ChatGPT didn't kill SEO - Elston Baretto, founder of Tiiny.host - podcast episode cover

ChatGPT didn't kill SEO - Elston Baretto, founder of Tiiny.host

May 23, 202549 minEp. 137
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Episode description

Elston Baretto is the founder of Tiiny.host - the simplest place to put your work online. In this episode we talk about how Elston has been able to grow Tiiny to 70,000+ sign ups per month with content marketing.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Links:
- Tiiny.host
- Elston Baretto
- Ramen Club
- Charlie Ward
- Sabba
- Veed 

Transcript

Elston

Now we I think we get around 73,000 people signing up every month to the platform. We've just passed a million users in our database at the moment.

Jack

Hi, everyone. You're listening to scanning dev tools. I'm joined today by my friend, Elston. We talk about why SEO is not dead.

Elston

Where does ChatGPT get its information from? It's SEO. You ask ChatGPT what's the simplest way to host a HTML file? We come up.

Jack

We talk about how Elston was able to scale Tiiny to half a million ARR while being completely bootstrapped. I thought people wouldn't take you seriously because you haven't raised anything.

Elston

It was surprising how well they respected bootstrappers. Yeah. It's it's cool to see the ecosystem changing a lot.

Jack

And we talk about why mentoring and community matter so much.

Elston

It doesn't have to be an alone journey. You don't have to be, like, sitting there, be on your laptop watching everyone on Twitter. Like, speak to these people. Connect with these people. Yeah. I've I've never met community around the world as valuable. It's a center of, like, just bootstrapping in India in the world. I'm a big fan of the phrase, if you wanna go fast, you know, go alone. But if you wanna, you know, go far, go together.

Jack

Enjoy the episode. So you're back, and this time, you're using your real name. First time you came on, you were under an alias of Phil.

Elston

I was. But now I'm back full time and yeah. Great to be in your new studio, which I've never been to in Kennington. Yeah. Very cozy.

Jack

Yeah. But we're friends and so we hang out

Elston

a lot.

Jack

And so I got kind of the inside story, so I wanted to hear you back. And also the first thing I wanted to ask you is like, you're probably the guy I know who's like the SEO expert among our friends. Yep. And I had Kyle on recently from, Depot, very cool guy, and he was making a very strong claim that SEO is dead. So I wanted to put that to you.

Elston

Controversial. It's like when people said email is dead. I mean, email is definitely still not dead, and so is SEO is not dead. I think it's transitioning for sure, but it's it's we're in a bubble, especially in the tech world. We think, like, everyone's using ChatGPT to find everything now.

But, like, until my mom starts using ChatGPT to find out on so she's barely using Google now. So there's definitely some some steps need to be done. SEO is not dead. And if you wanna make the argument that SEO is dead because everyone uses ChatGPT, where does ChatGPT get its information from? It's SEO.

You ask ChatGPT, like, who's the simplest like, what's the simplest way to host a HTML file? We come up top as one of the recommend recommended options. And I kid you not, we have done zero chat GPT optimization. And the only way they would be able to get there is because we rank very highly for that landing page, those topics all over Google, and we put our blogs there. So it's still a massive driver.

We've got 35,000,000 impressions from Google over the past twelve months, basically, from them. We get a 50,000 clicks and growing every single month from them. So it's still a huge driver for traffic, and I think it's definitely not dead and still a big thing. It's it's something Google need to figure out because I feel like if they just sit on the way that people are searching right now and looking up stuff and and don't, you know, transition to a better model, they could be obsolete in five years, ten years, something like that. But Google are not gonna sit there and do nothing about it.

They're they're definitely gonna keep the attention on them.

Jack

Mhmm. Are you changing anything? Like, have you changed your thought process about any of the SEO to, like, transfer over to ChatGPT?

Elston

To chat no. No. Honestly, we haven't. We're just still really focusing on this. Yeah.

I I think the industry hasn't really also figured out what, like, chatbot optimization is or whatever they whatever you wanna call it. I think there's a lot of speculation on things like that, but we haven't optimized or changed anything, to be honest. I mean, we've we've tried to focus on specific channels a bit more. Like, we've got a Chatchippity app now and things like that, but we're honestly just still doubling down on SEO. There's so many opportunities.

There's still a growing place for things. And I think, you know, the more work we put into SEO, it's gonna transition to all the bots out there. And so, not really focusing on any change right now.

Jack

Okay. Yeah. I think that's a question a lot of people have

Elston

right And

Jack

the kind of final thing on from Kyle's point, think if Kyle like channeling my Kyle, if Kyle was

Elston

here Yeah.

Jack

I think he might say like, you know, okay, yes. It makes sense that, you know, SEO works for like we think like someone's like how to host PDF. But then if it's like gets like very specific like dev dev stuff Yep. That that might be different.

Elston

Yeah. SEO is not like the silver kind of bullet for for everything. Any marketing channel, maybe besides ads, is not applicable for every business. So I think you really need to be specific about, like and and honest about, like, is SEO good enough for what I'm trying to do? Are the volumes there?

So, like, an easy thing is just doing keyword research and seeing how many opportunities there are for the obvious things like upload PDF, share HTML, and this that kind of stuff. Certain industries, like, there's tons of people searching for stuff around them. Certain industries, there are. And, actually, I mean, the only interesting thing we're doing that's different for the AI world now is we're actually targeting AI specific keywords. And so there's a lot of new, like, words that are very easy to rank for, like, I don't know, support AI or, like, I don't know, host AI or, you know, building apps with AI because there's not a lot of good content for that.

And so you can target those kind of keywords at the moment. But you have to be honest, and it's not a perfect distribution channel for everybody. A lot of businesses, it wouldn't be useful for, but some businesses are. It's usually very good for tools, maybe productivity tools, but you have to figure out, like, is the volume there? Because there's no point soup like, investing in it.

It's it's not a lightweight distribution channel. You're investing about, you know, at least three to six months of, you know, time and constant attention to to that channel before you see results. And if you've put all that time in and you get maybe, like, you know, hundred visitors a month from it, you're better off finding something else. But, it can still be very, very useful for certain apps depending on what you're trying to build.

Jack

Scaling DevTools is sponsored by WorkOS. If things start going well, some of your customers are gonna start asking for enterprise features. Things like audit trails, SSO, SCIM provisioning, role based access control. These things are hard to build, and you could get stuck spending all your time doing that instead of actually making a great dev tool. That's why WorkOS exists.

They help you with all of those enterprise features, and they're trusted by OpenAI, Vercel, and Perplexity. And if you use them for user management, you get your first million, yes, million, monthly active users for free. I honestly don't know any dev tools that have a million monthly active users apart from GitHub maybe. So that'll get you pretty far. Here's what Kyle from Depot has to say about WorkOS.

Kyle from Depot

We use WorkOS to effectively add all of the SSO and SCIM to Depot. It's single handedly, like, one of the best developer experiences I've ever seen for what is, like, a super painful problem if you were to go and try to roll that yourself. So for us, we can effectively offer SSO and SCIM, and it's, like, two clicks of a button, and we don't ever have to think about it. It's, like, one of the best features, that we can add to Depot. It's super affordable, which effectively allows us to, like, break the SSO tax, joke.

And essentially say, like, you can have SSO and SCIM as, an add on onto your monthly plan. Like, it's no problem. So it really allows smaller startups to essentially offer, like, that enterprise feature without a huge engineering investment behind it. Like, it's literally we can just use a tool behind the scenes, and our life is exponentially easier.

Jack

If you were working with a dev tool that was just getting started, and they were like, Elston, can you mentor us? What what should we do over this net what should we do over this, like, next three to six months?

Elston

For SEO or just marketing in general?

Jack

I well, I guess I'd be curious to say of, like, when you think SEO like, if they should focus on SEO.

Elston

I I yeah. I think, I mean, at the beginning, you should really just see if SEO is a valid option or not. So literally just day one, buy Ahrefs subscription, go to it, Start putting, like, keywords related to your business or look at competitors and see what they're ranking for and just see if there's traffic opportunities, or you could hire, like, someone to try to create keywords for you. And from that, like, literally in, you know, a few hours, you'll know whether there's potential or not.

Jack

What what what means there's potential?

Elston

You need to have search volume in the thousands. And the higher, the better. Right? So, like, you want maybe five, ten, 20, 30, 40 thousand people searching a month just in The US for that to be useful, like minimum and the the top keywords there. And effectively, when you do SEO, you wanna go for the you wanna make sure those words are there, but if if those big words are there, that means there's a lot of smaller opportunity words that trickle down, which are probably in the low thousands.

And then you can you can actually those are accessible because the keyword difficulty is pretty low for that. But then if you found, like, terms which are only, like, you know, one, two thousand that are super applicable, then chances are well, you're not gonna rank for those, but the chances are the ones you are gonna rank for are probably gonna be in the low tens or hundreds, and maybe it's not gonna make a lot of sense. Mhmm. So you wanna be super honest about that.

Jack

Does it make a difference if, like, your volume is lower, but, like, the value of what you're selling is quite high?

Elston

I don't think SEO is the ideal distribution channel if that's, like, the business model. Like, we we do we do YouTube as well, and YouTube is way higher converting with lower volume for us. Really? SEO is pretty much like a spray all, and then you'll get like a low conversion around that. So go it's a volume game.

That's what SEO is. I mean, there are maybe specific keywords and specific industries that people are searching for when they come up. But then I wouldn't say that's your main distribution channel. Like, I'd say that's something that's just, like, augmenting what you have, and you're probably better off by using that same term and running cold emails or ads around that kind of thing. Mhmm.

But I guess you I mean, another thing you can check is the CPC. So HRFs and other tools, they tell you, you know, how much advertisers are paying per click on that. Mhmm. And so if if someone's paying, like, $10.15 dollars a click on that, that's that's super high. And so it means that, obviously, other people are getting business from that.

And if it's obviously related to your app, then that makes sense. But then just run Google AdWords on it. Right? That's there as well. So I think SEO is definitely you want it to be a volume game. Like, who's doing it is doing it on a volume level. Programmatic SEO is like the next level out there. It's it's hard to treat it as a quality rather than quantity kind of distribution channel.

Jack

Yeah. What kind of how does your like YouTube content compare to like the like written stuff you do?

Elston

It's it's very overlapping really. Like we've we the the topics we create, we actually cross reference to see if Google feature those videos. And so a lot of tutorials, and Google now in the, I don't fourth or fifth position will have a series of videos featured for that keyword.

Jack

Mhmm.

Elston

And so we'll basically just try to create better videos for that. Yeah. And so we get a lot of traffic from Google because of the videos. And so that's really it. We look at what people are searching on YouTube, create better videos for that, look at people searching on Google.

But we kind of follow, like, a it's a well known strategy for, like, content creation. You you got the the lightweight, easy kind of ways to create content, and then the other end, you've got the the most difficult ways to create content. And so at the easy end, there's like a tweet. Right? So you put a tweet out there and you say something useful to some people.

Right? And if that catches on, you say, okay, people seem to be interested in that. So maybe you then you write a blog post about it. Right? Mhmm.

And then from that blog post, you turn into a video. So you use the blog post as some kind of script based. The video is higher production, high effort. And then from that video, you take and you cut shorts out of it, and then you post those shorts on different platforms like Instagram, TikTok, etcetera. So from, like, one tweet, you've got several different pieces of, like, marketing material, and you just make that, like, piece of content go very, very far.

So we do follow that, not the tweet level essentially, but we'd maybe we'd we do a blog post about the topic that we seem that's useful. If that's, you know, working well, we'd turn into a video, then hopefully try to cut shorts out of it and follow that process. So it's very intertwined in a way. Didn't realize that until, like, more recently. And interestingly, like, some of the stuff on YouTube takes as long to rank as SEO does.

It's we created a video that I just discovered, like, few like, last week that basically shows you how to use I think it's Versailles on Netlify, how to deploy on Versailles on Netlify. That video took two hundred and twenty days to start trending. That's, like, nearly a year. And now it's, like, 10 k, 11 k, 12 k views. But for two hundred and twenty days, it had 800 views.

And now it's like Really? Yeah. And now it's just skyrocketing. Yeah. And it's weird, and it it's it's probably Google's, like, algorithm trying, like, picking stuff up a bit later and starting to feature us in search, and that's why it's trending.

And YouTube is owned by Google, so there's probably shared, you know, algorithm strategies. But it's it's really interesting stuff. So it's YouTube is kind of like another fire and forget thing that we're treating it. It's a similar thing. Like, with SEO, you create a landing page, you plug Google to index it, and then you kinda just forget about it.

And you do many of those because the hope is in a few months or in a month, they'll start ranking, and then you see what's actually working. And with YouTube, it's similar. So you just, you know, you need to have like a a hunch of like what topic is gonna work well, but then you just, you know, forget about it and then eventually just gets picked up, which is insane.

Jack

Yeah. Sorry. Just cutting into that. So if people don't know, it's like, you're the founder of Tiiny

Elston

Yes.

Jack

Which is like a very easy hosting tool. And so when you talk about landing pages, it's like, Tiiny can do many things. So you could host HTML, PDFs, anything. Right? Anything static. Yeah. So that you have like your main landing page, I guess, where like you can show that you can do it all. And then you have all these other pages that are like very specific like, I guess like you you had people how to host the menu, how to

Elston

Yeah. Exactly. So we followed like what's called the jobs to be done framework. And we pretty much market when people need to achieve a task. Right?

So if you want to upload a PDF, we create a landing page for that. We're number one. If you want to host HTML, you create a landing page for that. We're, like, you know, top three for that as well. We've kind of ended up doing what I've coined now, like, just in time marketing where, like, we are there exactly when you need us, but you are pretty useless if you don't need us.

And so it's like some people I explain the product to. They're like, but why do I need you? Like, what's what's what's, you know, useful about you? And then some people who had the problem before were like, oh, this is amazing. Like, this is perfect.

Like, I understand it. And so we've tried, you know, running ads about, like, uploading PDFs and that kind of stuff, but no one's on Instagram and TikTok scrolling and seeing, like, an upload PDF ad and thinking, oh, I'm gonna click on it and upload my PDF right now. But someone who wants to upload a PDF are gonna go to Google, type in upload PDF, CS, click it, upload it, and then boom, they're in our system. So that's the way we kinda focus, and we've just kind of verticalized our platform and just having tons of different use cases. So we have good or bad in in the sense we have tons of different ICPs, but effectively, the technology is a static web hosting tool.

But it is but a web hosting tool, a static web hosting tool can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. We also don't market ourselves as a static web hosting tool. We are just, you know, the simplest way to share your work online, and now we support 80 different file formats from, like, video to images to documents. But primarily, it was HTML, PDFs, Zips. You drag and drop any of those, and we get a link that you could share with the world in literally ten seconds.

Mhmm. And we're we're just simpler than anybody

Jack

Yeah.

Elston

Out there. GitHub, Versal, Netlify, Google Drive, everybody.

Jack

Yeah. Yeah. I'm having used it, I can attest to that.

Elston

Yeah. You're a you're a customer.

Jack

Yeah. Very, very simple. And then for like landing pages, if someone wanted to do that, so if there was like, let's say this is gonna be a hard one to pull out pull out of my head. What's a what's a dev tool? We could say like feature flagging.

There's lots of like feature flagging tools. So you might have like experiments that were like designed for like a b testing. You might have like a very specific landing page for that and then a very specific landing page for like Yeah. Turning on features and stuff like that.

Elston

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Or if you're like an auth provider, you'd basically have a landing page for Google auth integration, out Microsoft integration, GitHub integration, Yahoo integration, SSO integration. So, I mean, every platform and app can be sliced vertically in many different ways and has specific use cases.

Yeah. And you wanna create as much content around that as possible, as much custom journeys as possible because people, you know, want a personalized journey. They wanna know that that tool is for them and that use case as much as possible. And, yeah, it's a very common standard to do that.

Jack

Mhmm. Okay. Very cool. The other thing is that we spoke a little bit about this last time, but you're completely non VC funded. You have Mhmm. Completely bootstrapped. Yeah. You started off with building Tiiny while you had a job and kind of that was probably why you had the alias at the time.

Elston

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And

Jack

it's all through SEO. And now you have like a little team making very good revenue. Yeah. Could you talk us

Elston

a bit about the journey of how that's been? Yeah. It's it's been a while. Definitely been a roller coaster, but an amazing journey for sure. I think, yes, when I started it, it was like when we first actually launched it, it was supposed to be a dev tool.

So it was like a very basic landing page. You couldn't scroll, and it just said simple static web hosting, basically. Simple static web hosting. And we modeled it very heavily around WeTransfer. So I think WeTransfer meets, like, s three, basically.

And effectively, if you drop something in, it took about, like, ten minutes to, like, actually go live. And I remember, like, putting it on Reddit and saying, hey. Look. I made this. And the first feedback was like, this is great, but ten minutes is too slow.

And so the first major change I made was make figure out how do we tech technically make it quicker. And now it's, like, five seconds effectively. But then what really happened is I was trying to push that, like, you know, position through as simple static web hosting, and people kept on comparing us to GitHub pages of a cell or Netlify. It's kind of like the Dropbox hack and use kind of comment out there. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. You could do this. Like, why do why do you need this? You just spend two hours doing this, this, and this, and this, and then you have a free s three bucket tier whatever, and you have everything set up.

And so I but when I marketed the product, I tried to market it to as many people as possible, so technical and nontechnical people. And I found that the nontechnical kind of users were like, woah. This is amazing. Like, this is super cool. And so I made a decision at some point just to ignore all the technical people and just be like, I'm just gonna focus on the nontechnical people.

And then we did a reposition, so we we changed from the simple static web hosting to, like, the simplest way to host and share your work online. And eventually, dropped the word host because I think it's also too technical. And we don't position ourselves as a web hosting platform, really. We position ourselves probably more so Google Drive and Dropbox. But Google Drive and Dropbox don't really render in browser custom URLs and don't give you the the power of a web hosting platform.

Right? And so we're, in this in between. But I was I was solo for a while, which was super helpful because it really helped me focus on the right mechanics that were needed to grow the business, which was distribution, getting SEO together. I did it in a completely, like, different way to what, you know, Indie Hacks are doing now. They're doing, like, the twelve twelve apps and twelve week challenge or whatever like that, and they're just shipping really, really fast and iterating and different ideas.

I basically spent what twelve months on one product, and it was a side product for a long time, mainly because I also wanted to learn marketing. I think for me, was like, I'm gonna build something, but I really need to get good at marketing. So I'm just gonna learn all the different ways that I can market this product, and I didn't really know what it would be. So it wasn't like I need to make it all. This is like businesses.

All this is the end of everything. And so, yeah, it wasn't until I got SEO working that about, you know, eight, nine months into the game, I started to see organic traffic coming through and then the free flowing kind of growth that we needed. Yeah. And then quit my job a few years later into that. And then last year, when I'm more of like a hiring kind of spree where we have, yeah, four full time people now and about four, five, you know, part time people working around the world fully remote.

And it's it's it's really cool. Yeah. We get now, I think we get around 73,000 people signing up every month to the platform, which is which is insane.

Jack

Yeah.

Elston

We just get crazy volumes. We we've probably just passed a million users in our database at the moment. Wow. Which is which is pretty cool. So we just get crazy traffic. It's it's just it's really cool to see how many people appreciated the simplicity and the the value that we produce. Right? So we're not the most sophisticated. There are options you can use for free, but we're just simple and straightforward. I think rarely do many tools out there stick to that and stay to that.

And you can't be, I think, if you're financially structured in a different way, like you're VC backed or something like that.

Jack

You need to be Got more market share.

Elston

Yeah. And you need to be a more complex product and that kind of thing, but just sticking to our guns. I think the only product that's comparable is probably, like, WeTransfer. Like, it was just very, very basic, and I really like that philosophy around it. Yeah.

Now now we're just kind of growing really fast and trying to get to the next kind of big milestones and get our get our name out there. So I think and ironically, like, we have now a percentage of our paid and non paid user base who are developers because they have just come and said, yeah, we could use Versal or Netlify, but I think those tools end up, like, needing you to have a repo and setting up a lot more configuration. Whereas we are literally you have a HTML file you created, you drag and drop it live, especially with some of the AI tooling now, which creates, you know, HTML code for you in seconds. You don't wanna create a GitHub repo and then connect it and set up a deployment pipeline and all that kind of stuff. A lot of times, especially when you're just prototyping, you wanna get stuff out quick.

Yeah. We're the tool for you for that. We now can integrate with GitHub and stuff, but it's still just that really easy tool. I'm glad the developers have found, you know, us again, but it's because we didn't really super focus on them. We said, like, the platform's there for you, but we're gonna focus on the audience that really, you know, appreciates us.

And it's a painkiller for them as well. And I get it. Like, in a weird way, I'm a developer. I probably wouldn't use my own platform in that sense. Like, now I would because it's super simple, but early in the day, like Mhmm.

I would just set up an s three bucket or that kind of stuff. But but now it's just actually just so simple, especially because we've got, you know, custom domain setup. We've got password protection. We've got analytics built in. Just building the entire stack for something, and you can now just even just buy a custom domain through us.

Jack

Mhmm.

Elston

That entire stack setting it up, like, versus paying, you know, 9 or $18 dollars, basically, to just get that going in literally about, like, sixty seconds is a no brainer for some people.

Jack

Yeah. I mean, especially with, like, the AI stuff, like, where where you can generate code in, like, ten seconds. Mhmm. The hosting could become, like, a significant portion of your time, whereas

Elston

you could just be like, bang. Yeah. And just drag this

Jack

into Tiiny save it in HTML. Yeah.

Elston

And people have realized some people who are now using these tools don't know anything about hosting. Right? There's there's, like, this meme on Twitter. Right? Look at my app.

This is the URL. It's, like, local host 3,000. And that's a serious thing where people are trying to explore their space. Like, they just don't know how to they've they've got this app now that they put it online. And so we're not a full fledged, like, dynamic host, but I think, like, a lot of apps can literally just be static. A lot of use cases can be static, and we work really well for those. Yeah. How do you

Jack

make it so simple? Is it like do you have any, like, thing? Secret source.

Elston

No. I think, honestly, it's it's it's a lot of just product design and intentional product design. Like, we've we've said no to a lot more than yes, and I think it's not you know, it's it's this is a difficult thing. So, like, underlying and tool based, like, we're in s three, you know, wrapper and layer. Right?

And we've got routing and stuff set up, but we've created a very simple UI on top. And so we abstract a lot of things. Right? And so, like, one thing we've intentionally done is whatever you throw at us on the back end, we should be able to handle it.

Jack

Right?

Elston

So whether if it's a PDF, whether it's a ZIP, whether it has an index, doesn't have an index, like, we'll handle that use case for you. So typical, like, example is we found out at some point that people are uploading websites, but it never had an index or HTML in their website, in that zip, for example. And so it was breaking because you need an index to have a home page. And so if it was just one HTML file, we just assumed that it was the index, and we just renamed it to index, and we hosted If there were multiple HTML files and also nested in different levels, we'd return back an array of HTML files and say, pick one. Like, we need you to pick one.

And so just those different use cases are super appreciated. Like, people just like, oh, it works. Like, that's it. So simple things like that.

Jack

By the way, can I just say inter interrupt here and say because I I used to run this startup called Coder Uni where we would do like coding classes at universities for like business school students? So was like we'd teach HTML and CSS. And the hosting was always actually the thing where things went wrong. And like, we would just go around and be like we tell people like, here's the instructions. Okay.

And and as we the more we did it, the more clear we'd be. But it was like, save it as index dot html. And people would put capital I Yeah. Index.html. Or they would like have a space in there or something. Or like, you know, there'll be so many things and like yeah. So I I like thinking about that, was like, this this is not like a niche thing. It's like Yeah. If you tell people that haven't done much code, so many of them will save it wrong with HTML, like index. HTML.

Elston

And but all these stuff can all these things can be solved programmatically. And I think I really like Apple's philosophy lies. You shouldn't need an instruction manual to use this effectively. Right? Like, you give us something, we'll figure it out, we'll do it.

And a lot of times, we know what it is. And so abstracting that complexity has probably been the hardest thing. And then and then at the UI layer as well, we're just so dead, like, simple on having, like, a drag and drop box, like, few buttons, one obvious CTA, and, like, one clear path to getting things through and getting stuff hosted. Right? That's, like, a really easy flow.

Like, I think I measure things in terms of, like, two clicks or three clicks, for example. Like, we don't wanna be more than three clicks away from your document to, like, a link. And that's like a it's super, super important. And you look at other apps, and don't know even know how how long it takes to to link a GitHub page. Right? But it's definitely more than three clicks or

Jack

like it's surprisingly complicated. They might have made it easier, but yeah.

Elston

And there's a lot of clicks and stuff going on. People don't look at things from clicks. Like, if you take like, if you pretend the click is expensive. Right? And every click, every button click is is something that you should really treat, you know, well, then you can really make simple apps and design really well structured, you know, solutions around it because you you don't you don't you don't just, you know, take for granted that someone's just gonna click a button and and then figure stuff out that way.

Right? It's about just trying to value someone's click effectively. Right? And the fewer clicks possible, the better. And it translates to very easy to use product.

And I'm very, yeah, proud to say that people who are complete opposite of tech savvy, who are you know, have visual impairments or who are elderly, who've never hosted a link, probably put anything online before in in their lifetime, have used this. And then they maybe get stuck. Then they then they feel a bit more daring to try to link custom domain, and then they get stuck at that stuff. And that stuff, we're still trying to make simpler, but it's it's inherently complex. But we see they get through the biggest thing.

Right? They're like, oh, I've got this link, but I'm trying to pass a protector. Like, how do I do this? And they get frustrated. But they get through the hardest thing, which is getting a document from their machine to a link online which they can send pretty easily, which is which is awesome to see.

Jack

Yeah. Yeah. I I really like that.

Elston

Yeah.

Jack

Yeah. That's very very cool. One thing as well I wanted to ask you is like, I know at the beginning you got advice from like the guy who's probably the most beastly founder that I've ever You know what I'm talking about?

Elston

Yeah. Yeah. I do. Saba. Yes. The one and only.

Jack

So so for anyone that doesn't know Veed, it's like the video editing. It's like kind of like After Effects in the browser, kind of Canva for video, this sort of thing. And they're doing insanely well. Yeah. And Saba is like the most kind of opinionated, like hustler. Like he's like business genius, I'd say.

Elston

Yeah.

Jack

And he I remember like you were telling me, I think last time like like he's just kind of told you like a lot of advice at the beginning. Yeah. But I think he

Elston

He was he was instrumental honestly. And it's it's the community especially. Right? And so the deaf deaf dev tools community, Indie Beers, Ramen Club, etcetera. But, yeah, I met him really, really early on in the journey when we were testing out many different, like, strategies.

And it was a good time because they were just, like, seeing results, good results from SEO. And they're like, hey, SEO is working really well for us. You know, just you should try this, this, and this. I remember going to his office, and he even just showed me exactly how to build the right landing page and stuff. This is pre AI days as well, so he was doing everything manually.

But, yeah, but he was pumping out, like, twenty, thirty landing pages a week or something just writing them, like, manually. And so they got serious growth. But Veed is also an an obvious example of, like, where SEO makes a lot of sense. Like, you look at the terms and the keywords around SEO for for video, and they're in the thousands. And there's so many there's a wide array of keywords, and they went after everything.

In every language you could possibly imagine, they've got it. For for web hosting and what I'm doing, it wasn't as cut, you know, as as as straightforward. And we had to expand the product a bit more and grow it, I think. But the volumes are not just there as as much, but there are a lot of volumes there as well. And so and it's also what, you know, Canva have done as well.

Canva's model has been very similar in SEO. So they've just got, like, every possible thing you'd Google around an image or mod or modifying an image, can't there's a Canva landing page for it. And that's worked insanely well. And so that's still a really good strategy, think, to make things work.

Jack

Yeah. And what what is like the focus now that you've got like a team and what how has things changed since like when it was just you?

Elston

It's it's it's interesting having a team because like you have to intentionally sit back and sometimes you just get a bit frustrated because going from the team from solo to team is solo you if you had an idea or you need to kind of fix something, you could go in and just, you know, do it yourself very quickly, and you were the sole person for it. So the way I I still try to keep that flexibility in the team, which is which just means I can, like, go in and fix stuff and change stuff very quickly. But the team just helped to work on, like, longer term initiatives that would take a lot more time, development time. And so it helps to, on parallel, develop different kind of things. So, like, one person just working on GitHub integration.

One person's maybe looking at, like, a Outlook integration. One person's looking at, like, LLM integration options. And it allows us to make just longer term bets and big bit build, like, you know, bigger features. Whereas when I was, you know, solo, it was really just about getting quick wins. Everything everything I built, I never spend more than one or two days on it and before I shipped it.

But now we could I tried to minimize that still in with the team. So but now we could spend, like, you know, a week on something and then and then get it out to production anyway, but a few days before testing. So it's about that. But we've just managed to do more, and I think I'm I'm a big fan of the phrase, if you wanna go fast, you know, go alone. But if you wanna, you know, go far, go together.

And I think that's basically what the the goal of building building a team is now we're trying to really go far and try to be a big bigger competitor in the space and really focus on some interesting use cases that we weren't able to do before. And so that's that's where we are at the moment.

Jack

Yeah. And you we're talking about like simplicity. So what kind of features are you building now?

Elston

Yeah. That one of the biggest things we did last year was just adding going from three file types to 80. So now Wow. We've just horizontally expanded the platform. We do need to do, like, marketing around that a bit more, but, like, we now allow, like, photographers to basically upload multiple different formats now. And then we render it in the browser. Right? So we've got conversion pipelines. You upload a doc file or PPT or a raw image. We convert it to a web readable format.

So Wow. With with the raw image already there as well.

Jack

That's cool.

Elston

So that allows us to just be this hosting platform for anything. Yeah. And that's basically what my vision was for a while, and it's just basically like being the simplest way to put anything online. Yeah. We did a little bit of PHP, although that's yeah.

That's that's very weird space because it attracts a lot of spam and just malicious actors. So yeah, but it's been popular. There is still not an easy, like, drag and drop PHP tool out there. We'd like to get a bit more into Node, Next, and maybe Python and stuff like that. But, yeah, we're just expanding on that case.

And then, I mean, from a business perspective, we're trying to probably dial in and focus on customers that have, you know, longer LTVs, churn less, probably, again, value a bit value us a bit more. We've because the platform was pretty much built from a, like, quick hosting, temporary hosting kind of use case. And that's okay, but it's it means that, you know, we have high churn. And but as long as we bring in new new new customers, we still grow and we are. But we wanna maybe have a more longer term sustainable product.

Right? And so figuring out how do we make the product more sticky for people. Right? Convince people to use us not just for a month or to temporary temporarily host something in the in in the interim, like, be a solid contender in your workflow, in your in your in your, you know, pipeline or whatever to to be there. So that's what we're kind of working on now.

Jack

So how can you do that? How do you think you can?

Elston

That's about really more product kind of just reposition the product a bit more. So a really easy example is a lot of people use this to put portfolio stuff online. Right? And so it could be if you're designing a design portfolio, like work you've produced. If you're a developer, you could have an app you put out there.

Right? And I think if we focus on some features around portfolio hosting, for example, it makes a lot more sense to to to to not use it just for a month. Right? Because you wanna have that place online where where you can just put your proudest stuff there and keep there for a little longer as opposed to just putting it for a month and testing it out. And so those are some longer use cases.

There's some really interesting use cases in sales at the as well. Like, we now we can you can now toggle on email capture in seconds, basically. So you upload either your website or a a PDF, and then you need to enter your email and That's cool. And double verify that to get access to it. And so it's super useful for people creating assets that wanna generate leads and that kind of thing.

So things like that. I think it's more of a marketing angle than it is a tech angle, honestly. Like, there's a few features we need to do there, but it's more just getting into the right channels again. And also, I think from a product perspective, one of the hardest things we have problems we have is we have so many features, useful features. But because we keep UI so simple, a lot of stuff is hidden.

Yeah. And so we're trying to figure out, like, how do we surface this in the right way to know that it's gonna be useful to somebody. Right? And that's, like, a really difficult but interesting thing as well, especially with our constraints. Right?

We're like, we could just put everything on the page for you, but then it wouldn't be simple. You'd just be your eyes would be caught in different directions. People wouldn't know where to click, and that's where I think a lot of products end up going, and it just becomes complex. Not because they wanted to be complex, they started off simple, but then they added all these features and stuff. And now you've got, like, you had one tab, and now you've got four or five different tabs, and then all these banners and things coming in.

And so we wanna keep the 80% path flow the same, but then also be able to, like, tell you about this, this, and this as well. That will be useful as well. So it's a lot of that kind of thing going on. And then we're exploring other stuff in the AI space as well, like building building some interesting tooling around that. And actually look look looking now to move a bit more upmarket to be big host.

So, like, we're trying to allow you to upload large files, And I think there's an entire different market for that, which is super cool. Been the easiest way to upload large files. Like, hundreds of gigs? Hundreds of gigs. Yeah. Up to, like, five terabytes, for example,

Jack

files. Interesting.

Elston

Yeah. Video. Yeah. In the video space and the professional media space, there's a lot of interesting use cases there. And I think very underserved. Mhmm. And there's a lot of opportunity there as well to figure that out.

Jack

I think there's just not that many places you can, like, upload Large files. Five, you know, if you Yeah. Like I I just don't think it would work most places. They're like, oh, you've exceeded the limit.

Elston

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I know we transfer is pretty well used, but like some of them are very enterprise and yeah, our cake. And we've got the technology there for it.

And I think it's it's it's the reason I started Tiiny.host because I thought it was too complex to put things online if you didn't know how to do it. Yeah. But if you did, it was actually so simple. Like, lot places don't upload it, but you can upload a five gigabyte s three bucket in really easily once you have an AWS account set up the bucket and everything. Right?

And then made it public, whatever. And so there's no reason why it can't be done. I guess there's obviously there's bandwidth associated and stuff around that, but but you can do it. But there's not a lot of tooling out there that help you do that.

Jack

Yeah. We should upload this video. Massive the full version of

Elston

One of

Jack

our largest many gigs. Yeah. Yeah. We compress it. Okay. If you had one piece of advice for a DevTools founder listening from all the things that you've learned over the years with Tiiny, what would you say?

Elston

Oh, has a lot. But I think honestly the most valuable is try to find the mentors just ahead of you. I think you can learn so much from that, and people don't really kind of say that a lot. I was fortunate to find it in the community. Someone had told me SEO, and it was at the right time.

But, like, mentors who have, like, made it or have exited or, like, trying to reach out to, I don't know, Zuckerberg or, I don't know, whoever to ask for help makes no sense because they're dealing in problems that are way beyond anything that you're trying to do. But people who are like maybe if you're like, you've just launched, and there's someone who's launched and been around for one year and they've got some growth, like, they're a perfect person to speak to because they're just it's fresh in their head, like, the the latest strategies, the techniques, the growth channels, and everything, and how to build a product that is relevant to today. I think you can learn a lot from that, and I think it's it's it'll completely change your trajectory if you can find that kind of mentorship.

Jack

And I think you you you haven't said the classic Elston, which is if you are like a bootstrapped founder, you should probably join Ramen Club. Right?

Elston

Yes. And you should join Ramen Club. Hundred percent. Yeah. I've I've never met community around the world yet that's that's as valuable, and that's definitely there's a lot of cool stuff happening in London.

It's a center of, like, just bootstrapping in India in the world. And, honestly, there's so much that I can attribute to the community. Like, you know, I've met you through a community. I've figured out a growth channel for the community. I've hired people through the community, designed stuff through the community for us, and there's so much that, you know, I've managed to get from it that's yeah.

I'm just so grateful for. And I think if you can surround yourself with that, like, it doesn't have to be in a lone journey. You don't have to be, like, sitting there, be on your laptop watching everyone on Twitter. Like, speak to these people, connect with these people, like, join, like, a mastermind or, like, an online community because it'll make your job a lot easier. And it's it's about getting to that mentality.

Right? Like, I mean, a lot of people ask me, like, you know, how do I get my first users and that kind of stuff? And all this information is out there. But if you're not around those people who who know how to do and are constantly doing that things doing those things, you wouldn't know it. Right?

Like, it's actually difficult to to figure it out. But when you're in the circles and you just hear people trying out things on Reddit or trying SEO, it's pretty normal. And from there, you can basically, you know, get the foundation you need to take it past that.

Jack

Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. I also owe a huge amount to Charlie. He's an absolute legend.

Elston

He

Jack

is. Oh, Elston, thanks so much. Where can people learn more about Tiiny?

Elston

You can go to Tinyhost.com, which is URL. But if you wanna learn more about me and connect with me, just Twitter underscore baretto, b a r e t t o. And I'm always able to connect with anybody. DMs open, so slide in my DMs. Yeah.

Jack

And you you just been in San Francisco. You got your Jam.dev

Elston

I have hats

Jack

and your Stamford Yeah.

Elston

It was it was great. But it was it was it was surprising how well they respected bootstrappers and people who had Really? Making money there. Yeah. I I I didn't know what to expect. I thought people wouldn't, you know, take us take you seriously because you haven't raised anything. But there is a lot of respect for that. And so, yeah, it's it's cool to see the the ecosystem changing a lot.

Jack

Yeah. I mean, I feel like this is going aside here, but like I think the bootstrap is like there's there's not as much difference as people make out this whole like divide and like there's so much that I think both sides learn from each other.

Elston

Yeah. A %. Collaboration, I think, between the two. But I think the whole the old days of, like, like, the Silicon Valley show where, like, you need to make no money because a company is worth more without without a new revenue because it's all mystical ups yeah. Mystical stuff. I think those are gone. Like, people are like, oh, you're making revenue. Okay. Amazing. Like, less than one. Let's go. What's next? It's it's super important. Yeah. Yeah.

Jack

Amazing. Well, everyone should connect with you, Elston, and maybe you'll be back in SF, and they can hang out with you.

Elston

%. Or London. Or London, let me know. Or Lisbon.

Jack

Or Lisbon. Yeah. For sure. Thanks, for listening.

Elston

Thank you. Thanks for coming, Elston. Cheers.

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