I'm pretty excited about RankScience. SEO can have a huge effect but also be one of the hardest things to accurately measure; and it's an industry where there's a fair amount of dogma and waving dead chickens around.
Also excited about this product but from their pitch:
"No one has solved automated SEO because SEO is a software problem that non-technical marketers are trying to solve."
Great pitch, but untrue. Most SEOs I've met at serious companies are almost always very technical people.
And this isn't a recent development, back in 2007 there was an SEO contest held to grab the keyword for "Greatest living american".
An SEO named Brandon Wirtz took the win(1) and the guy would fit any description as a very technical person previously having been the compressionist and technical lead for Microsoft's Merlin Lab.
SEO is, at its core, a technical puzzle with constantly changing parameters, and as a result attracts a lot of very talented technical people from diverse backgrounds to solve.
>> Most SEOs I've met at serious companies are almost always very technical people.
Companies of a certain scale can afford to have engineering teams focused on SEO, and they should! Most companies can't afford this, though, and the vast majority of people in the SEO industry are not technical.
Also, who's better at solving ever-changing puzzles with many variables: humans or software? : )
It sounds good, but I don't get it from the brief description. I'm interested in hearing more.
Especially this line makes me wonder:
> No one has solved automated SEO because SEO is a software problem
I thought SEO is a content and linking problem, not a software problem. I'm somewhat disillusioned after having lost keyword rankings to competitors with far inferior content software (hundreds of HTTP requests, 20s load time, MBs worth of junk) vs. my highly optimized website that loads in milliseconds even without AMP.
Pagespeed is a ranking factor, but it's far from the most important one. I would think deeply about what might make humans engage with your competitor's site for longer than yours.
SEO also includes: "what meta description can I surface on a SERP that has the highest clickthrough?" so in that sense, it's an A/B testing/software problem.
The cost, difficulty, and research required to penetrate the market makes it not worth the potential return for Paypal/Alibaba/Venmo. Instead - another company can take the risks, build the market, then be acquired by one of those larger companies. The larger companies now has a proven business model for the market.
Like a typical Korean "grind MMO" businesses have two options:
(a) Buy high-level gear for an extremely inflated price from other players
(b) Grind to make it yourself (potentially losing more money than if you had bought it in the first place)
(a) is lower risk and makes more sense for businesses. They "could" spend $300,000,000 - $800,000,000 to maybe extend into a potential market. Or maybe they fail and threw away $600,000,000. Maybe they try again and lose another $800,000,000 with nothing to show for it. So why not acquire a company for $3,000,000,000 and forego the risks altogether? (All figures made up for example purposes.)
It seems odd that PayPal/Alibaba/Venmo don't take these "risks" themselves. Considering their extensive domain experience, if anyone is to successfully acquire a market, it's them.
Which is why large businesses sometimes expand into markets they feel comfortable enough to expand into using their domain experience. Markets they aren't confident they can thrive in - they don't join. There is simply too much risk attached.
They have the option of expanding their existing markets instead of taking risks trying to enter new markets. Let other people take those risks then simply buy out whoever ends up being successful. Sometimes this backfires when the new kid on the block is better at your business than you are. That's a potential risk and is also why some acquisitions appear to be too soon and have an extremely inflated price tag. Give them an offer they can't refuse before they run you out of business entirely. :)
If you don't understand why "PayPal for Africa" makes sense, then you likely are not from Africa, you've never visited, or you know very little about the place.
Consider that Paypal is not accepted in a few countries from that continent, then you'll realize that there's a market for it.
The other side is Paypal is an American outfit. With options like Kudi that are not controlled from the USA, there's less chance of a group not popular with the US govt. being denied access to funds.
There are many angles to consider. You just have to know the landscape. And an aside: From my knowledge of that part of the world, kudi is Hausa for money.
The same argument can be made for "Alibaba for Africa".
Imagine if Alibaba was not founded, and the Chinese had to rely on Amazon. That's a lot of moving flowing from online Chinese shoppers to the confers of Amazon. At some point it becomes a national security issue.
So, yes, "Alibaba for Africa" makes a lot of sense.
You did a nice job explaining why consumers should choose the local service option, but you didn't address why the service options shouldn't/can't launch in those regions.
IIRC, one of the central points of Innovator's Dilemma is precisely about why this is rarely as straightforward as it seems.
All those existing companies are probably up to their collective ears in work satisfying and growing the lucrative markets they already operate in -- it's hard to justify focus on much smaller markets with much smaller margins.
Then, sometimes, those smaller markets end up being really big, and oops you've been disrupted.
And until they do? If a company isn't able to capitalize on the whole global market why shouldn't someone else fulfill that need?
People usually take the stance of "it's just ripping of that other original company's idea" but it's very hard to make a business succeed and grow it, wherever it is, much more in the harsher overall conditions Africa generally presents.
I hate the competitive feel surrounding these kinds of startups. It doesn't seem like any of them is trying to bring anything new. Mostly, they're building mediocre versions of what already exists, then fold after 6 months when faced with reality.
If they succeed, it's all of us that lose. We'll add yet another "me too" tool to the collective toolbox, further dissipating the little focus that we had.
I thought this is how Silicon Valley works. The churn|acquisition|procurement is how everyone makes money, at least that is how it looks to an outsider.
Just wanted to hop in here as a Simple employee—we are not shutting down! We're very much alive and well: as another commenter said, we're currently in the process of migrating our customers to our new partner bank, BBVA. (Definitely speaking in an unofficial capacity, but thought I'd clear the air as best I could.)
good group of companies. See the need for a CDN that can handle television volume audiences. Symple makes a lot of sense. Basically, bill.com that doesn't suck/feel dated.
WebRTC seems like a really cool opportunity to rethink certain kinds of services. Video is an obvious candidate, I've also seen a bittorrent client that uses WebRTC. What are other interesting peer to peer applications that WebRTC could enable?
