also referred to as: alphabet
includes Google Ads, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Google Cloud, Google Chrome, Google Search, Google Drive, Google Meet, Google Workspace, Google AdWords, Google Calendar and 18 more
45 statements across 30 episodes · 7 bullish · 28 bearish · 14 people on the record · first statement Apr 14, 2020 by Rob Walling · said 631 times in 157 episodes since 2020 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Rob Walling (472), Colin Bartlett (15), Mike Taber (13), Tracy Osborn (11), Derrick Reimer (9), Andy Kim (8), Kevin Wagstaff (6), John Warrillow (6)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2025 91 mentions in 18 episodes 5 per episode
- Episode 798 | Lessons From 10 Years of SaaS Growth Without a Hock...
- Episode 752 | The State of SEO in 2025
- Episode 792 | Hot Take Tuesday: GPT-5 Struggles, the A.I. Bubble,...
- Episode 750 | Making Your First Hire, Testing Prices, And More Li...
- Episode 790 | From Scrappy to Scalable: Evolving Your Role as a F...
- Episode 786 | Questions About Bootstrapping SaaS to a $90M Exit (...
- Episode 747 | Evolving SaaS Customer Success Over 7 Years (with J...
- Episode 802 | Marketing Not Scaling, Where to Publish Content, an...
- 10 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 133 mentions in 38 episodes 4 per episode
- Episode 746 | 9 Startup Predictions for 2025
- Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have...
- Episode 735 | The 8 Levels of SaaS Platform Risk (A Rob Solo Adve...
- Episode 725 | SEO in the Age of AI, Freemium, When Brand Becomes...
- Episode 722 | Bootstrapping a Vertical SaaS to 7-Figures in 18 Mo...
- Episode 711 | Finding Early Customers, Horizontal vs. Vertical, P...
- Episode 695 | Ideal Customers, Moving from B2C to B2B, and More L...
- Episode 736 | Founder Regrets, DIY vs. Hiring, Defining your ICP,...
- 30 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 91 mentions in 33 episodes 3 per episode
- Episode 647 | Equipping Sales & Support With Critical Product Kno...
- Episode 643 | Feature Flags, Impostor Syndrome, and More Listener...
- Episode 673 | Lifetime Plans vs Subscriptions, Testing an Idea Wi...
- Episode 663 | 5 Insights SaaS Founders Should Know About A.I. (Ig...
- Episode 678 | Selling a Half-Finished Product, Phased Launches, a...
- Episode 667 | Increase Your Exit Price by Decoupling Yourself fro...
- Episode 690 | When Opt-in Email Could Be Spam, Collecting Custome...
- Episode 666 | Entering a Competitive Market, Books for SaaS Found...
- 25 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 31 mentions in 6 episodes 5 per episode
- Episode 640 | Hot Take Tuesday: Recession and Bootstrappers, Chat...
- Episode 636 | A Customer-Led Approach to Driving More Recurring R...
- Episode 634 | Naming Your Startup, Tapping Out a Niche, and Licen...
- Episode 638 | How to Generate Startup Ideas (Plus 8 Ideas You Can...
- Episode 631 | Re-writing Your Codebase, Stair Stepping, and Diffi...
- Episode 616 | An 8-Figure SaaS Founder's Approach to Remote Work
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 132 mentions in 28 episodes 5 per episode
- Episode 564 | Running a Business with 10,000 Paid Subscribers
- Episode 552 | Google Audits, Partnerships, and Freemium with Mike Taber
- Episode 540 | Bootstrapper News. Twitter Spaces, Indie.vc Closing, Shopify, and More
- Episode 565 | Correlation vs. Causation, Focus, Sharing MRR, and More Listener Questions
- Episode 563 | The Struggle, Calls to Action, Selling Above $1M ARR, and More Listener Questions
- Episode 551 | Task-level vs. Project-level Thinkers, No Such Thing as an Autopilot
- Episode 546 | Hiring Entrepreneurial People, Anonymity, Disruptive Innovation, and More
- Episode 537 | On Launching, Funding, and Growth with Serial SaaS Founder Rand Fishkin
- 20 more episodes that year, every mention in 2021 →
2020 150 mentions in 32 episodes 5 per episode
- Episode 504 | 15 Tools We Use to Run Our Business
- Episode 521 | A Roundtable Discussion about a Potential Recession, Working from Home,
- Episode 511 | Raising Prices & Re-writing Your Codebase
- Episode 528 | 2021 Predictions from Rob and Mike
- Episode 525 | A Bootstrapping Artifact from 2005
- Episode 523 | Breaking Through Plateaus, Entrepreneurship for Kids, Common Bootstrapper
- Episode 503 | Idea Validation, Expanding Internationally, Affiliate Programs, and More
- Episode 516 | When to Re-write Your SaaS Codebase
- 24 more episodes that year, every mention in 2020 →
Everything said about Google, oldest first
Apr 14, 2020 bearish
Walling: Bootstrapped SaaS Businesses Rarely Last 10 to 20 Years
“Can't run a business like we run and expect it to be here in 10 or 20 years. A lot of these businesses just don't make it because of the massive shifts in Google and APIs and protocols and, you know, how many SaaS companies do we know that, that really last th…”
Nov 3, 2020 negative
Nov 3, 2020 negative
Walling: Google restricted keyword data to force businesses into buying ads
“Well, they pulled it out, and it was, they give some bullsh**t excuse about it being privacy. First, it was only, it was like if, only if it was over SSL, and then they just rolled it out to everything. And what it did is it forced you to buy ads from them. Be…”
Nov 10, 2020 positive
Hewitt: Consolidating into one domain beats maintaining separate brands for SEO
“I think for a lot of reasons, managing just one brand generally is a lot easier. From an SEO perspective, it definitely is better to have all of your kind of link juice pointing to one place. I think there will be people that say, yeah, but if you were two bra…”
Nov 18, 2020 neutral
Dec 22, 2020 bearish
Taber: Regulators will attempt to break up Big Tech, likely targeting Facebook
“There's going to be a over attempt by a government and I'm going to, you know, kind of lump a couple of them together, like the United States, either the United States federal government, the European union, or even maybe even, I doubt a state government would…”
Dec 22, 2020 negative
Feb 9, 2021 negative
Feb 9, 2021 negative
Jun 1, 2021 negative
Jun 1, 2021 negative
Taber: Google Mandated Minimum Price Floors For Third-Party Developer Security Audits
“The other piece, when I was talking to the three different companies, one of them basically let slip that Google came to them and said, you are required to charge at least this much money. And apparently they get copies of the invoices, which to me seems like …”
Aug 24, 2021 bearish
Aug 24, 2021 neutral
Orwell: Billion-dollar health media companies scale SEO by acquiring established domains
“Healthline, which is a billion-dollar company, WebMD, which is a billion-dollar company, and Everyday Health, also a billion-dollar company, they basically started dominating. But what's so genius, what they did, and mad respect to them, is they then started g…”
Aug 31, 2021
Walling: Autopilot businesses inevitably face major disruptions every 6 to 18 months
“You can't have autopilot businesses that are autopilot forever, because eventually Google smacks you down, you get some competitors, you have a server added, just code needs to be rewritten. Just something happens every, I'll say six to 18 months that derails …”
Dec 20, 2022 bearish
Feb 14, 2023 positive
Rob Walling: Startups solving urgent pains grow fastest via search intent
“If you're solving a blatant pain or an aspirin type of Pain, you have a huge advantage because people are searching for it, and that's where you do content marketing, and people search for that in Google or on YouTube, and you just get in front of them. Those …”
May 23, 2023
Jan 16, 2024 negative
Walling: Big tech pedigree is among the least important hiring metrics
“Where I get on an interview with anybody, developer, designer, support person, and I'm looking at their resume saying, oh, they worked at Google. They worked at Facebook. They must be really good at that. No, don't do that. Or they had, they were there for sev…”
Mar 5, 2024 positive
Walling: Vertical software founders do not need to be top-tier marketers
“We really like, I really like vertical software. We do at TinySeed because it's, you can dominate it. You're not competing with whoever, Microsoft, Google, Facebook. You don't have to be the best marketer. You just have to be better than the other, like five i…”
Apr 30, 2024 positive
Walling: Target LinkedIn for job titles, Facebook for psychographics, Google for intent
“If you want, if you know the job title, you go there. If you know the demographic, psychographics, you go to Facebook. And if you want intent and there is actual volume, then you go to Google if you have any money to spend.”
Jul 16, 2024
Oct 15, 2024 negative
Google updates have driven multi-million dollar affiliate businesses to zero overnight
“I've seen several businesses killed, you talk about Google changing their algorithm, you know, every, what, three, six, nine months, and entire affiliate businesses that were doing millions of dollars basically go to zero overnight.”
Oct 15, 2024 negative
Walling: Relying on Google SEO is riskier than technical infrastructure dependencies
“So the reason I have this as number six is that if bubble 10 X their pricing or had a big outage, you could rebuild that. And if you're hosted on AWS or using SendGrid or using WordPress, you can rebuild it. The risks are there, but they're lower than if you l…”
Dec 31, 2024 bearish
Walling: Google will see its biggest revenue drop ever due to AI
“So my sixth prediction is that Google will see its biggest ever drop in revenue Due to the transition from 10 blue links being the prominent way people search into AI ads, and I think Google's gonna have a bit of time that they're gonna need to figure it out”
Dec 31, 2024 bearish
Walling: Google organic SEO traffic will drop 15% to 25% in 2025
“So my fourth prediction for 2025 and the first new one is that search volume For Google organic SEO, and I'm talking about content-based keyword targeting, where you're cranking out an essay, an ultimate guide, a blog post, I think they will slide across the b…”
Jan 21, 2025 bearish
Jan 28, 2025 negative
Google aggressively penalizes domains that use obvious legacy SEO tactics
“A lot of it will actually hurt your rankings now, because Google basically went to the opposite end of the spectrum and said, look, if this thing even smells like an SEO touched it, we're going to just nuke it to oblivion. And they certainly, 100% do that at a…”
Jan 28, 2025
Scaled parasite SEO operations on major news sites generate hundreds of millions
“And they're making a ton of we're talking like tens of millions of dollars a month, hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And when it's fully scaled and fully operational, these are just colossal amounts of money. There's a few companies that kind of special…”
Jan 28, 2025
Lars Lofgren claims Google uses multi-channel brand presence for search rankings
“When Google is looking at things to rank and deciding who ranks for what, they do place a lot more emphasis in, okay, is this site, is this brand, is this entity, are they on social? Are they doing stuff in other channels? Is the traffic coming to this website…”
Jan 28, 2025 negative
Lars Lofgren says link building alone no longer guarantees search rankings
“The big loophole with Google used to be links. Like if you built enough links to the right page, you could basically rank for whatever you wanted. And that, that's how we got going, to be honest. We built a bunch of links to a very few key pages, and it was wo…”
Jan 28, 2025 neutral
Google's current algorithm prioritizes top 500 brand domains for search rankings
“That era ended and the new era is basically Google being like, okay, we're not going to spend nearly as much time figuring out what pages are good. We're just going to trust really, really major brands, really massive sites. And I think there's a lot of nuance…”
May 27, 2025 negative
Jun 17, 2025 bearish
Aug 5, 2025 negative
Paid Google and Facebook ad campaigns completely failed for Spectora
“Paid ads never seemed to hit for us, and it might have been the lack of expertise and sophistication with targeting and kind of like the full-stack setup, but like, running campaigns Out of Google and Facebook paid tended to result in tons of clicks, tons of w…”
Aug 5, 2025 positive
Wagstaff suspects YouTube engagement positively influences main Google search rankings
“YouTube is owned by Google, second biggest search engine on the planet. So keep in mind, good YouTube presence, I just believe has something to do with the main algorithm. I don't have any proof of that, but I have to believe clicks and signals into YouTube he…”
Aug 26, 2025 negative
Bernstein: Google engineers ignored Larry Page and Sergey Brin's unscaled review advice
“The founders, Larry and Sergey, who are some of the smartest people on the planet, they used to run the company by basically walking into a room, asking the team what they did, put it on a whiteboard, and then they would use their superior knowledge and intell…”
Sep 2, 2025 bearish
Vollset: LLM Capability Gains Are Approaching an Asymptote
“The data shows which it's really reaching, looks to be reaching some kind of asymptote. Like this asymptote can be very high, but It's still, to me, it seems like each new model that comes out, whether it's from ChatGPT or Google or Grok or whatever, it seems …”
Sep 2, 2025 negative
Vollset: Windsurf Deal Was a Massive Founder Payday Structured to Screw Employees
“The original deal, which was like a successful, holy crap, that's a big number deal was three billion. The Google aqua hire is 2.4. That's ballpark same number. So like, you got screwed as if this was a soft landing for the founders, but it was a massive payda…”
Sep 23, 2025 positive
Jan 6, 2026 negative
Roeder: 'Practice' was a terrible startup name because it ruined searchability
“I do think they had just a terrible name. And I don't think that names matter that much at the end of the day, but this name was impossible to Google, impossible to track. It's like, you can't see when people are talking about you on Reddit or Facebook or anyt…”
Jun 16, 2026 negative
Gomez: Prompting Users for Business Emails Reduced SignWell Conversions by 30%
“So we tried that, and this was one of the things we're like, yeah, not that Google sign up. Let's make them type in, and then, like, say, you know, type your business. And we didn't cut them off if they tried Gmail, but we just, and we had a, like, I don't kno…”
Jun 16, 2026 neutral
Jul 7, 2026 positive
Walling: Paid search traffic is not too expensive for pre-product validation
“I actually don't think Google traffic is too expensive. I think if Facebook or Instagram traffic isn't converting, I would probably spend more time trying to optimize those. I don't need to make money on the Google traffic. Even if I'm overpaying, I mean, unle…”
Aug 11, 2026 negative
Walling: Cloud programs require VC backing as cheap applicant filtering
“The challenges with these startup programs, Is they want companies that have, ultimately have a lot of money to spend, and it is giving away the razor to sell the blades type thing, or giving, you know, the first piece of candy is free, and they want you to st…”