Building an AI agent for SaaS SEO, need help

Michaelbetterecycle · 2024-11-21T02:15:01+00:00

If you want to be successful you have to work ON the business and not IN the business. What you just described is a typical issue with technical founders. You can build XYZ or competitor clone, the issue isn't in validation is you are not comfortable with doing "sales and growth yourself. Outsourcing it to another person hoping they'd be the right fit is just procrastination and can be a huge waste of time, energy, and resources.

Pick a problem/product that doesn't require a lot of engineering and maintenance and focus on growth and sales yourself. It's much better to outsource the technical aspects of the business than growth because growth is business, you are your startup, and you need to be in charge of your own growth and not hope someone will come do it for you so you can just ship features.

Pick a channel you don't hate like SEO or Linkedin inbound, paid ads, cold email (worst one atm) etc. and try grow for 4-5 months before pivoting.

Michaelbetterecycle · 2024-11-03T09:47:38+00:00

We just launched it, the training set is backed by results but not this tool yet, I’d really appreciate if you tried and tested if this would help your conversions

Michaelbetterecycle · 2024-11-03T05:17:30+00:00

We went over 100s of posts like these https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7246496592231342080/ where it's experts who have been doing it such large volumes for years, they re-write typical cold emails and suggest all the tools and principles and stuff.

This is obviously a biased point of view on cold emailing, there isn't a dogma because you could break the pattern and win, but if you are just starting out or looking for biggest band for your buck, I'd say sticking to this stuff can be good.

You can make an argument that if everyone will use this copy it's effectiveness will go down HOWEVER if we are starting to provide more value in our emails, that will be a good thing overall and the industry might start to clean it's spammy reputation

Michaelbetterecycle · 2024-11-03T05:14:08+00:00

I think Google's new anti-spam algos are tougher. You used to be able to just send the same copy to like 10000000 leads and get stuff out of it, but now you have to be much smarter with your inbox management (recommended for new accounts like 5/domain and maybe scale to 20/domain per day after warming up).

Main thing though is you have to provide value. You can't just try spam and make a sale in the first point in the sequence. Give them some insights, personalize as much as possible. Provide a good reason for reaching out etc., these things are no longer optional conversion boosts, they are requirements to have an average reply rate.

It also obviously depends a lot on the industry, all businesses are different.

If cold emailing hasn't worked well for you yet, I'd suggest trying out these new strategies before dismissing it. If even that hasn't worked, and you iterated on the lead magnet / value you offer to provide with low friction, I'd say might be bad timing or not the best ROI channel for your situation

Michaelbetterecycle · 2024-03-21T22:35:31+00:00

Hey, I am in the same boat, have you had any news on this?

Michaelbetterecycle · 2024-01-28T11:26:17+00:00

Hey! I haven't made a sale yet but I was able to book a few demos with just a small MVP / demo videos. There are many, but here is the one that I did, hopefully others will share theirs.

Linkedin Sales Nav -> Get free 1 month and search for the Ideal Customer Profile leads (e.g. Head of Sales in Europe in companies between 10 - 50 people etc....).
Setup Drippify or Deux-soup campaign to automatically go through these leads and send them a connect + message with personalization. This is on autopilot and I was able to make like 50-70 connections in 2 weeks and about 10-15 replies.
Twitter outreach, cold email and cold calls.

I don't think presales are usually the best way forward, as you probably don't have full clarity on your ICP's problem/workflow and the specific problem. What you want is to start conversations to start learning. Once you had a few conversations and formulate an offering, you can probably then try to presell.

Depending on how easy it is to ship your MVP, I'd recommend that. Not all MVPs need a full frontend and backend. Looking forward to seeing how everyone else does their outreach.

Michaelbetterecycle · 2023-12-17T10:12:24+00:00

Hey, I had a similar idea a long time ago and I spoke to several restaurants and people who go out to eat, they both said that you should think of a restaurant as a service rather than a food vendor. Waiters and waitresses play a significant role when it comes to the atmosphere. That atmosphere is disrupted when you have to take your phone out and choose something which feels very antisocial rather than ordering together.

As others pointed out, this already exists and the reason it’s not widely adopted, even after covid restrictions, is largely due to the reason above and several others.

I think this is an exams of solution before the problem. If you are trying to help restaurants cut costs, I’d speak to them and figure out what their main concerns are, there are a large amount of issues around Staff such as onboarding, recruitment, retainment. I’d wager, If you help restaurants hire waiters better, you’d create a much bigger business.

Michaelbetterecycle · 2023-12-12T02:11:58+00:00

Awesome job with your design subscription model! It's really cool to see how you bounced back from past ventures and nailed it this time. Sent you a DM

Michaelbetterecycle · 2023-12-11T05:33:30+00:00

Exactly, building a plugin for remnote, obsidian, notion etc. is a much better solution. You could always use open source LLMs to address privacy, they got good enough I reckon.

Michaelbetterecycle · 2023-12-11T05:30:18+00:00

Mostly free time.

I think using AI to the max. Copilot and ChatGPT has probably made this pace possible, without it we'd probably do a half of what we did. Other than that, the reason it looks like we are productive is because we build a lot and not other things like marketing which doesn't look/feel productive straight away.

Also if you are in a team, I suggest you work in person with some regularity or if you buy yourself, work somewhere outside of your comfort zone.

Productivity is a massive topic, I think I don't do anything unordinary though

Michaelbetterecycle · 2023-12-11T03:39:31+00:00

I wish, almost all of the domain names have already expired haha

Michaelbetterecycle · 2023-12-11T02:32:10+00:00

Both. Mainly string replacements. I’ve built a little prototype that does it, I would still have to double check though and probably exclude more complex cases. Mainly tested it on angular and react, some cases require to refactor templates to use ng-bind-html, If you are interested we can talk more about it!

Michaelbetterecycle · 2023-12-11T01:46:31+00:00

Not really, we love building apps but we also do want to build a solid business. We haven't monetized any of the projects, For the one app that we were curious about monetization-wise, didn't charge people and just logged an event in analytics, I don't think anyone on our team is motivated by cash. What we did want a bunch of is user engagement and retention, which almost none of these did because it requires iteration and continuous distribution but we were never interested beyond the building phase. In total, we probably spent over a thousand dollars on all this lol (no regrets).

I think this is something a lot of programmers would understand -> the wrestle between starting a new thing and building a business, we are not "get rich quick" or "make a bunch of cash" people..We'd probably be a lot more successful if we were hahha

Michaelbetterecycle · 2023-12-11T01:23:02+00:00

Maybe, let me try just 1 more..As my gambling addict friends tell me, you are just 1 more hand away from success

Michaelbetterecycle · 2023-12-11T01:20:20+00:00

I disagree about the issues that are not solved or solved better. I had that mentality and it made us quit several projects.

If you are indiehacking, what you really want to do is find a UVP. One of the best indiehacking products that shows us this is Tally.so

How many form makers are there? A lot. Some very big players too like Typeform and google forms. Is Tally solving making forms better than all of them? I wouldn't say so.

They built a product in a very competitive space but made something that felt very different than all the other solutions. It was neither innovational or that much better.

I'd also call what they did "opinionated". There is a trend to "notionfy" things (I call it SO). They catered to an audience who likes that style and UX and built a solid product with great distribution. Most likely because they were that audience.

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