How MarsX.dev Reached $3.5M ARR Across 20 AI-Powered Tools in 2025 (Interview with Founder John Rush)

John Teases $3.5M ARR Upfront

John Rush

00:00Yeah. So I'm I'm doing around 3,500,000 ARR now with all these agents, and I started I launched the first one a bit more than a year ago.

Nathan Latka

00:09>> Mhmm. So this is is is SEO bot the biggest revenue earner?

John Rush

00:13Yeah. This one is doing almost 120, k MRR now and been doubling month over month after the launch. And how many folks are on the

Nathan Latka

00:22>> team working on SEO bot?

John Rush

00:23It's just me and one more person.

Host Introduces John Rush and His AI Agent Portfolio

Nathan Latka

00:25>> Are you can I put you on are you open to screen sharing your Stripe account and showing us the tiny ads growth just from zero to five k? Yeah. Of course. Hey, folks. My guest today is John Rush, and he is building all kinds of tools in the SEO space. He's updated on all the latest AI tactics, whether it's agentic workflows or anything like that related to growth. Really prolific on x as well. And one of

00:47>> his posts caught my eye where he basically showed a screenshot of one of his agents getting a job on a job board. His specifically listing bot, paid $499 to do a SEO job that, someone named Caleb Peffer, put together for their startup fire called Dev. So I wanna talk to John about how he's building these agents, how much revenue he's doing, how he's growing, and just how he's thinking about building, you know, 20 plus startups all

01:10>> at one time. John, you ready to take us to top?

John Rush

01:13Yeah. So I'm all in building AI agents, and I think I bet everything on the future of AI agents. And I think the future is founders plus AI agents, that will be the new normal. That will be the new corporations run by very few people. In some cases, like in my case, almost no people and the AI.

Nathan Latka

01:35>> That's wild. So your bio here, I run the most automated org on Earth using AI agents that you build, like Unicorn Platform, Index Rusher, Listing Bot, SEO Bot, Tiny Ads, etcetera. We're gonna jump into all of these today. But, John, I don't wanna bury the lead. Can you share anything from a growth perspective? Are you comfortable sharing sort of how much revenue all these things do together? Yeah.

Total Revenue and Portfolio Overview

John Rush

01:53Yeah. So I'm I'm doing around 3,500,000 ARR now with all these agents, and I started

Nathan Latka

02:00>> Mhmm.

John Rush

02:01I launched the first one a bit more than a year ago. So before that, I was in the trenches just experimenting and building stuff. So it's several of them making most of the revenue like SEO bot, bot unicorn platform, and few others are accounting for most of the revenue. And the other products are either free, or they're just starting out.

Nathan Latka

02:26>> So this is is SEO bot the biggest revenue earner?

SEO Bot: $120K MRR and Growth Trajectory

John Rush

02:31Yeah. This one is doing almost 120 k MRR now and been doubling month over month after the launch. So it's doing really, really well, and I think, it has the one that it has done really good job at making the whole AI agent on autopilot popular on Twitter at least.

Nathan Latka

02:50>> Mhmm. Mhmm. You know, this this is this is fascinating. So 120 k a month right now in revenue. You're charging $19 a month. When did you launch the platform?

SEO Bot Pricing, Launch Timeline, and Team

John Rush

02:59It was a bit more than a year ago. So I launched in the internal beta for like six months with people I know. And they've been using it for six months. And after that, I launched for the public around twelve months ago, or maybe fourteen months ago.

Nathan Latka

03:14>> Okay, so maybe like, like April, February 2024.

John Rush

03:19Yeah. Yeah. That's when it was kind of public. Until that, I had the six months of closed beta where I would invite people to try it. Uh-huh. And how many folks are on

Nathan Latka

03:29>> the team working on SEO bot?

John Rush

03:32It's just me and one more person. So all my teams are the same. It's me who comes up with the idea and who builds usually the first MVP and tests out and does the presale and and ideate and builds up the UX and everything. And then I find a comaker, usually on Twitter or in my network, who joins in to build the thing, and we build it together. So the other person is building, and I'm promoting,

03:58and then I help him to build. He helps me to promote. So it's kind of a team of two people.

Nathan Latka

04:03>> So that's you and Vitalik on SEO bot. Right?

John Rush

04:05Yeah. Yeah. Just two people that say Like

Nathan Latka

04:09>> Can I ask? What do you do? Do you just split equity fifty fifty, or how do have that conversation?

John Rush

04:12Fifty fifty. Yeah. Exactly. So it's fifty fifty split just like the cofounders in the startup, and he is the CTO and I'm CEO, but we do a lot of things together too.

Nathan Latka

04:23>> This is wild. Okay. So so I love how you're building. You're obviously building in public. You know, this is this does very these kind of screenshots obviously do very well on Twitter. Actually, you see them all here, which is great. Are you're using testimonial.io for this wall of love?

John Rush

04:35No. I think this one is from Senja, just a competitor.

Nathan Latka

04:39>> Spell that.

John Rush

04:41Senja, like, s yeah. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

04:46>> Okay. Okay. Senja.io. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Alright. So you got this you got this great wall of love going here. Okay. So help us understand. Your price point's $19 a month. And so, I guess, so what is that? 120,000 divided by 19. Does that mean what you've got about six six thousand paying customers?

Customer Count and Organic Word-of-Mouth

John Rush

05:02A bit less than that because we have 49. We have one nine nine. We have 499. So we have a lot more inside there. And right now, I'm seeing a lot of people moving for higher tiers and higher plans. And and we haven't even started working with bigger customers. But the end goal here is to go, of course, for the bigger customers. So I usually start with smaller check just that my first customers are the builders.

05:29Because I like to build product for builders first because they give me good feedback and they actually become part of my product team. And once I get to a place where they love it, then I increase the price and then it goes more for teams and we see funded companies and corporations.

Nathan Latka

05:46>> Mhmm. Mhmm. Okay. So sorry. How many customers do you have today about?

John Rush

05:50I think it's, like, five k or four k. Between between four

Nathan Latka

05:53>> and That's five

05:55>> great. How are you driving like, this obviously does all the selling for you. Right? Getting your users to tag you and post a screenshot of their growth. Yeah. Is this all happening organically? Are you sort of softly prompting folks, hey. You should put a screenshot up. Tag us. You're crushing it.

John Rush

06:10Yeah. So surprisingly, I've never asked anyone to do that. And I think if I did that, I would maybe 10 x my revenue over a few month. So people do it on their own, and it's just I spend time to listen to the users and have chats going on with a lot of the users. I don't think anyone on Earth has more chats than me. I think I have almost, like, 1,000 chats going on with users.

06:36And Mhmm. And they love it because I listen directly, and I come back with fixes and with improvements. And usually, that kind of makes them loyal, and then they become, like, ambassadors of the product.

Growth Strategy: SEO, Cross-Promo, and Social

Nathan Latka

06:50>> Mhmm. That makes tons of sense. So it's just two of you guys building us. So, like, that's really high revenue per employee. Right? $60,000 in per month in revenue per employee or $720,000 a year in revenue per employee. Walk us through so and you mentioned what what's growth strategy here? I mean, is it really just almost purely social? I mean, are you I'm gonna go into your back end here. Are you running your own SEO play

07:12>> for SEO bot?

John Rush

07:14Yeah. So basically, have a very simple strategy. So number one, I show everybody how the tool is helping myself. Right? So in case of SEO bot, I use it for all my other products, and then I share the results. And that helps a lot, the products I share the results for and the those I used. Then I do a lot of SEO using SEO bot listing bot index index rusher. So that brings around 30% of my

07:43traffic. And then the other 30% comes as cross promo. So all the tools are targeting the same audience. Right? And if somebody joins one of my products as a customer, then they end up using all of my other products eventually. Mhmm. So that's like a big chunk of the growth of 30% SEO, 30% cross promo, and 30% is social media where I build in public and other people share that they use my product too. So it

08:14just come from social media. And 10% is all the other things. All the small things.

Nathan Latka

08:18>> Here's an example of you using your own dog food. Right? You launch your own SEO tool, llmodels.org. You grow up from zero to this many clicks per month. You're saying, hey. I used SEO. I used my own tools to do this.

John Rush

08:29Yeah. Exactly. And I do a lot of products. So since I keep doing zero to one over and over again, then I can reiterate on that again. So I I'm not sharing the same product, the same thing over and over again. So I start new product from zero, and in month, I get somewhere, and I use my own tools. And then when it works, I share, and it brings users.

Nathan Latka

08:51>> Mhmm. This is great. Okay. So that's the story of SEO bot. You said the next biggest tool that you run-in terms of revenue is ListingBot?

Listing Bot: One-Time Payment Model and $50K Per Month

John Rush

09:00Yeah. ListingBot is is very simple tool. So it does only two things. So one part of the tool is deep research it does on the Internet to find all the web directories for a particular product. And and it's really hard work because you wanna find everything on the Internet, and then you wanna rank it by the relevance and domain rating, etcetera. And the other thing it does, it actually lists you there. So it's a web automation

09:26that registers on the directory and adds your product there and does all the form filling, etcetera.

Nathan Latka

09:33>> John, this is crazy. Are there really over 10,000 directories that people can apply to?

John Rush

09:38Oh, there are there are more actually. This is hard coded numbers, so there are a lot more now. Wow. I think this is from a year ago, so now a lot more. I would say that every month, we add at least 500 new directories into database. And when I say directories, people think this typical AI directories, but in fact, there are a lot of directors in the world for niche products too, for for ecommerce stores, for

10:02mobile apps, for for pet shops. Like, there are a lot of directories. There I think there are 100,000 directors in the world, and and probably we have around 20 k of them now. And my goal to, you know, find them all. And, there are new directories popping up every day, we can find them to you.

Nathan Latka

10:20>> Mhmm. And are you control sharing revenue here?

John Rush

10:23Yeah. So this one is doing over 50 k a month, and it's a one time payment. So it's basically a thousand people buying it every month.

Nathan Latka

10:35>> Wow. Okay. So a thousand people got and it's got so there's no recurring thing. You have to get new new traffic, new buyers every month. Exactly. And this is

John Rush

10:42very interesting. Like, when I started that, everybody said that you must have recurring plans and, you know, it just worked. And it's actually was an experiment where I have one time payment and also I have strap link. So you have to pay first to see the next step. It's really high bar. Right? Like, I think a like very tiny number of people actually go through this. And even that brings quite a lot of users. And I'm

11:12launching the version two very soon where a little bit lower bar where you can actually pay $50 a month and get 20 directories listed every month. And then I entered this wider game. But my goal was to start just like Tesla start with Roadster, like expensive car, really good service. In my case, like, right now, it's expensive, but it's really good because I have the AI stuff working on, but also I have actual people who review

11:39everything and then it's just really good job at the end. And the next step is to reduce the human labor there and have it fully autonomous and drop the price and let people to kind of moderate the whole thing themselves, but pay less.

Nathan Latka

11:55>> Yeah. Yeah. And now is this are you building this one yourself or do have a co founder here as well?

John Rush

11:59Yeah. This one is just me, but I have a so I built myself, but I have a cofounder who is doing all the moderation work. So a guy who just, you know, watches the AI do the thing and then corrects all the mistakes and make sure there's no hallucinations and things like that.

Nathan Latka

12:16>> That's cool. And so do you do a fifty fifty split there as well, or is he more like a paid contractor?

John Rush

12:22Yeah. It's not fifty fifth. So it's also split, but not fifty fifty. It's, like, ninety ten. I see.

Nathan Latka

12:28>> I see. I see. Yeah. You're 90. He's 10. Yep. Are you a are you a Warren Buffett, Mark Leonard kinda guy? You you build and hold forever, or is the goal here to build these, sell them, then do it again? Build it and sell and build and sell.

Tiny Ads: New Ad Network Launched April 2025

John Rush

12:41No. I hold it forever. So I only buy. I don't sell. And because I don't see any reason to sell. In my case, every product is not just a product itself, but also it's a part of my ecosystem where it drives people into my other tools. So even if the product is not doing that well, it's not a problem for me. Like, I have some products. For example, I have, like, few products that are doing people

13:05are not moving from free to paid here, basically. I'm not making money in there. But people still discover my other tools from those products, and I'm happy because it's still a good mark so it's they act as marketing channels for me. Like, I have directories. I have Yeah. Like, 25 or 35 directories right now, like, lot of them. And most of them make no revenue. Some of them do pretty good, but but most of them don't.

13:28But they drive traffic to all my other tools, so I'm happy to keep them. And and I don't sell because I actually wanna end up having this full ecosystem where I have every single tool that a typical Beezy founder or, like, a Bootstrap founder would ever need starting from, tools for building products, tools for operating, tools for growing, and tools for monetizing. So, like, the whole stack, that's my endgame here.

Nathan Latka

13:57>> Mhmm. Really interesting. I'm just trying to get a sense of your background here so I can understand, like, your DNA, your genes. Right? So you were in, look, UI UX QA here. Yeah.

John Rush

14:08I studied computer science and AI and then UX. So my first ten years were in VC backed companies. So I started seven VC backed companies as a CTO with other cofounders in Norway. Okay. Then I went to The US, to San Francisco, to 500 startups, to Altamist. So I've been in this typical VC backed game for ten years. And at the end, basically, I felt like my whole game is to serve investors and to chase the

14:39exits where what I really wanted is to serve my users and chase like a legacy. So chase generational company where it will gonna be there even after me. And that's why I made a pivot from VC backed world into the bootstrap world where I'm my own boss and I don't have to optimize for exit or for the next round. I just own the whole thing. I have good profits. I use profits to fund myself. So now

15:10that's my life. So, basically, some products are making pretty good money. I use that to build the next product and just spinning around the same blueprint.

Nathan Latka

15:22>> Mhmm. Is Tiny Ads your company as well?

John Rush

15:25Yeah. This is my latest product. Really cool one. So so far, I've been only doing organic growth or non paid growth. And every time I tried paid growth using Google or Facebook, it never worked. So I built my own ad network for b two b, for small b two b startups just so that I could actually spend money on growth. And it works really well. So now after thirty five days, we reach 5 k MRR and

15:5710 k in revenue, and almost 1,000 publishers have joined the platform to serve the ads. That's going really well.

Nathan Latka

16:08>> Are you are you can I put you on are you open to screen sharing your Stripe account and showing us the tiny ads growth just from zero to five k? Yeah. Of course. Just give me a second. Let's go. This is gonna be great. People people love seeing the proof behind the story. You know what I mean?

John Rush

16:23Yeah.

Nathan Latka

16:25>> So, guys, this is this is I think, just to give some context while John's bringing that up, I think this is the future. I mean, he's got a holding company. I believe he called Mars. Right? Mars x dot dev, John? Yeah. Yep. It's his holding it's his holding company. He's building all these tools for himself. Right? He's generating profit.

16:42>> You use marsx.dev and all these this basically Microsoft concept. These are all Yeah.

MarsX.dev Origin Story and Vision for 100 Tools

John Rush

16:46I will show that.

Nathan Latka

16:47>> You built are part of this. Right?

John Rush

16:49Yeah. I will show you how I build it using MorseX. Okay. So I will take over screen now.

Nathan Latka

16:53>> Turn the screen over to you. Yeah. Let me stop sharing. Go ahead.

John Rush

16:57Alright. Just have to make sure I don't share any emails of the people.

Nathan Latka

17:00>> Yeah. Don't don't click don't click customers. Yes. But there's your MRR graph there. Can see. So hover over that zero. Where was the zero?

John Rush

17:06You can see it this way. Yeah. So it started like where is it? I launched that on April 15. So Uh-huh. Exactly a month ago, and then it went like, up, up, up. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

17:22>> That's awesome. You

John Rush

17:24know, it was, like, crazy because everybody sat like, you are crazy launching an ad network that has game for big guys. But, you know, I I had peoples telling me that everything I do not gonna work ever because, like, you know, in 2022, I was building AI coding tool. Like, MorseX is a AI coding tool, and people said, like, developers will never switch because there's Versus code, and everybody gonna use Versus code for the next decades.

17:53And now we are in a world where everybody's using something else for that. Right? I will show

Nathan Latka

17:58>> you my other tool. Look. All these all these l yeah.

John Rush

18:00By by the way, if

Nathan Latka

18:01>> you have ListingBot, like, we'd to and Stripe, SEO Bot and Listing Bot, we'd love to see the growth on those two if you're comfortable sharing those in Stripe. I mean, guys, to John's point just now, I actually think the ad space is very interesting because Google has an innovator's dilemma. Right? They're gonna have to cannibalize their ad revenue to go make sure that, you know, the LM search and the chat function stays with Google versus ChatGPT

18:21>> winning that space. And if that's the case, tools like what John's building, like new creative ways to do ads, there's gonna be a big, big, big market for that if Google takes a step back there. So eager to see how tiny ads grows over time, John.

John Rush

18:33Yeah. I mean, I think, like, one thing people don't realize that the whole game the Google is playing is is basically running on a lot of VC money because people are fine in the VC world to spend $10 and get back $5. Right? And but in my case, I actually I felt like, why it should be that way? Why why can't we make a system where where you pay $1 and you get 2 back? And also

19:03the other side makes money on that. And I thought and people said, no. The the math won't won't work. Like, somebody has to lose. I'm like, why? Like, you serve the ads, you get paid. The other side just pays for the traffic. They should get work. I will share some more stuff. Just give me

Nathan Latka

19:21>> Yeah. I mean, while you're loading that, we're seeing very creative new ad networks. Right? I mean, you look at what Tyler's done at Beehive, right, where you subscribe to a newsletter, and then at the end of the first subscription, it recommends through other newsletters, and those other new other newsletters pay per new subscriber, right, as you're growing. Like so these new, like, tiny ads, beehive, there's all these new creative ad networks, I think, that are gonna

Background: From VC-Backed Startups to Bootstrap

Nathan Latka

19:41>> pop off.

John Rush

19:42Exactly. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

19:43>> Alright. What are we looking at?

John Rush

19:44So this is SEO bot, and so I have two channels. One is the Stripe, and one is the enterprise with invoices. So I have here Mhmm. Like, most of the revenues here actually, like, over 100 k a month. And then Yeah. How old

Nathan Latka

19:58>> are they?

John Rush

19:59Five, six, 12. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

20:00>> Do you have the MRR graph here if you scroll down a little bit? Yeah. So In Stripe?

John Rush

20:04I I sell credits. So, basically, the way it works is that people pay for people load the whole thing with credits and they spend credits on the articles.

Nathan Latka

20:17>> I see. I see. So the reason we see the dip there is because that month is it's that's this month, May 16. It's only halfway done.

John Rush

20:23Yeah. Yeah. So it it basically reached around 100 k, and that's my system, basically. The way I do it is I start, I get to 50 k, then I pause, then I come back, I get to 100 k, then I pause and go to other tools. And I basically don't wanna go farther than 100 k because then it becomes a product that will require me to work a lot on the product because now we have to

20:49move up on the audience. You have to move up to more serious clients, to enterprise clients. They want demo calls, and they want, you know, spend your time. And I don't want that. So I wanna have, like, fully as async. And and then I come back once I know how I can automate that part so that I can go farther. Like, for example, two bottlenecks now and as we are bought for me, one is support. So

21:17it's it's a lot of support because it's a lot of customers, and they can't connect their CMS, and everything just falls apart all the time with all those CMS. So I wanna automate the support part. So I'm building support agent that will not just Answered like all the others, but it will act. It will try to fix the problem and get into the database and change things and and get the whole fix done for you. And

21:43because now, like, almost 80% of our time go for support. So we're not building anything new. We're not I'm I'm not marketing. We're just doing support. And once we fix that That makes sense. We're gonna go to the next because otherwise, we just can't free our hands. And I will show you

Nathan Latka

21:59>> So so so well, hold on. Before we leave here, can you scroll down a little bit so we can see the y axis on the gross volume chart, the bottom axis, the x axis, the time stamps? It's cut off on my screen. Can you just scroll down a bit? Yeah. There we go. Okay. Got it. So you get going in

John Rush

22:10August 20 there are emails of the customers.

Nathan Latka

22:13>> No. No. You're good. You're good. You're good. Well, click click view more under gross under gross volume. Click view more on that graph. Then it will just show that graph. Actually You see the view more?

Live SEO Audit of GetLatka with John

Nathan Latka

22:25>> That way, there's no risk of us hitting sensitive customer information. Oh, but that

John Rush

22:30would be I see it. It looks Exactly the opposite happened. I opened in the other tubs, so it brought me to the list of customers Oh, don't do that. You with emails.

Nathan Latka

22:39>> Okay. Enough sharing enough sharing Stripe. Tell us about Mars. No. But Is Mars is Mars holding the holding company? Or

John Rush

22:46Yeah. So I show I will show you Mars. Share this tab. So that's an interesting story. So it all started with me in 2020 where I want to build this ecosystem of 100 tools and run it with almost no people. So I had this vision from the store. That was my goal because I I knew that I love building stuff, and I knew that I wanna do it on my own terms with no VC funding. It

23:15means I have to be efficient.

Nathan Latka

23:17>> So we're looking at it here on my screen. Right?

John Rush

23:19Yeah, exactly. So number one step there in my game plan was to build AI coding tool that will simplify the the whole building process for me because I have to build 100 products. And just for that, you need thousands of people. Right? And back then, even more. So my first job was to build that. So I I spent, like, two, three years building it just myself while I had my other VC backed startup running, and I

23:47was running that too. But this was my hobby project basically in the weekends and evenings. And by 2022, I built the first version that was working, and then I started using Morse X to build all my next products using Morse X. So that's kind of

Nathan Latka

24:05>> makes a lot.

John Rush

24:06So first, I built the

24:10SaaS producing tool, and then I build the SaaS tools using this.

Nathan Latka

24:16>> Yep. Very cool. Well, hey. Look. As we wrap up, are you game to critique my SEO for five minutes and give me some live feedback?

John Rush

24:26Yeah. Sure.

Nathan Latka

24:27>> Alright. So let's do this. We're gonna do it for for for Gitlack. Alright? So this is when I record podcast interviews like this. Right? And then I come list the companies on my site with all the all the audio data that you just gave. Right? So the CEO say we do million of revenue and okay. Boom. That's a million of revenue. And our SEO strategy here, John, is we know that we rank really, really well, many

24:48>> times the number one spot for the keyword combinations. So programmatic SEO of company name plus the word revenue because our data source is the audio. Yeah. It's a really good strong data source. However, you can see here over to, like, Notion revenue, for example. Right? Mhmm. 1,200 clicks, 18 k impressions. You see what's happening here though. Right? Which is like we used to get 4,000 organic clicks per day on those impressions. And now with AI results,

25:11>> we're showing up in more impressions, a 190 k a day, but our clicks have gone down by about 50% on average per day. Right? Are you seeing this across a lot of your tools?

John Rush

25:19Yeah. Yeah. So, basically, as AI made it easier to enter the game, there are so many more people playing a SEL game compared to the year or two ago. So now it's much harder to win traffic. But at the same time, I think what you're doing is pretty cool. And actually, I

25:39saw your website when I was searching for the revenue of these companies, some other stuff. And you have this yeah. Yeah. You you have this reports. So I like, first time I landed on your site from reports where it was, like, wider re report about something. So I think Yeah.

Nathan Latka

26:00>> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Report. There's a lot. We do we do thousands of reports. But, like, where I'm struggling is we're trying to figure out so, like, okay. This is this is the page for Zapier revenue. And so, like, what I do, John, like, once a once a week is I'll go in and open up all the LLMs, and I'll just say something like, hey. What is Zapier's revenue? Because this is the new homepage of the Internet.

26:23>> Right? So I ask I I I just ask every LLM, what's Zapier's revenue? And I wanna see how many of them cite GitLatka. Now, like, I don't understand how all these work, but I imagine a lot of these are using content that they scraped when they launched the models, like, eight, you know, eight months ago. So they're not gonna have our most up to date data on GitLabka. Right?

John Rush

26:44Well, not anymore. So now almost all of them use live search. So most of them use Bing search, but Bing just closing down their API now, by the way. But until they do it, if you're presented on a Bing first page, then you'll be presented in most of the LLMs too, because almost everybody who's using LLM now uses LLM with the Internet search enabled. And that's why, like, in the old days, you would have to be

27:11in a training set, but now you don't have to be in training set. So now basically, the SEO game is also LLM game at the same time.

Nathan Latka

27:19>> Yes. Yeah. Well, this is what confuses me. Like, we dominate in perplexity. You can see up our logo. We come up number one. Right? And we get a lot like, people click in. They see my interview with Wade. Right? And it's great data. We've also structured all of this in a way so that the LMs can easily read it. Right? That's how they rebuild these sort of inside the the results here. So we get, like, a

27:37>> ton a ton of clicks from this. But what's interesting here is if I go back into, like, Claude, right, and we look at the sources here, like, we're not we're not it's like they don't even see us. We're not cited at all. Or or, sorry, we're cited number two. Yeah. That's not bad. Right?

John Rush

27:51But I think

Nathan Latka

27:52>> Yeah. But they don't but they don't link to it here. Like, no one's gonna click the no one's gonna actually click that drop down. They're gonna hover over these. And if we don't get quoted here, we're not gonna get traffic from Claude for that keyword.

John Rush

28:01Yeah. That's true. But I I think SEO is a long term game, and I think you should bet on one thing that all LLMs will end up searching Internet before they produce any results, and they will end up searching Internet in a very similar way. So basically, as long so if you think that Google is the best search on the Internet and everybody's trying to be like Google, some use Google, some are building their own engines

28:29like that's similar to Google. I think just focusing on being on top of Google in the long term will actually solve all that other problems. Maybe in the short term,

Nathan Latka

28:40>> you can This is interesting. Yeah. It's interesting, though. Right? Because look like Zapier revenue. Right? If you put this in here okay. I I got it. Okay. Interesting. So Tap Twice revenue is now on that top spot. We're in the second spot. So, like, maybe that's why they recently changed. But what, like, I don't understand is, like, if you come in here, like, this is clearly, like, an SEO written article. Like, it's really not but, like,

29:03>> we have

John Rush

29:04It's the backlinks. It's the backlinks. So the anchor text that's used in the search, you have to take that text and add backlinks to your URL using that exact

Nathan Latka

29:15>> But how do you know but how do you know that they have more backlinks than we do?

John Rush

29:19I guess if if you actually test this URL for backlinks, not this side, but exactly the URL, you will see the anchors and the backlinks. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

29:35>> Yeah. I don't know. Let me see here. Let me just do the main website, Tap Twice Digital. I guess, where I see, look, they have such a low domain rating of 28. This is what I don't understand. We we have better for someone looking for Zapier revenue, would you rather look at a blog post like this or an actual interview where the source is the CEO's voice? Like, see, we can actually have better data, but we're

29:54>> getting our butts kicked by some of these other tools that just, like, aggregate the data. You know? And I need to

John Rush

30:00grab a few So, basically, even a website with really poor domain domain rating can have high rating on a specific page. And the page rating is more important than the domain rating because Google actually looks at the page rating first.

Nathan Latka

30:15>> How do I look up the page rating in Ahrefs? You Like, do I just type in that full page like this?

John Rush

30:22Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

30:24>> But see, like, there's not like, this shows up almost with, like

John Rush

30:27Yeah. It's it's this URL. I guess that's the URL rating. But I would say that

Nathan Latka

30:34>> like, it's so it's so bad compared to us.

John Rush

30:36I wouldn't trust this data because most likely that's something they've done recently. And it's not shown here because there's no chance Google would bring it to the top if there were no a lot of backlinks on the same search query you just put there coming from other websites.

Nathan Latka

30:52>> Look at ours. Look at our page compared to what we just saw, like, two domain rating, 24 backlinks. Like, see, that's what don't understand, but we're getting less organic traffic now.

John Rush

31:00Yeah. So your URL rating is 12. Right? And Mhmm. I think Oh, that's what

Nathan Latka

31:05>> matters for the OMs.

John Rush

31:06Yeah. In this well, that matters for Google. Right? Because no.

31:13When when Google is trying to present something, the way it thinks is that if somebody has linked to this URL from other blog, there's a zero. There is zero. Think it's just lack of data on Ahrefs for their website, and they happen very often. Like, for example, my websites, a lot of them have almost nothing on Ahrefs, and the reality is is different.

Nathan Latka

31:35>> So so you think it's back to you don't think you don't think it's how they structure this, like how they structure in the bullet points, the h one tags, the charts, the graphs. You don't think it's the actual structure of the HTML here?

John Rush

31:46I think it might help, but I've done what I'm telling now myself. So few times I saw somebody on top of me on Google search results, and I just picked the query and I did this backlinks to the URL with anchor text, and eventually, I took the number one spot. So that works definitely. And and that's Mhmm. Like, that's the most typical series work you can do on SEO is to take page by page and just

32:15try to win against competitors using backlinks to that exact page. So you could try that. Like, do the experiment. So take this page

Nathan Latka

32:23>> and get

John Rush

32:24Do you

Nathan Latka

32:25>> see this? Like, how funny is this? I asked why it didn't use Gitlacka. This is Google Gemini. Right? And it said, well, actually, we use Tap Twice Digital, which itself cited Gitlacka. Right? So how well, you know, like, we are the source of the data, yet we don't get the traffic value. And it even says, ah, I'm giving Gitlacka credit. Yeah. That's interesting.

John's Advice on Backlinks and Internal Linking

Nathan Latka

32:44>> It's kinda funny, isn't it? Look. We don't know the answers to this. This is a quick moving space, but, like, I guess, do you have any advice from just in general?

John Rush

32:52You should try that. So say it again. To get 10 backlinks. So Mhmm. Like, what what was the search query you did? It was up

Nathan Latka

32:58>> your revenue.

John Rush

33:00Yeah. So take that text and Mhmm. Create backlinks to your URL where the text says exactly

Nathan Latka

33:10>> Can I submit it to your can I submit it to your directory, and you'll go get me a bunch of Zapier revenue backlinks?

John Rush

33:15Yeah. Yeah. That's possible.

Nathan Latka

33:18>> Yeah. Yeah. I guess the tricky part about that is, like, we have we have 35,000 of these pages. Yeah. So do I go get backlinks for each page just one by one over and over?

John Rush

33:28Well, the best thing to do is to have, like, your own websites, like, whole network of websites and automate this part because you you're doing programmatic sale, SEO, and then you could automate that part too. But also, do you have enough inner links? Like, do you link things to each other? Like Like, do you link?

Nathan Latka

33:51>> Like, do you what do you mean?

John Rush

33:53Like, do you have links to this Zapier revenue within your own blog and web website? Like, any Yeah. Like, if you

Nathan Latka

34:02>> go to, like, if you go to SaaS, like, SaaS database here, like, page is gonna link directly to the

John Rush

34:08Yeah. But that page won't be seen by Google because it's it's not static. It's dynamic. Dynamic. Yeah. Yeah. So you have to make sure your actual link

Nathan Latka

34:18>> is create more blog posts where inside of these blog posts, we link back to that company profile page.

John Rush

34:24Yeah. You should go crazy with links. So it's almost impossible just to make it wrong. Like, it's it's better to have more links than less links as long as those are internal links. And I see your blog now and it has almost no links. And you should try to link to everything you have internally. You know, sometimes you can even link words. Like if you if you say Zapier in any of your blog, just link to

34:49that page about the revenue. Mhmm. And then you'll have hundreds of those links. And that works really well.

34:56Yeah. So links often beat like, now where do you link? Like, scroll up. There was is that here now? Well, this is

Nathan Latka

35:05>> a different like, this is a different one, but, like, you can see here, it's using the same format as that as as this one. Right? You get the sense, like, they all start to look the same, right, which is just like a big summary of stuff, and they all cite me. They all cite Gitlatka, but Gitlatka is not getting the traffic.

John Rush

35:19Yeah. I guess they do no follow link to you. Most likely, it's no follow.

Nathan Latka

35:27>> Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. So what do you so that's your biggest recommendation is if you're trying

John Rush

35:32to get

Nathan Latka

35:33>> and show up in the LL, get backlinks. Yeah. Focus focus on the UR rating here.

John Rush

35:37Yeah. Because you have really good website. You have really good content, and I think you can 10x your clicks. You have really good impressions, but you're you're you're everywhere not on the top. You're, like, on the first page of a lot of the queries, but not on top. It means you have good content because the way to get to the top of the Google, like, first hand is by having good content because Google tries to evaluate

36:02your content. But to get to the top, you have to have this precise anchor links leading to your URL, both internally and externally from other websites and from your own website.

Nathan Latka

36:16>> Yep. Yep. Very cool. Well, look, this was a ton of fun. I feel like I just got, like, deep deep into your brain there going through this. So if people wanna learn more about you, they can obviously go to listingbot.com. They can go to seobot. They can follow you on Twitter. Anything else you wanna shout out?

Closing Thoughts and Where to Follow John

John Rush

36:32Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm one of the most often founder on X. Like, I think I share something every day, and I'm trying to share things which are useful for people so that they can apply that about growth, about building stuff, about ideating, and also how to start from zero. So and the way I learned things in the past was by following people on Twitter and reading what they say. And a lot of people now are

37:00asking me, like, how can I start? How can I start learning the, you know, this startup thing? And I'm like, you have to follow the people and just get into their brains, like, see how they act, see how they think, see how they reason, and then you'll start doing the same. So that's my Guys. Advice.

Nathan Latka

37:16>> There there you have it. John Rush. He was working for a bunch of VCs before then said, you know what? I'm gonna build my own studio of startups over 24 today. The biggest one is SEO bot doing a $120,000 a month in revenue. Very profitable. Only two people on the team. So $720,000 in revenue per employee. 30% of that growth is coming from SEO, 30% from cross promotions, 30% from social media. His second biggest tool, listing

37:37>> bot. He owns 90% of 50 k of MRR. And it's not SaaS. It's a one time payment, but a thousand new buyers are coming in every single month. He's built a programmatic way to keep launching great new tools with really smart SEO strategies in this new age of AI. Check him out on X. John Rush, thanks for taking us to the top.