Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000

... had a small business plan for it. I was like, "If I'm gonna make 100K with this in the first year, then it's actually worth continuing doing this." And then I made more than 100K in the first month.

(instrumental music) Yoast, I'm so excited for this. I told you, I was literally with Shad last night hearing stories. I've also heard from Brian Hale, from Mullenweg, from Alex Schulze. So thank you so much for joining me today.

It's an absolute pleasure to be here. With all the people that have been here before me, it does feel like you're incorporated into this l- this ridiculous group.

Do you know what? I'm very lucky to be ingratiated by such intelligent people. But I wanna start at the beginning. So, you started the Yoast SEO plugin as a hobby. It's now used by 13 million sites, according to the trusty Google. What was the aha moment for, like, "I have to create the Yoast SEO plugin that even we use at 20VC"?

I started as an SEO consultant having my own website, doing some small things, and I built a couple of different small plugins that did s- various specific SEO things, and I was a quite regular speaker at SEO conferences already by that time, and I... and people kept saying to me, like, "Yeah, well, we, we just want one plugin that does it all." And, um, there was one plugin out there that, that tried to do that but wasn't really good enough yet, so I just combined what I had, the, the different plugins that I had, into one thing, um, and then realized quite quickly that there's basically two sides to SEO, right? You have the technical stuff and you have the content side of things, and the technical stuff is not something that anyone wants to think about. So, I... what I tried to do, and I think we've quite successfully done over the years, is take all the technical stuff away from people and just fix it for them and give them good feedback on their content. I think that that is what, th- well, the s- pretty simple recipe that has actually helped it grow so much.

And I love it. You have the, the, the green, red, orange light system-

Yeah.

... which is like, images needed, uh, meta description, uh, whatever, whatever, whatever. Uh, I love it. I d- so I'm totally am not the technical person who loved that. But there's a moment when it changes from, like, a hobby that's kinda cool and kinda working to, like, "Oh, wow, we actually have something." What was that catalyst for "I need to go all in on this," ƒs w- what was side hobby at the time?

So I started my own company in 2010, basically doing consulting. I was working for Alex doing consulting for Facebook and, and, and doing consulting for eBay and companies like that. What happened is that the plugin became really big, so it had, like, a million users. WordPress was growing quite fast, and I suddenly had on this free plugin that I'd built as a hobby a million users, and I was spending way too much time supporting it, and my wife was quite clear. Uh, Marika has been at the co ƒ... well, at the premise of a whole lot of these smart decisions in life. Um, e- she i- she was like, "You... either need to make money doing this or you need to stop doing it."