Jared Rhizor

Jared Rhizor

@jrhizor.dev

jrhizor.dev - building software ($1.7k MRR) poach.vc - founder leads for early stage investors keywordgems.com - ai keyword research otamatunes.com - sheet music for the otamatone

1.2K followers1.2K following103 posts

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

Most companies put testimonials on their home page. However, since elmohq.com is an AEO platform, we also added testimonials from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity by asking for the best open-source alternative to Profound. All four picked Elmo!

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

I'm switching poach.vc from MWF sending to Tues/Thurs. Instead of 2 paid days and 1 free day, each email will be 1/3 free and 2/3 paid. This: - gives free subs a reason to open every email - less manual work (there's no substack api) - should help newsletter conversion rates

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

So it looks like Beehiiv boosts will be absolutely amazing or a total money pit. A week after starting, I have 10 partnered publications, and almost 100 pending subscribers from boosts. If 1-2 of these convert, it will already be worth it.

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

I'm going to start testing @PoachVC expansion in the UK (~680 firms, ~1.8k VCs, and ~2.2k angels). I was thinking Europe (or Western EU), but focusing on full coverage of individual countries should be higher value to VCs + be easier to market.

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

Trying to grow a fresh newsletter with Beehiiv boost. I've matched with 7 highly relevant publications in 24h, let's see how long it takes to get some subscribers!

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

As part of Poach, I've had to build a method of finding a LinkedIn profile for a Twitter profile. I'm considering packaging it like tweetscraper.io: select a set of Twitter profiles and get a list of LinkedIns to download for $0.07/profile. Anyone doing LinkedIn outreach want to try this out soon?

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

Rough start with Mechanical Turk. 80% of responses were complete garbage. This might be preventable with additional form validations + upping requirements on worker rejection rates, but at the end of they day it doesn't seem like a great fit for Poach compared to LLMs + data providers.

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

Just launched www.shelved.domains My idea is that it'd be good if there was a directory where founders/makers can list their cheap but high quality domains and find interesting domains from other founders. Let me know if you want to list (for free)

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

AI generated shorts didn't work well. One video got ~50 views, and the rest under 5 views, so it ends up costing more than advertising without the ability to attribute sales.

Jared Rhizor@jrhizor.dev

I'm trying out AI generated short form content for mealbymeal.com on TikTok. I'll run 5 shorts per day and report back in a week with how many total views they get, and whether it impacted signups on the site.

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

I'm trying out AI generated short form content for mealbymeal.com on TikTok. I'll run 5 shorts per day and report back in a week with how many total views they get, and whether it impacted signups on the site.

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

Looking at a site through a revenue per pageview lens is interesting. For example, if I increased Otamatunes traffic 3-4x, I'd be able to make the same amount of money from ads that I do from sales. Maybe I could drive that much more traffic if all of the music on the site was free?

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

There are a few signs I've seen this year across different projects that indicate that people *actually* are looking for what I'm building. Lack of these signs is a major signal, but it's hard to notice when you're not expecting them.

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Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

4. Asking to see something that isn't built yet. For KeywordGems, I'm starting to have people reach out to try it without having built anything yet, just because it sounds promising. (This is a big motivator to move fast towards the MVP!)

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

There are a few signs I've seen this year across different projects that indicate that people *actually* are looking for what I'm building. Lack of these signs is a major signal, but it's hard to notice when you're not expecting them.

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Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

2. Decent conversion rates without much optimization. For poach.vc, 4% of subs are paid (so far), which feels good since most of the subscribers are fairly new. Most projects I've launched have had abysmally low conversion rates.

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

There are a few signs I've seen this year across different projects that indicate that people *actually* are looking for what I'm building. Lack of these signs is a major signal, but it's hard to notice when you're not expecting them.

View full thread
View full thread
Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

I also had a few outright failures: presetbot.com (api for lightroom presets) - cool idea, but no real demand altnado.com (automatic alt text) - struggled to find initial users, probably isn't a big enough pain point unless you're a super large enterprise, which would likely require work per client

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

It turns out sheet music for a niche instrument is very seasonal. Over December, otamatunes.com made $133.85 (versus $81.90 total since launch) from people getting an Otamatone as a gift and searching for sheet music!

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

Keyword brainstorming tool is coming along! You start with a root keyword before expanding via Google's related searches/questions/autocomplete, or a set of semantically related keywords. You can export your session to CSV. Soon this'll have volume/difficulty data and filtering. #buildinpublic

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

This week I'm working on a tool to do keyword generation and research. It will use LLMs to explore generating a wide range of potential keywords. More importantly, it will interpret existing results for keywords to find keywords that have unhelpful results which could be improved. #buildinpublic

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

With Google's "helpful content update", they try to prioritize pages that resolve users queries. If a user is already satisfied for the top few results on Google (it answers the query), there isn't really a point in creating directly competing content. It's better to find real value-adds.

Jared Rhizor
@jrhizor.dev

I tried setting up www.next-forge.com today but ultimately gave up. It's an interesting boilerplate, but with limited docs it's a real challenge to get started. To get the marketing site up you need to set up arcjet, sentry, ga, betterstack, stripe, clerk, resend, basehub, posthog, pg, and svix (!)