Get national press on a novel AI angle, mainly for the links back

Joseph ChoiBut did you have like motivation milestones? Cuz it it's really easy to quit when you have like no progress for a long time. But I imagine you had like user numbers flowing in, so you kind of thought, "Okay, there's something here."

Dmitri MirakyanI had user numbers, like I feel like with consumer stuff especially, like like you see the engagement, you see people interacting with it. Um, we we were early to this, so there was also a lot of excitement around AI, so I wound up getting a lot of media attention. At one point, I was on like Fox, CNBC, um, Wired, Washington Post. I wound up writing an op-ed for Newsweek. Um, so this this got a lot of media attention, um, and then the user numbers were always like like it was a slow hill, but they were consistently, consistently going up.

Dmitri MirakyanAnd also just hearing feedback from people who like genuinely found this transformative. The upside of working on something that you believe in is that like like this is a genuine problem for a lot of people, and like I was an awkward kid that didn't know how to talk to girls at one point. And I like I think I found it very relatable to work on something that like would have been something that I would have found helpful at an earlier stage in my …

Dmitri MirakyanNo, nothing. Um, I found like small communities. So, for me, this was, um, r/swipehelper. There was a a subset There was a couple of subreddits of people that, um, like were very focused on like optimizing their dating apps. I started posting on those and I got some early attention on those. Actually, still get a decent amount of SEO from some of those posts. Um, and then because it was so early, my app also started to get media attention.

Dmitri MirakyanUm, so I wound up being on a lot of major news channels, um, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post. Um, that got me a lot of media coverage. And like the media coverage, in itself, didn't actually convert to that much users, but um, I At one point, I was on like uh Fox Business. Um, and that got me less views than a single decent Reddit post. Um, it was it was kind of ridiculous, but um what it did give me was domain credibility.

Dmitri MirakyanAnd so that, um, ultimately made the SEO strategy that we took a lot easier. Um, so we wound up building out kind of an SEO pipeline. Um, if you look at our blog, I'll I'll caution that like I don't know if the SEO strategy would work now, partly

Joseph ChoiSure. SEO has changed a lot, but yeah, it it would be interesting to learn from the from the story and like the tactics of how you did this.

Joseph Choiwhen people search those terms. Is that a good like recap?

Dmitri MirakyanIt kind of with one small alteration. Like, we built the domain authority through getting the PR articles. Um, so like the we had very good domain authority at the door. Like, from from the starting point, we had really great domain authority, um, and then once we had that domain authority, we were like, "Oh, there's an SEO opportunity." And then we capped through that SEO opportunity. We didn't really like slow build out SEO or like build up domain authority over time or do any of that placement. Like, we never paid for back links or hunted for back links.

Dmitri MirakyanIt was more of just we're in the right place at the right time with a very viral product. Um, but yeah, but like the the PR itself didn't generate any money,