Do not index
Do not index
I have some great news to share with you today.
For those of you who don’t know - I acquired feather.so (Notion to blogs) for $250,000 back in June.
Why? Because -
- It’s a great product which I thought I could improve upon
- I am a big believer of organic growth and having an SEO startup in my portfolio made a lot of sense.
But what’s funny is that literally a few days later, Notion announced Notion Sites — which allowed users to convert their notion pages to published websites in 1 click.
I’ll be honest — I was worried that my $250k investment has just gone to 0. (Although in the back of my head, I knew this wasn’t the case)
Cut to today, we are at $9,743 MRR, which is about 50% growth since the acquisition. Pretty crazy for 4 month time frame.
So this got me thinking…
Here are the 3 main reasons why I think we grew despite all the headwinds:
1. Luck
Now that I look back, Notion launching Sites did more good than bad for us as it drove A LOT of attention to feather.so
Since we are making a dedicated product for 1 purpose only (Notion to blogs), we currently have a far superior product.
For example - We allow users to host their blog on sub-folder (like revid.ai/blog), which is better for SEO performance and impossible with Notion Site.
And I’d like to believe that focusing on 1 thing allows us to ship much faster than a team running software as big as Notion.
Until now, Notion has been making SEO moves, which has been good for us. What happens in the future is unknown and I don’t want to think too far ahead.
This quote sums it up pretty well -
You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. —Steve Jobs
2. New SEO strategy
Okay, this is spicy -
Since the launch of AI - SEO has been a headache to do. With people publishing 100s of ChatGPT created articles every day, SEO results all across the board suffered.
Multiple articles per day scream AI and the worst part—the articles aren’t even useful.
And if I know 1 thing, it’s this -
When they zig. You Zag.
I got a great human writer on - started writing 1 high quality post with him.
The process:
- We write an article using AI
- The human polishes it, making it easier to read and understand
- We publish 1x/day
This is a very ‘human schedule‘ — and Google hasn’t penalized us.
Instead, look at the SEO results:
I’ve explained it here in this tweet.
Okay, quick announcement → I am still onboarding people who are willing to try this new offering.
Keyword research + AI blog post writing + Human polishing
We will write 1 great blog for you per day: $1500/month
If you’re serious about it and want to try this experiment, reply to this email (you must be using Feather.so)
Now back to learnings…
3. Social media (still the king of organic growth)
Over the years, many people have tried to outgrow the social media led growth by burning money on ads and partnerships.
Few have succeeded, most have failed.
Social media - always was, and still is - the king of organic SaaS growth.
And me talking about the product on social media adds to the traffic and attention feather.so gets online.
For example, take a look at this tweet from a couple days ago -
I think you get the point. These tweets compound over time and become a great authority (and traffic) source for the product.
One of the biggest talking points on Twitter was me wanting to compete with Beehiiv and integrate the email sender in Feather.
I still think it’s a great (and big) opportunity but as we test in the backend, we find that it’s tougher to do than we initially thought.
But we are persistent and might be launching soon. Stay tuned!
So that was the growth story till now, I hope I’m able to do a similar one a year later, only with 10x the numbers. But we’ll keep working anyway.
No software grows just because of great tech, amazing marketing or luck alone.
Usually, it’s a combination of ALL 3.
I hope this helps you in your own software and business journey.
Let me know what you think by replying to this email, I read every single one of them 👇🏻
Tweet of the week
Max wrote this for socials, but I think this applies to software too…
That’s it for this week!
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See you next Thursday!
Keep building
Tibo 💻
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