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10 months after our pivot, how it’s going

10 months ago I wrote a post that we were finally ready take our pivot in Centori away from SaaS.

It’s been quite a while, what happened.

I can say with certainty that it is the best decision I’ve made yet.

Here’s why.

SaaS did not solve the problem

Focusing purely on SaaS was a drain.

Let’s wind the clock back a year. It’s summer of 2020, I’ve been at home for six month with nothing to do. Every day I got up at 5am, made a coffee, and got to work coding. When I wasn’t coding I was adjusting an ad, or a landing page for the hundredth time.

It was a bad summer.

I spent days redesigning interfaces and weekends building features that no one was using, and constantly feeling like I was playing catch up against some heavy hitters in our industry.

All the while, when people did sign up for our software they were stumped.

No amount of onboarding flows or how-to guides fixed the problem. People just did not know what to do with our software, or any software for that matter, and I was racking my brain in all the wrong ways to find ways to fix it.

I was so obsessed with the idea of building an easy to use SEO platform that I forgot about the problem. It’s not that people have trouble finding keywords or optimizing pages, it’s that they have no idea how to put all these pieces together.

Coaching actually solves the problem

SEO software is a wonderful thing, in the hands of a capable SEO.

But what if you aren’t a capable SEO, or can’t afford one? What do you do then?
You’ll likely sign up for a popular SEO SaaS app, get a big list of keywords, and write a blog post for each one. That’s what all the experts say, right?

Tools like Yoast, SemRush, and every new SEO SaaS platform after them all reinforce this behavior while their blogs encourage it as a best practice.

Maybe 20 years ago. But not now.

Here’s why: your competitor has access to the same tools and their staff of writers will write the same content. With every industry stuffed to the gills with competition there are dozens, hundreds, and maybe even thousands of companies all taking the exact same approach, creating the exact same content, and racing to the bottom.

You need a strategy to break this cycle and succeed.

Strategy is a coordinated set of decisions designed to win. It requires having a goal, an understanding of your best customers and a the ability to try something new to best your competition.

Strategy cannot (yet) be automated by software. It is a human problem that needs to be thought through and and solved creatively.

Over the past 10 months I’ve not only realized that coaching is a better solution to the real problem of SEO, it’s the only solution. Especially for people who are brand new to the world of SEO.

The road ahead

The past year has been a hard journey that has suddenly begun to look much brighter.

I’m encouraged by what the next year looks like. It looks like a lot less scrambling to find the magical feature to add to our platform and more working with people to build unique strategies that take their business to the next level.

In the past year we’ve finally made our pivot and it led to onboarding new clients, launching a group SEO strategy training program, expanding our team, and finding new growth channels to take us to the next level.

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