them with their friends and will revisit them. So we have to make better web pages. We, I, and Google has been saying for years, you need to make websites for users, not for search engines. And I think they're absolutely right in that, like, if you're, if that page that you land up on From search, that you build for SEO, is not something that I want to share with my friends, then that page is not worth its money.

AI assessment note: “some companies might lose that. I think the winners will not lose that.”

Q Uh, final one. What one company growth strategy have you really been impressed by recently and why?

A So the obligatory answer here right now is OpenAI and Microsoft, right? I mean, that's what everybody has been saying for the last few, few episodes, but, um, I think that what Microsoft's doing with Bing right now is absolutely brilliant. I really love it. So Bing chat is, is like, it's very fun that, well, what they're doing there. It's also like, it's, it's a bit cheeky because it doesn't really work yet, but it's making everybody at Google so very like conscious of what they don't have. So I, I really like that. But in terms of other companies that, and that I really like, I'm always impressed when companies do Marketing towards developers very well and grow on top of that, because I do think that that is still an underappreciated way of going at the market. So companies like Algolia and, um, Well, a lot of them liked it, that actually do great developer outreach, provide absolutely awesome docs on how to work with their software and how to solve your problems with it.

AI assessment note: “what Microsoft's doing with Bing right now is absolutely brilliant”

Q source and kind of freemium, uh, OG on the show, and I want to start with something you said, which is open source slash freemium models are extremely hard to make work, but when they do, they lead to incredible potential, which VCs are underestimating. Um, let's break that down. Because I'm simple as a VC. Um, why are open source and freemium models so hard to make work first?

A So there's two, two sides to that. On the one hand, freemium is always going to be hard because you have to decide about, um, what, what to put in free and what to put in premium. Like, how do you attract the most users and at the same time get, have enough in premium to, um, you know, to actually convert them into paying customers. And the Add on thing that's hard there when you're in open source is that when people think that you're, you've got a good product, but too much of its premium is that they might just fork your premium product. Uh, and so, so you have to be extremely good. At what you do, and you also have to build, like, a sort of trust relationship with the, with the customer. So you have, um, and the user, uh, uh, they need to trust you to be better than the other options that are out there. And what I said, we have relatively few people compared to the number of people using EOS SEO. So what you, what you get quite quickly with these models is that you have web skill problems and small company income. Uh, 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, uh, eleven million sites that we were running on at that time. I mean, that is, so you're solving problems for a whole lot of sites with relatively little people. At the same time, the open source community controls a large part o…

AI assessment note: “freemium is always going to be hard because you have to decide about”

Q fascinated there because quite often they're the ones most likely to churn. They're not the real lovers. And actually I understand that optimize for the power user and for the super lover, Because they're your champion, they're the ones who are gonna espouse it to their friends and the community. Make the ones who love it, love it more, and they'll do the rest for you. Why am I wrong?

A Well, you're not. That's why it's super hard. So, um, I think the thing that, the fine line that I've always tried to do with Yoast is that we, we did the things automatically that the lovers and that like the really geeky SEOs really liked. So we fixed all the problems automatically and very cleanly. And we tried to keep the interface as simple as possible. And at the same time, we horribly feel that at times. I mean, it is super hard to keep a settings interface for an SEO plugin simple because there's so many things you can toggle and switch and change. And, and the thing is that once you look, start looking at some data and, and one of the harder parts is that you actually don't have that much data, uh, in, in our context, um, is that people Don't look at settings. So for an SEO plugin, they turn it on and they expect it to do magic. And that means that your defaults have to be incredibly good. And that every setting you add is basically just more noise. Um, so I, I think that the, uh, that the power is to make sure that you keep on doing the right things and, and reacting quickly. So one of the things we always did was whenever Google came out with new stuff is we'd be on that and we, and we'd have a new release ready a couple days later or even on the day itself to, to release, like, to add the features that were needed. And luckily Google talked to us, talked to us somet…

AI assessment note: “Well, you're not. That's why it's super hard.”

Q What elements of AI over the next years concern you that you don't think enough people are spending time on or thinking about?

A I think the biggest problem, and this is where it shows that I'm very European, um, is that we don't know what's in those large language models, and that we, and we really should. Uh, and, and we, uh, uh, sort of have a right to know as well, like, what did you train your model on? What can I, based on that, I can make a decision on whether I want to use it for a specific use case. Um, and I would be very much in favor of some regulation that actually say, hey, you, you need to disclose these things about your large language model, um, in order to be able to, to allow the general public to use it. Because then they can know.

AI assessment note: “we don't know what's in those large language models, and that we, and we really should”

Q So you mentioned CPC. I, I did want to get to this, but we mentioned that it takes a decent amount of time, especially if you're early. How do you measure along the way the effectiveness and success of your SEO strategy in those early days? How do you advise me on that?

A Well, not just early days. Measuring the success of SEO is hard, because Google has very, very, very success, successfully, and I'm going to get shit for this, uh, Google has very successfully made it impossible for people to track the effect of anything but CPC. So they, every company out there either uses last click attribution or something or an attribution system where the last click is important. And the last click is in most cases going to be a brand search because you've convinced someone to buy somewhere in the process. Um, we don't know which keywords people search for anymore when they get to a site because Google hides those, and there's like, so it's actually quite hard to say, hey, how well does SEO work for us in our business? The same way that it's hard to tell the results of a TV ad. But that doesn't mean that TV advertising doesn't work, nor does it mean that SEO doesn't work. It, it really is a, something that's going to blow up the rest of your, uh, um, results and, and it might be hard to attribute. So I think actually that's one of the falsities that we have in the, in the whole growth world is that we can measure everything. I don't think you can.

AI assessment note: “one of the falsities that we have in the whole growth world is that we can measure everything”

Q fascinated there because quite often they're the ones most likely to churn. They're not the real lovers. And actually I understand that optimize for the power user and for the super lover, Because they're your champion, they're the ones who are gonna espouse it to their friends and the community. Make the ones who love it, love it more, and they'll do the rest for you. Why am I wrong?

A Well, you're not. That's why it's super hard. So, um, I think the thing that, the fine line that I've always tried to do with Yoast is that we, we did the things automatically that the lovers and that like the really geeky SEOs really liked. So we fixed all the problems automatically and very cleanly. And we tried to keep the interface as simple as possible. And at the same time, we horribly feel that at times. I mean, it is super hard to keep a settings interface for an SEO plugin simple because there's so many things you can toggle and switch and change. And, and the thing is that once you look, start looking at some data and, and one of the harder parts is that you actually don't have that much data, uh, in, in our context, um, is that people Don't look at settings. So for an SEO plugin, they turn it on and they expect it to do magic. And that means that your defaults have to be incredibly good. And that every setting you add is basically just more noise. Um, so I, I think that the, uh, that the power is to make sure that you keep on doing the right things and, and reacting quickly. So one of the things we always did was whenever Google came out with new stuff is we'd be on that and we, and we'd have a new release ready a couple days later or even on the day itself to, to release, like, to add the features that were needed. And luckily Google talked to us, talked to us somet…

AI assessment note: “Well, you're not. That's why it's super hard.”

Q So you mentioned CPC. I, I did want to get to this, but we mentioned that it takes a decent amount of time, especially if you're early. How do you measure along the way the effectiveness and success of your SEO strategy in those early days? How do you advise me on that?

A Well, not just early days. Measuring the success of SEO is hard, because Google has very, very, very success, successfully, and I'm going to get shit for this, uh, Google has very successfully made it impossible for people to track the effect of anything but CPC. So they, every company out there either uses last click attribution or something or an attribution system where the last click is important. And the last click is in most cases going to be a brand search because you've convinced someone to buy somewhere in the process. Um, we don't know which keywords people search for anymore when they get to a site because Google hides those, and there's like, so it's actually quite hard to say, hey, how well does SEO work for us in our business? The same way that it's hard to tell the results of a TV ad. But that doesn't mean that TV advertising doesn't work, nor does it mean that SEO doesn't work. It, it really is a, something that's going to blow up the rest of your, uh, um, results and, and it might be hard to attribute. So I think actually that's one of the falsities that we have in the, in the whole growth world is that we can measure everything. I don't think you can.

AI assessment note: “one of the falsities that we have in the whole growth world is that we can measure everything”

Q Do you feel we lose creativity in our content teams? And what I mean by that is you mentioned like the outlines that it can generate, um, and a lot of the low hanging fruit that it can take away. Is there a loss of creativity with not having to do this? It's like, you know, our arithmetic skills went down dramatically when calculators were introduced. Do we lose that?

A Um, I, 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 and shareable. And the thing is that SEO doesn't exist in a vacuum. So if you land on a page that was written purely for SEO purposes, and it doesn't have any value, you're not going to share that page with your friends. And at the same time, the thing that you want for pages to that rank in search and for them to be successful is that people will share them with their friends and will revisit them. So we have to make better web pages. We, I, and Google has been saying for years, you need to make websites for users, not for search engines. And I think they're absolutely right in that, like, if you're, if that page that you land up on From search, that you build for SEO, is not something that I want to share with my friends, then that page is not worth its money.

AI assessment note: “some companies might lose that. I think the winners will not lose that.”

Q So you said about brand story. We're going to do this in real time. Cause there's going to be a load of founders that listen to this and go, oh, like, great. I get it. I get it. But what does that actually mean for us? So Yoast, Yoast SEO for everyone. That is, is that your brand story? Just so I understand, like, is that what you want?

A So this is where it always gets, because I think Yoast as a company, I can still do this better than we probably do. Um, And I still say we, even though I'm not officially there for a bit now. Um, yes, it is like, I, I do think that SEO for everyone is the thing that Yoast does. It is as literally making SEO accessible to everyone. But the things that people search for are terms like WordPress SEO. And if you search for WordPress SEO, you'll either end up on a plugin page or on an article page that gives you a very long things, list of things to do for SEO, and it gives you, it explains to you how SEO works.

AI assessment note: “yes, it is like, I, I do think that SEO for everyone is the thing”

Q What worries me is actually like, Everyone agrees that it's going to create many billion dollar companies with 10 or 20 employees, large engineers. What that does to wealth inequality is terrible, even worse than what we have today. Do you not worry that we just usher in a new phase of income inequality and wealth inequality that we've never seen before?

A Um, well, yes. Um, I, so this is where I admit that I'm Pretty much a socialist, which I know is a bad word to most Americans. Um, no, yeah, I do worry about that. I do worry about the fact that, uh, that we, that the wealth inequality we create is not something that's going to be able to, we're going to be able to sustain. Um, so we need better systems for that. And I also worry about, like, How, how do we even make this understandable to politicians at some point? Like, are they going to be too late at the point where they start regulating this, where we've already gone past everything that they could fix?

AI assessment note: “yeah, I do worry about that. I do worry about the fact”

Q So you don't, so that's fascinating. So you don't think that, by the way, the funding hype is overhyped. You think this is justified? You think this is a fundamental platform shift like mobile was?

A And of course, yeah, of course the funding hype is overhyped. I mean, but that's, it always is. But it's also because a lot of money has to go into it, and we have to try a lot of different things to figure out which ones work. I, so I do really think that, that AI can make a very, very different, uh, well, can, can, can change where we go in terms of how big companies need to be to do things and how many things we can do on a day. I think using machine learning to, to do so much of the work that people are doing on a day-to-day basis could be very powerful, but we need to get better at Actually understanding what is machine learned. So we need explainable AI in a way. We need to actually understand what it's doing. So we can train a model to say, hey, you are getting credit. You are not getting credit. But in the end, we actually have to be able to explain why, why it's making that decision.

AI assessment note: “yeah, of course the funding hype is overhyped. I mean, but that's, it always is.”

Q I think dilution-wise you're absolutely right. If you could turn the clock back 10 years, or to 2010, when you started an incorporation, what would you do differently?

A The thing is, in, with hindsight, it's very easy to say that, right? It's very easy to say, I would have done this or that differently. Had I known in the beginning that we'd be selling the company at some point, and, and how this all would go, I might have hired a bit less people, and, and, and, but, because we, A whole lot of the things that we did, we did just because we thought it was fun, and not necessarily because we were thinking about how to, like, make the most money. Um, if you, if I look, you know, at it and back at it, maybe we hired a bit too much at, at certain points in time, and, and also, right now, we, we're really not that big. EOS as a company is not that big anymore. Uh, in terms of, or any more, it's not, it's a hundred people, but if you look at, like, thirteen million websites, uh, having a 120 or so people is really not all that much people, right?

AI assessment note: “I might have hired a bit less people”

Q lows of SEO. We, we met through Shaq, really, uh, and he told me about the instrumental work that you did on CoinDesk. So before we start on, uh, a lot of the, the dark art, so to speak, um, timing and budgets, what does it mean to invest in SEO? I often hear like, oh, we're going to invest in SEO. What does it mean to invest in SEO?

A It's a good question that doesn't really have a good answer. I think that every founder should understand the basics of SEO because it's going to help them in a whole lot of different things. There's a reason that almost every OG growth guy that you've spoken to or girl that you've spoken to in the last, uh, uh, in your episodes, so many of them are SEOs by background because What you need to do when you do SEO is you need to look at a whole lot of data, and you need to think about what do people search for? How do I describe my product in words that people actually use? Um, and when they have a problem, what are they searching for? What are these things, what are the words that people use to describe the problems that they have, and how can I tap into that? I actually think that that's good to think about when you're building a product. So investing in SEO starts there with actually thinking about what are people trying to, what are we, what are we solving? Which problem of our users are we solving? That's very, so that's where SEO is in the beginning and where it's important, I think. And then when you invest in SEO, you need content. And you need a good tech platform. 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. And then you need content, you need to …

AI assessment note: “when you invest in SEO, you need content. And you need a good tech platform.”

Q So you said about brand story. We're going to do this in real time. Cause there's going to be a load of founders that listen to this and go, oh, like, great. I get it. I get it. But what does that actually mean for us? So Yoast, Yoast SEO for everyone. That is, is that your brand story? Just so I understand, like, is that what you want?

A So this is where it always gets, because I think Yoast as a company, I can still do this better than we probably do. Um, And I still say we, even though I'm not officially there for a bit now. Um, yes, it is like, I, I do think that SEO for everyone is the thing that Yoast does. It is as literally making SEO accessible to everyone. But the things that people search for are terms like WordPress SEO. And if you search for WordPress SEO, you'll either end up on a plugin page or on an article page that gives you a very long things, list of things to do for SEO, and it gives you, it explains to you how SEO works.

AI assessment note: “yes, it is like, I, I do think that SEO for everyone”