There are three kinds of SEO: technical, programmatic, and editorial. Technical SEO is about setting up the right infrastructure for pages including page speed, internal link architecture, redirects, and so on. Programmatic SEO generates pages automatically from a database (e.g. a page for each address on a real estate website) and sometimes comes from UGC, user generated content. Editorial SEO is content written by a person about a set of topics to drive traffic around relevant keywords.

From The ultimate guide to SEO on Lenny’s Podcast.

See also:

• How to do SEO
• Not every website will receive a large impact from SEO, first analyze when to do SEO

Stutz is a documentary that is ostensibly about therapy, but is really about the endearing relationship between Jonah Hill and his therapist.

Notes

• Life force pyramid
  • Body
  • People
  • Yourself
  • If you’re lost don’t try and figure it out, work on those three things: work out, initiate relationships with people, write (journal)
• Part X
  • Antisocial part of you, wants to keep you from changing and growing
  • Voice of impossibility
  • Tells you who you are
  • Can’t get rid of it, always there
  • Pain, uncertainty, constant worry
  • Need it to grow though, from adversity
  • Learn to love the process of nullifying pain, uncertainty, constant worry
• String of pearls
  • I’m the one that puts the next pearl on the string
  • line, circle, line, circle, it’s a series of actions
  • You keep going, all actions are equivalent, just the next action, all the same size
  • The winner who is willing to go through uncertainty and accept the consequence
  • In the pearl there’s a small turd, can’t think about the turd inside the pearl, pearl around every turd there’s good even in the bad
• Shadow, the version of yourself you want to hide from the world the most
  • You can see yourself that way even with so much other success
  • It’s the part you are ashamed of
  • First you need to find your shadow, visualize a time you felt inferior/embarrassed/ashamed of, the part you wish you were not but you are and can’t get rid of it
  • Talk to your shadow, how did you deal with him
  • Shadow needs attention from you only, what can you do to make up for not paying attention to him?
  • Anything high stakes, have a conversation with the shadow and tolerate what happens, other people’s opinion feels way less
  • Constantly relate to it, respect it, otherwise it will become destructive
  • Looking for wholeness
• The snapshot (the realm of illusion)
  • You are looking for the perfect snapshot (moment, wife, job, perfect x)
  • No movement, no depth but you’ve told yourself something magical happens if you get to that
  • But, pain, uncertainty, and constant worry
  • Drive for success is trying to get to that snapshot but depressing when it doesn’t live up to
• The maze
  • Always involves other people
  • Example when someone always wants to talk about another person,
  • Quest for fairness puts your life on hold but it’s a maze that doesn’t let you move forward
  • You can’t get that time back
  • You’re not going to get it from others, but satisfied by active love
  • Imagine you are in a universe filled with love, dense with love, feel yourself taking in all of that love and place all of the love in the universe in your heart
  • See the person you hate/despise and send all that love towards the other person, hold nothing back, feel it enter their body and become one, you can become one with anyone
  • It’s not for forgiveness, not for them, it’s so you can move forward
• Radical acceptance
  • When something goes wrong, need a reflex to squeeze the juice out of the lemon, find the use from it
  • What am I going to do about it now
  • Not allowed to make a judgment, find something positive about it
  • Faith that there is something of value, everything becomes more meaningful
  • You get meaning from small things, all events have value, if you do that there is tremendous opportunity
  • Like a plan going through the cloud, can’t judge everything by your current experience
  • Every thought affects your mood
    • Grateful flow, remembering the sun above the clouds even if you can’t see it
    • Process of creating things you are grateful for, smaller the better so you feel the gratefulness
    • Keep naming things, then stop naming and feel the feeling take over, that’s grateful flow
    • Make it a creative act, dig to find things, it helps. Don’t say the same things over and over
    • Be grateful as much as possible, part X tells you not to be
• Loss processing
  • Worrying about loss
  • Potency of non-attachment, pursue it but also willing to lose it
  • Pick something you’ve become too attached to that you are afraid to let go of it
  • Imagine a tree, you are grasping a branch, you’re afraid to let go, but you do and you fall, say you are willing to lose everything and you hit the sun and your body burns up, you’re radiating a loving feeling and you see all the suns everywhere saying “we are everywhere” all you can do is give you can never take
  • Not trying to be detached, move towards that one thing can take away your sense of wholeness
• The secret of life is that you won’t figure it out ever, happiness is how you accept that, then what you do about it

There are many things I want to spend less time doing and many things I want to spend more time doing.

Less time reading pundits, more time reading novels. Less time listening to podcasts and more time listening to music. Less time listening to VCs and more time listening to users. Less time being practical and more time being whimsical. Less time worrying and more time being joyful. Less time checkin the news and more time playing with the dogs.

See also:

• Actions should be dictated by values not emotions
• Reflect periodically on identity and how your actions and habits reflect that

Before investing in SEO, evaluate whether or not it has the potential to have a large impact on your business. Not every business benefits in the same magnitude from SEO. The way to tell is by seeing if there is already a big market and your site has existing authority.

To tell if it’s already a big market, look at product competitors and audience competitors to see how much traffic they have. Product competitors are direct competitors or ones that have significant overlap with your business. Audience competitors are sites that reach the same kinds of personas or segments that buy your product.

Using Similarweb, you can see how much traffic sites are getting. Make a Fermi estimate to see what that traffic would do for your business by taking to amount of traffic, an estimated conversion rate, and avg revenue.

Next, evaluate your exiting site for search engine authority—non-search engine traffic and backlinks. Getting growth from SEO is more successful when you have existing traffic and referrals. You can check for traffic by going to Similarweb and putting in your website. You can check for backlinks using a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. Generally speaking, you should have 1000 visitors per day and 1000 referring sites.

From The ultimate guide to SEO on Lenny’s Podcast.

See also:

• How to do SEO
• Once SEO becomes a priority, there are three kinds of SEO to consider

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At an early-stage B2B SaaS startup, customer success has one responsibility: make sure customers don’t churn. The causes of churn are bad onboarding (users fail to find value quickly enough) and not making contact frequently. Both should be addressed by customer success.

Bad onboarding can be solved in many ways, but customer success puts in place a repeatable process that bridges the gap from being sold to realizing value. Even a self-serve product that could allow users to onboard themselves, benefit from having customer success identify key actions users need to take to be successful and, often manually, drive users to it. No product has perfect self-serve flows and customer success overcomes technical hurdles.

Making contact frequently builds a relationship, uncovers issues users are facing, and reminds users of the value they are getting from the product. If the only time you are getting in touch is for renewals, you need to sell the product all over again. Tactics like quarterly check-ins with top customers, helping users adopt new features, and responding to support tickets create a more durable relationship—even if problems arise.

Eventually, when the startup becomes more mature, customer success might evolve into something that is less onboarding + support and more up-sell and renewals driven.

See also:

• Preventing churn is why it’s best to build customer success first then sales
• Early customer success is an important next step to founder-led sales
• Consumers buy products, enterprises buy platforms

When things are going poorly, a natural response is for managers to get closer to the details. This can come across as micro management to others and they can be defensive about it. There is an important difference between micro management and leadership.

Leadership is the art of going from the current state to the desired state. Understanding what’s going on and where to go next requires good explanations otherwise they will set the wrong direction for the group. The key is understanding. Leaders need to be curious to dig into the details, ask the right questions, and drive change—that doesn’t mean prescribe all of the details (especially dangerous if they are not an expert).

In a recent interview, Toto Wolff (Mercedes F1 manager), said what I think captures the difference. “Do you give me the benefit of the doubt that I have reason to question what went wrong and how we can we avoid this in the future?” He knows that how to detect and eliminate errors is the most important knowledge. By being curious, pressing for explanations he can drive change even in a highly technical area without micro managing.

See also:

• Closing the gap between previous technical decisions and the current quality bar is an essential part of engineering leadership
• Synthesis is a fundamental skill of management

When building products, we’re constantly aware of how imperfect the things we build are. When telling users about your product, that’s not a very good thing to lead with. Instead, turn weaknesses into strengths.

For example, in the early years of Stripe, large enterprises looked at the offering and felt that it wasn’t “enterprise-ready”. Rather than shy away from this area of weakness, they embraced it with the mantra ‘Stripe is for Startups’. When speaking with enterprises, they didn’t bother trying to convince them that Stripe was enterprise-ready, instead they said “don’t you want to work more like a startup?” They turned a weakness into a strength until they eventually closed the gaps.

This is very powerful lesson in product and marketing. If you can fix it, then fix it quickly. If you can’t (or no time soon) embrace it and turn it into a strength.

The problem with unlimited vacation days is that it creates a bimodal distribution of usage—some employees take too little time off and some employees take way too much time off. At worst this creates resentment between employees and unwritten rules about when one should take time off.

Having an accrued vacation days makes taking time off explicit. It encourages people to take time off otherwise they could lose it. In the event they leave the company, they will get paid for unused vacation days.

See also:

• This is especially true for remote teams who need to be more deliberate about everything
• There are negative consequences of informal structures and those developing norms around time off might not have everyone’s best interest in mind

I use Alfred to switch between applications using keyboard shortcuts. On average, I use Alfred 127 times per day, mostly to use keyboard shortcuts.

I recorded a three key shortcut and found it takes just under 0.4 seconds to complete. Changing between programs using a mouse takes about 1.5 second (though I would argue the variance is much higher if you need to dig around the screen or screens to find the window). As a Fermi estimate, I save 16 minutes per week and ~14 hours per year.

That’s just for switching between applications! I use keyboard shortcuts everywhere, especially when writing and editing text (90% of my work).

See also:

• Typing fast is thinking with your hands, keyboard shortcuts surely help with the fluidity of thinking as you flip between applications
• Text editors like Emacs are entirely keyboard driven (although there is mouse support) making them much more efficient
• Slowness begets more slowness

An AOR list (areas of responsibility) prevents a tragedy of the commons at your company. It’s a list of responsibilities—grouped by function—where each responsibility is assigned to one (and only one) person. This makes it clear what the responsibilities are, who owns them at the company, and how to route questions.

Example:

From The Great CEO Within.

See also:

• Remote teams need to be more deliberate about everything

Impeccable agreements create accountability and motivation. This improves productivity and morale for high-performing teams.

The concept is simple. Precisely define an agreement (goal, task, etc.) such that an objective third party could judge if the follow-through was successful (write it down). Everyone involved fully agrees to it. If the agreement needs to be altered, tell the other members of the agreement as soon as you realize it and tell them what can be done. Successfully meeting an agreement only happens if it’s completed or promptly communicated that it needs to be altered.

Precisely defining agreements leaves no room for interpretation about what is expected. It should be written down and include a date. Like any goal, it should be actionable, specific, and time-bound.

Fully agreed agreements create buy-in from those involved. If it’s not fully agreed to, it’s because it’s not precisely defined or folks aren’t bought in. You should only agree to things that you have full commitment to completing.

Finally, promptly informing others in the agreement if you realize it needs to be altered builds trust and allows for adjustment. Polling for status updates and trying to externally motivate someone to complete a task becomes irrelevant everyone follows this covenant. Other members of the agreement can adjust their work or priorities with this new information so it doesn’t impact their productivity.

Building a place of work where people do what they say and renegotiate if it’s not possible creates a virtuous cycle of productivity and morale.

From The Great CEO Within.

See also:

• If you struggle to set goals for yourself, try the 85% rule
• Impeccable agreements are a kind of a performance management loop that happens continuously—it should be fairly obvious when someone isn’t keeping their agreements consistently

Knowledge work is often limited by time spent thinking versus doing, but typing fast helps you think faster. Ideas don’t usually come out clearly when they go from our brain to paper—they require some iteration and correction. That means some amount of exploration is required and the act of typing can help you think with your hands.

Thinking with your hands is not something we associate with work that involves a computer, but it can improve problem-solving. Typing is the equivalent of playing with the problem and turning it into something interactive.

Typing fast is a skill that lets you play with ideas more effectively. If you can keep up with the speed of thoughts, write them down, rearrange, and edit quickly, it can be your aid in working through even the most challenging problems.

This blog post disagrees and points to a study about typing and learning but it looked at 16 school-aged children and 16 adults.

I would be willing to bet that, two people of equal ability solving the same problem, the one who can type faster will solve the problem faster.

See also:

• Another example of writing is thinking
• If typing is thinking with your hands then mechanical keyboards are fountain pens

In my day-to-day business dealings, people are surprised when they receive LaTeX-generated documents for business proposals, memos, etc. from me.

In a way, this helps me stand out from the typical slide deck crowd. The documents look smart or even a bit academic. The expectation upon seeing a LaTeX typeset document is that it is serious and ought to be read. Some folks get downright excited to read things this way and have told me that—I’ve never heard someone say that about a slide deck.

The real reason for doing this was that writing prose is much more efficient at communicating complex ideas and I write everything in org-mode. Exporting to PDF happens by converting to LaTeX format and using LaTeX to generate the PDF. Not quite “omg this person uses LaTeX for business” but close enough.

See also:

• Writing is thinking so putting effort into writing a long-form document is a heuristic for more clear thinking
• Business writing should always answer a key question and slide decks are pretty bad at this

It’s obvious that living life without fear is a good thing, but what about life without hope?

Hope often comes with conditions for our mental state. Saying “I hope I will own a house one day” is the pretext for “I’m afraid I won’t own a house one day”. Then when we realize what we hoped for, we move the goal posts—that moment of gratification long since forgotten. Letting go of fear and hope, although that sounds odd to say, helps free you to see what already is.

Overheard from Sam Harris in Waking Up.

See also:

• Fear is bad advice
• The quality of your mind determines the quality of your life

Real world systems for operating a complicated process don’t start out perfectly designed complete systems. New information reveals itself only after you’ve done it a few times. Failure modes you weren’t aware of become apparent only after the system breaks.

That’s why it’s important to build a “knowledge capture loop” into systems. A knowledge capture loop is a self-reinforcing mechanism for ensuring that knowledge generated by the system ends up feeding back into the system.

Unfortunately, most systems don’t intentionally design a knowledge capture loop—it tends to be an afterthought (e.g. a knowledgebase, FAQ, sporadic bug report). This is unreliable (people won’t do it consistently) and seldom results in change to the system (e.g. updating code to fix the issue).

What does a good knowledge capture loop look like?

To start, performing the action must happen in software. The greater the distance between the software and the action the harder it becomes to capture knowledge.

Issues that arise when performing an action or step should be addressed immediately. Ideally the operator can update it in situ with no code. Making it easy to fix things as you go increases the chances odds that new knowledge makes it into the place where the work performed.

The software should have knowledge capture built in. It should be more of a tool set, where operators can update behavior safely, change copy, and share information with as little friction as possible. It should be more wiki like than a sealed system that can only be changed with code. Make it easy to report problems, add edit buttons to make changes safely, etc. The goal is to have near zero friction to capturing new knowledge.

A good way to tell if this is working is whether or not you need a separate knowledgebase.

See also:

• How to detect and eliminate errors is the most important knowledge
• Knowledge work should be accretive

Adding new dependencies to a codebase is a net positive until it’s not. The added leverage of picking up an off-the-shelf solution eventually gives way to dependency hell—fixing breaking changes, incompatibilities, security issues, and so on.

Most technical decisions about dependencies happen early on in development and stick around forever. Being judicious and deliberately selecting dependencies for longevity (especially frameworks) can keep the churn down later.

After the initial dependencies are selected, the default strategy should be to not add more. That doesn’t mean never add new dependencies, just that it should be the default. It means closely interrogating each new addition more carefully and acknowledging the trade-off each time.

See also:

• Adding dependencies is a right-half-plane zero
• The JavaScript ecosystem is dependencies heavy and you probably won’t get away from it, trading off ease of adding dependencies over bundle size

As much as product builders want to be self-serve and low-touch, there will always be limitations and improvements to make. Sometimes a customer won’t understand how to use the product. Sometimes a customer will make a mistake. Sometimes a customer won’t be able to translate their problem into a solution.

This is why customer success is critical for self-serve products. They can help guide the user through onboarding, implementation, and workaround rough edges as the product improves. Even better, they can improve feedback from customers to engineers.

Maybe this means that self-serve products aren’t really self-serve after all. The alternative is customers giving up or getting frustrated while you figure out how to build a perfect product.

See also:

• Customer success first then sales
• Similarly for sales, there are only certain segments of customers that will self-serve, enterprise businesses expect a consultative sales experience
• There are many forms “customer success” can take such as documentation, support, and an account manager
• From an except in The Great CEO Within

There is a patch of the cosmos which is 300 million light years across with significantly fewer galaxies. Where a typical section of the same size would have 2000 galaxies, the Great Nothing has 20.

See also:

• An anti-universe could explain dark matter
• Fermi paradox and pessimism of energy economics

Being afraid of something can cause us to make the exact wrong decision because fear is bad advice. In business, it might be a sign that you should do the opposite of what you’re afraid of.

For example, if you don’t want to tell your investors that things aren’t going well because you are afraid you will lose their trust, you probably should tell them and it will gain their trust.

(This doesn’t apply to physical danger, you should probably trust your fear of, say, a mountain lion)

From Lenny’s Podcast with Matt Mochary.

See also:

• Weekly reflection clarifies broad-based worrying

A self-coaching book about coaching Matt Mochary.

Hospitals separate the triage room from the waiting room otherwise you would have patients with time-sensitive medical issues waiting and dying.

The two concepts are entirely different—triaging is sorting, waiting is queuing. Triaging must be done quickly to avoid missing urgent issues. Waiting is buffering to help process large quantities of things without becoming overwhelmed.

This applies to our email too. If your inbox is both a waiting area and a triage room, you have the same problem—time-sensitive concerns will wait. It’s better to treat the email inbox as triage only and find another system to process it (including waiting).

See also:

• The Great CEO Within talks about the importance of inbox zero as having a good triage hygiene

It’s easy to get swept away by requests from other people and other demands on your time. This is why it can feel like you do a lot of work but make little progress on what’s most important. Blocking off time each day to work on your top goal ensures you make progress above all else.

See also:

• The Great CEO Within borrows this from Greg McKeown
• Adding time to your calendar can help combat the sense we should be doing something else
• Turn off notifications on all devices except one also helps (although maybe turn them all off for the top goal time)

The problem with first-principles thinking is that you don’t know what you don’t know. You might end up deriving the same thing you could have read in a 101-level textbook. You might think you have a novel idea of a blockchain-powered utopia but it turns out it’s Georgism with extra steps.

On the other hand, first-principles thinking solves the problem that you don’t know what other people don’t know. People make mistakes in their thinking that may directly or indirectly influence your thinking. Godel’s incompleteness theory tells us that there are always things we don’t know.

Now we have a conundrum—you don’t know what you don’t know and you don’t know what everyone else doesn’t know.

So when should you apply first-principles thinking?

Low epistemic status ahead!

As the default on the edge and as a counterbalance in the middle.

Imagine knowledge about a given area of inquiry is a two dimensional field (e.g. distributed computing, socialism, space travel, etc.). Beyond the edge is the unknown. The further you move from the center the longer the path of propositions that must hold true for that point to also be true.

At the edge, first-principles thinking is essential. New technology, techniques, and ideas can make finding new knowledge possible. Uncovering flaws in the long line of propositions that got the field to the edge of what’s known can also be fruitful. Perhaps there was something wrong that is easier to see from the edge looking back.

In the middle, being dogmatic about first-principles thinking is a reductionists trap but a useful counterbalance. If you never think from first-principles (even in the well-trodden middle) you’ve essentially outsourced your thinking.

See also:

• The Incomplete Guide to the Art of Discovery
• Richard Hamming talks about this in terms of academic success in You and Your Research