Building An SEO Startup In The Age Of AI

Karan Sawant, the founder of the startup BeyondMe, who is revolutionizing the SEO industry, is our special guest today. Karan has created a product that helps companies in identifying the causes of their traffic decline, including issues with crawling, rendering, indexing, ranking, or content quality. Jobdai sat down with Karan to discuss his diagnostic product and the difficulties of bootstrapping a young startup in the fiercely competitive SEO market.

Hey Karan, please tell us a little bit about your background and your company.

I'm Karan Sawant, a tech enthusiast driven by a passion for creating and building things. Throughout my career, I have actively pursued innovation and even applied for patents in the realm of AI and security applications. Prior to my current endeavours, I held the position of Senior Data Scientist at a crypto startup, where I had the opportunity to contribute my expertise.

In my view, innovation is not solely about introducing an entirely new category, but also building something to make existing ideas more accessible, scalable, and more human. I firmly believe that the future of successful startups lies in their ability to maintain a lean operation with a limited number of employees, ideally not exceeding 6.

With this mindset, I recently co-founded BeyondMe, a groundbreaking company that aims to empower digital marketers in their SEO. endeavour. Our primary focus is to assist marketers in identifying weak spots within the top 10 Google search results, enabling them to optimize their products' rankings. Additionally, we alleviate a significant burden from their shoulders by providing continuous monitoring of Google Search Console.

How did you come up with the idea for BeyondMe? I firmly believe that every company, whether operating in the B2B or B2C space, needs to do search engine optimization (SEO) and establish a presence on Google. It has become second nature for us to turn to Google whenever we encounter unfamiliar topics or products, and this is common for every business. As a result, if your customers are actively searching on Google, it is crucial for your business to be present and easily discoverable. So with this belief I did a lot of Customer Discovery Calls trying to define the problem and urgency, and got very useful insights from my potential customers stating “Existing products are very costly”, “Keyword research is a difficult and lengthy process” and “They cannot do this research on specific cities”. How did you go from idea to product? We started working on the MVP in early April 2023. And launched the MVP on May 3rd. It was not perfect, and we got a lot of feedback from our early users. We actually fixed those issues in front of their eyes, like in 2–3 hours. We also got lots of feature requests and implemented them. We are continuously refining our product, and there is no end to that process. We gave our initial users a glimpse of the future with the rapid development, and it was nice to see them as brand ambassadors of our platform. We got a negative review from one of our competitors, and our community sniffed them out. What sets your company apart from others in the field? We have the speed to break the movements of our competitors. Things that took our competitors days to build are actually taking us days or even hours. Apart from that, we are priced at 1/3 the price of our competitor, and we are a day-one profit-making company. With some more refinement, we will reach their current stage, which took them 3 years. We are planning to get there in 3-6 months. What's your biggest achievement so far with BeyondMe? We have currently acquired over 500 users with our launch deal. We support over 55 different languages, and we went local, which means you can do keyword research on cities like Vancouver, making us the only platform in the market to support it. And at last, you can analyse over 1500 keywords in 2-3 minutes. Finally, what are your long-term goals for the future of BeyondMe?

The user experience is going to play a very important role in the upcoming Google updates. We are planning to incorporate the same while you are performing keyword research. You will be able to select an audience group, and our AI will emulate the behaviour and biases of that audience.

We hope that this interview has given you insightful information about the process of developing an SEO startup in the age of AI. We invite you to join Jobdai's community of AI founders and thinkers if you're looking for chances to learn with like-minded people in the AI industry, join Jobdai's AI talent community.