I once blew $50,000 on a top-tier SEO agency and got almost nothing to show for it. Zero. That was back in the early days of RemoteTeam, my second startup. We were desperate for traction, and everyone said the magic words: "You need to invest in SEO." So we did. We got a fancy dashboard, monthly reports filled with vanity metrics, and a list of "target keywords" that had about as much to do with our actual customers as a horoscope. It was a painful lesson, but it led me to a realization that completely changed how I think about growth. Most of what people tell you about SEO is wrong. Especially for startups. They tell you to hunt for high-volume keywords, build backlinks, and write blog posts. It’s a hamster wheel. You’re always chasing the next algorithm update, always trying to outsmart Google. It’s a game you can’t win, not when you’re up against established players with massive budgets. ## The Myth of "Ranking First" We were obsessed with ranking for "remote work tools." It seemed like the holy grail. The agency told us if we could just get to the number one spot, a flood of users would follow. We spent months and a small fortune trying to climb that mountain. We did get to the first page, eventually. The result? A trickle of traffic, and even fewer sign-ups. It was a gut punch. The problem was, the people searching for "remote work tools" were just browsing. They were tire-kickers. They weren’t ready to buy. They were looking for listicles, not a solution to a specific, painful problem. My co-founder and I spent a weekend digging into the data from our few dozen paying customers. We looked at what they actually searched for. The queries were incredibly specific: * "how to pay an employee in the Philippines" * "contractor agreement for a developer in Ukraine" * "compliance for hiring in Germany" Nobody was searching for "remote work tools." They were searching for answers to urgent, expensive problems. And we, the experts who had built a whole platform to solve these problems, were nowhere to be found. ## The Strategy That Changed Everything That’s when we stopped trying to "do SEO" and started thinking about how to scale our expertise. We had all this knowledge locked away in our product and in our heads. The challenge was to get it onto the internet, in a way that Google could find and rank. The answer wasn’t to write a thousand blog posts by hand. It was to build a content engine. This is the one strategy that changed everything for us: programmatic SEO. Instead of writing individual articles, we created templates. We had a template for "how to hire in [country]," a template for "paying contractors in [country]," and so on. Then we systematically filled these templates with our data. We created hundreds of highly specific, high-intent pages at once. Each page was a perfect match for a long-tail search query. Each page was a landing page for a potential customer with a burning problem. ## How We Did It It sounds complex, but the core idea is simple. 1. Find Your Data: Every business has a unique dataset. For us, it was our knowledge of international employment laws and payment systems. For a real estate marketplace, it might be data about neighborhoods. For a project management tool, it could be templates for different types of projects. 2. Create Page Templates: We designed a simple page structure. It had a clear title, a brief overview of the solution, a step-by-step guide, and a call to action to sign up for our platform. 3. Generate the Pages: We wrote a script that took our data, plugged it into the templates, and generated the HTML for each page. We went from having a dozen marketing pages to over 500 in a single week. The results were staggering. Within three months, our organic traffic had increased by over 1,000%. But more importantly, the quality of the traffic was completely different. These weren’t tire-kickers anymore. These were founders and heads of HR who had a specific, urgent need. Our conversion rate from visitor to sign-up shot up by 300%. We had stopped chasing pointless numbers and started focusing on what truly drives growth: solving your customers’ problems at the exact moment they have them. ## Why This Works for Startups Programmatic SEO is the ultimate growth hack for early-stage companies because it’s a system you build, not a service you rent. * It’s Scalable: You can create thousands of pages with the effort it would take to write a few blog posts. * It’s Defensible: You’re building a moat of content based on your unique data and expertise. Competitors can’t just copy it. * It Aligns with Product: It forces you to think about your business as a collection of solutions to specific problems, which is the foundation of a great product. We took this same approach at MovieLaLa, my first company. We created pages for every movie, actor, and director, pulling data from public APIs. We became the go-to resource for anyone searching for movie information, and that traffic was the foundation of our growth. Stop listening to the old SEO playbook. It wasn’t written for you. Find the data that only you have, and build an engine to turn that data into a traffic-generating machine. It’s the one thing that can actually move the needle and put you on the path to a million users.
Frequently Asked Questions
How has this view evolved over time?
My thinking on most topics has changed significantly over the years. Early in my career, I held many conventional views that experience proved wrong. I try to update my beliefs when the evidence changes.
What's the most common pushback you get on this?
People often push back by citing exceptions or edge cases. And they're usually right that exceptions exist. But building a strategy around exceptions rather than patterns is a losing game for most founders.
What experience informs this perspective?
This perspective comes from over a decade of building companies in Silicon Valley, two successful exits (RemoteTeam to Gusto, MovieLaLa to Gfycat), and investing in 200+ startups including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI. I write about what I've lived.