A VC asked me “why don’t you do this, and this, and that, and this other thing?”
I said we’d like to, but there’s only two of us and only so much time in the day. You should invest so we have the manpower we need! We both had a good laugh at that.
“We Call Them Howdy Doodats” — GOB Bluth
People say a startup requires “wearing different hats” or “keeping the plates spinning”. You need awareness in a lot of areas and continuously switch tasks while juggling feedback from inscrutable and often bafflingly uninformed sources.
Here’s an inside look at how it worked over the last almost-year.
I started with a good idea validated by the market. I incorporated with Stripe Atlas.
I used Codecademy to brush up on languages and frameworks, then implemented a demo in VS Code with Github Copilot and Claude. (I later switched to Cursor. If I were starting over, I’d probably give bolt.new a shot.)
My friend Jase insisted on YC Startup School, which was worth the time, and Co-Founder Matching. That’s not where I met Wes, but it did lead me to the how and why.
We built an MVP for robots.nxt in TypeScript with Next.js, React, and ShadCN, using NameCheap as our registrar and fly.io as our host. (We want robots.nxt as our domain but .nxt isn’t a valid TLD and that costs $185k to get. A battle for another day.)
We use Clerk for RBAC and Postgres for our database, after trying Turso and Neon. Prisma for our ORM. ChatWoot for customer service, Figma for mockups, Jira for work planning.
We use Mercury for our bank, Coinbase for our treasury (which has its ups and downs, ha!), Gusto for payroll, Xero for accounting, Dropbox for our file store, Google Workspace for our email & documents, and Pitch for our decks.
You have to do a million things, layered on top of each other and interlocking, brick by brick by brick, each in the right place at the right time. Just like climbing a staircase, if you take one step out of order, you can take a bad fall.
Look Who’s Talking
My engagement traction is awful. I don’t have a large enough audience and I suspect I might be boring. I try to spice things up by including memes, jokes, music videos, and sometimes even full entire movies linked in the middle of my articles.
Our mailing list is on Substack, I mirror that to Medium (I also post personal stories sometimes), and rehost it on our site blog. Repost to reddit and LinkedIn. When I remember, I also post them on BlueSky.
Breaking out on Medium, reddit, and Bluesky with personal content is relatively easy if you post food pictures, hot women, bitching, or are funny. Lucky for me that’s my vibe, but it’s not business.
Business is more challenging for engagement if you don’t have a huge audience.
Like on LinkedIn, it’s easy to get followers there, but engagement is tough because LI is crass and people follow you because they want to sell.
Hey, I get it, I do it too. We all float down here.
I tried rewriting my posts as LinkedIn native to get more engagement, which worked a little better. I tried using the “write article” feature but then you… post it on your feed as a link. Which like a 3rd party article, someone has to click it, so engagement isn’t easier. “Write article” would be better if it populated your feed like any other post.
My friend Cody said to take my blog posts and record them on Youtube. That gets more engagement on LinkedIn than written content. But LI doesn’t play YT videos in the post, so you have to then rehost the video into LI first. Thanks, LI. You’re helpful.
My best LI-native written content got engagement of 1/34 viewers. My best LI-native video content got at a rate of 1/24 viewers. Cody was right.
Video is the best so far. I’ll keep working on it. Someday I aspire to be interesting. And if I crack that, maybe I can make it all the way to fascinating.
Look Who’s Talking Too
The other side is, who’s looking at stuff like what we do, and who and what are they finding? What are other people doing? That’s analytics, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Ranking (SER), and keyword research.
We set up Google Analytics to track our site visitors, Google Search Console to understand how we’re surfacing in search, and Ahrefs for keyword insight. Then SEMrush, SpyFu, and Ubersuggest for competition keyword research.
We found one of our competitors doesn’t rank for keywords other than its name. Another ranks quite well on a lot of relevant topics. We built our bots page so that people searching for bots they see on their website can find us.
What Remains of the Day
Keyword research told us that people are looking for things like “how can I make money from my recipe website”, “make money from my art”, “make money from my writing”, and other things related to how to make money from a website. That’s not too surprising, and these are all things robots.nxt can do for you.
There’s also a relative number of people searching for “make money from AI”, “sell content to AI”, “stop content scraping”, “how to block bots”, “how to paywall content”, and “how to prevent form spam without captcha”.
Right now there’s not many great results for those searches, and they’re relatively low volume (only a few hundred or few thousand per day), but they’re low competition, so they’re relatively easy to rank on.
Those are also things that robots.nxt is built to help with, for any website that wants to protect its content. We built robots.nxt to defend and monetize every type of content, whether it’s written, images, video, any kind of media that AI might want to harvest for training.
People are out there looking for us, we just have to make sure they find us when they look. We’ll keep working on it until we have all the pieces in place.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for a way to make money from content, defend content from scraping, or monetize your content to AI, set up robots.nxt and let’s get going!
P.S. If you like those songs, check out Peggy by Cheechynaa. If you didn’t like those songs… well, you’ll especially NOT like Peggy, so be warned. There’s a reason I didn’t put it in the main post.