Alek Asaduryan

Some marketing things we've done this year to help us get more people trialing Referral Factory: 1. Me appearing on more podcasts (talking about referral marketing) 2. Using clipping tools and turning this podcast content into social content and YT shorts (does well) 3. Full software review / deep dive articles on external publications 4. Collaborating with YouTubers to review our software (cough cough paying them) 5. Full website restructure - removing dead or irrelevent topic clusters (lots of no indexing) and also brining everything under one menu not blog on one subdomain and help on another subdomain. 6. Asking our customers for referrals and reviews constantly 7. Publishing more case studies / real success stories on our website 8. Hired an actor and producing a lot more YouTube content for our channel Something we've found is freshness is so much more important than it used to be for SEO. Like what is the internet saying about you right now, not two years ago. Also videos get WAY more interactions, views and comments than long form blog posts. I really think only bots will read 3000 word blog posts these days 😂 Some things we're not doing that others swear by: 1. Capterra / G2 spend on premium profiles - should we be doing this? We used to and have stopped as i just didn't see the ROI there. 2. Shipping constantly and talking about it on X. We are shipping a lot, but its not really part of our content - should it be? 3. Aggressively commenting on reddit. We maybe comment once or twice as a team, but not hiring an agency to do it aggressively. Should we be doing this? 4. Buying links. We're now getting less links but more real ones as we just try make good content and hope people reference it :) 5. Having a target number of blog posts to write monthly - we hardly make new posts anymore, just update old ones and then focus only on video format for new content. Something interesting: our traffic has dropped overall, but mostly because we were ranking for tons of irrelevent and unrelated keywords before - so by cleaning that up we may get less traffic, but we get much better quality traffic and that leads to more people actually starting a trial ✅

By far THE most annoying part of running a business for me is collecting receipts for my accountant Every month my accountants hounds me for invoices and receipts of every single expense I did, doesn't matter how tiny like $0.50, sometimes also for income (I don't know why) Most companies charge monthly so that means collecting 12 invoices per year at least One reason I am canceling so many SaaS is not even the cost, it's just that I hate bookkeeping so much so I think if I don't spend the money, I don't need to collect invoices and receipts for every single payment every month (also I like extremely high profit margins like 99.99%) I'm down to just about 10 companies I pay now, like Cloudflare, Hetzner, Backblaze etc. so that means only ~120 invoices to collect per year cause most are paid monthly Yes I have an automatic email filter that forwards invoices to my accountant but many companies do NOT send you an automatic invoice by email So you're talking about logging in to 10 websites, them sending you a 2FA code by email, opening your email, entering the code, trying to find wherever the Billing page is hidden, going to Invoices, opening the invoice, clicking Download to DPF (if it even exists) This week I tried to improve this, my accountant uses Xero, so I made a Xero API key, gave it to Claude Code, and asked it to login and figure stuff out, then it just asks me which expenses still need a receipt and a note, I find it and drag the PDF or screenshot into Claude Code and it resolves it Next step is letting it login to all my vendors and also download the invoice by itself which seems very very possible Much easier!

Ask just shut down, book-ending one of the great internet what-ifs. It was founded as AskJeeves in 1996 and acquired Excite in 2004 in a $343m deal. In 1999, Excite had turned down offer from Sergey Brin & Larry Page to buy Google for $750k (so they could finish Stanford PhDs).

Dude GPT-Image-2... wtf... how.

🚨 GOOGLE: now has a "what people are saying" box in search results pulling from: - youtube shorts - instagram reels - linkedin posts - reddit - x/twitter - medium if you're only doing blog SEO you're missing half the SERP real estate, social is now part of the SEO channel

How they started: Nintendo → playing cards Nokia → paper pulp Samsung → dried fish Suzuki → weaving looms Tiffany & Co. → stationery store YouTube → video dating site Slack → video game Sharp → belt buckles Raytheon → refrigerators DuPont → gunpowder Berkshire Hathaway → textiles LG → toothpaste Hyundai → construction Toyota → automatic looms Lamborghini → tractors Colgate → candles 3M → mining Hasbro → textiles Instagram → location check-in PayPal → crypto for Palm Pilots Shopify → snowboard shop