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Hi, I'm Philipp, 46y and new on this platform 👋 I'm strangely attracted both to 9-5 work, And building startups in my free time All while being husband and father of two teenagers My little story 👇

I'm a programmer who turned into a product manager over a career of 20 years. I enjoy working as PM a lot, but I missed something: the joy of building something from scratch. Thinking of something in my head and then crafting it into existence. I started with something (too) close to my 9-5 work:

I needed to go out. I found the #buildinpublic scene on Twitter and learned how to navigate social media. I always sucked at it and assumed this will be no different. But lo and behold half a year in I got 1000 followers and more importantly - some new friends, some of which I even met over lunch.

But Twitter was not where my users were. I had two options: paid ads or SEO. My friends at work were mocking me and said I will never get users as I didn't have the budget. Which was true, I didn't want to spend big money on my weekend project. So I started learning SEO.

The crucial part of my SEO strategy was to get backlinks from my niche. I looked at where my competitors got their backlinks from and wrote the owners of these websites asking them if they put a backlink. No incentive, no payment, no link-sharing, just "pretty please cause it's my weekend project".