New Blog Launch and 5 Case Studies on Early Startup SEO Strategies— Startup Week 24

Masatoshi Nishimura
Kaffae
Published in
8 min readJun 23, 2020
Kaffae new blog launch on science around reading and brain

This week, I’ve set up a subdomain for blogging and wrote the first piece there. I’ve been writing a weekly update on Medium since the beginning of 2020. But the focus has been to log my progress and share tips with other startup folks. This blog on the other hand will be solely for attracting new users.

The topic is about scientific experiments and findings related to reading and your brain. But this Medium post is not about Kaffae blog. It’s about generalized advice around SEO strategies for startups.

There has been so much conflicting advice out there regarding startup doing blogs. Some say you should start it ASAP before the product is complete. Others say it will be likely a waste of time until much later in the growth stage.

I want to aggregate some of the findings and share my conclusion from the common themes. It assumes you’re building tech product startups.

Million Conflicting Advice

I first looked into tips if there’s a consensus. For example, prioritizing feedback from potential users with as little cost as possible is a gold advice everyone agrees on. What about blogging?

We all know it takes time to build traffic to your blog (SEO). How wonderful it’d be if people start coming in after 5 posts. The reality is it can take months till you see any visible effect.

Startup time is previous like falling diamond. You want to know if it’s the best worth your investment in the early stage.

Unfortunately, the advice was all over. There is no common practice startup should follow. Let me introduce a few.

Craig Cannon at Y Combinator

He teaches content marketing at Y Combinator, one of the world-renowned startup educational accelerator. In the video, PR + Content for Growth, he mentions you should start writing only after you have a sense that people are looking for what you are building/offering. That’s solid advice.

And he cannot stress the importance of writing on your own website to build the domain authority. So don’t write on Medium. He’s also suggested too many companies fail because they write bad blogs — the typical dry corporate ones you can tell they’re writing just to keep up the weekly update. That’s a bad one. People would come as long as you write good articles.

Aaron Patzer — Founder at Mint

Mint is a personal finance software that made a gracious exist in 2009 at 170 million dollars. That took them only 2 years. The growth was very rapid. It is one of the most successful entrepreneur story.

As soon as Aaron secured angel seed funding with his prototype website, he started blogging right away. All of his 5 members contributed to the blog. With further accelerated growth from guest bloggers, Mint blog became the biggest contributor in their user acquisition. It’s true that blogging was less competitive back then. But, there is no Mint success story without blogs.

Ryan Hoover — Founder at Product Hunt

Product Hunt is a platform where anyone can share their projects with other people. With its active community, independent developers with side projects take their platform very seriously these days.

In his guest-published blog, he described how he attracted early users. Ryan started Product Hunt with an email list. After confirming the concept works with a handful of people, he’s quickly moved onto blogging. He first asked someone to cover the story, and went on to guest blogging. It’s important to note, however, that he’s had a professional content marketing background. It’s natural he chose a blog as the growth strategy.

Braveen Kumar — Content Marketer at Shopify

Braveen is a content marketing manager at Shopify, the biggest software startup in Toronto, where I’m from, pulling in countless talents.

I asked him directly at the entrepreneurship talk he’s given at Ryerson University (I’ve written on that piece before). He spoke of the importance of the content marketing strategy. But, to my question of whether startups should focus on content strategy, his answer was straight forward no. Instead, startups should always focus on sales. The reasoning was that because content strategy takes time to make a dent in your strategy, you won’t be able to afford the long span.

*I wrote about his advice in the previous weekly update blog.

Cristian Villamarin — Co-Founder at Flipd

Flipd is a Toronto app company that helps you focus without distraction.

This advice also came from what I heard at the Ryerson entrepreneurship speech event. He started blogging right away as he started building a prototype. That was from the very beginning. And he attributed his early success as the blogging he’s done early on.

What should we do?

Extracting the essence from all the founders’ advice, there’re 3 considerations to have beforehand for your early startups.

  1. Are you good at writing?
  2. Is your price point less than $100?
  3. Are you offering an innovative solution?
  4. Did you exhaust all early acquisition strategy?

Are you good at writing?

If you have professional experience in blogging, that’s your strength. There’s no doubt you should start writing ASAP. For the rest of us, we gotta be careful before jumping the gun.

The expertise is not about whether you aced at your highschool English class. It’s about picking interesting topics and write authoritatively or emotionally. The mentioned YC founder was laughing as he reread his old piece. He could write an entertaining, engaging, and funny story. Do you have that much confidence in your story writing?

This will be the biggest variable for us. It’s safe to assume we are all terrible at writing and only become good at writing a decent piece after a certain amount of time invested. I’d say that can take 1 month writing full time. If you have a cofounder who’s looking after the product development, you might be able to pull that off. If it’s something that you do on the side for once a week with 30 minutes apiece, that will likely get nowhere.

Is your price point less than $100?

Blogs are offered by B2C as well as B2B companies. In B2C, you want people to sign up. For B2B, you want to convert them to a lead to a further sales funnel. The reason is the difference in pricing points. This concept has been taken from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. The potential customers don’t immediately buy your $1000 online services. They demand the proper demo from the sales representatives.

B2B companies will eventually benefit from blogging by establishing authority in that industry. But in the beginning they would be able to get away with sales representatives alone building trust and connection with the potential customers.

All the examples I’ve given above are consumer products. Those companies have higher ROI from writing blogs directly attracting and converting potential customers. In other words, the payoff for your viral marketing is huge - people sharing your blogs on their social media.

Are you offering an innovative solution?

You’re offering is very innovative. It’s so innovative that you might not know if it’s something people want. I can think of Airbnb that fits the category. It’s so unique most people you talk the idea to will reject it as strange and stupid. That’s when you should prioritize getting direct feedback from users through sales because the demand of the solution provided is very unclear. Airbnb started off with cold-emailing directly to Craiglist bed and breakfast owners in the early days.

The opposite is equally true. If your service offering is more established services like consultancy or restaurants, blogging is a must from early on.

In reality, it’s very hard to be objective since every founder wants to think they are being innovative. And there’s no clear cut of the definition of established services.

It may be possible to draw the line with the technology backbone. If the architecture is straightforward like social networking site where you ask users to upload something and interact, that can be considered established. Another line is analytics B2B, where your offering is a better version of the established companies.

Did you exhaust all early acquisition strategy?

To attract very early customers, there are many acquisition strategy your startups should try. Forums are perfect places. Hackernews, Reddit, Facebook Groups, Indiehacker, ProductHunt (as mentioned above), Betalist, etc. Keep in mind also that you can relaunch over and over in those platforms. I used to be afraid of spamming the community, but once learning the proper relaunch strategy is good. I won’t talk about that in detail here. But the good rule of thumb is to leave 1 or 2 weeks and tweak the headline. We get annoyed with anything that resembles bots. Try to bring in new news about your product from a different angle every time. It’s also true that unless you make the top headlines, most people will never have seen your share. People will be never annoyed.

After exhausting the forum strategy, you should try pitching the journalists. This step is the disheartening first step for sales if you’re tech founders. But it’ll be worth a try.

All of these strategies take way less time than establishing a blog audience which can easily take 3 months to move from 0 to 1 in your traffic.

How to Set Up a Blog

This is a bonus as there are many sites discussing the blog setup. There are 3 options I’ve considered in setting up a blog site.

  1. Wordpress.com
  2. Ghost
  3. Hugo

Wordpress.com is different from the free hosting site Wordpress.org. Wordpress.com is a hosted site and you can start blogging today with 0 expertise. That’s the biggest benefit of this option. The downside is you have to pay $5/mo to use your own domain (which is a must).

Ghost is a hosted and self-hosted solution based on NodeJS. It’s comparable to Wordpress, but I chose this for self-hosting since the server setup was much easier. There was no need to setup MySQL server separately. I could have it run on a container self encapsulated with its data easily.

Hugo is a static site generator that’s getting popular among the developer community these days. New Bootstrap 5 website is rendered using Hugo. While they offer blog themes, I don’t recommend this path. The value of your startup blog is its SEO capability. Nothing more. And, there isn’t much distinction in any hosting method. Hugo’s flexible setup makes your blogging experience unintuitive.

What’s more important than blogging

Blogging can be an attractive customer acquisition tool. It can be a long term asset for our startups. After a certain threshold, it will keep directing new customers to your site.

At the same time, it’s important to focus on the customer experience of your product in the beginning. It’s dangerous to lose sight of the product improvement. Just like life, we need to balance between short term and long term tradeoff.

Happy startup life:)

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Masatoshi Nishimura
Kaffae
Editor for

Maker of Kaffae — remember more from articles you read. NLP enthusiast. UofT grad. Toronto. https://kaffae.com