17 guides ยท updated when reality changes
Guides
Everything here is dated, specific, and written to be useful on its own - no email wall, no "book a call to learn more".
01
AI search & GEO
Getting named and cited when someone asks a model instead of a search engine. The least crowded surface in distribution right now.
The GEO Audit rubric
The exact scoring sheet, published in full - because a rubric you can't see is just an opinion with an invoice attached.
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Updated 2026-08-10
AI Overviews optimization
Your rankings held and your clicks fell off a cliff. That pattern has a name, a measured size, and three sane responses - none of which is writing more of the content that got eaten.
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Updated 2026-08-10
Generative engine optimization
The discipline is roughly two years old, the mechanics are undocumented, and most of what's written about it is guesswork sold at consultant rates. Here is what is actually known, what the work consists of, and where the honest gaps are.
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Updated 2026-08-10
How to get cited by ChatGPT
Buyers now ask a model for "the best tool for X" and get the same five names back. Here is how that list is actually assembled - and what genuinely moves you into it.
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Updated 2026-08-10
How to rank in Perplexity
Perplexity is the only major assistant that shows its working on every answer. That makes it the cheapest feedback loop in generative engine optimisation - and the place to run your experiments before you spend anything on the surfaces you can't see into.
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Updated 2026-08-10
02
You built it with AI
For products shipped with Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Cursor and friends - where the build was the easy part and nobody mentioned the rest.
I built an app - now what?
The honest answer, in order, from someone who will not tell you to "start building in public." Four weeks, one job per week, and a clear list of the things that feel productive and aren't.
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Updated 2026-08-10
Is my site invisible to Google?
There is a specific failure that hits AI-built sites more than anything else, produces no error message, and quietly guarantees zero traffic forever. Four tests tell you in about a minute whether it's yours.
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Updated 2026-08-10
Marketing a vibe-coded app
The build collapsed from six months to six days. Distribution did not get one minute easier. Nobody told you that, because the tools that made building trivial have no reason to mention the part they don't do.
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Updated 2026-08-10
03
Search, with receipts
What search actually does for a new site in 2026, answered with live Search Console data rather than opinion.
How long does SEO take?
The honest answer is two answers, because impressions and clicks run on different clocks. Here are four sites launched between 8 and 25 July 2026, with the numbers, so you can tell which phase you're actually in.
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Updated 2026-08-10
Is SEO dead?
No - but the honest version of "no" concedes more than most people defending SEO are willing to concede. Two things are true at once, and the data for both is public.
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Updated 2026-08-10
04
First users
The ordered answer to the most-asked question after launch: where do the first ten, then the first hundred, actually come from?
How to get your first users for a Chrome extension
Extensions are the one product type where your distribution channel and your product page are the same object - and where you have no email list, no retargeting, and a permission dialog standing between every visitor and every install.
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Updated 2026-08-10
How to get your first users for a developer tool
The audience most hostile to marketing is also the one that will read three thousand words of documentation at midnight. That is not a contradiction - it tells you exactly what to build instead of a funnel.
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Updated 2026-08-10
How to get your first users
Not twenty tactics. One ordered answer: the first ten users are a manual problem, the first hundred are a repeatable one, and almost every stalled launch is someone trying to solve the second before the first.
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Updated 2026-08-10
How to get your first users for a marketplace
Every other product type has a distribution problem. A marketplace has a physics problem first - neither side will show up for an empty room, and the only known solution is to fill one side by hand, in a space small enough that filling it is possible.
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Updated 2026-08-10
How to get your first users for a mobile app
Everything you can control before launch lives in about two hundred characters of metadata and one screenshot. Everything you cannot control lives in the ratings, and those are decided by a retention problem you probably have not solved yet.
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Updated 2026-08-10
How to get your first subscribers for a newsletter
Every other product needs a marketing channel bolted onto it. A newsletter is the only one where the thing you ship is itself forwardable, quotable, indexable and swappable - which changes what the first hundred subscribers should cost you.
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Updated 2026-08-10
How to get your first users for a SaaS product
Two decisions determine your entire first month and most founders make both by accident: whether you sell through a free trial or a conversation, and what single action counts as activation.
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Updated 2026-08-10