The Making of Programmatic SEO OS
1:30 pm; Dec 18, 2022
It’s Sunday and I (Deepak) am talking to Bikash over call about doing something interesting. He suggests making a collection of useful datasets that can be used for programmatic SEO.
I like the idea!
And we decide to make an Airtable base with 100s of cool datasets and sell it for $10.
10:00 pm; The same day
We are talking, again. Instead of just the dataset collection, I propose creating a simple course about programmatic SEO and selling it for $99.
After a few minutes, we finalize, we would create a complete operating system (course + a massive library of resources) on the topic and sell it for $149. The idea of using Notion was very obvious for this kind of project.
This time, we also decide to launch it by Jan 5th, 2023.
7:00 am; Dec 19, 2022
I and Bikash start working on creating the first draft of the outline of topics and subtopics that we will be covering.
This keeps us busy for a few hours.
9:00 pm; The same day
We set up a simple pre-order landing page on Gumroad, tweet about it, and go to sleep.
The idea is to only start creating the OS if we get, at least, 1 order.
6:00 am; Dec 20, 2022
I wake up and, to my surprise, there are 5 pre-orders – $99 each.
And then we actively start working on the programmatic SEO OS.
The backstory
Our love for programmatic SEO started way back in January 2022, when I first saw the term somewhere on Twitter and told Bikash about it. Over the next few months, we created several programmatic sites for learning and experimenting – some provided surprising results, while most failed.
On a website, we were able to get results like this (see the screenshot above) in just 4–5 months.
It blew our minds!
We experimented by creating different kinds of projects and working with different platforms (WordPress, 11ty, Webflow, etc.) to create programmatic pages.
And the best thing was, I kept writing about our experience with programmatic SEO on our blog and also kept tweeting about our learnings and progress. After seeing numerous people engaging with our content, the decision of making the pSEO OS wasn’t that difficult.
Why the “OS”?
Initially, we did call this a “programmatic SEO course” but later as we became certain about what information it will contain, we started calling it the “Programmatic SEO OS”. It correctly describes the content we have created. And I won’t disagree with the fact that the idea of calling it an “OS” came from Janel’s Newsletter OS.
The domain name programmaticSEOos.com was a bit long, so we went with pSEOos.com.
We completed the OS in 18 days
Thanks to our first-hand experience with programmatic SEO, we committed, completed, and launched the OS in 18 days.
I took on the writing and video recording part, and Bikash took on the resource collection part. We both worked on the OS for more than 400 hours combined before launching – that’s more than 11 hours per day per person for 18 straight days.
Who is the pSEO OS for?
I am sure you would agree with me on this, there isn’t enough content about programmatic SEO on the internet. People, who just want to start their first programmatic SEO site, are confused about many things – they want their queries answered.
When we started making the OS, there were 2 groups of people who were in our minds:
- Who were entirely new to the pSEO world, and
- Who were familiar with the technical parts of pSEO, but needed help with the non-technical aspects (which is the most important, by the way)
And the OS is created by keeping the needs of both groups in mind.
The next plan
We are taking feedback from people who have taken the course and building their programmatic sites and noting down all their pain points to be included in the programmatic SEO OS.
The OS will always be updated with additional information and I will be recording more videos showing everything from the scratch.
That’s it.
All the best for your programmatic SEO projects.