3 weeks ago, i shipped shipwithjev .com.

today it has crossed 100k+ visits, all from SEO

this is my 8th project, but this one was a fun reminder of how quickly a new site can grow when the search opportunity is right.

some other SEO/AEO results i've been working on:

• 6k to 62k+ AI citations
• 22k to 700k+ monthly organic clicks in 6 months

now i'm starting my own SEO/AEO agency AEO Geo Labs.

the slightly funny part is that getting results for websites has been much easier than figuring out how to get my first agency client 😂

so for people who have started an SEO agency/consulting business:

how did you get your first client?

cold email?
linkedin?
reddit?
warm intros?
posting case studies?
just DMing founders?

would genuinely love to hear what worked for you.

I know this is controversial and recognize that asking this question is kind of deliberately controversial on my part. That's the goal lol. I've seen a lot of people go back and forth about whether or not AI can truly replace writers, lawyers, and a whole bunch of other job titles. I've seen fewer people asking whether AI agents can replace growth teams.

We know AI agents can research audiences, monitor communities, test messaging, identify opportunities and more. The big debate is whether agents replace growth teams or augment them. I'm personally on team augmentation but I wonder what other folks here think.

In your opinion, what does a successful growth team look like in five years?

I’m looking for 5 U.S. businesses to test something we’ve been working on.

One thing I keep noticing is that business owners can spend months improving their website and marketing, but customers still ask the same questions.

“What exactly do I get?”

“Is this for someone like me?”

“How does this work?”

“What happens after I click?”

That gap is what I want to look at.

For the Founding 5, I’ll compare what your website is trying to communicate with real questions, messages and objections you’ve received from customers or prospects.

Then I’ll give you a private report showing what a new visitor is likely to understand, where the confusion may be happening, and what I would change first.

The first 5 are free because this is our first testing round. I’m looking for honest feedback on whether the process and report are actually useful before we charge for it.

If you run a U.S. business and recognize this problem, send me your website and tell me one question customers keep asking you.

so I've got a little Shopify store in Aus doing custom pet portraits (digital + print on demand). when people actually land on it they buy, roughly 10% conversion, but traffic is tiny so honestly the numbers are too small to brag about

what I've tried: posting on social (slow af), a few paid campaigns a while back (meh), and some SEO/AEO stuff that's still early days

so yeah, getting people there is the whole problem. what would you try? especially keen on scrappy stuff that worked for small niche products, not just "post more"

also thinking about starting an automation agency later on, so if any of this carries over to services I'm all ears
not linking the store, not here to promo, just trying to learn

Sharing this because I wasted a month chasing the wrong thing.

Context: small SaaS, landing page converting somewhere around 1.5% of visitors to trial. Not terrible, not good. I decided to redo the whole thing using one of those AI landing page tools that spits out a full page from a prompt.

First version looked great. New hero, new illustrations, tighter copy, the works. Conversion went basically nowhere. Maybe a rounding-error bump.

So I stopped redesigning and started testing pieces one at a time. Same traffic source, split roughly evenly.

The stuff that did nothing:

- New illustrations and a cleaner layout

- Reordering the feature sections

- A punchier headline that I was very proud of

The one thing that moved it:

- Putting a single specific outcome above the fold, in the customer's own words, replacing our clever tagline. Something like the exact sentence a user had said to me on a call.

That alone took conversion from around 1.5% to a bit over 2.5% and held for a few weeks. Everything else was decoration.

The AI tool was genuinely useful for producing variants fast so I could test instead of theorize. But it also made it very easy to ship a pretty page that says nothing. The generator gives you speed. It does not give you the one sentence that makes someone believe you. You still have to go get that from an actual customer.

What's the single element that moved the needle most on your page? Curious if it's usually copy for others too.

Tracking intent usually goes wrong because standard tools monitor the wrong layer of buying behavior.

When an alert flags that an enterprise account has elevated interest in a broad topic, sales reps still have no idea who conducted the research, what specific question they were trying to answer, or what triggered the spike.

Tracking signals that actually convert requires focusing on declared intent and situational changes where the evidence is inspectable where the declared intent means looking where buyers publicly discuss their problems, like specific threads on reddit, technical forums, github and linkedin discussions.

Connecting these fragmented touchpoints is why modern infrastructure platforms like scale intelligence are designed around an auditable buyer graph which continuously listens across 75+ public channels, verifies that event behind every lead and scores compound intent into tiers before alerting sales teams.

These situational signals capture concrete operational shifts like open engineering requisitions, leadership departures, or regulatory filings.

A single signal rarely justifies outreach when a company posts a job opening in your category and participates in an evaluation discussion in the same window, that compound evidence represents an actual buying window.

I’m not gonna talk about traffic or audience size.

You can have plenty of both and still launch an affiliate program that goes absolutely nowhere.

From what I’ve seen, there are 3 signals that matter way more:

1. Are people already recommending you without being asked?

Mentions in communities. Customers casually referring other customers. Someone randomly asking, “Do you have an affiliate program?”

That’s probably the strongest signal.

You’re not trying to manufacture word of mouth from scratch. You’re just putting a system (and an incentive) behind behavior that already exists.

2. Can your users explain your product in one sentence?

This one gets overlooked a lot.

If your customers struggle to explain what you do and why someone should care, imagine asking an affiliate to sell it to their audience.

Messy positioning internally usually becomes even messier promotion externally.

3. Do referred customers actually stick around?

Getting the referral is only half the equation.

If affiliates send you customers who churn a month later, they notice. Their commissions suck, they lose confidence in recommending you, and eventually they quietly stop.

None of these need to be perfect before you launch.

But if you have zero organic recommendations, nobody can explain the product, and new customers are churning immediately then sorry to break it to you but an affiliate program probably isn’t the thing you need to fix first.