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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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,

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.

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?

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.

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.