Joost de Valk is the founder of Yoast and an angel investor. He is advising founders on selecting tech platforms for search engine optimization.
Insight
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…”
Opinion
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.”
Insight
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 …”
Insight
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 …”
Prediction Open · timeframe Apr 2028
De Valk: 60% to 80% of software code will be AI-generated in 5 years
“60 to 80. I, the thing is, it allows you to focus on business logic a whole lot more.”