Taro
A premium membership for ambitious software engineers
I published a post about tech company layoffs on the Taro blog 2 days ago. It immediately got indexed by Google, and then pushed in thousands of peoples Discover feeds (28K to be exact).
The traffic we got from the Discover feed yesterday was more than the past 3 months combined ๐คฏ Take a look at the spike in our search traffic:
A few hypotheses on why this blog was so impactful relative to dozens of other posts on the Taro blog:
- The post covered something happening right now in the news, explicitly mentioning the layoffs happening in the past few days. News always has
- The post contains a YouTube embed from a video on my channel that did really well (> 100K views). Perhaps Google interprets this as a positive signal? Or at least a signal that it should this page should be indexed faster.
- The post offers both an explanation of current events, along with actionable advice about what to do. So I imagine retention on the article was relatively high.
We kept hearing that SEO is a long game which takes 6+ months before you see tangible results. But the above example shows there are at least a few instances where results are much more immediate.
The question now is, how to replicate this success...
As a platform designed to help software engineers grow their career, Taro has tons of content. We have more than 2,000 videos and questions from verified software engineers at top companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
With so much content, it's critical that users are actually able to find what they're looking for. That's why SEO is so important for a company like ours. Thousands of users are searching for high quality, credible content around career growth, but they're still not able to find Taro.
Just take a look at Blind and Quora to take a look how powerful SEO can be.
Taro today gets 50 - 200 clicks per day from Google search, but the issue is that we haven't grown in a meaningful way these past 2 months.
Here's what we're trying:
- Use ahrefs to identify keywords which have decent traffic but not much competition
- Create good content (we're trying both native content and blog content on Ghost) that targets keywords.
- Find relevant blogs/podcasts/websites where we could get a backlink.
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Whatever SEO effort you put today, it will come into effect after 3-4 months... at least thats what I have learned from the SEO blog posts. So I think it is the game of patience and hard work.
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If you do get 50-200 clicks per day from Google, why aren't you growing? Looks like the traffic is there, but the site is not converting (either because of the site itself or because you write about topics that are not near your niche of Taro enough.
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Our number of users (free and paid) is growing. I meant that the number of clicks coming from Google is not growing.
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Taro was born in 2022, so of course it's been a special year for us ๐ฃ
Some stats:
- 350,000+ views on Taro's video and Q&A content
- 17,000+ registered active users
- 650+ Taro Premium members from 20+ countries, with dozens of engineers at companies like Meta, Google, Amazon, and top startups.
- $100K+ in revenue booked
When we started, Alex and I agreed that weโd be long-term players in a long-term game (h/t to Naval). Taro was founded on the premise that a meaningful number of software engineers are not getting the career guidance and insights they need. (And 1:1 mentorship programs are too high-friction and expensive to actually work.)
We spent months trying to figure out what exactly the product would be, how we'd measure success, and which engineers we'd target first. In August, we had office hours with Paul Graham. He listened to us ramble about our product vision and growth anxieties, then replied very simply:
"Just be genuinely useful"
These 4 words have become our guiding principle. Our goal is to be genuinely useful to software engineers, even if itโs not clear how the business will profit. We'll do things that don't scale, like talking to every engineer who signs up, replying to questions they have with videos, and reviewing their promo packets. When these stop working, we'll figure out how to automate.
The benefit of playing a long-term game is the magic of compounding. The true benefit of compounding is only apparent on the 5-10 year time horizon. This applies to our content library, SEO ranking, YouTube channel, and the word-of-mouth from our community members.
A timeline of our year:
๐๐๐ง๐ฎ๐๐ซ๐ฒ: Left our cushy Big Tech jobs
๐๐ฉ๐ซ๐ข๐ฅ: Finally decided that weโd build something for individual SWEs (and not businesses)
๐๐ฎ๐ง๐: started Y Combinator S22
๐๐ฎ๐ฅ๐ฒ: public launch of Taro Premium, our paid product
๐๐๐ฉ๐ญ๐๐ฆ๐๐๐ซ: officially hired Charlie (we were in the same freshman dorm 13 years ago ๐ฎ)
It wouldnโt be a startup unless we also had lots of problems:
- It's starting to become difficult to keep up with the amount of emails/messages we get in a given day.
- Few users are organically opening the Taro app โ most of the traffic is coming from a push notification, YouTube video, or LinkedIn post.
We have tons of exciting plans in 2023! If youโre a software engineer and want to join Taro Premium before the end of the year (use your learning budget), join here: jointaro.com/membership
Happy holidays :)
5 Comments
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
I am starting to think that nowadays things are changing so fast that SEO is a short-term game, where you have to constantly publish the right things at the right time and hope that the algorithm likes you. Not only that, but more and more the freshness of content is used as a strong metric when ranking content.
Google definitely cares a lot about freshness. The challenge is that these articles generally don't provide durable value for your audience over time.
So we're trying to weigh the approach of newsworthiness vs longer-term articles which target a keyword.
Just out of curiosity. What Taro offers that I can't get on one of the many platforms out there like Udemy, Coursera and even YouTube, where you can find such courses taught by experts?