In-House Growth, Stakeholder Politics & Email

He gets bored doing one thing, so growth suits him; he experiments with SEO, newsletters, social, design and AI on the side. At LearnWorlds, SEO was only 30–50% of his job alongside martech, social, PPC, affiliates, inbound sales and email.

Asked by Nik · answered by Nick Malekos

It depends on company stage. Early on (~$100K ARR) you test one or two channels and see what sticks. At LearnWorlds, Facebook and remarketing worked in 2017, and SEO's selling point was outranking affiliates on 'online course platform' searches, capturing traffic directly into remarketing and email instead of paying affiliates.

Asked by Nik · answered by Nick Malekos

Be political, negotiate, be patient and pick your fights — he once saw just two bullet points from a 30-page recommendations doc accepted. Befriend developers (a 2-hour WordPress fix took 1.5 years to prioritize). Companies benefit from dev resources dedicated to marketing; technical SEOs on product teams get more priority.

Asked by Sara · answered by Nick Malekos

Nick Malekos: come with data and revenue expectations, keep a list and revisit it; tailor the message (CFOs want revenue, developers want clear instructions). If it never works, the environment may not be right for you. Sara: rejected fixes create technical SEO debt, so later fixes get harder; balance passion with being pleasant to work with.

Asked by Sara · answered by Nick Malekos & Sara

Let brand/product marketing own the homepage and main positioning pages with light keyword tweaks, and in exchange get one or two dedicated SEO-optimized pages. You may lose a bit of traffic, but otherwise you'd lose it all.

Answered by Nick Malekos

He often tells companies not to start with SEO, especially technical founders. Many B2B SaaS companies have leads they've never emailed; a simple newsletter activates the base. Owning your audience data is most important. Early-stage startups should lean on direct sales, events and outreach.

Asked by Nik · answered by Nick Malekos

Separate three things: a newsletter builds audience, nurture sequences turn leads into customers, and cold outreach builds pipeline. His 'sandwich' approach: industry news, your content, a feature update or product video, a customer quote, and a demo CTA — valuable enough to read, with an occasional ask.

Asked by Sara · answered by Nick Malekos

There are technical, sales and marketing founders; marketing-minded ones are rare in tech. Technical founders dislike SEO's uncertainty. SEO fits where there's search volume (B2C, SMB B2B) and is often a poor fit for sales-led enterprise. Learn to say no.

Asked by Nik · answered by Nick Malekos

Nick Malekos thinks attribution is dying (GDPR/CCPA, cookie blocking, AI, 50–150 enterprise touchpoints) and prefers spending energy on doing the work, not defending it. Nik shared a Zapier setup that tagged user-journey touchpoints to prove SEO's impact for a smaller client.

Asked by Nik · answered by Nick Malekos & Nik

Inbound consulting requests led him to join a friend's agency, growing it from ~$2K to ~$20K MRR in about eight months, but partner disagreements and two burnouts from working two jobs followed. He prefers building a product long-term in-house, though he may return to his own thing someday.

Asked by Nik · answered by Nick Malekos

He's an AI skeptic: it's a productivity tool ('Zapier on steroids') that won't replace marketers. He built a LinkedIn-post bookmarking Chrome extension with Lovable and fixed it with Claude, and uses Gemini for Google Sheets and regex. Sara agrees AI isn't replacing us and warns that people over-trust flawed output.

Asked by Nik · answered by Nick Malekos & Sara