Episode 725 | SEO in the Age of AI, Freemium, When Brand Becomes Important, and More Advanced Listener Questions (with Ruben Gamez)

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2024

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In episode 725, join Rob Walling and Ruben Gamez as they answer several more advanced listener questions. They discuss the challenges of pursuing freemium as a bootstrapper and make a suggestion that might surprise you. Rob and Ruben also talk about why building your business as a SaaS founder is usually the best way to build your brand indirectly. Episode Sponsor: Hiring senior developers can really move the needle in your business, but if you bring on the wrong person, you can quickly burn through your runway. If you need help finding a vetted, senior, results-oriented developer, you should reach out to today’s sponsor, Lemon.io. For years, they’ve been helping our audience find high quality, global talent at competitive rates, and they can help you too. Longtime listener Chaz Yoon, hired a senior developer from Lemon.io and said his hire ”definitely knew his stuff, provided appropriate feedback and pushback, and had great communication, including very fluent English. He really exceeded my expectations.” Chaz said he’d definitely use Lemon.io again when he’s looking for a senior level engineer. To learn more and get a 15% discount on your first four weeks of working with a developer at lemon.io/startups. Topics we cover: 2:31 – Considering a freemium plan as a bootstrapper 9:52 – Freemium, but without the intent to convert free users 12:24 – Raising prices as an alternative to starting a freemium plan 18:32 – When to start caring about your “brand” 25:10 – Investing directly in branding 31:00 – Revisiting your marketing funnels 34:08 – AI’s impact on SEO 38:20 – Google’s search results are already changing Links from the Show: Get notified about The SaaS LaunchPad Ask a Question on SFTROU Email a Question on SFTROU MicroConf TinySeed The SaaS Playbook Ruben Gamez (@earthlingworks) | X SignWell Episode 724 | Managing Managers, Breaking Through Plateaus, Thoughts on EOS, and More Later-Stage Listener Questions Episode 717 | Bootstrapping to $1.3M ARR and 300,000 Free Users Val Sopi (@valsopi) | X Blogstatic

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Start Up to the rest of us. I am your host, Rob Walling, and in this week's
0:04.4	episode, I bring Ruben Gomez back on the show to answer intermediate and advanced listener
0:10.7	questions. I made a call for questions on the show and on X Twitter a few weeks back and asked
0:17.3	for questions that weren't aimed at beginners at people validatingating and pre-validating and trying to find ideas
0:21.5	and received great questions about how to think through freemium,
0:25.7	when should you start to really, really care about brand,
0:29.2	revisiting your sales and marketing funnels,
0:31.0	SEO in the age of AI.
0:32.6	And I couldn't think of a better person to bring on the show
0:35.2	to hammer through these than Ruben Gomez, founder
0:38.2	of Seinwell. He's a super knowledgeable, super successful bootstrapped, and now mostly bootstrapped
0:43.6	founder. And I think this episode turned out great. We dug deep into the questions that we
0:50.2	answer today. Before we dive in to those questions, I have been hard at work on a video
0:56.6	course called the SaaS Launchpad. It's everything I know today about the early stages. So in
1:03.6	contrast to the listener questions we're going to answer today, this is about coming up with ideas,
1:08.1	how to prevalidate, how to validate, how to build a launch list,
1:11.7	and all types of things that you'll experience in the early stage. And this video course
1:16.9	is going to go live here in the next couple months. But if you want to get on the list and be the
1:20.7	first to hear about it, as well as receive a bonus if you buy the course early, you can head to
1:26.0	SaaSlaunchpad.co. I'm actually really stoked
1:28.9	about this course. It's everything I know about how to get those things done. And I've teased
1:34.1	on the podcast a few times that I have a mostly written book on this topic and basically
	...

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