Rob: Hi Mo, welcome to the Trial to Paid podcast second episode.
Rassam: Yep.
Rob: Good to have you on.
Rassam: Glad to be here.
Rob: So yeah, just to kick things off, I'm just wondering if you might have a guiding principle to share, uh, with, with the listeners, something that just sort of influences how you
Rassam: Mm-hmm.
Rob: build products and businesses and just keeps you moving forward.
Rassam: That's, that's, that's, that's the hardest question to start with.
Rob: I
Rassam: Because,
Rob: is. I know it
Rassam: because, because I remember when, uh, when I joined Junaid in making, uh, LiGo and the other products, if you're making it at the cloud, that's the main company. So we sort of have a, uh, parent company, and then we make products inside that umbrella.
He had this, I would say, nine mission statements and a huge, I would say like four to five pages long philosophy on what Ertiqah stands for. And, uh, the, the summary of all of that is basically that, you know, everything is changing because of AI now. Right. And it, this was at a time when we had not sort of internalized this.
I mean, I was coming from an AI development technology firm that was Antimatter. We, we were developing AI solutions, but even there, we, we had not sort of internalized how huge of an impact was it was gonna have. So the underlying philosophy was, if we cannot do something with AI, we don't do it. That's number one.
So we have to be extremely, uh, you know, uh, disciplined about that. Secondly, if something can be done with AI, it must be done with AI. You don't, uh, do without it. And third, uh, it, it, it was basically an idea that, you know, you don't give the job of one person to two people. Right. So if one person can handle any everything, then they should be handling everything.
And, uh, we, so, so that's why we sort of don't really have any clear boundaries around the roles. What, what we like to call it is, you know, we have wild cards, so people who are experts in pretty much every single domain and they can jump in and, uh, you know, uh, contribute whatever whenever they want. And that necessarily means that we have to be leaner than most companies.
In fact, at this point in time, we, it's just the two, two of us founders. We had some contractors, we had some employees in the meantime, but we kind of automated so much of the work that we did not need them anymore.
Rob: So lean on automation, AI, and uh, sort of embrace wearing many hats. In the people you look for, so that's cool. Um, so okay, just by way of a, a, a very short kind of lead into, your startup product, LiGo, I'm, I'm pronounced that,
Rassam: Yeah, it's, we call, we call it "lee-go", but a lot of people call it "lie-go", so it's It's the same thing.
Rob: LiGo. Cool. Uh, so yeah, so, you know, just to kind give the headline on that. So, so as you describe it in your website, a full, full stack LinkedIn system, not just another post generator, which
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: is interesting. So we'll, we'll, we'll get into that in, in a little bit. Um, but just, yeah, just kind of, first of all, just think it would be, just be interesting to just go into your, just into your kind of back story a little bit.
So you, you kind of personally really. So, so I guess first of all, just, I mean, I'm presuming that you, you, you, you code or, or I mean
Rassam: Yep.
Rob: maybe you use some AI tools and stuff, but
Rassam: We do everything. Everyone does everything.
Rob: yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm just interested to know sort of, you know, how did you sort of get into coding, kind of get the bug initially and sort of start
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: Where did that start? I.
Rassam: Okay. So I wouldn't say I'm necessarily by personality, a coder. Uh, in fact, in my, uh, so my first exposure to programming was actually during my, uh. Year gap before university. That's, that's the year I've put in as my chief failure officer, by the way, that, 'cause I was on a year gap and I was basically stuck in a room for the entire year.
And that's when I discovered programming. I tried to do some courses but couldn't do, couldn't be disciplined with that. But, uh, that was just an idea. Okay, this seems interesting. I would like to probably pursue this as, as a career, try to understand. 'cause I was heavily into philosophy at the time, uh, reading, you know, formal logic.
I was reading Kant, Stan, all of these people, and there were so many, uh, you know, overlaps with, with the, with the actual logic behind computer programming that I was seeing that I was like, okay, I, I've got to study this. So, uh, it wasn't until I came into university and it wasn't until the sixth semester of university when I actually started to take it seriously.
'cause I think in the first two or three years I was just like, uh, this seems just too much work. I, I was very lazy at that time. Right. But in the sixth semester when, when COVID hit that, that was the time I remember, I was like. Holy shit, I'm not gonna get a better chance than this to really upscale and develop my, uh, skillset here.
So that's when I decided to go like, as deep as possible into c plus plus. That was the language at the time. It was, it was the love of my life. Uh, I was like constantly reading the, uh, the c plus plus standard, trying to understand things from, from a first principles perspective. I had a Stack Overflow account, getting some comment and all of that.
And, uh, my first job out of university was also in c plus plus. It was as a quantitative researcher at a, at a very secret, uh, sort of hedge fund. So there, there was this, uh, hedge fund in the US that had an offshore in Pakistan. And that's where I, uh, began working. And I, it was very interesting job because there was a lot of programming, uh, the scientific programming, not just general, you know, the front end and the other stuff.
And, uh, there was a lot of statistics, mathematics, and finance involved as well. So that was my exposure, and that's the part that I loved about programming was just to, you know, express mathematical or statistical constructs in programming. So my, all of my programming, I would say the, uh, what do you call that?
Uh. The zest for programming was limited to this, uh, scientific computing domain. Uh, and that's where I was. I think, uh, uh, my favorite languages at the time were Julia Rust and c plus plus. These were the ones I primarily worked in.
Rob: So I guess that sort of naturally, um, did that naturally sort of lead you towards the AI path? Obviously that
Rassam: Yeah,
Rob: of mathematical at its core
Rassam: that was the thing I majored in during university. Actually, it wasn't a part of the university curriculum. I was just doing online courses on the side. I think I did it on maybe 36 or 37 in just a single summer, uh, vacation. And that's when I learned as much about AI as I could.
Rob: And so I mean, before you sort of got onto, uh, LiGo, um, I mean, did you build any sort of side projects or anything like that?
Rassam: Uh, so I was doing freelancing initially. Uh, right after university I was doing freelancing and my job. And then, you know, we, uh, when we started Antimatter, it was supposed to be a product company. That was probably the first product that I worked on as a front-end engineer, not as an ai about ai. Uh, but after a while we just, we realized that, you know, okay, we are not gonna be able to make this product or gonna get some decent revenue in it.
'cause, 'cause we don't know how to make products. We don't know how to get the funding and whatnot. So we decided to pivot and just go towards, uh, services. Right? So, so that's when we began developing projects for clients. And I did a lot of projects for clients at the time. Uh, but after like six or maybe six months or maybe one year, I realized that okay, everybody in the team is a very strong programmer.
I'm a strong programmer, but at the same time we, we lack anybody on the business development side. So I gotta pull back from, from programming and I, it's just went more and more in the sales and marketing side.
Rob: So, so how did you sort of transition from, from, from that part of your, uh, background career, I suppose, into, to starting to starting LiGo?
Rassam: Yeah. Uh, it's, it's a long story. It's a long story. I, so Antimatter was, uh, a company started by five engineers, five co-founders. We were university friends. We actually, some of us were housemates as well. And we had this shared love for programming for hardware technology. But, uh. I think we, we grew really fast.
And again, two years we got up to 1 million in a RR and that's when sort of like, you know, the cracks begin to appear in the sense that, you know, there was five co-founders, so everybody's gonna have their own opinions. Uh, and then we had some external investment as well. They also had their own opinions and there was just too much politics going on at, uh, at the time when I decided that maybe it's time for me to move on, right?
'cause we need less heads at the top. So we kind of had this strategic, uh, disagreements between us. The, I wanted to narrow down as much as possible, but the investors wanted us to be as broad as possible because we, they wanted us to go for the enterprise and so on and so forth. And there was just so, so much of this noise happening.
So that's when I left. And who's my co-founder now. He was already doing it and he had this. Mega plan of making a hundred micro SaaS over the next, I dunno, 10, 20 years. Right. So that's what I jumped into. I had no intention of making micro SaaS, but, uh, I knew Junaid from my school years. He, he was, uh.
Practically the best guy in terms of the academics and everything. And he was the go-getter that everybody looked up to. And he'd been doing a remote job for so many years making you know, more than anybody else in our circle. And when he decided to just go on his own way, that was a very deliberate decision on his spot.
So he had to leave behind maybe a six figure job to do this thing. So it was a big, big step. And that's what I jumped into. And initially, in the first month, you know, I had some of my own ideas. We decided, well, hey, so AI compliance is gonna be a big challenge in Europe at the very least. 'cause you know, Europe has these regulations, but nobody's complying with those.
So that was the thesis that why not just, you know, just deliver AI compliance solutions to European markets. Let's just go with that in the beginning. So we were doing some initial tests on LinkedIn, trying to reach out to people, posting about that and whatnot. And after a month or so of doing that, we kind of realized that, you know, Europeans just don't care.
Like they, they don't wanna move fast, they don't care. Right. Uh, they're kind of sleeping and, and you know, by the time, uh, the regulations are actually gonna kick in in 2025 or maybe beyond, uh, by then, either we'll be dead or the regulations would would've changed. Right. So, so that was the, that was the problem in the, in the meantime, you know, since our primary validation channel was LinkedIn, we were posting about that.
And this was at the time, by the way, when, uh, LinkedIn was still sort of functioning like, not like it is right now. It's pretty dead. I'm not sure why. But, uh, yeah, so Jan wanted to make my work easier. He just hacked up like a prototype in two days on making very targeted posts. 'cause we were making pivots very fast.
We were trying to target healthcare sector and then something else, and then something else every single, single week. So it was a lot of pain for me to go and search for, you know, understand those industries and then write very targeted posts for each of them.
Rob: Yeah.
Rassam: So he made that prototype that had this idea of content theme inside it.
So just define
Rob: just, just briefly there then, so does this link to the, um, a hundred micro SaaS sites
Rassam: Yep,
Rob: that you could create a content sort of
Rassam: yep.
Rob: of them quite
Rassam: Exactly. Exactly. Yep.
Rob: Makes sense.
Rassam: So he just made, made up that prototype quickly, uh, with, with a, with a central idea of a content theme. So you just define your topics, uh, your audience and give it some more context if you want. And then was able to generate, I would say, quite reasonable post at the time, like it was 60 to 70% there.
And all I had to do was just add some parts out and then make a post. Right. So I used it for like a couple of weeks. I was like, this is a huge time saver. Right? And Gene was like, yeah, it is. Let's, let's just go and develop this thing. Completely. So then there was this, uh, almost like 30 to 40 days of development cycle for the first MVP, and it was 30 to 40 days, simply because, uh, you know, we followed the advice of a senior engineer who told us to go for, I don't know, fire base and whatnot.
And we did not have any expertise in that. So we kind of, we built the whole thing and then we was like, scrap this whole thing. We were just gonna go as simple and scrappy as possible. Like the first version of LiGo was so bad. I think Gene just actually posted a screenshot of that. You can go take a look at that.
It, it, it looked like an application from the 1980s. Right. But we got our first few paid users on that. That's the main thing, right? Uh, because. It, it actually saved, uh, people a lot of, uh, time when, when it came out. But, but, uh, I think the, the timing was probably, could, could not have been worse. 'cause the moment we came out into the market, there was so many other people who are doing the exact same thing.
So it's been an, been an uphill battle from, from day one for us. But I think right now we are kind of, uh, on a, on an upper trajectory, on a very solid path's. Good.
Rob: So just, just zooming out a little bit then. Um. So if you were to describe, uh, what in essence, LIGO does
Rassam: Mm-hmm.
Rob: who it's for now, obviously you've explained the path of how you, you sort of scratched your own itch to sort of create this product, and then it became a product in its own right.
But who, who is it for now and why? Why do they need it?
Rassam: Yeah. I don't, I don't think. It has changed since the beginning, who it is for? Uh, so in the initial stages, our idea was that it's probably for freelancers or independent consultants, right? So the freelancers category has sort of, you know, gone outta the window. 'cause they, those people usually don't have the money and uh, LinkedIn is not a very reliable channel for them anyway, right?
But independent consultants, agency owners, founders, all of these that, that were our secondary markets, they are still, uh, you know, very important right now. But another layer that we have seen happen is, uh, sort of psychologically the people who like to systemize every single thing. They really like LiGo, right?
Uh, so, so the creative sort usually do not like it, of course. 'cause for them writing posts on LinkedIn is, is a creative sense of creative expression. So they don't like to automate that stuff as much as possible. Uh, but the people who are very systematic, who treat it as a revenue channel, I. They, they appreciate that.
And the other thing is you have people in Brazil, in Italy, in all, in a lot of these countries who don't speak English
Rob: Yep,
Rassam: And this kind of struggle with that. So for them, LiGo is, is really excellent. And I think a lot of our, uh, paid user base is actually from these countries.
Rob: I also just picked up on your, might be one of your posts actually, how, um, also just trying to kind of put forward this idea that it's, you know, in sort of like a B2B SaaS or something like that, that
Rassam: Hmm.
Rob: it shouldn't just be one person like the CEO or something trying do
Rassam: Yep.
Rob: in a, in a particular voice.
You want to come at sort of from some different angles.
Rassam: Yep. So this, this, I think we came to this realization, uh, just a couple months ago that, you know, the real value for LiGo is not just for individuals, it's for entire teams, right? So you have, uh, usually it's just the founder who's posting, right? But if you think about it, the, the con, the idea for content theme, once you make it for somebody and you, you know, back it up with their particular writing style and their experiences, you are able to generate content for them.
That is, you know, more or less, uh, I would say exactly like how they would write, right? So a lot of these teams have a challenge that the reason they cannot activate their employees on LinkedIn is because, you know, they, they're worried about a lot of things. They're worried about somebody speaking things that, that's not gonna align with the company.
That's number one. Then, uh, they start worrying about, you know, are they even going to stick to that? Like, you know, you, you can get your. Talk to your employees and tell them to post more, but after a couple of days, they're gonna be like, this is too much work. Right?
Rob: Yep.
Rassam: if you can automate that and you, you can make themes, and then, uh, we added this feature called the delegate access.
So now you can invite somebody to manage your account on your behalf. So the way it works with teams now is you get like three to five people in your team who you wanna build as thought leaders. You make an account for them, and then you invite a single social media manager to manage all of their accounts so they can sort of, you know, be their ghostwriter from a single, uh, entry point.
Rob: So I guess a couple of things then. How do you sort of train it to kinda speak in a particular person's voice and and what's their contribution? Do they, do they sort of feed in ideas for
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: and then it helps 'em express those ideas?
Rassam: So, so we are covering it from pretty much every single angle at this point in time. Initially it was just, you know, you. You would automatically generate ideas from the content themes you like or dislike an idea. If you like an idea, you could generate a post, but this point in time if you, you can either generate ideas from your themes automatically.
You can add more context to those ideas if you like, you can add your own ideas and back them up with the theme. Or if you have a newsletter or a social media post or whatever and you just wanna repurpose that, you also have that option. And if you actually like posting with RCPD or Claude, we have MCP integrations with those.
So you can just go and install those MCP integrations and it's gonna basically pull up your, uh, history from your LinkedIn, understand your writing style, and be able to give you content in your own style. So that's essentially the way it works, is it, the way it copies your voice is, you know, the moment you sign up, we're gonna ask you for your LinkedIn profile and we just get the public data from you.
So like the last couple of posts to understand how you write, like, you know, what are some facts about your personality? So sort of build this understanding of the user. And in fact, the more you interact with the product, the more memories we're gonna build of you and the better it gets over time.
Rob: And you mentioned, um, you mentioned the initial version you built was, uh, was pretty sort of retro
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: basic, um, and you ended up throwing it away. Was that, um, was that sort of part, did you do a sort of, um, of deliberate sort of validation process around this?
Or did you kind of already know that
Rassam: Yeah, the,
Rob: solving.
Rassam: was, it was, uh, like, it's part of our philosophy that anything that can be done with ai, we should do with ai. So with ai we can only do a very basic version of this, which we did. And then, uh, you know, and I, we both have, uh, A GDM, uh, background. So we both in go to market for many years and. We, we were both like, if we can sell this ugly thing, then we can sell anything.
Right? So, so we were like, let's just go and validate that. So, so, so the way we validated this initially was I just started a personal branding cohort and, and I discourse server. I invited some people over, you know, trying to reach them how to write on LinkedIn and whatnot. And went for like a month or so.
The plan was to go for three months. But, you know, it was too tiring. After, after a month I was like, this, screw it. The job is done. We just wanted to validate the idea that this is gonna work or not. And by the end of that, uh, cohort, we were able to get like 60 to 70 people in the beta version from that cohort only.
Right? And they were using the product, they were making, uh, good use of it, and they, they were impressed with it. Uh, so I think that that's how we validated the idea. And then of course we, uh, the, the, the moment we launched the MDP, we went and made some ready threats and got huge traction. From those threats.
I think we were able to get like four, 500 signups and in a, in a couple of weeks at that time.
Rob: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So how did you, um, you mentioned you set up a discord for the kind of initial,
Rassam: Yep.
Rob: I guess, what turned out to be this sort initial kinda, almost like beta group who were,
Rassam: Mm-hmm. Yep.
Rob: to, um, and, and how did you kinda spread the word about the Discord group?
Rassam: LinkedIn
Rob: Yeah,
Rassam: just talked about it on LinkedIn just.
Rob: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. then, um, and then Reddit as well. I mean, hear, hear quite a lot about Reddit at the moment. It often crops up in stories about how people get things started now. It seems like a good,
Rassam: So Reddit actually came, I think, uh, much later in the process. Uh, when we were actually done making the product. That's when we went on Reddit. Uh, the initial, uh, list of people who we got in the, in the Discord server was actually all from LinkedIn. And it was of course, at the time when LinkedIn was actually performing well for us and for everybody.
So you could get like maybe 10,000 impressions on a, a daily good post, and now you can barely get like 500. So that, that's the, that's a problem.
Rob: Yep. I can attest. great. So, so basically you did some posting on LinkedIn around a sort of personal branding kind of idea
Rassam: Yep.
with content, I guess, and then you got those people talking the Discord, and then you sort of built that initial kind of MVP around, around them.
Yep.
Rob: One other question around the product, I guess the sort of positioning of it then.
So, um, you mentioned, I mean, I mean when you started this, it was probably very good timing and there were less tools like this.
Rassam: Yep.
Rob: Seems there are quite a few now. do you, do you still feel that you have a sort of like a, like a kinda USP sort of point of differentiation amongst,
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: the others?
Rassam: Yeah. This, I think, uh, we have probably the, the most solid USP of all. The challenge is just communicating that because I think at this point there is only one solution in the market that is covering every single angle of LinkedIn. So we are not just for posting, we also have analytics, we also have comments.
We also have a CRM inside it that we are currently building out. And there are so many other things that we are also building out in this. So like, we are going for a very horizontal approach at this point. We're not trying to be know very deep into a single feature. We're trying to build as many as possible.
So if you look at maybe the, the top one is tapo, right? LiGo is good at posting, is good at the inspiration part and everything, but when it comes to comments, it's absolutely bad. I, I, I'm saying this, uh, maybe I'm biased, but you can try it yourself, but like, like I've used every single solution in the market.
Like every time I see a new competitor come up, I go and use that. 'cause that, that's my way of understanding you. What, what gap can we fill? Right? So that's,
Rob: I can definitely, I can definitely tell from your, from your posts
Rassam: yeah.
Rob: looking on the site that kind of ensuring that , you know, the posts are high quality and that, you know, they do, they do represent the, um, the person's voice,
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: at yourself authentically is, it seems to be very much baked into the core of what you
Rassam: Yeah, and more than that is the comments. I think the, the comments we have are probably the best in the market, and that's because a lot of these other tools, I think Engage Yeah. Was a big, big biggest one. And it just got banned by LinkedIn by the way. They had a, they had an engagement pod running in the background.
Uh, they got banned. What they do is they just give you generic high quality comments. They're not backed up by your profile. They're not backed up by your content themes or your style. But with LiGo, since your entire profile is backed up with your profile, with your memories, and you can define your own custom styles, the comments are almost 95% there.
If a majority of our paid user base actually comes from the Chrome extension rather than the actual app, uh, web app.
Rob: Right. And, and, uh, you mentioned some of these other tools getting, getting banned.
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: Um, and is that sort of a constant kind of looming threat or do you feel that you are playing,
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: the, the game the right way? So it's not a problem, not a problem for you or,
Rassam: Yeah, I think we are, we are more or less on the line. Like if we just take, take one more step further it, we are in the danger zone, but right now we are just more or less on the line. So, uh, the recent Engage AI got banned. Of course they were doing an engagement part, so they, that's completely outta of the question.
Uh, the other thing they were doing was when you install a Chrome extension and you comment on a post, it was, it actually wrote the comment for you. And that's against LinkedIn's policy. 'cause you're actually directly, you know, interacting with the DOM and changing things in real time. This, it's not user initiative.
So with us you just, you know, copy, paste the post, you get the comments and you have to copy, paste the comments and make edits and then post it.
Rob: Okay.
Rassam: that puts us in, in the, in that safe zone. But of course, uh, the, the fact that we have that engage button show up in the, in the dome itself is a bit of a yellow flag at the, at this point in time.
It's not too, like if we do one more thing that is against LinkedIn terms of service, then maybe we are there radar. But right now we are not.
Rob: It's a bit, it does seem, I mean, I'm sure they have, obviously have their terms. Maybe it's
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: there, but it seems, it seems pretty gray and there's obviously plenty of these tools around
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: they could just ban them all tomorrow if they wanted to, but they're not,
Rassam: I, so I think one of the tools that, that actually can confidently say that is compliant is authored up. And we look up to them a lot in terms of the compliance, right? So we try to model pretty much every single thing behind them. Uh, so I think, uh, in fact right now, currently as we're talking, we're in the process of removing that engage button as well.
So we are gonna go for a, uh, even more compliant, uh, step forward there. But yeah, uh, if, if as long as authored up is safe, we are safe.
Rob: Yeah. And I guess it's sort of, there was some parallels with say, like, like SEO and the old Black Hat days, and that all got,
Rassam: Yeah,
Rob: Google called time on that. Uh, uh, uh, you know, and that was a good thing. But still, SEO lives on and you just gotta kind of do it the right, the right
Rassam: yeah. Yep.
Rob: So, um, let's talk a little bit about progress so far. I suppose more with the, the, the kind of the business side of it in a sense. Um, so when did you, when did you launch LiGo?
Rassam: We launched it in October last year. That was the beta launch.
Rob: Yep. Um, and, um, ran random question actually just. Um, I, I noticed it's on a sub, it's on a subdomain, and I was just wondering
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: that was and why maybe you hadn't transitioned to
Rassam: Yeah. That was this, this was a very confusing decision for us at the beginning. 'cause, uh,
Rob: Yeah,
Rassam: I said that, you know, we have a parent company and eventually we want to build a hundred Microsofts, right?
Rob: yeah,
Rassam: we want the parent company domain to get stronger and stronger over time so that, you know, we can back the other ones up.
But, so at this point, so that was, that's what went into the decision. The other problem was, at the time when we were looking for domains for LiGo, uh, all of the.com domains were too expensive, we're just not available, right. So we decided let's just go with a sub domain for novel worry about it later.
But now we are planning to Mike it. 'cause you know, we've got feedback from a lot of people that when they see the subdomain, they just, they don't feel like it's, it's a bit sketchy, right.
Rob: yeah. I think, I think nowadays it feels like, is it a kind of, a bit like you've spun something up on like, you know, sort of vw,
Rassam: Yeah,
Rob: V zero or something like that. And you just like, oh, it's a little test site or something.
Rassam: yeah,
Rob: that was just what it made me, me feel a little bit. So I was just curious as to,
Rassam: yeah. Every, everybody says that. So now we are taking that seriously. We we're gonna migrate for year.
Rob: yeah. Yeah. Might be, might be a big unlock.
Rassam: Yeah. Big unlock.
Rob: know. Um, so, um, yeah, so in terms of, um, I, I dunno what you're willing to share, but just in terms of kind of MRR, even just sort of a range or so, and kind of number of
Rassam: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so across the product portfolio, I think we are making around $5,000 per month right now. So we actually have two products. One is LiGo, the other one is audio ai, which we don't talk about 'cause we just kind of just hack that up in a co in a week or so and just put it up. And it just keeps on bringing subscriptions.
I don't know why we we're planning to, uh, we are planning to give it, uh, more dedicated time after this current, uh, marketing sprint for LiGo. That product has huge potential. So I don't know if you've used Wi Flow or Mac Whispers on Mac. So you, you, it's a dictation software, right? So you can talk anywhere it's gonna, you know, voice to text anywhere you want.
That's what we're trying to build. But for Windows, right? So currently audio ai works in browsers. It does not work, uh, everywhere. But we are trying to make it everywhere after this, uh, marketing sprint. But this, that's one of the strongest signal that, that we had, uh, with, with, with audio ai was it was just a Chrome extension, right?
And after the initial flurry of users, it's just. Continually growing. 'cause the Chrome Store has its own distribution channel.
Rob: Yep.
Rassam: what inspired us to make a Chrome extension for LiGo as well. 'cause once your Chrome extension starts to, you know, ramp up, then you, you know, it's just an automatic distribution channel that you don't have to worry about.
It's just gonna keep on bringing users more and more. So that's the, uh, I don't know. I think I, I kind of went off topic. I was trying to answer that. Yeah, $5,000 is the, across the broader portfolio. LiGo is currently growing and growing. That's, you know, 50% of their revenue currently is just LiGo.
Rob: Great. Um, and roughly how many customers?
Rassam: Roughly. Uh, uh, I mean, you would have to, to first engineer that, but probably around, I think a hundred users that we have on the pay plan,
Rob: And so, and it's a free trial, isn't it?
Rassam: it is a free trial. So in terms of the signups, I think we've had maybe, I don't know, 3000 signups at this point in time.
Rob: Yep,
Rassam: the paid users are much less. So we had a lot of churn around February. There was too many bugs. Otherwise we would, we would be double the revenue that we are right now. Yeah,
Rob: Yep. Yeah. Um, great. And you, you talked about how you sort of got your, your initial customer as well, I suppose You talked about how you kind of validated the MVP and kind of maybe got your initial, initial kind of
Rassam: yeah,
Rob: then was there a sort of a phase after that when you, you launched and you needed a, I guess you probably did some more work on on LinkedIn.
Rassam: yeah.
Rob: To get the word around.
Rassam: So I think the initial phase was just making some very flamboyant Reddit threads and we got so many viral threads that, uh, I, I think in pure numbers, I got around 500,000 views in the first, uh, week or two on Reddit
Rob: Right.
Rassam: the thread. Right. And that's where the majority of the users came from. But then I got banned from all of the subs.
So I had to make a new account and, uh, start from scratch. And that's when we sort of.
Rob: much the exact same story in, in, in the, in the previous podcast episode.
Rassam: I was just listening to that. So he said that,
Rob: just switched another account and like carried on. But, you
Rassam: I dunno, you just, you just gotta do it. You just gotta do it.
Rob: mean, it's
Rassam: Uh, I
Rob: kind
Rassam: think,
Rob: because everyone's, everyone's selling on there, aren't they? And it's, um, yeah.
Rassam: you don't get many good channels if you're a bootstrapper. So you just have to make the, make the most of what you have. And, uh, the rest of the sprint was mostly, uh, on Twitter. On LinkedIn.
LinkedIn by the way, just worked for a couple of weeks and then it stopped working for us. It still hasn't worked. So it works as an awareness channel that, that, you know, somehow works in B2B deals, which you haven't made too many of. But in terms of pure user acquisition, it was kind of bad. I think around month three onward, all of our user acquisition is from two places.
One of them is directories. So, uh, there's a directory called, there's an AI for that we we listed on there. That brings us the majority of the user so far. And the other is our own SEO. That's what we spent a lot of time on. So it's bringing around a hundred thousand impressions every month.
Rob: Yeah, I heard of that. There's an AI for that. Is that, is it Product Hunt?
Rassam: It's, it's a directory, kind of like Product Hunt, but sort of, you know, it's more of a directory where people search for products, uh, that they wanna use rather than product hunt, which is more of, you know, I would say it's, it's a Y Combinator hangout at this point. Product hunt.
Rob: Yeah. Great. Um, and, um, yeah, just, uh, briefly in terms of, um, I mean you mentioned, you, you unfortunately, you sort of churn a few customers due to some bugs. I guess you
Rassam: Yeah,
Rob: fixed the worst of those bugs now.
Rassam: absolutely.
Rob: but is it, is it, um, do you, do you find it once people are set up, it tends to be a sort of fairly kind of sticky product.
Rassam: Yeah. Uh, so we actually had churn issues from the very beginning for multiple reasons. Number one is when you have a platform product like this, right? The usage of a product relies in, in a lot of ways on, on the behavior of the platform, right? So if people are not disciplined enough to stick to LinkedIn posting for a long time, they're not gonna be using a product anyway.
So we had a lot of people who were just starting out on LinkedIn and they decided, okay, why not? We just use LiGo to get started. And after a couple of weeks they decided was a lot of work, let's cancel the subscription right? Challenge. So. That gave us a signal that, okay, we don't wanna go after people who are just starting out LinkedIn and we wanna go after people who are mostly on LinkedIn already.
Right. And when we got those people, they have, they subscribe within the first few days. They don't even wait for the future to be over and then they stick around for a very long time. Right. And
Rob: So you're, so you're kind of looking for people who already have that sense of sort of discipline and kind of posting regularly. They're, they just wanna do it a little bit more efficiently.
Rassam: Exactly, so, so the time base, uh, the, the time saving is the main, uh, USP for them. And the other thing is that, you know, initially of course the bugs were some of the reasons that people could not activate the entire product. So we've been doing very aggressively outbound customer support right now.
Anybody who signs up on LiGo, we send them a DM and ask them about their experience. We actually track the API errors and whatnot, whatever they get in the backend, and we reach out to those people and tell them, Hey, you got this, uh, this is the solution. So we, we had to do that manually, but at this point in time, you know, so, so our MRR graph was probably, you know, up and down, up and down for a long time until last month when it's just been constantly going up a little bit.
Rob: Yep.
Rassam: Right? So that's, that's the signal that we were looking for, is that now the product is at a mature stage where, you know, if they're not, they're not too many issues. So it's gonna keep going.
Rob: So you're just fe feeling that sense that you've, you, you, you've achieved some level of product market-fit
Rassam: Yep,
Rob: and you
Rassam: a hundred percent.
Rob: kinda scale things up a bit. So have you, um, I mean, you doing anything, doing any kind of paid acquisition or, do you have any, any plans to,
Rassam: We, we tested out, uh, a little bit on LinkedIn, a little bit on Reddit, uh, and access, well, so Reddit was pretty good initially then it tapers off very quickly. 'cause the kind of user we get from Reddit is just not the kind of user we want. So, so people who click on the add-on where they are generally just getting started on LinkedIn, so that's not the ICB we want on LinkedIn itself.
Uh, the ads are very expensive. The targeting was pretty bad. May, maybe that was the reason. So we're just gonna run a couple more experiments to see, you know, what happens. But the main, main problem with LinkedIn is just that the ads are a bit bit more expensive than we would like them to be. Right? It, it doesn't make sense for us to be spending a hundred dollars to acquire a single lead when the product itself is just $64 per month.
Right? Uh, so we, we have to figure some mechanics out there, maybe, maybe get them on a team plan or whatnot. Maybe we get them on a way, uh, you know, a white glove consulting offer, whatever. So that's, that's an option we're exploring. X worked really well in terms of driving the clicks and impressions, but I think it had the same problem as Reddit.
Uh, the kind of user was just not the kind of user who's active on LinkedIn.
Rob: Yeah. It's pretty obvious where you need to look for your customers, isn't it?
Rassam: Yeah,
Rob: That's the
Rassam: so, so that's the challenge with, with page channels for us right now is LinkedIn is probably the only viable one, but in order to reach the right market on LinkedIn, it's just very expensive one. Let's figure out some, some ad collateral that is gonna blow it out of the box.
Rob: Great. Okay. Um, just focus a little bit then for a minute on the actual, um. Actual sort of product slash mvp. So, how long did it take you to build the MVP and, and was it, did you build it? Uh, do do you have a, do you have a team who worked
Rassam: Yeah, yeah. So the initial, the beta version was built entirely by Junaid himself. Uh, so that, that was the one that took us one month. And then after that it was basically team, uh, you know, tag teaming on, on this. So you could roughly think of it like this, that the backend was almost intelligent, eight. And the front end, especially the website, all of the pages, that's where I was, uh, mostly active.
Uh, so we were tag team on both of these. We did, we had one or two contractors, but they mainly worked on, uh, you know, a couple of pages. And they also, uh, but then majority of their time was spent on the other product on audio ai, not LiGo itself. So Wego is almost 95 percenta than me, probably 60 to 70 Percenta.
Then that's just me. So that, uh, that that's what we, we were making. And, uh, the MVP itself, so the beta version was just the beta version. The MVP took us, I would say, another 40 days. And since then it's been a process of iterative improvements. I don't know how to, what do we even call the current stage right now?
I don't know what it is. It's probably product.
Rob: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Uh, the long road.
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: Uh, yeah. So, um, and so realistic sort of two, two kind of co-founders and, and, and technical people, developers.
Rassam: Yeah,
Rob: so you, so it's, it is kinda a little bit different to the usual, sort of like, you know, you've got a, whatever, a hacker and a hustler or whatever, that kind of
Rassam: yeah,
Rob: of both doing some coding and both doing some selling and marketing.
Rassam: yeah. So we,
Rob: Yeah.
Rassam: in sprint. So we have a development sprint for a month, and then we do a marketing sprint for a month. So, but, uh, you know, the, the, the ratios are, uh, uh, change a little bit. So generic is pretty much 90% development. When he's doing development, I'm like 60% development when I'm doing development.
So that's the idea.
Rob: Yep. Um, and, just a kind of brief sort of idea of your kind of tech stack and kind of any, any sort of key frameworks, tools that you use.
Rassam: Whatever the AI is comfortable with, we don't ask questions, but we do have a tech stack. So, you know, front is all next js the backend was, uh, is in python flask. Uh, 'cause the, when you're programming with the ai, you can't get fancy with the tech stack. You just have to use what, what the AI is most comfortable with.
Rob: yep, yep. Python's always a good fit there,
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: And then, um, I guess then in terms of kind of the, the, uh, of LLM model that you're building this on,
Rassam: All of them.
Rob: all of
Rassam: of them.
Rob: So you get like, get like a, a choice.
Rassam: So, uh, so for building it out, of course we use Cursor. So, you know, whatever the model, uh, does the job, we just use that. But inside the application, if you're asking, you know, what would we use to write the post and whatnot, we have different options. Uh, so we, primarily, everything is on clo, but, uh, comments are, you know, we test it out and, uh, I would say G PT is much better at comments.
So that's what we use there. But you can chase change that in the settings. You're gonna get the comments from the cloud, or you can even put Gemini or Grok there. So that's up to you, whatever you like.
Rob: So, so what do you find the, the Claude's better at then?
Rassam: Uh. At this point, I'm a little conflicted. I would say GPT is much better at writing posts and comments. Both. Initially I felt like, you know, Claude was just way better, way better. But right now I think GPT is there. 'cause I, I, I don't know what they did to Claude initially. It was so much better. But, uh, somehow I think it, it got nerfed somewhere along the way.
Now it just, it has, it gets, it goes into the habit of, you know, repeating some things. And that's what I don't like.
Rob: Okay, Um, so yeah, could we move on to, just getting an idea really of maybe some of the kind of, kind of big wins and maybe, and then maybe some of the kind of, I don't know, the failures, but sort of things you learned along the way. So I guess, so starting with, would you be able to give me sort of an example of two things that you feel worked really well, whether it's in the marketing or, or, or the sort of product side?
Rassam: Yeah, on on the marketing side, you won't believe this. Nobody believes this, but our best distribution channel is actually medium.
Rob: Oh, okay. Yep.
Rassam: so, so the medium was a slow burn in the sense that, you know, Junaid had been writing a blog for a long time, not very consistently, but he had this instinct that, you know, medium can proof would be a really good channel over time. So we, we were just, you know, pushing out one article every single week or so.
And then luckily when we released audio ai, we came up with this, uh, and Deep Seek came out, by the way. Uh, it was a coinciding, and we decided, hey, why not? Why don't we write a blog on, uh, you know, how, uh, that, you know, at this point, prompt engineering is more or less there, so you just wanna give it more and more context.
So why not use audio ai, something like that. That's the idea. Uh, rough idea of the block. And so I wrote the block, uh, and it, it was a genuinely interesting take, and Jeanette posted it from the, from the medium itself, and it, you know, became viral. Uh, I think it got maybe 40, 50,000 claps in a couple of weeks.
Uh.
Rob: was that just that just outta the blue or did he have a sort of following on there already?
Rassam: I think the following was, we probably just had maybe 200 followers at that time, so not too much. But that, uh, blog got shared so much, uh, all of the internet that there was, uh, I think we got maybe 500 or 600 signups from that loan on audio ai. So that was our signal that we gotta do something similar for LiGo now.
Uh, so we've been, uh, writing on and off different, you know, whenever we have, uh, a big feature come out, we write a blog on that, and some of them go, you know, uh, go viral. Some of them don't. That, that's fine. That's up to the platform, what they like, what the people like there. But it, it's, it's probably the most consistent, uh, acquisition channel for us than anything else right now.
Rob: Interesting. And um, then are you using AI or your tool to help with those posts or are you writing those
Rassam: Yeah, so, so the medium articles are a mix of human and ai. 'cause we've gotta make them as good as possible. So I, I write the first, first, first draft. Uh, I actually write like a couple of drafts with AI for, with different models with cloud, which activity. And then I pick and choose the lines. Every single line has to serve its purpose.
'cause those articles are written with the intention of going viral.
Rassam: The other thing that worked well, and I'm gonna get a lot of, uh, criticism for this is. AI blogs on your website. Nobody, nobody believes it. I think everybody wants you that if you, if you use AI for your seo, it's gonna hurt you a lot. But I don't know, maybe they're doing something wrong. Maybe we are doing something right.
I'm not sure. But we have a multiple process set up. Uh, we have multiple steps in the process with generating a blog. So number one, we don't use the vanilla, uh, I would say models, either cloud or chat cd. That's number one. We don't do that. What we do is, so we have a code base. We centralized our content menu system inside the, uh, you know, app itself.
We don't have an external CMS, so all of the blogs are inside the directory where the code base is. Right. So we have this, uh, I would say separate folder where we have, where we've given it specific paths to each of the folders, where the relevant information is. And every single time I wanna write a blog, I just tell it, okay, this is the job, this is the keyword, this is what we wanna rank for.
Right. Go take a look at all of the information. You have the images in this direction and whatnot, and the, there is like a file which describes, you know, this is the image name and this is what, what the image is showing. So then the model has every single, uh, piece of con information. It needs to produce a high quality block.
So it's usually a one shot process at this point in time. It take, it took some time for us to get here, but now it's like a single prompt that tells you what to write and it, it's able to get all of the images, all of the, the relevant links. It's able to do the internal links perfectly. And it's, the tone is itself, is, you know, of course, uh, we give it the other blocks as an example that this, this is what we've written before.
So this is our process. Yeah.
Rob: so what, um, so what are all those images of
Rassam: So the, these are images, either, you know, infographics that you made for, while writing blogs before, or these are screenshots of the application. 'cause that's what the, that's the kind of blogs you wanna write usually are bottom of funnel or middle funnel, right? So they're gonna be either about your product, education or problem awareness.
So these are the kind of images you want in that directory. Just put them all there. Describe each of the images and every single time. So for example, just yesterday I wrote a blog on Engage AI getting banned, right? So of course that was a perfect opportunity. Engage AI got banned, here's an alternative, blah, blah, blah.
And it was able to pull the entire command generation, uh, flow and uh, you know, the images we have for that flow from the directory and put that in the, uh, in the actual block. So I didn't have to think about, okay, what images to add here, what to do that, 'cause that's usually the most laborious part of the writing the blogs is, is selecting what images to put and what links to put in, how to do the internal link and whatnot.
So we've automated all of that.
Rob: So you've got, so, and you're doing that literally within your code base, within your
Rassam: Yeah. Within,
Rob: your,
Rassam: within a code base. Yep.
Rob: So, so what are you, are you sort of using, uh, like cursor or something to make your blogs then,
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: yeah.
Rassam: With.
Rob: Well that's a bit different. Yeah. No, that's really interesting. Cool. Uh, it's a bit different.
No, it's kind of like, uh, uh, yeah, I've never heard of it done that way. So did you just come up with that?
Rassam: Uh, I think it was, it was a iterative process initially. We, we had a set of some Claude projects for this, uh, but eventually we realized, you know, we are doing a lot of this, uh, you know, in a disjointed way. The reason we were on Claude initially was because we had, uh, an external CMS, uh, that's another indie hacker, CMS, by the way, called Wisp.
But it had a lot of limitations. It used to go down every Monday. I don't know, I'm not sure. We had an inside joke that, you know, maybe Raymond is pushing to prod right now. So,
Rob: they don't wanna do it. They don't wanna do it on Friday, so I'll do it on Monday instead.
Rassam: yeah, so he would always do that on a Monday, and that there was, there was a huge pain. So we decided, you know, let's just, there's in, uh, internalize the blog and
Rob: Yeah,
Rassam: we'll, we'll be better off because when you have the blogs hosted externally, then you know, you have to fetch the content of the blogs using the API and then you cannot give it, uh, in the context as easily.
So if all of the files are already in the, uh, in your code base now, you can easily reference each of the files that you want, uh, to cursor while writing the blogs.
Rob: Okay. Uh, now can you think of one thing that, uh, didn't, didn't work out so well? Something that you,
Rassam: Oh boy.
Rob: lesson from?
Rassam: Oh boy. LinkedIn,
Rob: Never again.
Rassam: not, never again, I would say it's, it's, it's been a slow burn in the sense that,
Rob: Yeah,
Rassam: uh, it, it's get, it's definitely getting us eyeballs from some high quality prospects of problem. It's just that we don't have an offering to make them right now. Right. So they, so we, we have gotten some people, uh, who are looking to eye for, uh, a team plan, but we still have some, uh, building out to do on that front.
So I would say if you have a B2C or a product that is, you know, targeted at individuals, maybe LinkedIn is not it, but if you're going for B2B, then you know, it's definitely the channel to be on.
So the, I mean the, our product is about LinkedIn, so for a long time we have this, you know, this, this sinking feeling that, you know, we are selling a LinkedIn solution. If we can't get customers for our own product from LinkedIn, what gives Right? But, but it's not the product. It's not, it's not our content.
The content is fine and everything is fine. It's just the offering. It's just not, uh, what LinkedIn, you know, hugely prizes.
Rob: Yes. So, yeah, 'cause you've mentioned this a couple of times, I guess you're, you're kind of zeroing this, this, this, this, this idea of kind of the type of, uh, I guess ICP that I
Rassam: Yeah,
Rob: right ICP for your product, but also the one that actually LinkedIn can, can actually, uh,
Rassam: yeah,
Rob: you, can, can help you find, I mean, 'cause you
Rassam: yeah,
Rob: that, um, I was gonna ask you about this actually.
'cause you said that you, you, like, you don't think that LinkedIn's great for like freelancers, for example. Um, and what, so what's the reasoning, what's the reason there, and why do you think it is that LinkedIn is particularly good, I guess for, for B2B? I think that's what you're saying, isn't it?
Rassam: yeah. I think I. What I've seen success with on LinkedIn is when you target specific job roles, now it resonates specifically some special roles like software engineers. LinkedIn is full of them. Maybe it's my own profile, maybe I had a software engineering background, so my, you know, connections are full of that.
But I literally n every single software engineer from my connections and I still get impressions from software engineers. I don't know why. So these people have, you know, swarming LinkedIn, you have recruiters, you have HR people, you have job seekers, and you have, you know, all of these, uh, segments and uh, the clusters.
Uh, now if you have a product that very clearly aligns with the job role, you can get a lot of traction from LinkedIn,
Rob: Hmm.
Rassam: right? So if, so, for example, if LiGo was a product that was targeted strictly at marketers, and eventually I think the team plan is going to be targeted at VPs of marketing who wanna build the, you know, company brand and whatnot.
Then it would make sense for us to be on LinkedIn and talk directly to that job role. 'cause when we, when you can specify a job role in your post, that those people will stop and start reading the post. Otherwise, if it's just, you know, a generic thought leadership about, you know, how to improve this and that, blah, blah, blah, uh, people are just gonna scroll past.
I don't think that's what people, uh, open LinkedIn for. Generally speaking, they, they either wanna connect with, uh, similar colleagues or they wanna get a job or they wanna find a customer. That's what people are for. Sometimes they can be for entertainment, and I did try that angle, by the way. So in the, I think in the first, uh, I would say three to four months of LiGo, I was actually a complete shit poster on LinkedIn.
I had a, I had a Korean baby, PFP. Uh, baby PFP and I was making completely unhinged shit posts. I don't, I don't recommend anybody to go and stalk me, stalk my posts from that time 'cause they were really unhinged. I did try that. The problem is, of course, the people who are there for entertainment, they're not there to buy.
So I had to change that direction at some point.
Rob: have to go and have a look now.
Rassam: Please don't.
Rob: So you didn't, you didn't go and clean all that up then. Delete them all too many of them, I suppose.
Rassam: Well, I like live dangerously.
Rob: Uh, very good. Okay. So, great. Okay. Well, let's, um, let's look a little, little ahead to the sort of the future here then. So for, I guess for, for LiGo, but just in generally for your, for yourself even, or for, for your kind of, um, uh, your kind of GR company or your group if you like. Um, do you have a sort of short goal, short term goals in mind?
Longer term goals, a bigger vision?
Rassam: Yeah, the short term goal is always double the revenue.
Rob: Yeah.
Rassam: that's always
Rob: Can't go wrong with that.
Rassam: the, can't go wrong with that, that this is short term goal. The long term goal is to at least be able to make a couple more products by the end of next year. 'cause that was what if the car started for, it was not, it was just about a single product.
We wanna make as many as possible. So like if we get stuck on just growing one product, uh, that, that's, that's a bad sign for the entire company strategy. So that's, that's a long-term goal. The, I would say the deeper goal is always to be ask clear about our, uh, direction and trajectory as we have been so far.
I think this is one of the things that, uh, I really like about at the car that, you know, very few people get to experience in their career is, uh, a company whose direction just makes sense. Uh, it's, it's a deeper philosophical point too because, you know, I. A lot of, a lot of the times when you ask people, you know, why are they growing?
They, they, they don't really have a clear answer. Uh, or if you ask them, why are you not growing? They don't have a clear answer. But in our case, every single time we sit down to think about, okay, either of these directions why we're not growing, or why are we growing, we have an answer that is very clear.
And usually our answers are maybe 50 to 60% correct. That's a pretty high, uh, you know, chance. Uh, we can usually compare the uncertainties in the business environment. So this is, uh, this is a thing that, you know, we, we wanna keep this strong strategic focus on every single thing and just, just make decisions that keep on making sense.
Uh, I think that it was LinkedIn's VP of product maybe who said that we, you know, uh, we may be wrong, but at least we are not confused that, that that's the, that's the philosophy we have. We may be wrong, but we don't wanna be confused or the, uh, or another way to put it is we'd rather be roughly right than precisely wrong.
Rob: Yeah. And when you are wrong to know
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: why you were wrong and
Rassam: Yeah, exactly.
Rob: it.
Rassam: We wanna know that
Rob: Yep. And with, with the, and with the forthcoming products and the, um. Are almost certainly gonna be, have some form of AI,
Rassam: all of them are gonna be AI, pretty much all of them because, uh, that's what the company stands for.
Rob: And do you have, do you have an idea for those products yet or are they just considering a few things?
Rassam: Ooh. We have some cooking up in the Bon. One of them is, you know, you can probably guess it's gonna be about SEO
Rob: Yep,
Rassam: 'cause we were able to do something that, you know, a lot of teams, uh, haven't yet figured out. Uh, by the way, this is, this is something that a lot of people, uh, don't know about us. We, we got 200,000 impressions on our blogs within 30 days.
From almost a thousand impressions per month, right? Uh, so that was a huge trajectory. People think that, you know, you need to give SEO six months or whatnot, but you can get very decent traction within a month if you're really co consistently, you go hardcore on this.
Rob: Now that's, that's a whole topic, but how, how do you. Probably a million dollar question, but how do you see the sort of future of SEO panning out, you know, with sort of chat GPT, Yep. the likes and nipping the Google's heels?
Rassam: Yeah. So, so you wanna, if, if you're an leader in any company at this point in time, you wanna focus on two things, number one. Do not write anything top of funnel. And people have been saying this for so many years, I don't, I don't know why people were writing top of funnel. The main purpose of your blog is to educate people either about the problem or about the solution.
That's it. You don't wanna do any random, you don't wanna write for the sake of writing just these two. If, if a blog is not educating either about the problem or the solution, scratch it. You, you, you don't have to write that. Right? And, uh, if you're doing keyword led research and whatnot, always ask, is this keyword, you know, e either part of the problem or the solution.
If it's not, don't write about it. That's the number one thing. The second thing is, and this is a bit more technical, is uh, I'm not sure how many people are familiar with product-LED SEO, but that's the approach that I very strictly follow. Right. So the idea of a product-led SEO is that. I think at this point in time, the simplest definition would be you don't want content, you want to expose data sets.
So, so the way, uh, the, another way to say it is, think about Amazon, right? Amazon does not write content. They just have product listings,
Rob: Yeah.
Rassam: are the pages. Think about,
Rob: to
Rassam: think about Zillow. They don't have content. They have pages. User generator, Figma Figma doesn't have content. They have usage generator templates and whatnot.
Miro, Canva, all of these companies that are, that, that are not threatened by whatever was happening in the a IO views or whatever is they, they all expose sort of their data to the world. Now, the challenge, of course, there is. You know, uh, not every product is, can be very easily translated in that way, but that's the job of a marketer or an SEO person to really figure out how to do that in a way that is going to be useful to people.
So, for example, one of the ways that we are exploring right now, and it's, it's a little bit of a gray area with LinkedIn right now, but we gotta, we, we gotta figure out some way on that is so, so we have a lot of people sign up on LiGo. We have the analytics and whatnot. We know, you know, this is your industry, this is what you're writing about, this is what's getting interaction, this is what's not getting interaction.
So how about we start making pages on that, right? So like, if you like what, imagine that there was a page where you could just go and say, okay, I'm a software engineer in Berlin. What should I write about on LinkedIn and just shows yoga. These are all the people, uh, that, that fit your profile. This is what they're writing about.
Just go and do that. So tap you probably is already doing that inside the application. LiGoly. So we gotta figure out some LiGo way of doing that. But, you know, on, on the, on the SU side, so this is, this is, uh, the way I think of it is you wanna create that content mode on SU If you are able to do that, you're golden.
Otherwise, you, you just keep on struggling. But I think if you just follow the first one, middle funnel or, but funnel, you're more or less there.
Rob: And you still think it's sort of a, a valid approach in terms of more people using. ChatGPT to search rather than Google around what way It's still gonna get you, get you traffic just a different way.
Rassam: Yeah. I, I mean, think about it, what exactly is, is chat CCPT recommending you at the end? If, if you're searching for a product, it's gonna give you a product listening page. If you're searching for a Figma template, it's gonna give you that listing page. So what is it about your product that people are likely to be searching for that you can expose directly instead of, you know, giving them 3000 word essay about the history of that thing?
Rob: Great. Um, just coming back to kind of Yeah. The future of the company. So you, um, pres, presumably your bootstrapping have been bootstrapping
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: from the start.
Rassam: So in the beginning, not a single external dollar,
Rob: Cool, cool. And is that how you plan to continue.
Rassam: we don't have any other choice. I mean, none of what we are doing is, is something that a VC would look at and say, Hey, I want to invest in that. None of these are 10 x or a hundred x products.
Rob: But you, but you could, well you never know, but you, you, you could still, you could still raise maybe a little bit to help, but I mean, you don't, you just,
Rassam: We don't need that. So, so, so, so the way we do this is whenever we feel like we're on a cash crunch, we need this, we just do consulting on the side.
Rob: Yeah.
Rassam: That's it. Because the Junaid and I, we both have so much experience and so much, I would say, intellectual value in our own persons that all we have to do whenever we need cash is go to some people that we know and tell them, Hey, do you need my help?
Okay, fine. Let's just get some cash in. Fine.
Rob: Yep. And, um, and so longer term, are you looking to build this company or this group you're building? Is that something you wanna hold on to kind of,
Rassam: Forever, forever,
Rob: or are you kind of trying to get towards Yep.
Rassam: Yeah.
Rob: Kind of, kind of legacy?
Rassam: Just prob not sure if they could be a legacy, but it, it, it's, we don't have any plans to sell at any time. Not,
Rob: That's not, that's not the game plan.
Rassam: Yeah. That's not the game plan.
Rob: Yeah. Yeah. Great.
Rassam: I mean, where the world is going. I mean, world War 3 happens. Maybe none of us have a legacy anymore. That's, that's why I'm saying, I don't know.
Rob: the jury's out. Great. Cool. Okay. Um, good stuff. Uh, so no, that's a really, really interesting story. I mean, a lot of, lot of, uh, kind of takeaways there, um, for everyone is brilliant. So, um, yeah. Just to kind of start wrapping things up, so do you have a, a, a kind of tip or kind of message more for a kind of founder who might not even have started yet, maybe just sort of sit on the sidelines and thinking of, thinking of having a go at something, have you got any kind of message for them?
Rassam: Yeah. Uh, I mean, if you want to stop to death, don't start. 'cause the way things are happening, I think in a couple of years all of the jobs are disappearing and we don't know where the world is going. So if you don't start now, it's, it's like goodbye forever. Uh, like it, I'm not joking here 'cause I, you know, I get a lot, I get approached by a lot of juniors in university and whatnot.
They're like, here, some, uh, I can't find a job. What do I do? There are no jobs. What do you mean you can't fight one? There isn't any, how do I tell you? I'll tell you that. Right? So, so unless you're literally in the top, you know, 5% of candidates in any field don't expect to get hired. That's, that's the reality that we are living in right now.
So my advice to everybody who's in university right now is to start their own startup right now. 'cause that's, that's the fastest way you can get to the top 5% of candidates. If you succeed in a startup, of course that's the best outcome. If you fail, you, you automatically graduate into the top 5%. That's the way you wanna think of it.
If you are currently stuck in a corporate job and you wanna do your own thing, well just, just gotta do your own thing. You don't leave your job just yet, but just start today. Today. You just have to start today. Yeah.
Rob: the side and see where, see where it goes. Great. So LiGo, um, the URL for that. Well, I actually, you know, I can put that in into the show notes 'cause it's a
Rassam: Yeah. So they're complicated.
Rob: Uh, so I'll put that in there. Um, and um, obviously there's gonna be people listening to this who may be interested in, in using the product, you know, having a look so they can go get a trial, they can get a demo, can't they?
If they fill out the form.
Rassam: They get a demo, just send me a dm.
Rob: Yeah. Cool. Okay. And, uh, best place to reach you these days, LinkedIn, presumably
Rassam: unfortunately,
Rob: you, uh, anywhere else that you spend time
Rassam: uh, I'm, I'm thinking of starting a substack, uh, but I have figured out what, what do I wanna write about there? I'm thinking of doing, you know, I'm starting a sort of a services wing inside as well, so maybe I could write about that. Not sure.
Rob: Alright, we'll pop a few links in the, in the show notes to those and, um, yeah, I think that's about it. It's been absolute pleasure mo
Rassam: Absolute pleasure as well.
Rob: about your story and as I said, there's so much to un unpack there.
Rassam: Yeah,
Rob: and uh,
Rassam: I hope, I hope if, if it wasn't the most insightful, at least it, it should be the funniest
Rob: there are definitely a few giggles. Alright, great. Thanks Mo. Um, all the best and I'll be seeing you soon.
Rassam: See you soon. Thank you.
