436: When Long-Term Investments Finally Pay Off
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Why does Arvid compare long‑term product growth to planting seeds?
Hey, it's Arvid and this is the Bootstrap Founder. There's something deeply satisfying about watching the seeds you planted a year ago finally break through the soil. Figuratively, even though I do enjoy growing my own tomatoes. Today I do want to share a few stories from Podscan, that's my podcast intelligence platform, about what happens when long-term investments start compounding. Some of those took 18 or so months to materialize, and others became possible only because I embraced tools that I thought I'd never touch. So this is a bit of a year in review. Although slightly delayed and probably incomplete. But I think there are lessons here that apply to any founder playing the long game, and maybe you are gonna encounter a technology or a thought that you may not have thought about before.
Now let me start with something that took real patience, because that's the hardest thing to do as a founder. And that was our programmatic SEO efforts for PodScan. For a solid year and a half, I wasn't sure that they were working too well or at all, particularly in the beginning. But that's kind of obvious because things just take a while. And obviously, each new page, particularly if it comes with a .fm TLD, like podscan, has some work to do before it's recognized as a trustworthy location. But that seems to be happening now. And more and more people are linking to particular shows or particular episodes directly using the podscan.fm link. And each of these backlinks from major newspapers like Wall Street Journal and Forbes and other places, wherever a podcast is mentioned,
Each of these backlinks increases the quality of the domain. The domain rating goes up, and that obviously means better search result placements, higher trust value with these anti-spam systems, and generally people picking our page to link to when they need to reference a podcast. Also, it means a lot of people email me trying to place their weird spammy advertising stuff on my blog, but that's a different story. A good domain rating. It's attention, the good kind and unfortunately the bad kind as well. But here's what I find particularly interesting from my business from the kind of business owner perspective. Podcasters themselves, like the people running the shows, are now putting links to their pod scan page into their show notes.
And some of them, not all of them, but some of them have claimed their show on the platform as well. Others are just collecting links to every analytics service out there. Not exactly. sure why they do it, but I'm glad they do. Either way, the name has become almost synonymous with podcast analytics in certain circles. And that's exactly what I wanted to accomplish. And this whole SEO effort has proved to be a very reliable lead generator. More and more of my prospects find their way through what is effectively user-generated content, the podcast transcripts themselves. We just host the content. We facilitate already pre-generated content on the platform by hosting transcripts for shows that other people recorded.
And for that reason, it's a kind of cheap way of generating unique content, or at least like facilitating the discovery of that unique content. Like we don't generate it, it's somebody else's work. but we point at it so people can actually listen to the show. And because it's genuinely useful content, all these new podcast episodes, it is found by people with a vested interest in that particular topic. So they want to find out more and they discover podscan, they explore the other features and ideally they become customers. Obviously, competitors in this field have understood this too, and have similarly high-rated domains, but just from all the links that they've been able to collect over a longer time than Podscan has been around.
So that comes with the territory of being a newcomer in a field, but the compound effects are real and they extend beyond just search rankings. Domain age also helps with email deliverability scores. The reputation builds up in multiple dimensions.
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