Joost de Valk
Partner, Emilia Capital. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderinvestorexecutiveengineer@jdevalk ↗LinkedIn ↗joost.blog ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
He is the founder of Yoast and creator of the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, which was acquired by Newfold Digital in 2021. Through his investment firm Emilia Capital, he invests in and advises early-stage open-source, web technology, and digital marketing ventures.
2shows
2appearances
39statements
10resolved
8supported
0contradicted
80%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Joost de Valk said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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…”
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.”
De Valk: Matt Mullenweg and Automattic cannot afford to acquire Yoast
“I don't think he can afford us, first of all.”
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 …”
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.”
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: 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.”
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: 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.”
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…”
De Valk: Yoast suffered 70% annual churn under manual renewals
“For far too long, our term was of like, 70%.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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.”
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: 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?”
Joost de Valk: Free tiers should include essentials, paid tiers save time
“We have a pretty strict rule within the company on everything that we think every, every side on the planet needs to do the basic works we put into our free plugin and then stuff that saves you time we put into the premium plugin.”
De Valk: Yoast subscription churn dropped to roughly 15%
“The first bunch of people that signed up to a subscription are now over a year in, and for them we only have, like, 15%.”
The other half of the tape: Joost de Valk's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Andrea Volpini 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 2
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Joost's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 20VCLEDGER | Partner, Emilia Capital | 1 | 22 | 50% 2/4 | full record on 20VC → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Partner, Emilia Capital | 1 | 17 | 100% 6/6 | full record on Top Founders → |