The Wisdom Wall

8 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.

Everyone Ryan Allis (13)Wade Foster (12)Cameron Herold (12)Helen Hastings (11)Seth Godin (10)Ethan Smith (8)Rob Howard (7)Steve Huffman (6)Ricardo Vice Santos (6)Neil Patel (6)Brian Chesky (6)Ben Tossell (6)Sam Ovens (5)Jordan Harbinger (5) Best Newest Oldest

“I think it's hard for early stage companies, which is why I mentioned when, when a startup asked me what they should do in SEO, I say, don't work on it and wait until you're larger. Wait until you're, you know, series A or later, maybe series B and later, because it's, it's, it's hard. Like maybe you could get a little…”

Ethan Smith, Nov 11, 2025

“And if in chat you say, what's the best website builder and Webflow's URL is the number one citation and nobody else mentions Webflow, then they won't win. And so for these popular questions, the way to win is not just a page on your site. It's pages off of your site.”

Ethan Smith, Nov 11, 2025

“So actually to do answer engine optimization really well, I think it's not doing pure answer engine optimization. It's doing all of these other channels, but doing YouTube and Reddit with the intention of helping you on answer engine optimization.”

Ethan Smith, Nov 11, 2025

“If I'm making viral YouTube videos and, uh, you know, a TikTok video and an Instagram story and a Reddit thread, I can be the best product tomorrow. So the time to impact is fast and I can grow on these other channels without really having a substantial brand.”

Ethan Smith, Nov 11, 2025

“And the less entertaining your product is, the better, the more interesting video is. And the reason why I say that is because video is made to be entertaining and entertaining categories like food, travel, beauty, uh, are the most crowded and the least entertaining things are the least crowded. So website builders is…”

Ethan Smith, Nov 11, 2025

“help center is actually a great place to do that because help center is you talking about how your product works and what it does when it does not do. And so help center optimization is not something you would focus on for SEO, but you would for answer engine optimization. Because that's where you have all this…”

Ethan Smith, Nov 11, 2025

“Yes, you do not need to create millions of pages for every single question. You need to generally answer the question... It's grouping and theming them. And the AI is indeed smart enough to just find the answer. So you don't need it explicitly verbatim exact match for every single question.”

Ethan Smith, Nov 11, 2025

“The reason why the control matters is because LM's are growing a lot, and charts are just going to naturally go up because they're growing a lot. So if you don't have a control, you don't know whether or not you caused an effect.”

Ethan Smith, Nov 11, 2025
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