Introducing daydream
Aug 3, 2023
I’m super excited to announce the launch of daydream with Ashok Raju, Kelsey Reynolds and Shravan Rajinikanth joining the founding team. 🎉
A simple way to describe daydream is the following: one SaaS platform that automates programmatic SEO from end-to-end.
Scalable, efficient, and automated growth
Programmatic SEO is the secret user acquisition playbook used by companies like Github, Masterclass, Canva, Zapier, and others to acquire a large percentage of their user base. If you’re unfamiliar, programmatic SEO essentially converts structured data into content for the purposes of acquiring users.
The classic example most people are familiar with is Zapier, which created a unique landing page for every permutation of “[SaaS A] + [SaaS B] integration.”
This strategy was instrumental in Zapier’s run-up to $140M ARR, but there are plenty of other case studies on how programmatic SEO has created explosive growth. Here are a few you can read!
Programmatic SEO engines are hard to build
Despite being so effective, programmatic SEO engines are expensive and time consuming to build. This is because there are three key steps — identifying search queries, creating content at scale, and updating that content based on performance — that require at least 5 different skills to be applied in a tightly coordinated fashion.
This is both expensive from both a cost and time perspective. As a result, despite Heads of Growth loving programmatic SEO engines, few can actually build one. There’s a small handful of specialized agencies that can, but they charge hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in fees.
Our team’s story
daydream’s founding team previously worked together on Flixed, a business we bootstrapped to millions in revenue per year and 400K+ visitors per month almost purely on the back of programmatic SEO.
The Flixed playbook was pretty simple. We built a data set of the content available across every major streaming service. We then built a custom programmatic SEO stack to generate long-form, detail-rich content to answer different “How to watch [x]” search queries. We then generated revenue by sending subscribers to streaming brands like Disney, HBO, Hulu and others.
As we continued to scale Flixed, other founders and Heads of Growth began asking us to build similar engines for them. Initially, we said no to all these requests because we had no interest in becoming an agency.
However, interest continued to pour in and soon we started to exploring the idea of productizing the programmatic SEO engine that we’d built. As we followed the rapid development of LLMs from GPT-3 onwards, we became increasingly convinced that it was now truly possible to automate every piece of the programmatic SEO chain from end-to-end.
Announcing daydream
daydream is the platform we wish had existed when we started Flixed. One platform that automates all the key workflows involved in building a truly robust, scalable, and durable programmatic SEO engine.
These workflows can be broken down into four categories:
Research - Identifying long-tail search patterns for users that are commercially relevant to them automatically, proactively, on an ongoing basis.
Content creation - Creating 90th percentile quality content at scale. A key piece of this allowing you to integrate proprietary & private data sources.
Performance analysis - Surface relevant and actionable insights for the user based on conversion data, movement in SERP rankings, and changes to content.
Automatic updates - Based on performance data and the content created by competitors, automatically update your content.
Stay tuned
We’ll be regularly posting Notes to the daydream website moving forward. This will include updates on our product, memos on the future of search, customer case studies, analysis of high-performing programmatic SEO strategies and a lot more! If you’d like to stay updated, subscribe to our newsletter.