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Share–Engage-Optimize the SEO Way : Success Story of Yoast

Leave a Comment / Founder, Marketing, Product, SEO, Social media, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Nowadays, with Internet access having reached an all-time high, it is not easy to keep customers engaged and satisfied. There is so much content out there on the web that it is quite easy to get lost amongst all that noise and clutter. To stand out and be heard, articles, blogs and all other kinds of media need to be unique and engaging. They also need to follow the right SEO practices so that they are picked up by search engines. Search engine optimisation is every marketers and content creator’s best friend, as it helps their work get the recognition it deserves. The undoubted king of WordPress SEO is Yoast, and this time around, we will be taking a look at how the company started and got to where it is now.

About the Founders

Yoast Founder
Image Source: gelderlander.nl

Joost de Valk started his career working for a digital marketing company. He gave that up and began consulting for big corporations such as eBay and The Guardian. While doing this, he was working on a project of his own- a plugin that would help websites boost their SEO score. It started as a mere hobby because Valk was interested in the algorithms governing SEO.

After a while, he started sensing that there was more to this than what met the eyes, and he began to take it more seriously than just a hobby. He became so busy with this hobby that his actual work started suffering. That was when his wife suggested that maybe he needed to quit his job and start trying to make some money out of the plugin he was working on.

Founding Yoast

The entire empire we now know as Yoast started as one man’s hobby in 2010! He started his blog in 2004, named joostdevalk.nl, and in 2006, began css3.info. In June 2008, he began yoast.com and started making money through advertisements placed on the blog. Halfway through 2010, he felt the time was right to invest in Yoast full time, giving up his job and founding the company.

The journey started with Video SEO, then came WordPress SEO Premium, and this morphed into Yoast SEO Premium. All these ventures became so successful, so fast that they had to make a company around these services. De Valk was the only one involved, handling everything from consulting, to support for the first few years. The initial years were very taxing as he had to single-handedly manage to support the development and testing all on his own. During these years, it was his wife who served as his biggest supporter and aid. Even today it is Joost, Marieke, his wife, and their first employee, Michiel Heijmans who handles almost all the management and logistics.

Joost’s wife, Marieke, shares Joost’s busy lifestyle having majored in sociology with a PhD in Criminology. She began her career as a researcher at Avans University in Den Bosch. But, as her husband’s company, Yoast started picking up, she decided to help out her partner with his work. Her love for writing inspired her to begin creating eBooks, and soon enough, the idea flourished. Marieke is responsible for the entire Yoast Academy tab and has been a tremendous power in assisting in growing the company.

An Instant Success

WordPress is a well-oiled machine that hosts over 74 million websites, and slowly Yoast started gaining momentum, becoming a regular feature in millions of those websites. One of the most significant issues they have had is maintaining and providing support to millions of beloved users.

Joost had to focus on testing early on, as once the business started to expand exponentially, making sure the version had no bugs or errors got more important than ever before. In the early years of the company, testing was an afterthought that rose when someone encountered an error. That practice is long gone, with testing getting two full weeks, as a means to prevent trouble later on in the release.

Yoast SEO 3.0 was a landmark release, as the company shifted 35-40% of their code from PHP to JavaScript. To facilitate the extensive testing that was necessary for this, the team expanded to include about ten developers and ten other support staff. It is astonishing how such a small group is able to pull off such mammoth tasks.

With the company expanding daily, they are in “full-on hiring mode,” having deviated from Joost’s initial plan of never taking on any employees. The team now includes 32 people in the Netherlands and over 50 worldwide. The team has also introduced several fun methods to make the team feel like a family. One such plan includes a “Know Your Colleague” Quiz which contains over 26 questions regarding the music taste and favourite colour of employees. The team also has a 40-hour workweek, unlike other start-ups and tech companies which demand a minimum of 60 hours a week, with Joost working for longer hours, as he is the leading man.

Joost de Valk single-handedly built WordPress tools to help site owners optimize their content and get discovered by search engines. Doing so helped make webpages more user-friendly, intuitive and reliable, making him one of the chief names in SEO. What makes this success story so inspiring is the fact that it is essentially the story of one man turning his hobby into a multi-million-dollar business!

buffer

Tweeting the Right Way : Success Story of Buffer

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With the Internet having expanded exponentially, in the past two decades, it is harder than ever before to keep people engaged. Whether it is a fashion brand or a blog, it is no longer easy to keep customers interested, because there is just so much competition out there. With over 124 billion business emails being sent and received every day, how do companies and brands stay relevant? The only way to stay ahead is to have the right content development and marketing strategy. Having the right digital marketing strategy can now make or break companies, and that is where companies like Buffer help make a difference.

Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich founded Buffer in 2010, and it has over the years developed to become one of the biggest players in the social media marketing management niche. The company banked over $1 million in cash recently and even raised more than $3.5 million in the capital. They have also experimented with several things, such as making the hiring and recruitment process a lot more transparent, investing in employee training and even trying out self-management. These pendulum shifts in management did not hamper Buffer but rather contributed to its growth, so much so that, it has over 700,000 users a month now.

The Founders

Being an entrepreneur is not just about mergers, acquisitions and bottom lines, but rather, it is an emotional rollercoaster that is fascinating. No story is more engaging in that aspect than Leo Wildrich’s; the man who co-founded a company that hauls in profits over $10 million a year.

Buffer founders
Image Source: flickr.com

Leo Widrich was born and brought up in the quaint Austrian town of Melk, and dreamt of becoming a professional footballer. Though a part of the football academy in St. Pölten, a knee injury at 15, saw him bid farewell to that dream and focus more on his academics. Once he was done with school in Vienna, his fellow schoolmates inspired him to go to college abroad, and so he did, choosing to attend Warwick Business School. Here, he met Joel Gascoine who, at the time, was working on a prototype for a social media management software. The two friends decided to join forces, and soon enough, the small idea grew till it became a full-time job, which made the pair quit college and move to the Silicon Valley.

Founding Buffer

Seven weeks into the company’s inception, users started paying for the service, and angel investors contributed 400,000 euros just before their personal investment ran out. Buffer, which started off as a tweet scheduling app soon evolved into a social media management app which makes over $4 million a year. Buffer now helps startups manage their Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn marketing efforts, and has turned into a kind of entrepreneurial necessity.

Initially, Joel wrote the code and Leo Widrich marketed the software. Early on, Buffer had difficulty finding a voice because most top blogs refused to air their pieces. As a result, Leo set up the Bluffer blog and began by writing the blog’s initial pieces. Starting with three articles a month, demand quickly led to him writing over four articles a week. Thus, the wheels were set in motion, and Buffer started gaining momentum. Ten months later, Buffer had more than 100,000 users, and this prompted the duo to leave for Silicon Valley to start their fundraising.

The Success

Following the shift to the US, Buffer started recruiting more writers to keep up with the demand. Over 45 writers posted as guests on Buffer, and slowly yet surely, the tribe began to grow! It was not just the number of writers that grew, but also the frequency of posting. From three articles a month, the Buffer blog now posts almost daily. They got themselves on an AngelPad platform, raised multiple rounds of funding and grew to amass over a million users. The company even acquired Respond to expand their business. Over the years, they revolutionised the industry by bringing forth unique policies that celebrated transparency and even survived a compromising hack.

Presently, the company boasts a team of over 80 employees spread across the world, working in over 15 different countries. Since their early days, Buffer has emphasized on providing a great environment for their employees, and this, in turn, has led to the great employee and customer satisfaction. Having proven their mettle time and time again, the company now helps brands as large as GitHub, Shopify, Huckberry and Microsoft do their business.

Having shaped their entire company policy around customer satisfaction and brand building, helped Buffer grow an extremely loyal customer base of over a million users. Maintaining a high-quality blog has also gone a long way in helping them keep their customers engaged. Most of their blogs now garner up to 4000 shares on Twitter, with some of them occasionally hitting 8000 shares. Hence, it is easy to see that Buffer’s success is mainly due to a well-established and thought of marketing strategy, which is exactly what it helps other companies do!

Leo Widrich’s story is so much more than just a success story, but rather is a testament to the human spirit and is an inspiring tale of pushing and discovering yourself. From travelling the world, enjoying the best of things, Widrich moved to the woods and found himself. More than anything else, this story re-iterates how important it is to stay true to yourself even when it isn’t easy to do so.

imo

imo : Communication App Making the People Connect with Eachother Better

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Out of the twenty initial employees that Google hired, only six still work there. This includes its founding fathers Larry Page and Sergey Brin. So what happened to the others? Are they off making ripples in other technology-based companies? Well, some of them definitely are, and this time around, we are looking at one such pair- George and Ralph Harik, the founders of imo.

Certain early Google employees became entrepreneurs in their own right, while others turned into angel investors, and several others worked their way up the corporate ladder and became top executives at different companies. A few of them even retired happily. But George Harik had other plans in mind when he left Google. He and his brother Ralph co-founded the messaging application imo.

The Harik brothers were born in Beirut, Lebanon, but grew up in the commercial capital, Dubai. Both were naturally interested in technology, with Georges starting his programming journey on an Apple II when he was just ten years old. The family moved to the US, and both brothers got degrees in computer science, with Georges graduating from the University of Michigan with a PhD and Ralph being an MIT alumnus, and taking up jobs centred around the Silicon Valley.

imo founders
Image Source: businessinsider.com

In 1999, Georges Harik got a call from a friend working at Silicon Graphics informing him that a friend of his was founding a company. Since he had a job of his own at the time, the invitation didn’t sound all that promising. Or that was, until Larry Page, sent him an email regarding Google, and invited him over for dinner. That dinner changed Harik’s life, as it convinced him to join Google.

Georges was recruited into Google’s initial engineering committee as a software engineer and worked at Google from 1999 to 2005. Following this, he left the company and invested in several other tech-based companies. While at Google, Georges served as the Director of Product Management and worked on applications such as Gmail, Google Talk, and Picasa. He also worked as the manager of Googlettes and was involved with the development of AdSense and AdWords Online. Following his exit from Google, he was an advisor for GV, which is the venture capital arm of Alphabet. Then he moved into the field of angel investing and funded several tech-start-ups and also co-founded hslabs, before joining his brother to found imo.

Meanwhile, Ralph was working for Oracle. The fact that Georges worked with Android applications, while at Google, opened his eyes to the future implications of this sector. This served as inspiration for him to collaborate with his brother and found a new startup. A few years down the line, the brothers quit their respective jobs and together founded the instant messaging application imo in 2007.

imo started as a web-based app and has since branched out to mobile networks, helping bridge communication gaps that existed. Ralph’s education at MIT gave him enough technical knowledge to handle imo’s initial coding in the early days. When it came to revenue generation, on the other hand, Georges’ training at Google gave him in-depth knowledge regarding internet advertising. Ralph, who is the CEO, handles the day-to-day management of the company, while Georges is tasked with product design and studying new technologies.

Since its inception, imo has grown to cover over seven million users as the application allows users to connect to more than eleven different messaging networks across various platforms such as desktops, tablets and smartphones. Users can use the application to text via either voice or video chat with other individuals or groups. The application utilises cloud storage, and hence every message sent and received via the app is stored on a web-based cloud. This allows users to switch devices with ease, significantly increasing the application’s accessibility. imo has also launched voice calling options for iOS users, making it easier than ever before to call up a loved one. Ralph enlisted his big brother Georges’ help to found the messaging app because he felt that the communication industry needed some radical changes.

While imo started out with just five employees, it now has over 20 people working for it from Palo Alto. The company has grown from being an innovative idea that two brothers had, to a considerable company whose product has over 4 million downloads with more than 50 million messages being sent every day.

klarna

Sebastian Siemiatkowski : The Founder of Swedish Buy-Now-Pay-Later Fintech Klarna

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There have been many rags to riches story, among which, Jack Ma’s rejection story is on the top. In almost every such story, the people who have succeeded once had difficulty in even earning their one time meal. But as time changes, their hard work takes them to new heights, and they only set up new examples for other people. One such story is of the founder of Klarna, a Swedish version of Paypal, which was founded by Sebastian Siemiatkowski in 2005. Siemiatkowski was not rejected, but had a similar humble background and worked at Burger King. And now, like Ma, he has also established himself as one of the successful entrepreneurs in the tech industry.

Early Life

Sebastian Siemiatkowski met his future partner and friend Niklas Adalberth, at Burger King, where both worked as part-timers. Later, the two went on to join the Stockholm School of Economics to pursue a graduate degree in Economics. At the college, they even met the third co-founder of Klarna, Victor Jacobsson.

The two while studying and working together always discussed new startup ideas, but none of them was sure about what they should really do. During their college, they decided to take a year’s off and travel the world without flying. The two went to explore the world through road trips and on ships. This way, they got extra time to think about their career.

Klarna founder
Image Source: businessinsider.com

Founding Klarna

While back from the trip, Siemiatkowski joined sales job and came across the emerging concept of e-Commerce. While working with the sales department, he got to know that it is quite difficult to sell things online, as people do not trust the online payment systems. This problem later became the basis for Klarna.

Siemiatkowski discussed the problem with Niklas and decided to build a new payment system for people to make the purchases. Jacobsson also joined in, and they participated in the Stockholm School of Economics annual entrepreneurship award with the idea. Though Siemiatkowski and his partners had a lot of faith in the idea, it could not make to the finals. In fact, it was one of the lasts. But Jane Walerud, an angel investor, showed interest in the idea and invested in it. He even helped the three co-founders to meet a good development team.

Finally, in the mid of 2005, Siemiatkowski along with his partners founded Klarna and opened its first office in Sweden. They started by offering the option of paying for the goods after receiving them. This led the consumers to trust Klarna faster, as they were hesitant about buying things online. But with Klarna, they could pay after deciding if they wanted to keep the goods.

The Success

The company received another investment from AB Öresund in 2007. In 2010, the company expanded its services to Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. The same years, Klarna also received investment from Sequoia Capital, and the company’s revenue raised by 80%.

In 2011, the company was named as one of Europe’s 100 most promising young tech companies by The Telegraph. In a round of funding, led by General Atlantic Klarna raised a $155M investment. The company also acquired the Israeli company Analyzd specialising in risk management and online payments. Klarna then expanded its services to the US. This expansion has contributed a lot to the growth of Klarna. In the same year, the company’s revenues made it one of the Unicorns in the country.

By 2018, the company registered around 60M users, and around 90,000 online merchants were using Klarna to carry out their payments. In the latest round of funding held in 2019, Klarna raised $460 million, Dragoneer Investment Group, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, HMI Capital, Merian Chysalis Investment Company Limited being the major investors. This funding round made the company value at $5.5 billion, and it became the largest fintech start-up in Europe.

Through the story of Klarna, we definitely can say that hard work can really change one’s life if it is put in the right direction.

Civic Champs

Civic Champs : An App that Helps Nonprofit Organisations to Manage their Volunteers

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In a world, where everyone is delving deeper into the competitiveness seeking powerful jobs in the corporate world, let’s have a look at the story of Civic Champs, a mobile app that is helping the nonprofit organizations manage to volunteer. According to Geng Wang and Ryan Underdahl, the founders of Civic Champs, the nonprofit organizations should focus more on their aim and less on tracking volunteers. So, as an initiative to help organizations like these, with a bigger goal to improve our world, they founded Civic Champs in 2019. It has not even been a month that the company has been established, but it is receiving unexpected appreciation and support.

The Founders

Wang went to Michigan State University and completed his Bachelor’s in Supply Chain Management and International Relations in 2008, after which, he went to Harvard to complete his MBA. Wang has a very versatile career profile as he worked as a summer intern in Shell Oil Company, worked as a content manager in a business centre, business analyst at McKinsey and Company, a summer associate at Cue Ball Capital and not to mention deeply engaged in volunteering.

Wang has also co-founded TeamCartoon.com, Rent Jungle and Community Elf. He also served as a board member at Drizzle, Advisory Board Member at The Bee Corp and Clever Real Estate. Wang is still a part of The Bee Corp even after founding Civic Champs.

Civic Champ founder
Image Source: zimbio.com

After graduating from Boise State University in 2010 with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Underdahl went to Kelly School of Business under Indiana University after seven long years. In these span of seven years, Underdahl served as a District Manager (Gitanjali Gems Ltd), Store Manager (Signet), Intern at LRAP Association and currently as the CEO of Civic Champs.

During Underdahl’s days in LRAP Association, he came across Wang and both of them together along with three other employees decided to open Civic Champs.

What is Civic Champs and how it works?

Wang, along with Underdahl, created Civic Champs to help the nonprofit organizations easily deal with volunteering. The platform is created nearly six months ago as a great initiative for social upliftment. Both the volunteers and the nonprofit organizations can interact with each other in a hassle-free and efficient way, thus, making the work of such organizations even easier.

The first and the only, product of the company till date is a mobile-first platform through which the nonprofit organizations can track volunteering and can engage with them. The mobile-based application of Civic Champs is available for iPhone. Like every other application, Civic Champs also uses GPS technology, and along with that, a geofence. A geofence is a part of modern GPS technology that creates a virtual geographical boundary and based on that, the users are alerted when a volunteer is leaving or entering in a particular zone. Basically, once the data is used from a volunteer’s phone it gets tracked, and hence, the users receive an update.

The volunteers, thereby, receive messages from the organizations, if they are free to volunteer, and the app keeps a record of the volunteer hours, by collecting relevant information. Since the app is created for the nonprofit organizations, Civic Champs also receives a donation from the volunteers working for them.

The question may arise that how can there be so many enthusiastic people in a town who can be interested to volunteer for the nonprofit organizations.

Talking about that, My Sister’s Closet is one of the nonprofit organizations that are registered to Civic Champs. The organization provides professional training to low-income women and especially to those women who are not socially accepted. More than 350 people volunteer in this organization through the website of Civic Champs. With the help of Civic Champs’ database, the organisation keeps the data of the volunteers, and without wasting any time, it reaches to them whenever they require them. The story is the same for many other organizations.

The Team and Funding

Within the period of six months, Civic Champs has raised $312,000 in the pre-seed round. The company’s headquarters are based in Great Lakes, Midwestern U.S., and the team currently comprises of ten members. A great initiative taken by Civic Champs has inspired people to sign up both as a volunteer as well as donors, and it will flourish more in the near future.

belkin

Chet Pipkin : The ‘Low Profile’ Wealthiest Tech Person in the U.S.

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Most of the people are desperate to get fame, and for that, they don’t mind doing anything. But there are some people who believe in sheer hard work, and no fame is more important for them than their work. So despite having achieved a lot in life, the popularity does not affect them, and they rather try to stay away from the limelight. One such personality is Chester J. Pipkin (aka Chet Pipkin), the founder, chief executive and chairman of Belkin International, a company that manufactures and deals in computer hardware and peripheral devices.

Early Life

Chet Pipkin was born in a working-class family in California. His father worked as a machinist in World War II, and his mother was a machine operator in aircraft factories. Since his parents never had gone to a college, they wanted Pipkin to join one.

Pipkin was always interested in history, so he went on to opt for history as his major in college and joined the UCLA university. But soon, amid the revolution that the personal computers were ready to bring, he decided to switch to computer science as his graduation subject. Meanwhile, he also joined a part-time job at an electronics company to earn his daily expenses. He then joined the YMCA as a camp counsellor, he met his future wife Janice.

Chet pipkin
Image Source: theaustralian.com

Founding Belkin International

While working and attending school, he realised that though people are getting familiar with the new personal computers, they still find it difficult to connect the computers with the printers. This brought him an idea to invent cable assemblies that would help people easily connect computers with printers, and he started Belkin in his parent’s two-car garage.

Caught up between studies, job and his own business, he decided to drop off from the college. But soon, he realised that he was more focused on Belkin, so he had to leave his job too. So finally, he started to work solely on Belkin and established the company in 1983. In the beginning, he worked on inventing cables to connect printers and modems. The company’s first product was the Belkin Hamlet, which was made to connect an Apple IIc computer to the non-Apple printers.

While trying to establish the business, it was not a smooth ride, and like every other startup, he had to go through a lot of ups and downs. But he did not come out of these situations with regrets or discouragements, but life lessons. Despite the challenges, the company earned a $100,000 revenue in the first year of its inception.

Developing and selling the PC hardware for around 6-7 years, Belkin moved its focus to the USB storage devices in the early 90s. Since then, the company has focused on reinventing things and has become a leader in the field of IoT devices manufacturing and selling.

Since Chet Pipkin has always been low-profile about him as well his company, there has been no information on the revenues for the past many years. But the company is surely in profit. Pipkin has even kept the company private despite the trend of silicon valley companies going for their IPO within 4-5 years of tasting success.

In 2013, Belkin International acquired the Cisco Systems, and its further units, including Linksys. Since then, Belkin has been dealing in three divisions, Belkin International, Linksys and WeMo. Linksys deals in the data networking hardware products, whereas WeMo sells devices like wireless chargers, screen protectors, USB-C cables.

The success of Belkin has made Chet Pipkin one of the wealthiest men in the U.S.

Achievements

Belkin has been named in the Inc.’s ‘500 Fastest growing privately held companies in the United States’ list multiple-times. It has also been among the ‘Los Angeles Technology Fast 50 Company’ around nine times. The company also got featured around six times in the LA Business Journal’s list of ‘100 Fastest-growing Privately Held Companies’.

On the other hand, being the owner of such an innovative company, Chet also has been a finalist in the ‘Los Angeles Entrepreneur of the Year Awards’ three times. He even won the ‘Southern California Regional Award’ in 1996. He has also featured in the ‘Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame’ of the Dealerscope Magazine in 2006. Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce awarded him the ‘Lifetime Still Achieving’ in 2013.