YouSaid · the spoken record

Joost De Valk

lines on the record
56
first
2023-04-12
most recent
2023-04-12
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Reasonably good Growth tactics at the moment are really focusing on the SEO industry as one of their levers of getting other people to install or use Wix. I don't really like their product.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think that what Microsoft's doing with Bing right now is absolutely brilliant. I really love it. So BingChat, it's very fun what they're doing there. It's a bit cheeky because it doesn't really work yet, but it's making everybody at Google so very conscious of what they don't have. So I really like that. But in terms of other companies that I really like, I'm always impressed when companies do marketing towards developers very well and grow on top of that. Because I do think that that is still an underappreciated way of going at the market. So companies like Algolia that actually do parade developer outreach, provide absolutely awesome docs on how to work with this offer and how to solve your problems with it.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I would want people to stop thinking they can measure everything. And that's mostly stolen from my wife who's a PhD in sociology and just says people think that they can explain behavior way too much and you can't.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Not considering branding from the get go in their entire strategy and not considering what words people use to describe their problems.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Move out of London. I think work life balance is absolutely achievable. Also, don't think it means what people think it means. If it's good for you, then it works, right? I will say that not being in a big city and having to go to a fancy dinner three times a week does really help”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think we both Marie and I are better in the preceded stage than much later on. If you're getting too later on, then most of the value that we can probably give you has already been happening.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So we have a shared Slack channel with each and every one of them, and I talk to almost every one of them on a not always daily, but most of them on a weekly basis.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Going to be a lot more common. Think of an open AI interface on top of no code interfaces, et cetera. Connecting APIs together is going to be tremendously powerful and is going to save a whole lot of time coding things.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Hardest part right now of building software is thinking about DUX and then fixing the business logic. But the business logic is almost always like only 10% of the time you spend on this whole thing. Everything else is all the other stuff. And all the other stuff is relatively basic, but it just costs a lot of time. But the relatively basic stuff AI can do fairly quickly. So you need to create the processes. You need to create the logic because the AI is not going to do that for you entirely. But at the same time writing the individual functions is going to be easier and easier. I'm a big fan of Cloudflare. If I describe to opening AI, like I need a Cloudflare Flare worker that does this, this and this, it'll just give me the code. I don't have to code anything anymore. It'll just give me a working worker. I've done this twice in the last few weeks where it just did exactly what I needed it to do. I didn't even have to write a single bit of code. And I think that's.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Of course, the funding hype is overhyped. It always is, but it's also because a lot of money has to go into it and we have to try a lot of different things to figure out which ones work. So I do really think that AI can change where we go in terms of how big companies need to be to do things and how many things we can do on a day using machine learning to do so much of the work that people are doing on a day-to-day basis could be very powerful, but we need to get better at actually understanding what is machine learned. So we need explainable AI in a way. We need to actually understand what it's doing. We can train a model to say, hey, you are getting credit, you are not getting credit. But in the end, we actually have to be able to explain why it's making that decision.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yes, I do think this is different from crypto. I think this has a bigger impact on society than crypto will because this has the type of impact that electricity and the steam engine had in terms of productivity changes.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Well, yes, so this is where I admit that I'm pretty much a socialist, which I know is a bad word to most Americans. I do worry about that. I do worry about the fact that the wealth inequality we create is not something that we're going to be able to sustain. So we need better systems for that. And I also worry about like, how do we even make this understandable to politicians at some point? Are they going to be too late at the point where they start regulating this, where we've already gone past everything that they could fix?”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I hope it speeds them up if they use as well. It speeds them up, and you might need actually a few less people to do the same amount of work. There's very many ways in which AI can speed up not just content, but development too. If it doesn't mean a step change in your productivity, then you're using it wrong.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “That is hard and I don't have the answer. And part of that is going to be licensing. But part of that's actually also going to be SEO. Like how do we create robots.txt rules for this sort of stuff that allow you where you can say, I want to be in this type of large language model, but not in that. It's going to be super hard. I don't think we have any good solutions to that yet”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I think the biggest problem, and this is where chosen, I'm very European, is that we don't know what's in those large language models and that we really should. And we sort of have a right to know as well. Like, what did you train your model on? Based on that, I can make a decision on whether I want to use it for a specific use case. And I would be very much in favor of some regulation to actually say, hey, you need to disclose these things about your large language model in order to be able to allow the general public to use it because then they can know, especially because a lot of those large language models are trained on content that they don't necessarily own. I've had the pleasure of working with the team at the Guardian for a couple of years, about a decade ago.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Concerns mean, and I think that concerns search engines even more. That is one of the things that Google is panicking about. Like, this is going to create a way of very, very bad content on the web. And how are we going to surface the really good content? And that's why I expect them to be doubling down on things like the EA team things, which they've had expertise, authority, trust. They've already talked to that in quite a number of occasions. And I think they'll double down on that.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Some companies might lose that. I think the winners will not lose that. I think creativity is still what's going to make content truly good and truly unique and shareable. SEO doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you land on a page that was written purely for SEO purposes, it doesn't have any value. You're not going to share that page with your friends. At the same time, the thing that you want for pages that rank and search and for them to be successful is that people will share them with their friends and will revisit them. So we have to make better web pages. And Google has been saying for years you need to make websites for users, not for search engines. And I think they're absolutely right if that page that you land up on from search that you build for SEO is not something that I want to share with my friends then that page is not worth its money.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “In terms of more content being created, yes, there will be loads more content being created at probably very, very low prices. The thing is that most of that content will be not good. The content that will rank in search engines will very quickly be the content that is actually unique and actually has value in it that is not given by an AI solution.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “On that page is true and is good. They want to make sure that they can actually trust the author. I think the author of an article is going to be more important over the next few years than it has been in the past few years.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I think AI for content generation is still problematic because it hallucinates too much. So there's too much things that are in there that are just not true. Predicts the next word, but it doesn't mean that the next word has to be true. At the same time, I think AI can be tremendously useful in content generation. It can help you create outlines. It can help you create excerpts of longer articles very quickly. It can actually help you distill your research very quickly because you can say, hey, so I've got these 30 articles on this topic and you can use something like OpenAI to make excerpts of those and summaries and use that to write your own content very quickly. But I do think that writing your own content and adding something unique is going to be more important over time. And with a lot of these changes happening, search engines are bound to focus more on the author of the content than they have done for a while because it's actually important for them to make sure that what's”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “At that point, you're going to want to start optimizing the use cases. You'll have a ton of use cases. You'll want to tell that story. You want to tell the story of how your customers are using it. And writing that down, all the different ways in which they are using it and all the different verticals that you're thinking of where people could be using your product, you want to be creating pages for that and actually telling people those stories.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “It's one of the funny things when you start selling your company. People start asking for things like your cost of acquisition per customer. And we were like, we never spent any ads. So how would you calculate this?”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I think as a company, I can still do this better than we probably do. Yes, it is. I do think that SEO for everyone is the thing that Yoast does. It is making SEO accessible to everyone. But the things that people search for are terms like WordPress SEO. And if you search for WordPress SEO, you'll either end up on our plug-in page or on an article page that gives you a very long list of things to do for SEO. It explains to you how SEO works.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I think the worst start looking at a very long list of technical things to fix and go from top to bottom and just spend months and months and months fixing things that really don't matter because the overall story is bad. The best go in and look at, okay, so what is our brand story? What is the thing that we're selling? They fixed the biggest technical problems and then go into, okay, so how do we create a story around this? How do we together with comms and others make sure that people that land on our site do the right things and find the content that actually addresses their needs?”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Not just early days, measuring the success of SEO's hard because Google has very successfully made it impossible for people to track the effect of anything but CPC. Every company out there either uses last click attribution or an attribution system where the last click is important. And the last click is in most cases going to be a brand search because you've convinced someone to buy somewhere in the process. We don't know which keywords people search for anymore when they get to a site because Google hides those. So it's actually quite hard to say, hey, how well does SEO work for us in our business the same way that it's hard to tell the results of a TV ad but that doesn't mean that TV advertising doesn't work nor does it mean that SEO doesn't work it really is something that's going to blow up the rest of your results and it might be hard to attribute so actually that's one of the falsities that we have in the”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “If you're already doing CPC, I take 10% of your CPC budget and allocate it to SEO and then start from there and see what happens.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Depends a bit on where you are in your journey, but if you're starting as a new company, then it's going to take quite a bit of time. Nobody's heard of you and you're not going to get like a whole lot of clicks automatically suddenly because you've launched a new website. At the same time, if you were a bigger company and you've not invested in SEO, but you do already have a brand, then you could see results very quickly as soon as you start actually putting decent, well-optimized content on your site.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Actually, I think that they should probably be in that triangle the whole time. And the content side, I think, should probably also talk to your PR and comps to your people, etc. SEO has a nasty habit of being in so many different places at the same time, like so many different things are important to the SEO.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “As you move quickly on your site and all these companies want to ship every day, then it's hard to not make SEO mistakes every day. So you need people that keep track of what you're shipping and say, okay, maybe we can change this so that it's actually actually SEO friendly.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I think you should have SEO specialists on your team if you're building a larger growth team because it's a pretty specific problem area to keep track of. It's quite a bit of time that it takes to just keep track of everything that Google does. As your company gets larger, managing SEO gets a lot harder. So you'll probably need an SEO team over time.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “So category creation is, I think, super important, but it's almost always, it's a category that already exists as a problem. The problem that you're fixing for people already has words attached to that. If you're going to start using different words for that category, then the people are using to search it for, then you're going to have a hard time getting people that search into your website. You can't really create demand with SEO. SEO is very demand driven, just like AdWoods is very demand driven. The demand has to be there. You can't create the demand. So that's why the branding is important and you have to do other things as well and a holistic view on growth should absolutely include SEO, but should also include a whole lot of branding.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “One, come up with a brand that is not recognizable. Even in search, if people search through your problem area, they never search once, right? They always have like a search journey where they search for multiple words for multiple things over a period of time. Even if they don't click your result, if they see your brand name a couple of times in their results, you're slowly building up confidence for your brand. So being recognizable in search is super important. People underestimate how important it actually is to have a brand that people can remember and that doesn't become very vague very quickly. That's one. The other is coming up with terms themselves for, say, you think you're very clever and you create your own term for what you're doing. Nobody else uses that. So don't use the words that everybody else uses.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “If you pick the right platform to build your website on and make sure that it's relatively technically SEO friendly already, then you're good in the beginning. And then as soon as you start doing customer support, you'll get questions that you have more than two or three times. Start writing knowledge-based articles for those. It's as simple as that. The things you're already writing anyway, because you're answering those customers and you're fixing them. Reuse that content and put it on your site. Then just build on that. I think the right time to start investing in it is fairly early, but that doesn't mean hiring an expensive SEO consultant. It just means putting content on your site and making sure that people can find what you do.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I think that every founder should understand the basics of SEO because it's going to help them in a whole lot of different things. Because what you need to do when you do SEO is you need to look at a whole lot of data and you need to think about what do people search for? How do I describe my product in words that people actually use? When they have a problem, what are they searching for? What are the words that people use to describe the problems that they have and how can I tap into that? I actually think that that's good to think about when you're building a product. So investing in SEO starts there with actually thinking about what are we solving, which problem of our users are we solving? That's where SEO is in the beginning and where it's important, I think. And then when you invest in SEO, you need content and you need a good tech platform. And honestly, WordPress is out there. So if you're going to use another CMS, I think you're pretty stupid because every other CMS is going to cost you more money. And then you need content. You need to write that content.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “So I've spoken to quite a lot of them because they do reach out and fees are going to fee. I don't think a whole lot of them get it. I think there's a wide open market.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “That's what I'm saying. Like, this is very uncommon to, I think, most VCs that it is much more out in the open. I mean, when you sell Yoast, what you sell as a brand. And what you sell is not necessarily just the software because the software everyone could just pick up and copy”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Yeah, but also why would you want to tell pre launch? I mean, most of these things exist already. So it's a very different building atmosphere. It's very much built out in the open.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “In terms of software, I can just look at the code. I'm arrogant enough to say that I think I can determine that myself. And then I was just looking at what users are saying, looking at reviews, looking at how people are talking about it in these communities, what you really get is that you have like the WordPress communities, it's a layered thing, but the inside WordPress community is relatively small group of people that goes to WordCamps and that goes to these conferences. And when I see small, that's relative, right? I mean, WordCamp Europe will probably be a couple thousand people. It's actually very cool to listen to that and figure out like, hey, these are the ones that are really going to make a change. So that's being in that community and actually caring about that community, being aligned with that community.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I mean, the risk of that is quite big, right? I mean, I no longer pay for it, but when I used to pay for it, it cost me more than my Google workspace account. And I was like, these pricings don't match.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Honestly, a lot of those companies are also building for scale that they're never going to reach. I think that there's a lot of opportunity to just do scrappy and small and also to price reasonably because some of these things just get too expensive and then it's too easy to throw you away. So something like Calendly, which I see a lot of people use and love, Google rolls out a new feature and suddenly Calently is gone.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “I am slightly concerned there, but I'm not as concerned for Yost because SEO is probably going to be invested in more instead of less in a down market because people look at their AdWords bill and they go like, oh, maybe we should do something about that. But yeah, I think you're right.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “The biggest product mistake is thinking that people who are using features when we didn't know for sure. So we spent a whole lot of time building features that nobody used. And that's the problem of building a WordPress plugin because you don't have telematry going back to your systems all the time. So we literally didn't know. And then we started building tracking to actually get sensitive telemetry back. And then we realized, oh, wait, we're spending a whole lot of our time working on this. And nobody's using it.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I think the default is what 90% of your users will end up using, so it better be damn good. It's actually one of WordPress's core principles in design philosophies, which Matt came up with, decisions, not options. That means we're not going to add options for stuff where we can decide the right thing for 90% of people. We're not going to add an option for it. There might be a filter in the code to change it. So if you're a developer, you can change it. But for normal users, adding more options just makes your product harder to use.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Beyond that, and we'd have a new release ready a couple days later or even on the day itself to add the features that were needed.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “You're not. That's where it's super hard. The fine line that I've always tried to do with Yoast is that we did the things automatically that the lovers, the really geeky SEOs really liked. So we fixed all the problems automatically and very cleanly. And we tried to keep the interface as simple as possible. And at the same time, we horribly feel that at times. The thing is, once you start looking at some data, and one of the harder parts is that you actually don't have that much data is that people don't look at settings. So for an SEO plugin, they turn it on and they expect it to do magic. That means that your defaults have to be incredibly good and that every setting you add is basically just more noise. So I think that the power is to make sure that you keep on doing the right things and reacting quickly. So one of the things we always did was whenever Google came out with new stuff is we'd”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Makes a great develop the lab brand is it's not just develop a lead. If I'd been the only one building your socio, then we would have only optimized for SEOs and for developers who want very specific niche features all the time to do very specific things. And honestly, nobody cares. I think what Brian mentioned in one of your podcasts at some point that companies tend to optimize for their power user. I think that's the thing that you don't have to do, the exact opposite of what you should be doing. And it's very hard to do that well. So if you're just a developer leading a company like that, then it's really very important that you get someone on board who's not a power user who can help you like, hey, I'm a normal user of this product.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “The biggest underestimated thing in all of open source is branding and thinking about, hey, how do we want people to look at us? What are we putting out there? How are people perceiving us?”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “I will say that putting too much in free early on is dangerous because you can't really take it back. I think that's where open source slightly differs from SaaS because in SaaS you can just take it back. And in open source, as soon as you put it out there, it's out there and someone is going to fork it if you take it out.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Time to open source community controls a large part of the web, a very, very large part. I think people still underestimate what Matt has done with WordPress. I mean, more than 40% of websites on the web are WordPress sites. And companies like Shopify, and I heard you on a podcast with Toby, which was awesome. But Shopify has like two, three percent of the market, if that. So WordPress is way, way bigger. And people underestimate that and it's underinvested in, I think.”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Two sides to that. On the one hand, freemium is always going to be hard because you have to decide about what to put in free and what to put in premium. Like how do you attract the most users? And at the same time, have enough in premium to actually convert them into paying customers. And the add-on thing that's hard there when you're in open source is that when people think that we've got a good product but too much of it's premium is that they might just fork your premium product and you also have to build like a sort of trust relationship with the customer they need to trust you to be better than the other options that are out there what you get quite quickly with these models is that you have web skill problems and small company income at its peak used was a 15 million euro z year revenue when we sold that's not a whole lot of money compared to the 11 million sites that we were running on it at that time so you're solving problems for a whole lot of sites with relatively little people at the same”

    2023-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source