I’ve been working on agents for 3 years now. In that time, I keep seeing headlines showing companies going from 0 to $trillions in 2 seconds.

It seems like every company that builds itself around AI is getting acquired or growing like crazy and raising a ton of funds.

Intellectually, I know that those stories are either fake, exaggerated, or the sub-1%.

Emotionally, it irks me.

But I keep going because I have no other choice. I need to build and I need to create wealth for my family and I need to feel like I’m doing something satisfying and fulfilling and I probably just couldn’t do anything else right now.

Maintaining hope, not to mention mental sanity, when you’re not making progress but it seems like everyone else around you is, is tough.

But that’s where I think vision, goals, grit, perseverance, and a bit of optimism can help you keep going.

That’s where I am today, and a big part of that vision and optimism lies in something I just can’t seem to stop thinking about.

As I’ve gone through Apteo, Locusive, and now Nobi, I’ve realized that without a built-in audience, or eyeballs, or something that just makes you stand out, it’s extremely hard to sell into a market.

I’ve tried many different tactics for direct sales, and it seems like without a big budget or pre-existing connections, it’s a slog.

But I’ve also seen companies grow huge from word-of-mouth, inbound, and or a single tweet. They’ve been able to do so because they set themselves up to capture demand when it showed up.

As technology progresses, I think we’re going to see more and more businesses, especially small businesses, agents, SaaS companies, agencies, and other digital-heavy businesses, start to rely more and more on inbound interest to grow.

We’re entering a world where you can simply ask Claude or ChatGPT for what product to use to solve a problem, and it’ll not only tell you which one to use but it will also sign up and set it up for you (I know because I’ve done this for my own SEO marketing platform, more on that below).

SEO might be dying (I honestly don’t think it is), but AEO and GEO are only going to grow, and the ability to be found and discovered is going to get more and more important.

While I believe many businesses, especially the largest, enterprise-focused ones, will likely need to continue to have an outbound sales approach, I think a lot of smaller, newer businesses can grow quite large based on inbound alone.

That’s something I find myself obsessing about a lot these days.

There are common things that SaaS businesses can do to attract new customers. Content, LinkedIn postings, short-form videos, social and community monitoring, mailers, etc. etc.

A lot of these are old-school tactics, and while their efficacy may be declining over time, they’re still good ways to grow awareness and facilitate conversations if they’re done consistently and in a focused, targeted way.

Unfortunately they all take a ton of time and humanpower. Or at least, they have, traditionally.

We’re now living in a place and time where it might be possible to significantly systematize and automate some, if not most, of these tasks. And if you’re a small business with no budget and limited time (but lots of drive and willpower), it’s an extremely appealing prospect to implement a system like this — one that automates things for you in the background so you can have tactical progress done for you with minimal effort on your end.

I’m now wondering if I can build a system like this for myself, and if it works for myself, can I productize it and sell it to others.

As mentioned above, this is something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. As I talked about in my last newsletter, even though Nobi’s growth has slowed, I have a big belief that the product is needed (not to mention data to show that it works better than the incumbents), and I think that a really strong marketing foundation could help to generate the growth that direct outbound sales couldn’t.

There are immediately obvious things that I could do to try to grow Nobi from a marketing perspective.

The first one, which I think could pay the most dividends, but probably takes the most amount of time and effort, is SEO. In fact, if you saw my last newsletter, you’ll know that I’ve been building out an automated bottom-of-funnel SEO engine specifically for that purpose.

And it seems like it’s starting to do something.

About a year or two ago, I came across Melissa Kwan’s post on bottom-of-funnel (BoF) growth. She mentioned an agency she was using to help her grow her SEO presence. And that SEO’s core premise is that top-of-funnel (ToF), educational, informational articles should not take precedence over BoF content.

Yes, ToF is where the volume is. But volume doesn’t pay your cloud bills. Prospects who are searching for high-intent keywords, like “best ai search engines for Shopify”, are more likely to buy, and despite there being far less volume in keywords that target those customers, conversion rates and sales growth is significantly higher for those customers.

So I became sold on BoF SEO (I’m also probably biased because it’s one of the cheapest forms of marketing that could still result in conversions, and not being funded this time around means I have to really focus on spending as little money as possible).

The cool thing about BoF articles is that there aren’t too many variations on what they look like, it’s usually something like “best [product type] for [business type/platform type]” or “X product vs Y product”. Middle of funnel articles can also be useful (those generally look like “how to do [some task] for [some problem]”).

Because of their targeted, limited nature, it’s possible to knock out a lot of high-value BoF articles systematically. And that systematic nature is where autonomous agents and automated platforms can shine. And that’s the type of platform I’ve been building out for Nobi.

We launched our first automated article around April 22nd, with a goal of launching 2-3 articles a day, and we’re now starting to see increased impressions and clicks for high-intent queries:

Some of these clicks have led to visitors engaging with our own assistant on Nobi, which then gives us additional feedback about what types of content to write about and create in our own website. An added benefit is that our branded, top-of-funnel presence has also grown:

So, while it’s still early, and our numbers are low, I do believe that with consistent posting and high-quality SEO hygiene, we’ll be able to start seeing more Nobi usage, free trials, and customers.

I spent a ton of time automating the article generation process. I wanted to keep it as high-quality as I could, which meant rigorous factual research on competitors and the market, keyword-based content creation, meaningful outlining and proper content creation for the article itself, high-quality editing, correct targeting and positioning, and technical optimization for SEO/GEO. But all of this is arguably the easiest part.

The much more challenging part is the off-page work needed to get your site listed. It’s the link building, or getting yourself mentioned in press, or having a Reddit thread talk about your company.

The off-page work is where SEO can really pay off. And that’s an area where I think you can really automate the heck out of your workflow.

One idea that came to me last night as my daughter woke me up in the middle of the night (🤦) was the idea of an agent that builds links on your behalf. It could automatically reach out to others and offer link exchanges, or it could even go one step further and be some sort of script that gets embedded in websites and dynamically inserts content about your product or business in an existing article.

My hope, goal, and vision is to build this, combine it with the automated SEO engine above, and generalize it to a point where I can use this system for not only Nobi, but possibly for any other project and business I build.

I think SEO is one of the most impactful tactics to implement in the long run. It can lead to continuous organic growth at a very low cost. But it takes time, a lot of luck, and it might just never work.

But there are a lot of other inbound techniques that could also work well: like writing answers on Reddit posts (or Quora, or any other specialized internet forum), posting consistently on LinkedIn, creating a branded newsletter (ha!), creating videos, producing data-backed case studies, doing physical mailers, and even doing cold outreach.

I think all of these can work.

Most businesses only rely on one or two channels for a majority of their inbound and outbound. That’s smart, as long as you know which ones work.

But if you’re a small business and you haven’t found that silver bullet yet, it can take a lot of time to experiment with all of these to find something that sticks. But if you’re automating these and you’re able to get them to run in the background for you, you can find the ones that work best in less time and with less effort.

Now, even with today’s technology, it’s not easy to automate all of this. Each tactic has its own nuances and challenges. It’s been a couple of months since I started building the automated SEO engine for Nobi and it’s still not able to complete more than 10% of its articles from start to finish without me having to go in and fix something.

That said, the hard work is where the value lies. If/when I get the SEO engine to be fully automated, it can run against not only Nobi, but any of my customers’ sites, enriching and enhancing their content profile so they’re picked up by search engines and LLMs.

Now imagine a world where you had not only the SEO engine fully automated, but also all the other tactics as well, and they were ALL running in tandem across all your products, and they themselves were products, so they were all enhancing each others’ profiles in an autonomous way, creating a flywheel that helps you capture all the latent demand for your products and solutions in a way that minimizes your involvement.

It’s a dream.

But with today’s technology, I think it can be very real.

I’ve already started building this out. It’s begun with a Nobi-specific SEO engine, which I plan on generalizing and rolling out to everyone (in fact, one of Nobi’s largest customers will likely be using it when it’s ready).

But there’s so much more to build. And because there’s so much to do, it’s hard for me to get through all of it, even after I max out my Claude and Cowork plans (again, as good as AI is for writing software, it seems like it struggles with getting through that last 10% of work to make a fully completed deliverable).

So I’m looking for folks who are thinking about this the same way to see if they’re interested in joining forces.

I’m in need of these products to-day. I can put them to use right now. What’s really exciting is that when they’re finished, each of them can start to be used to grow the profile for every product within the portfolio of the automated marketing platform.

In a few years, I’d love to have a fully automated system of tools that are all doing marketing work for not only each other, as their own products, but also for any customers that Nobi’s working with, and, like I said, any other projects that I build out.

If you’re thinking about things the same way and are interested in helping built out this platform, let’s chat.

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