Top SaaS SEO insights founders should know in 2025 with Mark Williams-Cook @AlsoAsked

Hey there, welcome to SaaS Unbound Podcast. I'm your host, Anna Dana, Head of Growth at SaaS Group, serial acquirer buying wonderful SaaS businesses to take them to the next level. And here I chat with inspiring founders and experts to get an inside scoop on how they made their business success. And today with me is Mark, founder of AlsoAsked, a free keyword research tool for exploring the questions that your visitors are asking. He's also the director at Candor, podcast host, and, you know, the SEO expert that we're all following. So I can go on and on, I guess. Happy to see you here. Welcome to the show.

I appreciate it and I'm looking forward to it.

Sure. Well, before we get into, and I think we will focus just slightly on Also Asked because this is for SaaS founders, right? You have such a cool background and you've done a lot of stuff. So maybe we can get there first.

Sure. So I've been doing SEO for around about, or involved in SEO for around about 20 years now. I started like a lot of people at that time in SEO because 20 years ago there wasn't so much in terms of courses and online videos and books on how to do SEO. So it's pretty much all self-taught on forums and I started just making my own websites and my initial kind of career was affiliate-based. And I did make some SEO tools quite early on, naughty black hat ones though, like link building stuff, how to like exploit social networks and get shares, which were quite successful. But I ended up about 15, 16 years ago agency side. And that's been the bulk, I'd guess, of my SEO experience. So I've been director at 3 agencies and currently at Kanda. And as part of Kanda, we've got a couple of other businesses. So one is a separate company technically, but it's running Also Asked, which is like you said, the SaaS tool. We also run and own an e-commerce business in the UK as well. So plenty to keep me busy.

Yeah. And you've probably seen it all in like 20 years in SEO. I don't remember what was 20 years in SEO is too— I remember like 10 years ago, 12 years ago, and it was messy, but it was fun. And it's totally different to what it is now. So I'm obviously not going to ask you to go into too much of history and detail of what changed in SEO, but ultimately you thought that also Ask will be a tool that will be needed.

Yeah.

for SaaS founders, for SEO experts out there. So what was your main inspiration behind it?

Sure. So Also Asked is focused around the People Also Ask data that's in Google. So that appears now more than 50% of the time when you do a search, you'll get the People Also Ask boxes come up. Firstly, that data has interested me for a long time. So as an SEO agency, we've been using that data again for 10 years, I would say maybe a bit more because it's a fascinating insight into how Google is understanding the intent of the query. So if someone asks this question, these are the next most likely things they are going to be asking. And Google's done a lot of really difficult work for you in terms of clustering those questions and understanding relationships because they've got all the data, right? How AlsoAsked came to be was I did a presentation, I believe it was in 2016 at a conference where I was talking about SEO. And at the time we had just built our own command line tool that we were using locally to get people's AlsoAsked data. And I had assumed that lots of people were doing this and I gave this presentation and I had like 20 people come up to me afterwards and ask for the tool. And I was like, yeah, sure. And I gave it to them. And then I had about 19 of those people asking me for help to run it because it was a command line tool and you need to install other stuff to get it to run. And it wasn't working on their machine kind of thing. And that led me to the thought of, well, if lots of people do want this data, there currently isn't any other place to get it quickly at scale and customizably, it's maybe something we could build as a web service. So we built like an alpha version for free and that went really well. We were getting quite literally like millions and millions of searches a month within 5 or 6 months. So I could see the demand was there. We had to actually take down the alpha version because it was costing us so much money to operate for free. It was my first real entry into like what I'd call proper SaaS, like a web-based platform. And when we had the alpha running, I thought, hmm, yeah, this is pretty much there. I think it'll be like 3 or 6 months before we have a version that's ready to scale and charge people. And it took 2 years to finally get to a stage where it was secure and solid and it would scale. So I was lucky in that 2 things. I was in the position originally to kind of be the customer for my own tool. So we instantly had product market fit because it's easy, at least at the start, to design a tool for yourself, just thinking I would want to use this and here's what I would want it to do. We were lucky early on because it was free. We got a very clear picture that there was a demand for that.

Yeah, I've heard a couple of stories here on the podcast where founders also thought that it's going to be, you know, because it's generates a lot of traffic to this free product. Hey, this is a clear indicator we should charge for this. And that was a mistake because they, when they started charging for it, like 99% of people disappeared because it was clearly not there. Did you make that mistake or were you holding on to the free tool?

Yeah. So the operating the free tool at its peak was going to cost us over £10,000 a month. So it wasn't really an option of keeping the free tool. It was kind of like, if you want it, you have to pay for it because I can't afford to run it for free. And I mean, it went really well, the launch. So in the first 3 or 6 months, we hit 5 figures MRR, which was a very strong indicator that people would pay for it. Of course, it did upset some people. I had people accusing me of doing like a bait and switch because they said I'd released a free tool and then suddenly I was charging for it. It was never the case that it was advertised as a free tool. It was very much test this thing and see if you like it. And I think it was interesting to me because you anchor kind of your value with that initial proposition of, oh, it's free. So then in people's heads, it's kind of like, well, this thing's worth nothing. How dare they charge for it? Whereas to get it, as I said, it took 2 years to get to a version that was solid enough and had enough features to be worth charging for and something we could build on. But, you know, that takes significant time in terms of paying developers, paying designers, paying, you know, people to security audit. And I think that's taken for granted and hidden by customers, which is very much a, you know, if you're running a SaaS, that's a you problem.

Yeah.

Right. Uh, but it, it did give me food for thought about pricing. And I think we set the, I mean, again, we did the pricing based on essentially the cost of running it and what would be an acceptable margin to do that rather than maybe looking at the value in terms of how much time does this save people. Because the other thing I wanted to tackle was because the audience is potentially global because it supports all. languages and regions that Google does. I was trying to find a way to make it accessible to the kind of economic buying power disparity that you get globally without doing geographic pricing, because that's something I've seen myself get exploited by other SaaS tools where people are buying the kind of cheaper version and reselling it. And I didn't want to kind of get into that.

Interesting.

All right.

Well, I wanted to obviously also ask about, you know, this whole setup that you have, because I recently had Brian Kaysal here on the podcast who is known for juggling a portfolio of different things and SaaSes and services. And apparently, you know, for a lot of Twitter gurus, this is not the right way to do this. There is you who also has a bunch of things you're involved with. with. So how do you make it work? How do you prioritize what gets your attention? And how did you even get to this setup?

Sure. So the agency business came first. The thing about agency businesses are generally the number of staff, the team size you need pretty much scales with the work you're doing. If you get more clients and you don't have enough people to do that, you need to hire more people. I mean, we're at CANDOR with 25 people, which is the size essentially we've aimed to be, and we're not looking to grow further than that. But we've got to a place now where we've worked very hard to essentially try and hire people that are better than me at specific things so that you can pass over those things. And I think it's a really good way to be in an agency in terms of People, most people, people certainly that work for us, you know, want to learn, they want progression. And to do that, you know, I need to get out of the way in some respect and let them have a path to grow and do that. So from an agency point of view, it was very tough. And I think that's common with a lot of people that are founders or owning agencies in that, at least for a long while, nobody's going to care. as much as you about the business. And it's not uncommon if you were running an agency that you're picking up other stuff and working kind of more than you should. So it had to wait until we were at a point where we had a good team that kind of could run most of the things themselves. The actual product AutoAsk was originally the kind of alpha and beta were built within the agency. So we were again, very fortunate because we've got a development team, design team, and SEO team in-house. So we had the right skillset to build it. I was not keen personally to take any type of funding for AlsoAsked because we wanted to maintain control over what we did with it. And once we had the first version that was ready to be charged for, we actually set up a separate company for it and then moved over some of the team into that company. So they now just full-time, that was their kind of role on it. I mean, I don't know if I'm a good example of how someone to emulate in terms of how to spend time, because I feel like I could spend more time on everything. I feel like I could, you know, also us would be more successful if I spent more time on it. The agency might be doing better if I spent more time on it, but they're all doing kind of okay at the moment. But the key has always been for me is finding the right people and giving them agency to work. So the main developer also works remotely now rather than coming into the agency. And we have once a week meetings where we agree kind of milestones and they just get on with it. And I'm handling all the marketing side. Again, it's entrenched in what I do with the agency because I had that initial connection with the SEO community, which is one of the audiences. I still think it's huge potential because the tool is really useful for anyone trying to understand customer intent, anyone in content, and I don't naturally have reach to those people. So we've been playing around trying to do a few different things in terms of advertising, but nothing too noisy. I don't know, that felt like kind of a bad answer to your question because there wasn't really an answer there about how to prioritize my time. It's really just a gut feel. Which may be an unsatisfying answer, but that is the unglamorous kind of truth. I don't think there's, well, I certainly don't have any magical framework to decide what I should be doing. It's just, I have discussions with people, get a high-level understanding of what's going on, and then yeah, whatever I feel needs the attention most.

Right. It's work in progress. I mean, it's a perfect answer because hey, like, we also discussed the fact that there are so many opinions on how things should be done, like how to prioritize. prioritize and what to focus on. Obviously, it's very much attention catching and fun to see when people are just very dogmatic about their beliefs. But at the same time, let's be honest, no one has their shit figured out.

I think 2 things there I would say. I think it's important to be able to drop things. That's something I am good at, which is if I've got 10 things to do and I can only do 2 of them, I just accept that and I just drop the other 8 things without thinking about them. I guess the decisions we make, I've roughly used that Eisenhower matrix before, the urgent importance. He decided something's urgent and if it's important, and there's the 4 squares. That is kind of my fallback, I guess, of does it need to be done now? And if I don't do it now, is everything going to burn to the ground? But in general, I will have a bias towards long-term decisions at the expense of the short term would be, I guess, the other guiding principle in terms of how I prioritize. So I would rather suffer today and have more success in a year's time than trade off trying to get something to work now at the expense of long-term.

Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. So since you started talking about how you think a lot more people can use Also Asked, I wanted to ask you, so who actually uses Also Asked? Like what is the biggest use case? And also how can SaaS founders, sometimes the team is amazing. They are building a great product, but they're tiny. They've never had an SEO or marketing person. And, and they were leveraging some tools for growth, but maybe haven't known about other possibilities. So how could SaaS founders don't necessarily have the team or the person who does SEO and content optimization leverage? Also asked.

So the, I mean, the biggest use case, I guess, for SaaS at the moment is within SEOs, but that's like a tail wags dog thing just because they're the people I originally had a community with. I would say the tool is brilliant for anyone trying to understand customers. So to give you some use cases outside of just content, which I will talk about, one use case that surprised me is someone made a TikTok video about AlsoAsked in Brazil. And it went viral and had like a million-something views. And Brazil is one of actually our largest paying markets now, and it's used predominantly by social media influencers, which didn't even occur to me at the time. And how they're using it is essentially deciding what to cover in the reels they're making. So they type in a topic and then they'll get back 20, 30, 50 questions. That are commonly asked. And that's literally what they plan their video content because it's matching with the intent of what people want to know about a subject. I've spoken to people who are using AlsoAsked from a brand point of view. People also ask questions around brand names, and it's been a useful insight. I was giving some examples with the online challenger bank Revolut recently, and you could see the types of questions people are asking about Revolut, like how much money is it safe to kind of keep in there? Is it a trustworthy bank? And that lets that company know, okay, if we have someone come and look at us as a consideration for their moving bank because they're fed up with their current bank, these are the important pain points that we need to address immediately. We need to talk to them about how we process money and why it's safe and guarantees and even things like You put in brands of cars, you can see if it's Volvo, it will surface things about safety because that's the essence of that brand. So that was another thing that really interested me, that people were using it to understand brands and how they shift. We've introduced some new tools recently into AlsoAsked, such as a timeline tool, which allows you to track topics over time, which is really, really interesting for me as an SEO because The thing I think that sometimes gets overlooked is the intent, i.e., what people want to actually— what they're expecting to find out when they type in something into Google does slowly shift over time. So what we actually do now is we permanently keep the questions that are attached to a query and we show over time, every time that search is done, the volatility and when it changes. So again, an example I gave was If you look at the data 3, 4 years ago when people were searching for COVID, a lot of the related questions were just kind of like, what are the symptoms? What do I do? Like, had no idea, obviously, what this was. Nowadays, the types of associated questions are basically just like double-checking the legality of flying and going outside. And it's pretty much everyone knows what it is. We're just, do the tests still work? Nice idea about When it needs updating. And there's some really advanced things that content and SEO people can do. So you can tie in other tools like Screaming Frog because AlsoAsked has an API that you can programmatically access this data. And you can do things now like content audit automatically in terms of you can crawl all of your content on the site and you can connect it up to ChatGPT and AlsoAsked at the same time. and get it to list where the gaps in your content are. So it might be, here's 100 of your content pages and here's 150 questions. You get to see maybe where you're not quite reaching that intent. So there's a huge amount there for brands, for anyone doing content. If you're running your own SaaS tool, I've put AlsoAsked into AlsoAsked to see what comes up. And it shows us, you know, that we're compared to people like Answer the Public regularly, people trying to understand the differences in our tool, because that was a really big thing for us early on. So Answer the Public is like a really famous tool for keyword research, but it's completely different to AlsoAsked. We use completely different sets of data. The use case is different. So Answer the Public is more kind of a topic research tool, whereas AlsoAsked is like a page article level tool, I would say. So it's once you've decided you're going to write about this, what should you be talking about? Because they visually look the same, It confuses people, of course. So people are trying to research the differences. So again, if you've got no background in SEO or you don't have marketing departments, AllSource is freemium. So you can go pop in the name of your tool or your competitor's tool and you'll get a steer on things like your product market fit, who people consider to be your competitors. People asking things, it's telling when people say worth the money. for instance. So then we know, okay, we need to be very clear with what the value and benefits are that we're offering. Because again, that was a pretty basic mistake I think we made early on with a small team, which was we talked too much about features rather than the related benefits and values of those, which is kind of embarrassing because it's like 101 copywriting, right? But again, like busy, where do you focus your time? You just kind of writing things. So I think, yeah, really broad audience for it. It can be useful for everything from product research to branding to if you're writing content.

Yeah. I mean, I use it too, like whenever I'm shy of ideas. Yeah, I go and I ask because in M&A, no one really goes to Google and Googles like, how do I sell my company? Like there is a ton of articles on that topic, but I feel like it's us, it's M&A people who go there and check what the competitors are writing about, but not really the founders who like really want to sell their company. So yeah, I wanted to dig a little deeper into like what kind of content would actually be interesting, like what people actually ask online. And it was super helpful. So yeah, I got a few really cool ideas there that are working. So thank you very much. Uh, but, um, that sounds like a testimonial. Yes. I'll send you, I'll send you a video. Uh, but yeah, I mean, I, I cannot not ask you about SEO insights because that's what you're known for. First question, I guess, going into 2025 already, what do you see like this last couple of years? Because SEO's Definitely changing. And I want to later ask you about that. What in the last couple of years founders have been struggling with, like people who are coming to Candor for your help, like what are the questions they're asking?

Yeah, I mean, the biggest change I think that we've had clients come to us about has been the helpful content update. And I think that's across everyone I've spoken to. in agencies, which is that as Google has moved towards internally using more machine learning, more AI, more kind of black box techniques, if you like, where they're building models and letting those models do scoring, it's become increasingly unclear to Google, I would say as well, why certain things are happening and why certain websites are ranking and why certain websites are not ranking. So I've definitely in the last few years had more people come to us with, hey, our traffic has gone down 50% in the last 2 years and we don't know why. We've been writing content, working on UX and speed. Can you help us? Which I think has been Really interesting because, and I tell clients this upfront, it's very, very rare that there is a silver bullet kind of answer to these questions of, oh yeah, you just need to change this, or it's, oh, it's just this template thing. It's normally a really nuanced mix of they have the right intentions, but they're doing kind of the wrong things for the wrong reasons. The mix of those things, how they get scored ends up with Google kind of not liking their website. So I'll give you an example. I spoke to a company yesterday who was in this pretty much exact situation of they had 3 or 4 different websites and they've been losing traffic and they don't know why. And they have been making content. And when I dug into this and kind of asked them what they were doing, they were talking about things like they were doing lots of guest posting, for instance, not buying links, but just guest posting on like hundreds and hundreds of websites over the last year. The content, they talked a lot about kind of keywords and what people were searching for. And we had this discussion around, because there's been some really great research, especially recently done by Tom Kapper from Moz. He was showing the sites that were most impacted by the helpful content update had high SEO metrics, i.e., lots of linking domains, but fairly low how they measure brand authority. So things like people regularly searching for you as a brand. This is kind of what I was talking to you about. This company is— the reason they are doing guest posting is for SEO. And I think that's fundamentally a bad SEO strategy to do things just for SEO. There's some exceptions with things like schema, for instance, of course, that's for search engines. But in general, The approach that we've had a lot of success with and has had clients sort of not have any negative impact, he says, touch wood, with any of the algorithm updates has been do what's good for your business, but do it in the most SEO-friendly way possible. And we were talking about even from an algorithmic point of view, how does it look? Why does it make sense that you're getting all of these mentions and links from fairly small websites over this period of time? But there's no corresponding uptick with how interested people seem to be in your company. Because if you had a major news website write an article about you, it would make sense that you would then get maybe 100 small links pop up around the web, because that's how news works, right? You see these big publications and it filters down. It doesn't make sense that it's just all these unconnected little sites are bubbling away giving you links? Like, how are they finding out about you if there's no other kind of interest Google can sense? And I think that's what's confusing people because I feel that's one of the things that has changed over the last few years is these models have got better at tying together what are sometimes treated as individual metrics. So rather than just doing this metric thing for SEO, which is tempting to do and I know a lot of SEO teams get pressure around what are we measuring? Okay, maximize this thing. I don't think that individual maximization is good. The analogy I used before was it's like if I gave you a recipe for a cake and we had a discussion about what makes cakes taste nice and we were like, yeah, sugar makes cakes taste nice, but it would be not smart to be like, well, let's maximize the sugar then and put like 5 kilos of sugar because you're not going to end up with a nice cake. And I think that's kind of how SEO is aging now.

Yeah. Oh, that's a cool example. And yeah, thank you for actually giving an example because I think I was talking to Will from SearchPilot about this. The last time I could say that I was any good in SEO was like 2016. So I'm just pretending. But I have a quote from my colleague who's actually good at SEO. And I mean, thank God we have amazing people at SaaS Group who actually work the magic. But what she says, traditional SEO, like old school SEO, has not been getting the results as it used to for a while now. And solely relying on Google search is not a good idea. It's just been the most popular to date. And SEO specialists will adjust their SEO strategies based on where they get the most effective results, like Bing, Google, YouTube, whatever. And at Solid Group, we're already working towards these changes through entity semantic and intent optimization, which goes far beyond just the use of keywords to do onsite SEO. What do you think about this? And is this something that basically is relevant to all the, you know, again, earlier stage SaaS companies, something that they can leverage, especially since, you know, we're in this AI era where basically you can probably do anything with AI.

So in terms of like structured data and, you know, talking about semantic SEO, I saw an interesting post, I think end of last week or early this week by Jono Alderson about schema. So he's one of the biggest proponents probably I know of structured data and schema. And he was expressing his kind of disappointment at how currently, while Google talks a lot about schema, they don't seem to do too much with it. But the longer-term outlook was it's something for essentially future-proofing, which I would strongly agree with, because especially if we talk about LLMs, so AI overviews, so specifically large language models, which is predominantly what we're seeing, that's how AI overviews work pretty much. It's how Gemini, ChatGPT works, large language models. The weak points of those technology, certainly when it comes to specificity, explicit— explicitity and detail. Because we've seen problems with that. By definition, the content they generate is average. It's literally the definition because they're using token probability, right? And we have the generative kind of spice of sometimes they hallucinate and say wild things, which is great for creative writing or things like that. Not so great if you're trying to do a technical specification where there's an objectively correct answer. And I think schema and defining entities is going to be more important as we will see more LLM AI overview stuff. I saw in Google's Q3 earnings call, they said they've reduced the cost of generating AI overviews now by 90%, which means we're going to see more of them. We've got the AI organized search results now for like ecommerce that are just pulling in summarized content. So viewing, we have to remember like the web is one way to essentially view a database. It's like a window to your business, your products, your services, your information. And what we've seen demonstrated over the whole time I've done SEO is Google wants to keep people on their SERP and in their ecosystem because it's how they make the most money, which is one of their main goals to make ungodly amounts of money, right? So we can say it's a fair bet that whatever Google does technology-wise is going to benefit them financially. And we know that's very closely correlated to keeping people on the SERP. So it's a very safe bet to say we're going to see more content pulled from the web onto their SERP unless something major happens with the ZOJ and they break Google up into tiny pieces, which I think will take a long, long time to do. So yes, I think those things are incredibly important because they will help, I think, get good answers into the SERP because you're aiding the understanding of those models that are pulling the content. In terms of whether that's like the right thing for Google to do, I think it's a bigger separate question. And while I have opinions on it from a professional point of view, My view is always, this is the reality, this is what I have to deal with. So that is what I will work with. But I think that's going to be interesting to see how that pans out, especially with the DOJ stuff.

Yeah. All right, well, it seems like we're doing a good job. Very good. So another thing that we also discussed with Will was I'm just super interested if Well, if it's possible, it's probably, it probably is possible. Uh, but how do you start thinking maybe already now and like kind of start planting the seeds to content optimization for AI?

There's a lot of, lot of experts on this topic already. I've seen, I mean, is that me? So the data, the, I mean, the data, there's lots of people that say they're experts. I'd say the data I've seen. Especially with like the— so the ChatGPT search is like the hot thing now, right? That's just been pushed out. And OpenAI have said Bing is at the core of what they're doing there. And in both the cases of AI overviews on Google and what we've seen in ChatGPT search, the results are very, very, very, very, very similar to what you see in the natural SERP. So at the moment, I don't think there's any compelling evidence to say, okay, you need to be doing XYZ outside of what you should be doing if you're doing good SEO at the moment. And I put emphasis on the word good. There have been some academic papers around generative engine optimization, which were fun because they showed you could increase your visibility. And this is specifically talking about within the model-generated answers now. Not a model fetching things from Bing, but by doing things like adding statistics and citations into your content, even if the citations weren't real, which is fun, right? And again, this comes back to, I think, token probability and the feedback those LLMs have got about, oh, this is a useful answer, in that when you get an answer like that, it appears to be a good answer. So people are like, oh, thanks, that's a good answer. I'm satisfied with that, which I think is one of the dangers of LLMs, which is, again, by definition, they're so good at giving a confident, what appears to be very good answer, that they're very, very good at tricking humans into thinking they've got the right answer. I think longer term, the kind of answer you're looking for there of how to optimize for AI content will be focused around this. Firstly, into solved and unsolved spaces. So I think we have solved information spaces where there are just good answers that exist within within models, how to make a beef lasagna. I don't know how many times as a species we need to rewrite that and tell people. I think there's probably a good answer there when it comes to more subjective things, when it comes to things that have empirically correct answers, when it comes to fast-changing things. I think they're all interesting areas to optimize for. I think the other thing about being a citation source is, and this is why I like people also, I've been interested in it so long, because you have that collection of very tightly knit questions, which I call intent proximity. So if I want to know A, I probably want to know B and C as well. I think having those things together will, in my view, increase your likelihood of being cited because the answers, the main change we're going to see, I think, is the complexity of the queries. So I have a book from 19— '97, I think it is, about AltaVista. It was called The Search Revolution. And it gave in the book, it's very quaint, they printed out common search terms in AltaVista. And the thing that kind of looking back now is interesting is most of the searches people were doing were like one word or two words. And as search engines have got kind of better, the length and complexity of queries has grown. And I think we're in for another leap with conversational agents where you can structure a very, you can ask it like a paragraph of a question and get answers to all those things. How that interacts with search, I think is going to be interesting because it's changing the demand on what the search engine needs to return. So rather than a list of pages, it's like, you need to pull this information and it's going to be easier and cheaper if they can pull the information from complex queries from single sources. rather than trying to knit together 10 different pages again, if it isn't a solved question that exists within the model.

That's really interesting. That's a really cool answer. Thanks for sharing that. I'm going to then compare the two and push them out together. But yeah, I mean, I want to come back to Also Asked because, well, we're running out of time and I wanted to ask you just a couple more questions about it. So first of all, what do you And it's kind of a random question, but I just want your honest opinion looking at something that you've built. What do you think is the most fascinating thing about this tool? And it can be in the value that it, in the technology it uses or the way it attracts customers. So anything that you find, that secret sauce.

So for me, it's the, a lot of people don't realize that PAA data is the freshest source of data that you can get from Google. If you— so we've— it's currently the US election, right? It's just finishing. If you type queries in, for instance, around the US election, you're going to get the popular searches that are changing within an hour or 2. And if you put these into any kind of traditional— to use a— it's probably a better word, but traditional keyword research tool, they will say it's zero. Like I was demonstrating this when OpenAI released GPT-4o, you could type GPT-4o into AutoAsk and within an hour or 2 you had all the questions like, how is it better than 4? And how much does it cost? And then you go and type it into Google and look at Keywords Everywhere search volume, et cetera. And it's like, oh, zero, no one's searching for it. So to me, that's one of the most important features because being first to market, if you like, with answers, is massive in SEO, especially if you're in like news sectors. But being the first to publish something is just like the easiest way to rank because you don't have competitors, right? So as long as you can convince Google to come look at the content, you're going to rank for it. So for me, that's one of the like best uses of, uh, AutoAsk data outside of kind of the bigger picture intent stuff is just a really neat little kind of like hack. If you watch those terms that are new, you'll be getting, you'll get there before your competitors.

Okay. Thank you. Don't try to pass it as a hack. I'm going to ask you about a hack later.

Okay.

But the first question I wanted to ask you to wrap it up is kind of maybe related to the previous one, but what so far you think is your biggest win and your biggest failure with Well, it can be also us, it can be Candor, it can be your personal founder story or the business.

So I think the coolest thing that happened to us probably this year was sort of by accident. We found quite a big Google exploit that we found an endpoint that Google had left kind of unauthenticated and it gave us kind of lots of information and scores around how Google ranks sites and queries, which was super helpful. We did end up reporting it to Google and they paid a $13,337 bug bounty for it, which— so every year, Kanda, we have like a charity of the year we support that we do a donation for. And this year it was Brave Futures. And fortunately we voted internally and we donated that bug bounty to that charity. And that was For me, that was one of the biggest wins of the year. Just, it was a really nice thing because it confirmed a lot of things we knew about Google, gave us some really interesting insights. We did some good talks about it and some good came out of it as well, which is brilliant because I work in marketing and SaaS stuff. It's not like I'm saving lives or anything. So it's really nice to be able to have purpose in what you do and be able to support charities like Brave Futures.

That's amazing. What about a failure or maybe a mistake that you turn into a learning?

There's just too many to choose from if you talk about failures. So honestly, I wouldn't know. I do a lot of stuff wrong, but this may be my mechanism of coping. But I try not to frame them as failures because my mental gymnastics is that I only get to see one outcome, right? So if I do something and it doesn't go right, I'm like, well, I learned a bunch of stuff from this. And if I, in retrospect, could go back and do the thing I think was right, it might have turned out to be worse. So I'm just going to continue with my complete delusional outlook and be like, there's no failures. It's just framing.

Right. Okay. Very good. I mean, that's how you survive in SaaS, right? Very positive mindset. Otherwise, there is a reason we talk a lot about burnout here on the podcast. So maybe that's something to really listen to. But yeah, Let's do a hack. So it can be anything, can be, you know, how to start with SEO if you don't have an SEO expert or how to build your own brand, how to juggle all the portfolio projects that you have. It can be anything that helps you, even the smallest thing.

So I thought I found that really interesting question because you told me obviously you were going to ask this and my kind of outlook and approach is, as I kind of said earlier, I'm very long-term focused, which is almost like an anti-hack mentality, if you know what I mean. If I had to give one piece of advice, it's super vague, but it's related, I guess, to things like burnout, stuff like that, which is just consistency. And I know that sounds kind of lame, but you can win so much just by, even if it's doing a tiny amount, every day and chipping away at it, you'll make more progress than like 99% of people. So I'd say that, or just being very generous with your time and ideas. Like, I speak to lots of other owners, agency founders, SaaS people, and one thing I've noticed about the ones that are more successful tends to be they tend to be quite generous with their time and their ideas as well. Because when you rule out the people that could do what you do, and then you rule out the other 99%, which is people that are actually willing to go through and do it. The payoff, the pros of being— I found being open and helping other people and giving advice and talking about what you do has far outweighed any kind of downside so far. I don't know if they count as hacks, but if they're like small— if you're counting hackers like small adjustment you could make to your thinking, then I would say consistency will be— because it's just about turning up and staying focused and keep doing it and trying to do it in a sustainable way as well. Because again, like you mentioned, I have to listen to those episodes you're talking about, about burnout, because that's something I'm very aware of. But in all honesty, not something as a founder I've particularly dealt with because of the way I chunk up and And do my work.

And that's also a very, very interesting— I was listening very carefully to what you were about to say about burnout, because I think one of the topics that we kind of explored here is the fact that a lot of people and a lot of founders don't want to frame it as burnout because, quote unquote, they don't know if if what they're experiencing constitutes as burnout. And we actually had here a former founder who sold to SaaS Group too, and he's now a mindfulness teacher and he works with burnout and he went through his own journey. And that was, interestingly enough, one of the things that he said is just, you know, one of the most important parts of, you know, kind of going through that journey is accepting that, yeah, this is your burnout. And, you know, if somebody else said that, oh, but have you had this and have you experienced that? And maybe, you know, if not, then you kind of call it that, then maybe that's bullshit and you shouldn't listen to that and you should just accept that this is what it looks like for you. Yeah.

I mean, I think there's a few things we've done Like I mentioned earlier, I didn't want to take funding for Also Asked or investment. And I think that's one of the reasons why, because that puts you in a position then to be put under lots of pressure to hit specific targets and goals and milestones, of course, because people want their investment to pay for them. And then I think it just comes down to people understanding themselves, which I think is fairly rare, like why they're in business and why they're doing what they're doing. And for me, an important part of running Kanda and why we've built it the way we have. And Also Asked is about autonomy and being able to have lifestyle choices. So if it's the cost between my long-term mental health or a feature in Also Asked, then Also Asked isn't getting that feature, or I'll find another way to do it. Because burnout's the enemy of consistency, right? Because if I do burn out, I can't be consistent. And that's one thing I am throughout those businesses. To me, I'm the tortoise in the tortoise and the hare, right? Long-term goals, I'll keep plodding, but I'm going to keep moving in that direction and it's going to be tricky to stop me because I've got a shell and stuff. I feel like I'm pushing that too far now.

Yeah, a little. Nowhere to stop. Remember Monica? But yeah, that's good. All right. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. I feel like there was a very honest moment there. But yeah, thank Thanks also for the story and for all the unveiling, all the SEO secrets and stuff. Because like I said, it's fascinating, but for me, it's mostly magic. I can probably whip up a quick SEO something for a new project, but it won't be any good if we're honest. So I'd love to To have people, like you said, who are way better at something than me here on the podcast. So thanks for sharing your learnings and I know, happy to do it again sometime.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Anna.

Same here and take care.