I've been doing SEO since 2008. Not as an agency, not as a consultant -- as the person whose business needed the traffic. First for a product company selling physical goods, which I sold to an international investment firm in 2021, and these days for the SaaS products I build, including directree itself.
Over those years I kept a running playbook in my head: what compounds, what decays, what's worth a founder's limited hours and what only looks productive. I've now written it down properly. It's called A Founder's SEO Playbook: How to Build Search Traffic That Compounds, Without an Agency or a Giant Budget, and it's available today.
Read about the book and get Chapter 1 free here.
Why write it at all
Most SEO advice comes from people who sell SEO. That shapes it in ways that don't serve founders: it overweights tactics that justify retainers, underweights the boring foundations, and almost never says "this isn't worth your time."
I wanted the other version. The one where the author has no agency to sell, has shipped the advice on their own products, and is honest about the waiting. Because there is waiting. Search traffic compounds, and compounding is slow at the start -- anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
I won't claim my way is the only way. It's the way that worked for me, across a physical-goods company and now a set of SaaS apps, through nearly two decades of Google changing its mind. Take what's useful.
Who it's for
Founders and small teams who need customers to find them but can't justify an agency retainer or a five-figure tool stack. If you have more time than budget and you're willing to do unglamorous work consistently, the playbook is written for you.
It is deliberately not for people chasing shortcuts. There's no "rank #1 in 30 days" in it, because I've never seen that happen honestly.
What's inside
Sixteen chapters that walk the whole machine in order:
- Foundations first -- how search actually works (the 20% you need), getting the boring technical stuff perfect, sitemaps and Search Console.
- Judgment -- how to tell whether a keyword is winnable for a site your size, and which page type each keyword deserves. This is where most founder SEO fails, and it gets two full chapters.
- Pages that rank -- landing pages, question-page colonies that earn authority in batches, and documentation as a pre-sale channel.
- The weekly habit -- a 15-minute Google Search Console routine, and the refresh process that moves pages from position 15 to position 3.
- Links without begging -- directories and launches, communities and roundups, and free micro-tools that earn links while you sleep.
- Keeping what you earned -- defensive SEO, and finally the full machine assembled: where to start and how to stay the course.
Three appendices turn it into action: a first-90-days plan, a founder's toolkit (almost all free), and a worksheet for writing your own case study.
If you've followed this blog, you'll recognize some of the thinking -- the realistic view of startup SEO and the honest take on directory backlinks we've written about both come from the same playbook. The book is the complete, ordered version.
The honest terms
The ebook is $9.99, one-time, yours forever as a PDF you can re-download from your account whenever you like. It's also included free with Directree Plus, our $49/year membership, because Plus members are mostly founders growing a listing -- exactly who the book is for.
And Chapter 1 is free to read in full on the book page, no purchase needed. It's the fairest way to decide whether the rest is worth ten dollars to you.
Get A Founder's SEO Playbook →
One last thing, in the spirit of how we run directree: I'm not going to pretend this book will transform your business in a month. It's a method that compounds if you work it. That's the only honest promise SEO allows.