What's up everybody, this is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and today I'm going to
have my friend Ryan Bednar on the show.
Ryan and I did Y Combinator together way back in January of 2011, and today he's working
on a startup called Rank Science, which he's very quickly ramped up to $80,000 a month in
revenue by helping businesses with their SEO.
For those who don't know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it's all about getting
your website to rank highly in Google, so that you can take advantage of all that traffic.
Specifically with Rank Science, he's helping businesses A-B test their search engine optimization,
and he brings a ton of experience as an SEO consultant himself.
This podcast will learn a lot about the fundamentals of SEO, about how to use your domain knowledge
like Ryan did to grow a successful business, and about how to find your first customers
and learn from their feedback, so here we go.
Ryan Bednar, how's it going?
It's going well.
Thanks so much for having me on here.
Yeah, thanks for joining me.
To jump right in, let's start with simple questions.
What is Rank Science and how does it work?
Rank Science automates SEO for businesses.
The way that it works is we built a CDN.
Companies route their web traffic through our CDN, and we automatically grow their organic
search traffic.
That's an idea that I've never heard anyone else doing.
How did you come up with that idea?
It's a good question.
It was sort of a longer evolution.
I'm a software engineer who became an SEO expert sort of by accident, and so at previous
startups I helped start or was an early employee at, SEO was this tremendous revenue generator,
and a lot of times it falls on engineering to manage and run SEO kind of by default if
no one else is doing SEO.
I sort of backed into it, and after my last startup shut down, I became a SEO consultant
for a lot of startups, so a lot of YC startups, folks through my network, and then even some
larger companies like some Fortune 500 companies.
My biggest advantage as an SEO consultant was that I was a programmer, and so companies
could add me to GitHub, and I could actually execute all of the HTML changes and SEO tweaks
that I was trying to get them to do.
Other SEO consultants just typically send over a list of recommendations, a PDF, like
here's a bunch of changes, please have your engineering team do this.
Because of that, iteration time with SEO can be really long.
What I ended up building for some companies in-house as an SEO consultant was A-B testing
software.
It was just insane to me that SEO is so important to all these companies' bottom line, but no
one can really measure their changes effectively.
There's a lot of best practices, there's a lot of so-called waving dead chickens around,
things that are just like, hey, everyone makes these sorts of SEO changes, you have to do
this, I don't know why, but you have to follow these steps.
I was really interested in doing data-driven SEO, started building in-house A-B testing
tools so companies can measure things like title tags, on-page changes to see how that
affected click-through rates, see how that affected rankings.
From there, rank science is an attempt to productize what I was doing as a consultant.
The first version we built of rank science about a year ago was an API.
The hope was that companies would integrate our API into their front-end, and they could
test front-end HTML changes.
What we found was that companies didn't want to do the work, that it was too much work
for them to integrate an API, and that's how we evolved into, hey, if we build a CDN, we
can actually do the HTML modification for companies, and that's how that idea evolved.
Is your revenue public today?
Do you guys share numbers?
We don't share numbers, but this did make the TechCrunch announcement from our YC launch,
and so we are above $80,000 in monthly recurring revenue right now.
That's awesome.
Congrats.
Yeah, thanks.
Yeah, so we started the company about a year ago, but really the last four, five, six months,
things have really started to gel, but obviously still have a ton to figure out and a ton of
work to do.
How big is your company?
How many employees do you guys have?
There are five of us right now.
My co-founder, Dylan, who's our, Dylan Forrest, is our CTO.
We have a lead engineer.
We have a director of SEO, someone who helps work on customer happiness and strategy.
We have a data scientist, and then we have an account manager.
That's a lot of growth in one year, because I assume it just started with you and your
co-founder, and you picked up everybody else along the way, right?
Yeah, that's right.
We just started hiring.
It was just the two of us for the first six months, and then we started hiring after that.
You mentioned that you did YC, and then you guys were in TechCrunch for, I think, YC demo
day recently.
We also did YC together back in 2011, and so between the two of us, we've probably seen
hundreds of companies working on various things.
What are your thoughts on picking ideas to begin with?
Because for Rank Science, it came out of the prototypes that you were building for clients
as a consultant.
Do you think that that's a good way for people to come up with ideas in general by solving
their own problems or doing things on the job?
I think so.
For me, and I forget who I was talking about this with.
For me, Rank Science was the perfect thing to work on, because I'm a software engineer
who finally and reluctantly embraced being an SEO, and embraced SEO being my lever for
helping companies grow.
It definitely came out of a personal interest and a personal pain point, and also something
that I knew companies would value a lot and could have a big impact.
I definitely encourage folks to work on things that are closely aligned with their experiences.
I think it can be hard if you're doing a consumer business sometimes, but for Rank Science,
that's sort of just how it evolved.
Six months ago, you guys started hiring.
I assume before then, you started taking off.
How did you find your first paying customers?
Were these people that you would have been clients of yours earlier on?
The first people that we convinced...
This was kind of tricky, but we built a CDN, right?
It's hard to convince an established business that, hey, you built this new technology.
We have no customers.
Please be the first customer to route all your website traffic through our CDN.
That was a challenge, but luckily through, as you said before, we did YC together back
in 2011.
I've been part of the YC network for a while now.
I did have a number of people who trusted me, who I had helped grow their sites before,
and they were willing to give Rank Science a try and kind of take that leap of faith.
Network definitely helped a lot.
Our first couple of customers were from our network, and then from there, other people
started kind of hearing about what we're doing, either through word of mouth.
Just the idea or concept of A-B testing for SEO is sort of a new-ish thing for most companies,
and so that did kind of garner us some referrals.
But then from there, my co-founder, Dylan, published a case study for this company called
Coderwall, and we posted that on Hacker News.
It was like how Rank Science grew Coderwall traffic by 57% with a single SEO A-B test,
and that got a lot of attention, and we started getting customers from there through Hacker
News.
Did you charge your first customers money, or did you just kind of let them prototype
it for free?
The very first people who plugged in, we let them do it for free because we just needed
to – again, one of the challenges of CDN is you can build a technology as a proof of
concept, but you don't really know how it works until you start piping traffic through
it.
So we needed folks to kind of volunteer just to see, just to ensure that this thing worked.
So I think that was one way to validate what we were doing.
It actually made a lot of sense because we were making a big assumption that companies
would plug into our CDN and route their traffic through us, and there's two steps there.
So one is we need to get them to be willing to plug in.
We need their engineering teams to okay it, and then two, would they actually pay for
it?
And so we kind of checked off that first box, like yes, if we promise that we can grow your
search traffic through continuous A-B testing, they will plug in, and then two, they would
eventually pay for it.
Here you mentioned that you started off with an API of sorts, and it wasn't that popular,
and then after that you moved to the CDN.
When did that happen, and why didn't people like the API?
Yeah, I tried to do a lot of customer validation before I actually built the API, and so I
went to friends of mine who ran companies where SEO was important, or say 30, 40, 50%
of traffic, and I said, why don't you have to do A-B testing for SEO?
I know how to do it.
I've done this for other companies.
If I build an API, would you use it?
And they all said, sure, this sounds great.
But then when I actually built the API and went back to them, nobody actually wanted
to use it, or it was just tricky because it would require in-house engineers to integrate
this API into their logic and into their front-end code, and that turned out to be too much of
an ask, but it was a great experience for us, and also like a learning for me, right?
So people will tell you that they want something, but then when you actually deliver it to them,
getting them to actually use it is like the real test.
At what point did you decide to pivot and try something else?
I mean, were they giving you feedback, like, hey, this is too hard for us to use, or were
you just analyzing your API usage metrics, and you decided, you know, this is not getting
nearly enough use, and we should do something else?
It was both.
So some of them were just like, okay, cool, yeah, we'll get to this, but then they never
did it, right?
And I got that feeling that it was just a really low priority, and then the folks that
I did get to actually use the API, they would do one experiment, like, ever.
And that was sort of another thing that we learned out of this, is that coming up with
A-B testing ideas for SEO is tricky, unless you have a lot of SEO expertise, and actually,
unless you've seen what good SEO A-B tests look like, they're not completely obvious,
and so A-B testing for CRO or conversion rate optimization is a bit easier conceptually
to understand, because, you know, everybody can, like, look at, like, a button on a page
and say, well, why don't we test, like, making that button green, or making that button red,
or why don't we make the sign-up form bigger, or let's really highlight the call-to-action,
and so those sorts of design changes are easy for people to generate, but good A-B testing
experiments are a bit trickier, because you're talking about, you know, small tweaks to title
tags, or, you know, on-page HTML changes, and so that wasn't completely obvious, too,
so that was sort of the second thing that we learned from building this API, was that
generating good SEO A-B testing ideas was hard, and that's another reason why we thought
the CDN was awesome, because we could execute the SEO A-B tests, and also we could come
up with the SEO A-B tests on our own, and we could just fully automate A-B testing for
SEO.
I'm curious how you came up with the idea for a CDN, because after your API failed,
it probably wasn't immediately obvious that, you know, there's a way to make this work
if only you created a CDN.
I also would like to know more about how you interact and talk with your customers, because
I've heard from a variety of founders that they get a lot better feedback talking to
people in person or over the phone than they do over email or over chat, and it seems like
you had a lot of rapport with your customers, and you learned a lot about their experiences,
so I'm curious what methods you use to learn and iterate on your idea.
And also, I'd love to know more about how it actually works, because, you know, for
somebody who doesn't know very much about SEO at all, it seems very difficult to even
think about how do you A-B test on Google?
I mean, do you run tests one test before another one, or do you test different pages that are
similar?
The way A-B testing for SEO works is we run tests across groups of pages, and it's sort
of the easiest way to think about that, and we have a case study on our site that we did
for Coderwall, but the easiest way to think about that is to take an e-commerce site,
for example.
So a typical e-commerce site, they all follow sort of like the same site structure.
There's category pages, there's subcategory pages, and there's product pages, and those
product pages, or each type of those pages are on their own template, and that template
is pretty much the same, but there's different content.
And so, for an e-commerce site, if we can increase the rankings of their product pages
by a couple percent, that could have a really big impact on revenue.
And so, you know, what we'll do is take, for example, a thousand product pages that are
on a similar template, split them in half, 500 would be into a control group, and 500
would be into a variant group, and we would make some small HTML change to the variant
group.
And to start, one of the biggest tools in our tool belt is increasing clicks, and increasing
click-through rate from the Google search engine result pages.
So if we can basically help companies make more persuasive titles that humans want to
click on, we can actually extract more clicks out of their existing rankings.
An example of that might be to add some call to action to the title.
So if we're talking about, say our product pages are like video games, and the page that
we're tweaking is like, you know, Zelda for Nintendo Switch, and the standard title is
just Zelda for Nintendo Switch dash brand name.
So we'll say it's like Best Buy.
We would run lots and lots of experiments on that title to see if we could get people
to click on it more by adding some sort of call to action to it.
So maybe that title tag is then Zelda for Nintendo Switch, in parentheses, Buy Online,
or Zelda for Nintendo Switch, Read Reviews, and Buy.
And those are just two really simple examples, but we'll run lots and lots of tests across
groups of pages to see if we can increase clicks, and we basically monitor how Google
responds over time.
So an average SEO experiment takes about 12 to 21 days.
Google has to index these changes, react to them, and then we actually look at the data.
And so we basically sum up those two groups in aggregate and kind of see how things fall
out and see if there is a statistically significant result.
So a lot of what you're doing is kind of manually looking at their websites and deciding what
options should you choose between in terms of the different tests you're going to run.
Is part of your roadmap making that something that the users themselves are going to have
to do, or are you going to build out a giant team of people to make these changes?
So I mean, this is where it gets kind of fun.
And so the example I gave you was pretty simple and required some human input.
But on our end right now, we're pretty high touch with customers in sort of the first
few weeks of them onboarding.
And so we'll work closely with them on coming up with a game plan for SEO, what keywords
they really care about, what they want to rank for, what the goals are.
From there, we can just kind of load in SEO A-B testing experiments and our software can
kind of do the rest.
And then the other cool thing is that we do have, so we have human inputs for SEO A-B
testing experiments for our customers, but we also have software inputs.
And so if you're an e-commerce site and you come onto Rank Science, we have all this
data from other e-commerce sites.
And so we know what good SEO experiments look like and what most e-commerce sites should
be running based on our previous wins.
And so for customers, it is completely automated.
And we are actually automating some of the SEO experimentation process already.
But I think over time, we'll move further and further into automation, because who's
better at generating small HTML tweaks and changes and monitoring results?
Is it humans or is it software?
We're betting that it's software in the long run.
We have a ways to go to kind of fully get there, but right now it kind of works both
ways.
So let's go back to how you've grown Rank Science into the company that it is today
in less than a year.
You mentioned that your customers come from word of mouth and that they also come from
your Hacker News post.
How did you get the idea to create that Hacker News post?
So I knew that there was this post in the SEO community like two years back that was
really popular, and the Pinterest growth team put it together.
And it was called Demystifying SEO with Experiments.
And that was sort of, as far as I know, it was the first published post on SEO A-B testing.
And so it got really popular, and it's still a really popular post, and it's worth checking
out if you're interested.
And so I was interested in sort of the stir that that caused.
And I was excited that you could do A-B testing for SEO.
And the more folks I talked to, the more I found out that a lot of Silicon Valley companies
that SEO is really important to them have these internal A-B testing tools.
And so that's Yelp, TripAdvisor, Airbnb.
But they all kind of kept it really close to their chests because it was like a competitive
advantage.
They didn't want to talk about it.
But this is something that could benefit smaller companies as well, mid-sized companies.
And also just like any company that doesn't have a whole engineering plus data science
team to devote to SEO A-B testing.
And so that post was really sort of inspirational for us in starting Rank Science, but also
kind of gave us a roadmap where we thought, hey, if we can just start publishing interesting
SEO A-B testing experiments and changes that people would be interested in and people would
want to share it.
And the quarter of all one that we post on Hacker News is particularly exciting because
if you look at the change that we made, for them, we added 12 characters to their title
tag and click-through rates went through the roof and really grew their entire site search
traffic with just a really simple test.
And so we want to continue publishing content that's sort of unusual HTML changes that lead
to huge SEO wins.
The fact that you knew about this other post that, would you say it was Pinterest who had
the post?
The fact that you knew about Pinterest posts talking about experimenting with SEO and how
successful was really is something that most people probably wouldn't have known about
or noticed if they weren't SEO consultants themselves.
Do you think there are other big advantages that you've had being an SEO consultant for
so long that has helped you make Rank Science successful as it has been that you wouldn't
have been able to do otherwise?
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is just coming from a software engineering background.
Dylan and I both went to MozCon in September and we're a fan of Moz.
Moz is this amazing community of SEOs and they have really good reporting software.
Everyone uses it.
They're great folks and they put on a great conference.
And we talked to hundreds of people there, kind of trying to validate Rank Science and
what we were doing.
Most of those folks are consultants or they run agencies or they do in-house SEO for big
companies like Western Union or something like that.
But we were just shocked that we were the only software engineers at this entire conference.
And SEO is pretty technical and that is weird to me.
And so I think there's sort of this stigma attached to doing SEO because of its checkered
history in the past where it used to be everyone kind of did link building.
Everyone did so-called black hat tactics and SEO kind of garnered a bad reputation.
And so I think a lot of programmers kind of steer clear of it or don't necessarily want
to embrace becoming SEOs.
And so that's something that I see as an opportunity and an advantage for us.
Do you use your own product to optimize your content?
Believe it or not, we don't really do SEO on our website yet.
We only have four pages and we have big enough sales pipeline where doing SEO for Rank Science
hasn't become a major priority.
This is something that people tease us about.
But it's definitely something we're going to...
I really believe in InBounds.
I really believe in Inorganic Search.
We're going to focus more on SEO this coming year.
But at the moment, oddly enough, we don't.
What do you think are the criteria that differentiate a company that can really benefit from SEO
from a company that might want to put it off until later?
It really depends.
So one, if your company is growing in all these other ways, you're getting word of
mouth, you're getting referrals, that's fantastic.
So Airbnb didn't focus on SEO until later because they had this tremendous viral growth.
Like Airbnb is a naturally viral product.
And I remember seeing them at YC and telling them that like, oh man, you guys just need
to do some SEO and it would be this huge channel for you guys.
And they didn't see it as that important because they were growing and they were totally right.
And it didn't make sense for them to focus on it then.
And now it's a really big growth channel for them, but they didn't really focus on it,
I want to say, for like four or five years.
So there's an example where it's not that important.
If companies like spending a lot of money on AdWords and isn't investing in SEO, that's
typically a mistake because the ROI from SEO is so high and AdWords is so expensive.
If your product is something that people are searching for it directly or people are searching
for like topically related content, that to me looks like a really big opportunity.
If you're creating some kind of app or some kind of service that's like totally brand
new that people aren't exactly searching for it, that's where sometimes SEO or just search
in general isn't that great or just doesn't make sense.
And that actually kind of applies to us in a weird way, right?
Because nobody's searching for automatic SEO, CDN and because this is sort of what we're
doing is new and different.
So that's kind of my thoughts there.
Yeah, what do you think people should do, what do you think people should go to learn
about SEO if they don't really know much about it?
Because in the past I've thought about using SEO to improve indie hackers and by the way
I'm going to ask you what you would do to improve indie hackers as SEO later and put
you on the spot.
But in the past I've thought about what can I do to make things better?
And I've gone online and there's a whole bunch of different sources.
There's Moz, like you mentioned earlier, there's a hundred other tools and websites and it's
easy to get overwhelmed and just decide, you know what, I'm just going to do this later.
Where should people start?
Yeah, so I think Moz is like the best online community for learning SEO.
I think that's the best starting point and I believe all of their, or most of their educational
content is free.
They do have online courses too.
So I would definitely point people to them, but then it never hurts to like, depending
on where your business is at, to either talk to a consultant for some sort of guidance
or anyone who's like done SEO or has like done growth before will like have some opinions.
Those opinions might be completely colored by just like what happened with SEO at their
most recent business or their current business, but Moz is a really great resource and then
just talking to people.
So there's this like super active SEO community that publishes and republishes content, you
know, nonstop on Twitter and you know, all over the web, but you know, Moz is probably
the first place to go to.
Are there any mistakes that you see beginners making very commonly with SEO that are just
quick wins and low hanging fruit that people in the audience might want to know about?
Yeah, it's tricky because it's so site specific.
I think a lot of people don't know like the very basics of SEO.
And so, you know, for example, they don't, don't use Google search console or Google
search console used to be called Google webmaster tools.
And so I spend a lot of time in there.
And I think most SEOs do.
And so some companies are surprised like when I talk to them or if I'm just giving them
advice or whatever that like they might be ranking on like page two already for some
like pretty important or relevant terms to their business and they didn't even know that.
And that's something that Google search console would tell you.
And then that's also like a pretty strong signal that like, well, hey, maybe if you
actually focused on ranking for this term or these sets of terms and iterated on it,
you could get that.
You can move from page two to page one.
And when you move into the, you know, number one through number five spots, like you actually,
you know, get a decent amount of traffic and clicks.
And so, you know, there's a lot of low hanging fruit just by kind of learning the basics.
Are there like some super simple tactics that people can use if they're going after a keyword
to move up in the rankings just a little bit?
Is it mostly like title tag optimizations or inbound links?
Yeah, so at a high level, rankings are still, you know, based upon links and content.
And so it's roughly like 50 percent links, 50 percent on page, like HTML.
I actually think that that on page HTML segment is growing.
And so Google does need to see that other websites are linking to you for you to be
a relevant authority.
In the past, I think that links factor was like maybe a lot was a lot bigger than it
is now.
And so SEOs got into a lot of trouble by just focusing on building links.
And so there were these things called PBNs and people would would create these like link
farms to link to their customers and to link to their sites.
And that was like a really easy way to game Google until it wasn't until Google like learns
like what these link farms look like and what city backlinks look like.
And then they like penalized all those people.
And what I found or what I see now more commonly is that most businesses have, unless you're
starting from scratch, most businesses have like enough of a backlink profile that they're
not extracting enough value out of their on page SEO.
And so, you know, ranked science is completely 100 percent on page SEO.
We don't do any link building or anything like that.
So if you're a brand new business starting out, you do need to get some links.
Links from high quality sources are the best, but just links from actual real sources are
fine too.
And so those can be your friends websites or those could be small blog posts from local
newspapers or anything like that.
Now I'm going to put you on the spot.
If you were to change anything about any hackers to make the SEO better on any hackers, what
would you change?
All right, I have indie hackers open in my browser here.
And I guess first what I would do is like is ask you some questions about like, what
is your what is your typical or ideal user look like?
My ideal user is usually a developer who's interested in starting an online business
or is already running an online business.
Got it.
Okay, so it looks like to me you're targeting learn from profitable businesses and projects.
And that's, to me, that seems like a good like marketing headline, but it doesn't seem
like something that like people are searching for.
And so I might leave that as sort of like your age one on the page, but I might experiment
with like trying to target something that people are actually searching for.
And so maybe they're searching for like successful bootstraps companies.
Let me search that and see if any hackers comes up.
Also bootstraps startups.
Okay, so like the h1 on the page should be different than the title.
Yeah, it can be different.
I would start experimenting with the title and some of the on page content to target,
you know, a term that I think people are actually searching for that's related to what you guys
are going after.
And you can do keyword research through some tools like tools like SEM rush is a really
good tool for keyword research, or you could just actually use Google autocomplete and
start typing in things and see what what Google recommends, as far as like getting an idea
of like, you know, what are some terms that people are actually searching.
And so if I copy and paste this learn from profitable businesses inside projects into
Google boom, any hackers is number one, you rank number one to n three for this term.
But it's probably like too specific and just like not something that people are searching
for.
And so I think on it, successful side projects is probably something that people are searching
for side projects for programmers, side project ideas, side projects to make money, I would
come up with a list of keywords that are that are close to that, pick the one that you like
the most that seems like closest to your brand, and start experimenting with that in the title
and the h1 or maybe in some paragraph content to the homepage and see how Google responds
to it.
Perfect, I'll try it.
And for anyone listening, this is how you trick an SEO into giving you free consulting
advice to invite them on your podcast.
Well, let me ask you this too, do you ever check out Google search console for any hackers?
I set it up a while ago.
I think I looked at it a little bit for a week and I haven't been there since.
Got it.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, that might just, there might be some interesting stuff in there too.
So you could go in there, click on search analytics, search queries, sort by impressions
over the last 30 days, and that would tell you kind of like what the most high volume
keywords are, where you're appearing in search.
And you might actually find something interesting, maybe there's some term you didn't realize
that the indie hackers is ranking for, but maybe not getting a ton of clicks for.
And that's something you could kind of hone in on.
All right.
So to go back to the rank science story, you guys have gotten a lot of traffic from your
content marketing, from your case study on coder wall.
What other ways have you guys gotten people to your site and are you focused really on
finding new customers or working with the customers that you have?
I told you first, we did this post on Hacker News before anybody knew about us that started
getting us some leads.
So that, that was really great and really important.
I actually experimented with promoting that tweet.
So I had just like tweeted out that link about the case study for coder wall.
And I had always wanted to kind of try Twitter advertising.
I'm addicted to Twitter.
I probably spend way too much time on there.
And I do follow like the SEO community a lot.
Me too.
Yeah.
And I actually had a bunch of success from, from just like promoting that tweet.
And I think part of that is like, it was interesting content.
It's a new angle on SEO.
It's kind of a refreshing angle on SEO, right?
Like this company is actually data driven.
And would they do AB testing to validate their SEO changes?
And so I don't know, I probably spent just like a couple hundred bucks on Twitter promoting
that tweet after it was on HN and it got a lot of distribution that way.
And it seems like a pretty profitable channel for us.
I think that one single piece of content did kind of run its course though.
Like over time that kind of faded out, but that's something that we'll probably try again.
As part of getting into, I see we are lucky enough that we had a tech crunch post about
us.
And when the tech crunch post came out, I was initially a little embarrassed because
the, you know, the angle on it was like, you know, rank science is coming to replace your
job.
Rank science is coming for your jobs.
Like SEO consultants are in trouble.
And you know, that wasn't like really like something that we were going for, like the
messaging that we wanted.
And so when I first read it, I, you know, I was like, oh man, I'm not sure if I like
this.
But the writer actually did us a huge favor because the angle she took on what we're doing
and yes, we are looking to automate SEO software.
And I'm like, that's actually true.
Like we're not actually, we're not trying to put people out of work, but we are trying
to automate SEO software, but the way she kind of spun it was like sensational enough
that like, so we had a bunch of leads from, from tech crunch and then it really got shared
on, on Twitter.
And so if you search for rank science on Twitter, you'll probably see that like people are still
sharing that article.
And so we got really lucky with that.
And then search engine journal picked us up sort of organically and wrote, wrote more
about us.
And we got a bunch of leads from that as well.
So that was great.
And we kind of have this, this sales pipeline through this press, you know, that we've gotten
that's not totally sustainable probably for us, like long-term, but right now we're, we
had, I don't know, we had something like 1500 signups from, from that.
And we're kind of still working through, working through those leads.
And how does your business model work?
How much do you charge people to use your services?
It depends on organic search traffic.
So it depends how much, how much traffic is actually going through our CDN.
And so we work with some sites that are really small and are just starting out.
And then we work with some sites that are, that are pumping through, you know, tens of
millions of visits per month.
And it, you know, our, basically all that bandwidth goes through rank science.
And so our costs go up like the, you know, the larger a site is.
And so right now our pricing is pretty simple.
It's basically anywhere between $2,000 a month, all the way up to about $8,000 a month.
Yeah.
That's interesting because the fact that you're a CDN with kind of like this value ad of having
AB testing, people are already used to paying for a CDN.
So it's not like they're going to blink when you charge them money to use your CDN, because
you're just going to switch from whatever they're using already.
And then you can just charge extra based on the extra value that you provide with your
AB testing.
That's totally right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so companies are used to paying for CDNs.
And then the other thing that they compare us to actually is like what it costs to hire
an SEO consultant or what it costs to hire someone to like do this full time.
And so, you know, when I was an SEO consultant, you know, I would charge anywhere from, you
know, $3,000 to $6,000 a month.
And you know, I could do, you know, a handful of clients at a time, but you know, it's to
say the range for if someone at the high end, someone who's like really good might charge
like $8,000 to $10,000 a month, or an agency might cost that much.
And so companies look at us and we're priced, you know, a little bit below, you know, what
it costs to work with an SEO agency.
That being said, I think we have a ton to figure out with pricing.
Our pricing model is like kind of simple right now.
It kind of excludes us from working with sites that I think we could help a lot who maybe
haven't done SEO before and think we're pretty expensive.
And so I think there's a lot of room for opportunity there, but that's kind of how things are working
right now.
Is there anything that you guys have done that's significantly grown your revenue, like
any pricing channel or any pricing changes are searching for different types of customers
that are maybe more willing to pay you?
We've had tons and tons of people, especially from the SEO community who like really want
our software, but they think we're just really expensive.
And there's always going to be people who like want you to charge 20 bucks a month or
a hundred bucks a month for your software.
And you know, those aren't like ideal customers and there's going to be people who think your
software should be free.
You know, those definitely aren't ideal customers.
And so we've tried to ignore that, you know, as much as we can and focused on companies
who we can have a really big impact in helping grow their sites.
And also companies that actually really value our service where SEO is important to them,
but they don't have time for it.
Their engineers are busy working on products.
They want to do A-B testing.
They want to be data-driven and we can really have a big impact.
And so we're focused on sort of like good fit customers right now.
I think you have to be careful in listening to what the market tells you when you start
doing pricing.
I also think that like, because we're not like cheap, sometimes you're going to be too
expensive for some folks.
If there isn't anybody who thinks you're too expensive, then you're probably not charging
enough.
Yeah, it's something I've seen, especially with a lot of developers who start companies
is they tend to underprice.
And part of it is it just feels bad hearing people say that your product is too expensive
and they don't buy because of it.
But another part of it, I think, for developers at least is when you see how something is
made and you're able to make it yourself, it's easy to discount the value that people
who can't make it hold it in.
And so if you're whipping up your own CDN and you're like, okay, I can do this, and
you might think, hey, it's not worth that much, anyone could just build it.
I'm not going to charge too much.
But in reality, it's almost always better to just charge more.
It's better to err on the side of charging more than to charge too little.
I think that's right because you can always kind of bring the price down later if that's
actually true.
If you're way too expensive, you can offer discounts, you can offer promotional pricing,
but raising your pricing later is a hard thing to do.
I feel like as developers, we naturally, I don't know why this is, but we scoff at the
prices of software because I think we're like, well, I could build that, and that would just
take me a weekend, or that would take me a day, or that would take me a month.
Why would I pay all this money for that?
As a programmer, your time is so valuable, and I don't know why developers specifically
don't want to pay for quality software.
What are your biggest goals that you're working on right now at Rank Science?
We just finished YC.
We're now kind of focused on growing the team.
Our network is ever-expanding, and so we need to hire site liability engineers.
We need to make sure our CDN is fast and secure and really stable, and we're hiring front-end
engineers as well as we build out more and more tools for our customers and for ourselves.
We have a ton of work to do, like really improving our products.
I think we've kind of validated this idea or this space.
We really believe the opportunity here is big, but now we really have to execute.
We really think that we're just getting started here, and we want to scale over the next year
by two or three X. Those are sort of our goals, but we'll sort of see.
That being said, YC just kind of came to a conclusion, and we're kind of just now kind
of like regrouping from this like three-month pressure cooker forcing function for us and
trying to figure out how to grow sustainably, and yeah, that's kind of where we're at.
How did it being in YC affect your business?
It was tremendous for us, and so we entered YC at about 28K in MRR, and they said, we
want you guys to hit 80.
That was like the first week, and we were like, oh man, I don't know if that's possible,
and so they set these pretty lofty goals for a three-month period, and then they kind of
told us how they thought we could get there, and then they helped us come up with the plan,
and then helped us do it.
I think it was really good because as you're forced to grow, you learn about what parts
of your products need help, what parts are held together with duct tape.
You learn about some of your key assumptions, and then I talked to so many customers and
so many potential customers during YC that I think I have a really good idea of what
sorts of features we need to build next.
If we want to move up to higher tier customers or even larger websites, what sorts of things
we'll need to do to get there, what things those companies care about.
So I think it just forces you to grow and learn so much in a three-month period that's
like hard to replicate if you're not in the program.
Yeah, is there something that you say special that doing YC, some sort of like special fire
lights onto you that you can't have on your own or that's harder to have on your own?
I think it's totally true, and so I don't think we would have, we definitely wouldn't
have hit these growth targets without YC as a forcing function, but then also just like
the community, the network, being around these other startups who are learning, who are making
mistakes, but are also supporting one another, I think that's collective, is so important,
and that insight into like, hey, other startups have problems too, is really valuable.
They do these things called group office hours where there's a handful of YC partners and
you're in there with, say, six or eight other companies, and you kind of go through how
you've grown over the last week, what your biggest problems are, what you're concerned
about, what you need help with, and in going through that with a whole group of other startups,
it's just like, I guess it's almost like group therapy, but it was really valuable for us,
and that's something that changed from the last time I did YC with you in 2011, the group
office hours concept, but we got so much out of YC, the YC partners were tremendous, and
I learned so much about sales from them, and just being a part of the network for a lot
of our early customers as well, it was super valuable.
I really wanted to ask about sales, so what role is sales played in growing ranked science
versus marketing?
So I'm a software engineer who never did sales ever in my life, and I kind of was learning
and starting ranked science, I think I was kind of afraid to get started, but as the
founder of a company, you're kind of forced into it, and there's no way to sign up for
ranked science at the moment without talking with me on the phone, which is kind of insane,
and we're working on a more self-service, automated sign-up right now, but learning
how to do sales was extremely important for us.
I think you can get by without much of a product if you're good at sales in the early stages,
but it's also really important for validating what you're doing, getting feedback on what
you're doing, figuring out pricing.
There's so much that we've learned, and so I think that I went from a total noob at sales
to someone who's still pretty green, but I've at least leveled up in some areas, and there's
a bunch of YC partners now who have grown big enterprise software companies, and getting
advice from folks like that was tremendous.
What's some of the best advice that they've given you?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I learned a lot about the proposal process, sales process, but at one point I think we're
putting together proposals for our customers, I would just send them out, and this is probably
something that's completely obvious to everyone except myself, but I would just send them
out and have a price attached to it that had to do with their organic search traffic, and
some kind of notes and opportunities that we saw where we think our software could get
them, and I would just send it out to them in a re-mail, like, hey, if you want to work
with us, that'd be great, but if not, no big deal.
I realized, or one of the partners kind of pushed me towards, hey, why would you send
out a proposal without scheduling a follow-up call to review the proposal, and I was like,
oh yeah, that's completely obvious, and once I started doing that, our close rate went
up by 30% or something, so there's really simple tactics that I just was unaware of,
because I've never done sales before, and still have a lot to learn, but there's certain
ways like that where you can just start to level up.
Yeah, that's one of the interesting things about doing a startup, is that you end up
having to wear all sorts of hats that you've never worn before, and so you're a beginner,
and a lot of different things, you just make really rookie mistakes.
Absolutely, for sure.
One thing for us that is really important is we're a CDN, and so the most important
thing is that we need to keep our customer sites fast, they need to be stable, if anyone's
site goes down, they don't care about their SEO, and so we spent the first couple months
really just honing in on building a really secure, fast, solid CDN on top of AWS, and
I think I probably could have been doing more sales and more validation during that period,
but it was worthwhile for us because the CDN piece is so important.
I think in the first couple months of a startup, first six months, first year, you're going
to make mistakes, and it's really about how you respond to them, how you bounce back.
Having a co-founder is really huge as well.
I think I initially started working on this a little bit on my own before Dylan joined,
or before I was able to convince Dylan to join full-time, but I really was just spinning
my wheels in a lot of ways, and when Dylan joined on is when things really started to
accelerate, so having a co-founder to kind of lean on, to get through some of those bumps
in the road, some of those difficult times is really crucial as well.
How did you meet Dylan and convince him to join?
Okay, the last startup I went through what I see with was Tudor Spree, so I was the CTO
and was responsible for hiring and growing the engineering team, and Dylan went through
this program called Hacker School in New York.
It's now called Recurse Center, and I was trying to hire him to be one of our engineers
at Tudor Spree.
It didn't work out.
I think he ended up taking a job somewhere else, which was a great move on his part probably,
but we stayed in touch and became friends, and ended up both moving out to San Francisco,
and timing just kind of worked out, so we get along super well.
And, you know, Dylan's fantastic, and yeah, just kind of really got lucky there.
So I want to switch gears and talk about a topic that I like bringing up in these interviews
just because it doesn't get talked about that often, and that's the psychology behind starting
a business.
Do you have any personal habits or things that you do to stay productive and motivated
as a founder?
Yeah, I don't know that I do, to be honest.
I know, like, I talk to lots of founders who have these life hacks where it's like they
get up at 6 a.m., and they have this ritual, I don't know, they go for a run, and they
make their coffee before they open their inbox or whatever.
I don't have anything like that.
I don't stick to any, like, really strict regimen.
I try to give myself some time where I'm not focused on rank science throughout the week,
and so I basically try and take at least like one day off a week, but, you know, the first
year of a startup, you're just kind of, like, working all the time, and not to, like, glamorize
that.
I think I really value, like, working efficiently and working smartly over just, like, quantity
of hours, but, yeah, that's really it.
Well, to ask you a different way, are there any times where you feel particularly demotivated
about rank science, and if not, why do you think that is?
So I have experiences with other startups.
I haven't experiences with rank science.
I think, one, we've gotten lucky in that we've kind of hit on something that, like, a lot
of people are excited about or that there's, like, a lot of inbound interest, and so, you
know, we're really busy with, like, you know, trying to make our existing customers happy
and then also trying to add new customers or onboard new customers.
So yeah, I haven't, like, experienced anything like demotivating.
I think in the past with previous startups where, like, growth sort of goes flat, that
can be, like, kind of demoralizing, and that can be hard to kind of work through, so yeah,
that's kind of my answer.
Yeah.
It's like traction is the cure.
Yeah, that's totally right, and I think, like, when things are going well in a startup, like,
you're sort of naturally energized, right, if, like, the company is growing, even if
you know that, like, you know, the products could be so much better or, like, there needs
to be, like, better human processes for doing, like, manual work or there's inevitably, like,
lots of things, like, going wrong in a startup, but, like, if the company is growing, if revenue
is growing, whatever your key metric is, you know, that kind of, like, satisfies, like,
all desires, and if the company is not growing, and that's where, like, you know, co-founders
or employees are, like, pointing fingers at one another or, you know, things are, you
know, really, like, problems are really amplified, and that can be kind of, you know, really
tough to work through, but really, I guess, you know, growth is the answer, if you're
trying to, you know, build a big company.
Yeah, I think I felt similar things in the past, even not building a big company, just
working on side projects and things.
Indie Hackers, for example, I've spent very little time demoralized about are, you know,
kind of just, like, spinning the wheels because it's been pretty popular since I started it,
versus older things, like Task Force, which I did YC with in 2011, just never really took
off.
It was always kind of hard to work on, it was always kind of, you know, I hope this next
thing works.
And so, ultimately, it seems kind of frustrating, because the answer is, like, okay, if you
want to, if you want to be motivated about your company, just build something that's
successful, which is not much of an answer, but to finish up, what is one piece of advice
you would give to people who are just starting out, maybe they haven't started their company
yet, but they want to get started?
I think for me, and this is, like, it's probably, like, too premature for me to take any, you
know, have any, like, major takeaways from Rank Science.
This is, it's only been about a year I've been doing this.
One thing that I like about what we're doing, one thing that I think has been helpful for
us is we focused on an area that's kind of unsexy at SEO, and there's not, you know,
there are companies, there's a lot of companies working on SEO, but a large part of what we're
doing is kind of new or different, and I don't know many SEO companies in Silicon Valley
that are working on this, and we don't think we really have any competitors yet.
And so I think choosing, like, an unsexy area or something that you think is really important
but other people are ignoring can be a really big advantage.
Cool.
Thanks for the tip.
Well, that is all the questions I have for you today.
Thanks so much for joining.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for having me.
It was a great time with you.
All right.
Later, Ryan.
All right.
Take care.
Bye.
If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, you should join me and a whole bunch of other
NdHackers and entrepreneurs on the NdHackers.com forum, where we talk about things like how
to come up with a good idea and how to find your first paying customers.
Also, if you're working on a business or a product of your own, it's a great place
to come and get feedback from the community on what you're working on.
Again, that's www.ndhackers.com slash forum.
Thanks and I'll see you guys next time.