[Startup Motivation] The Compound Effect and SEO

Oi Mate 👋,

I like to read and try to solidify what I learn by connecting it to real-world concepts that I deal with in the day 2 day.

I recently read a book called "Compound Effect" and as the name suggests there is really just one main idea in it and that's the Compound Effect.

Let's have a look at it in more detail together and why it's important to show up every day.

The What Effect?

The compound effect is the idea that small changes over time will compound and will have a big effect over a long enough time.

Think investing and compound interest, or showing up every day to make your product just a tiny bit better and increase retention over time.

The problem is that most of the time you put in a bunch of work and you see.... nothing, at least not for a while and it's easy to get demotivated but...

The Indie Hackers will win what can remind themselves that they need to "sacrifice" the short term in order to reap the benefits in the long term.

Let me show you a practical example if you're into growth by looking at SEO:

Compound Effect and SEO

See, ranking in SEO is something that has huge gains but it's also an upfront investment, so it's easy to dismiss this but it's one of the three main pillars to getting traffic as a small business.

Most of the traffic on Google goes to the first page as you can see below

Source: https://backlinko.com/google-ctr-stats

and that means that in order to get people to click on your site you want to rank as well as you can.

That means, setting up the right tech, writing high quality content consistently, and more (How to do SEO is a topic for another day but you can follow @JaumeRos, he explains it well :p)

Look at the following curve about the last 3 months of our own project that lets you transcribe YouTube videos and you will see that the growth is very slow and not at all linear.

It only started picking up very late and we're not even half the way there to a decent ranking.

Yet we know that we just have to keep showing up every day and one will get there by taking one step at a time.

In retrospect, it will have been a no-brainer but we have to see the present and optimize for the future, not the past ;)

Takeaways

The Compound effect and SEO have a lot in common. They both need you to show up and do the work even if it feels like nothing is happening

The key is to stay motivated, get it done and you will reap the rewards.

Understanding the fundamentals like the Compound Effect will give you the ability to make better decisions. This is more important than learning the latest and greatest tech or the last hyped book.

If you liked this article, feel free to subscribe to our newsletter I'm doing my best to stay motivated writing content :p

Cheers,
Stefan ❤️