Masters of Search

Luis Rodriguez has 12+ years of international SEO experience and led organic growth at Uber and most recently Miro. He let me pick his brain for 60 minutes about scaling organic growth in PLG companies. Here are my 4 favorite takeaways.

1) Snake oil is actually useful

All the panic and noise in SEO right now is helping the industry. It's forcing SEOs to go deeper, connect with experts, and prove their value. The smoke and mirrors push people to understand what's real versus what's hype. His advice: don't drink the Kool-Aid, but use the chaos to get closer to what actually drives business results. Check your data, look at your bottom line contribution, and let that be your answer to "is this the end of times?"

2) Templates aren't just acquisition tools, but retention engines

Most PLG companies think templates are just entry points for signups. But templates are collaboration points that bring more people in, create virality, and drive retention. A user can start their journey with a template, but they can also restart it, continue it, and bring more people with them. This opens up organic growth beyond just the acquisition funnel into actual retention loops.

3) Traffic has never been enough as a metric

What generates value for your company is revenue, subscriptions, conversions. The goal isn't to get more visitors, it's to provide growth and business value. For measurement, he focuses on three things: holistic visibility within your category (not just prompts or keywords), sessions as a leading indicator (people still need to come to your product), and retention (are you acquiring repeatable users, not just one-time visitors).

4) SEO profiles need a recalibration

He's attracted to people with automation experience who aren't afraid of tools like Lovable, not just traditional content writers. Someone who started their career with ChatGPT has completely different timelines for keyword research across multiple languages, it's a medium task now, not a huge lift.

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Most people will tell you SEO takes too long for early-stage startups. That it's a waste of time when you're at zero. Today, you’ll hear proof why this is a limiting belief, and we’ll show you exactly how to start.

My guest today is Irina Maltseva, a Barcelona-based Growth Advisor who's helped companies like Aura, Sphere, Artisan, Hunter, Riverside, and Nextiva build their organic growth motion from the ground up.

I found Irina's work particularly interesting due to her focus on early-stage companies like YC alumni. They come to her with a brand-new website, zero domain authority, and a fresh product.

In other words, she's solving one of the hardest problems in SEO: how do you drive meaningful growth from the ground up?

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STOP starting your content workflows with keyword research. If you don’t trust me, trust someone way smarter than me — and learn why it’s just one piece of the puzzle. New #MastersOfSearch episode with Margarita Loktionova (Content Marketing Lead @ Semrush) is LIVE now.

Here's what we covered:

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This might be the most niche flex ever, but I'm pretty sure this is the first ever publicly documented talk with a Director of AEO. Prove me wrong.

Andy scaled a site to Alexa Top 100 and grew revenue from $900K to $22M. Now he's leading AI search strategy at Telnyx with 14K clients like Microsoft, Zillow, and Cisco.

Here's what we covered:

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Tomasz Niezgoda (CMO @ Surfer) let me pick his brain for 60 min on how they bootstrapped to €15M ARR, get ~20% of paying customers from AI Search, and talked to 50+ customers per week in the early days.

If you care about SaaS, bootstrapping, SEO, AI Search, or marketing in general, this conversation is packed with insights.

Here are 5 things that stood out:

1) They didn't touch SEO for 4 years

While building an SEO tool, they focused on community, webinars, and education first. SEO came later when they had the domain authority to compete with Ahrefs and Semrush.

2) 50+ customer conversations per week in year 1

Not async support tickets. Real customer calls. Tomasz and the team split them. The knowledge they gathered became their unfair advantage over competitors.

3) AI search isn't magic, it's discipline

Monitor your prompts weekly. When competitors get cited, create similar content. Track visibility like a hawk. Act fast. Repeat every single week without missing.

4) They killed top-of-funnel content completely

Traffic dropped as a KPI. Now they focus purely on middle and bottom-of-funnel content. "Best alternatives" and "vs" pages feed LLMs with the exact narrative they want.

5) They doubled down on YouTube and it paid off 10x

They started with just 2 videos per month, and it took 3 months to see first signs it worked. Now they have 24K subscribers, published 180 videos, and it's one of their top channels.

This is just 5 of 20+ insights from our conversation.

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Bert Winterfeld runs performance marketing at HERO Software (B2B SaaS, Series B, >$50M funding) with 6-figure monthly budgets. One of the key insights he shared in our Masters of Search interview was: Paid search in B2B always hits a ceiling, and only branding breaks through it.

If you're running performance marketing at a startup with serious search budgets, this episode is packed with insights you won't find in any LinkedIn carousel.

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Eoin Clancy is Head of Growth at AirOps, one of the most exciting AI platforms currently helping marketers scale content operations.

Before AirOps, Eoin spent over 6 years at Telnyx, scaling from Growth Engineer to Head of Marketing, where he also got his first taste of AI tooling. He founded "Build AI-First" in late 2023, positioning himself at the forefront of AI-driven growth strategies.

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Carla Chicharro is Director of Revenue Marketing at Mitiga Solutions, one of Europe's most innovative climate tech companies specializing in climate risk intelligence. What makes Carla particularly fascinating is her long journey from the travel and hospitality tech industry, especially at Lodgify, now switching gears to climate tech.

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Ayla Grzegowski is Team Lead Content & SEO at awork, a Hamburg-based B2B SaaS startup that's making waves in the project management space.

What makes awork particularly interesting is their David vs. Goliath story. They're competing directly with international giants like Asana, Monday.com, and Trello. So far they're pretty successful with it and Content and SEO has played a big role in that success.

📌 Try awork for free: https://www.awork.com/

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Margus Veeber is Head of Web at Pipedrive, one of Europe's most successful SaaS unicorns, competing with the likes of HubSpot or Salesforce.

Pipedrive has had great success with SEO over the last years, driving more than half a million monthly organic visitors and thousands of signups.

What makes Margus particularly interesting is his unique perspective on how web strategy and conversion optimization intersect with the changing search landscape. His work on optimizing Pipedrive's multilingual website for conversion sits right at the intersection of where traffic meets business results.

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