This week Search Engine Land reported a fall from grace for Hubspot in their SEO rankings. This is a big deal, when a major player like Hubspot loses its footing in something they are well known for we take notice. Further, we ask, what does this mean for the startup community? SEO for most founders is a black box, but the allure of the #1 organic google listing keeps bringing us back like that one good golf shot in an 18 hole round. Hubspot, the golden goose of SEO, has proven that nobody is impervious to the will of the google algorithm. What’s the answer?
SEO isn’t the only GTM tactic falling prey to the “it’s what we’ve always done” playbook in GTM. Across the portfolio at In Revenue Capital, we look at GTM across three core pillars. Sales, Marketing and Partnerships. Each in their own right CAN be and often is measured by doing the hardest things, rather than the most efficient or impactful things to drive a result.
I’d put writing thousands of blogs on simple topics and optimizing the shit out of them for the sake of SEO a hard thing with a diminishing return. Much like outbound in sales, every founder deploys an outbound model at some point, optimizing for better connection rates, meeting rates and close rates all the while producing abysmal sales efficiency metrics. In Partnerships founders target the whales, the marketplaces and the resellers thinking that they are the golden unlock to their customer base only to spin their wheels without any forward motion.
Wouldn’t it be easier (and more fun) to be interesting instead? Look at what is happening with CEO’s like Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Palmer Luckey; they are single handedly making the hard things easier by simply being interesting.
Customers, markets, prospects, media, literally everyone is looking for interesting. Modern go to market is driven by influence, as Founder & CEO your proximity to the problem, the customer and the product is the perfect formula for influence. We invest in vertical SaaS and AI solutions for a reason, creating a new SaaS workflow or AI agent on its own has very little value, however, the niche market with a unique problem craves an interesting solution. A solution driven by the unique data and learned insight from it. Insight is the key to unlocking interesting.
The question then becomes, where do you start? How do you unlock the insights required to be interesting? Start with your data then look for and identify trends. You want to uncover the answer to the question, “what are the best companies in my space doing?” That answer alone is a great place to start. We’ve seen that the best at doing this leverage their insight to define north star customer centric metric which becomes the singular metric of success for their organization, their customers and when interesting, their market as a whole.
The interesting CEO is the modern brand and inbound engine we saw during the golden age of Marketing Automation with companies like Marketo. During that era, the content engine of Marketo with the golden ticket to making the hard things easier. Ask any seller who left Marketo during the golden era to sell somewhere else that didn’t have the same content engine and brand cache how much harder it was to do their job…
The content they put out was what people wanted to know. They capitalized on a market shift, defined what good looked like and shaped the market through their perspective. They didn’t write for SEO, they wrote for impact! The SEO was a fringe benefit. Much like the fringe benefit to sellers when performing outbound activities. They were easier because the market was already interested in their brand fueled by a content machine shaping a market narrative.
In the words of Bob Dylan, “The times, they are a changin” however the needs of the customer really haven’t changed that much. For the most part they want to know what other successful companies are doing. The opportunity for modern CEOs is to leverage their data and insight into the market they serve to provide just that, insight. What’s working, what’s not and what are their peers doing that makes them successful. The content, the SEO, the outbound, the key partners will work themselves out if you are just interesting. Interesting gets attention, attention drives interest and interest drives opportunity. Should we be optimizing for SEO or simply be saying something people want to hear?
