SEO advice for bootstrapped startups
Published in 2010, this chronicle by @illdave details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 38 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 2 comments
"Do not rely on SEO to market your product" Couldn't agree more. A good marketing strategy requires diversity of channels. Naturally, unless you have a full-time person working on marketing, you will have to make sacrifices, but relying on just one channel is really going to hurt your business.
"Add a free feature which is accessible, useful, and spreads virally. It can create a stream of links and mentions that quickly replaces an ad budget."
Aaron Wall makes a great point here. Creating the feature or resource is often a lot of work upfront, but over time it will turn into a better investment than churning out blog posts (that doesn't mean you shouldn't be blogging or creating content in some other form, though).
Great advice all around here - personally I'm a big fan of not "doing" seo but instead just making sure things are running in an SEO friendly manner.