SEO Blog (Pillar/Cluster)

Developer-brand built via long-form essays (Patrick + John Collison), Stripe Press books, and obsessive developer-experience investment. Distribution by being the obvious right choice technically.

Coined 'inbound marketing'; built the category with free tools (Website Grader, free CRM), HubSpot Academy certifications, and the OnStartups blog as cold-start audience.

Bottom-up developer-adoption + free-tier feedback loop. Conference circuit (Dash, KubeCon) + technical-blog content for developer brand.

Targeted authors + bloggers via Nathan's existing book audience + content marketing. Public 'teaching everything I know' playbook.

Shipped the Morning Brew growth toolkit (referral program, custom domain, A/B tests) and led with the founders' newsletter expertise. ConvertKit comparison campaign drove early migration; raised $33M.

OSS product analytics → paid hosted. The 'Plausible playbook for product analytics': free OSS drives brand, hosted drives revenue.

Co-founder Paul Jarvis is also a popular author ('Company of One'). Book-led brand acquisition + privacy-positioning content.

Founder-blog post 'I quit Google Analytics' went viral; built the entire ARR ramp on top of the audience that essay generated.

6000+ founder interviews; the interviews ARE the SEO playbook. Each interview ranks for the founder's product brand search.

Rand Fishkin's audience from Moz days transferred 1:1. Free tools (Audience Intelligence Report) gave reasons to come back monthly.

Solo side-project to $50K MRR via SEO (programmatic comparison pages: 'X vs Bannerbear' for every competitor) + Product Hunt launch.

Targets Python/Django devs (an underserved boilerplate niche vs Next.js). Cory's blog 'BuildItLab' is the cold-start audience.

Side-project SaaS targeting bridal-search SEO. Cory built it as a 'small bet' demo for SaaS Pegasus.