The year is 1995. The internet is just taking off. Nascent search engines are helping early adopters on the internet discover websites. The word “blog” and the term “SEO” haven’t been invented yet. At this point, methods of ranking websites are extremely rudimentary — mostly around meta tags and certain keywords indicating what your website was about. Soon, this begins to lose signal as every websites begin “keyword stuffing.”
The year is 2004. Google has just gone public, and the revolutionary PageRank algorithm prioritizes websites based on quality of content and backlinks — leading to a massive improvement in signal to noise, and discoverability.
The year is 2012. There has been an explosion in company blogs (including startups). A massive cottage industry springs up to help companies with their SEO. Everyone tries to game the system; but Google’s regular algorithm updates penalized hacks, keeping publishers of content, and the SEO industry, on their toes. This generally proves effective; while everyone has a blog, most of them are of decent quality.
The year is 2019. Phones have now surpassed desktops in pageviews. Accordingly, mobile experience and page loading speed have become a critical aspect of SEO. Technologies are imagined and companies are formed to help businesses with load times (Vercel, Netlify). There has been a spike in slop, with clickbait, listicles, mass-production of SEO content, etc. But domain authority, load times, and backlinks still allow companies to stand out in a crowded market.
The year is 2025. Multi-modal content has become far more common thanks to the pandemic. Hiring offshore talent took content production to a whole other level… just in time for the advent of LLMs and AI-generated content. Right around this point of time, GEO / LEO (Generative / LLM Engine Optimization) emerges, to help companies “rank” in answers in the LLM chat interfaces (which are rapidly replacing search).
This has led to several interesting dilemmas:
- AI has taken “slop” to an art form — it used to mean that slop was low substance / low style; but now takes on the form of low substance / high style, fooling users and hence the PageRank algorithm.
- Google is stuck between a rock and a hard place… even identifying LLM content has become a really hard problem (and hence, expensive… Google can’t possibly afford to analyze every page it scrapes); also: if the goal is good content (measured by user perception), who’s to say this is even a problem!
- In parallel, the rise of GEO/LEO means that, Instead of humans producing content and humans consuming them… LLMs are now producing and consuming the content. The best answer from Google (and SEO experts is) — if your content is still helpful and high quality, then it will keep helping your domain authority.
- Other digital means of finding customers has also faded. Community building was all the rage during the pandemic, but was overdone; there are now too many Slack communities (and a graveyard of community management startups). Performance marketing has gotten increasingly expensive, especially due to privacy regulations and Apple’s ATT. Cold email is completely dead; open rates have plummeted and response rates round to zero. There is now a glut of podcasts, and LinkedIn / TikTok content has been turned to slop, too.
Large companies still have ways to generate leads: brand is still valuable. They have capital to show up in force at conferences and host in-person events.
What is a startup to do to get attention?
After all, attention is all you need…
There is always a push and pull, always a cycle: when a signal emerges, it gets gamed. This leads to massive quantity, inevitable to degraded quality, and the signal loses way to noise. A new signal emerges, and the cycle repeats. Each cycle brings with it a “proof of work” — a way for companies and content creators to stand out from the pack. A way to produce quality content that is not just a lead magnet, but an enduring brand artifact.
What edge does a high-quality startup still have today?
- Hard-won expertise in their space
- Hopefully, a sense of taste
- A propensity towards speed
Fortunately — and just in the nick of time — there is now a way for a startup to package all of this together, in a way that forms a new proof of work.
The rise of vibe coding — quickly building expressive mini-apps using AI-assisted development and intuition — has lowered the cost of building software to nearly zero. In 2025, someone with negligible coding skills but with deep, hard-won insight and strong product instincts can build powerful mini-apps… things that would have taken an engineer weeks or months to build even a couple of years ago.
There will no doubt be a massive wave of “fast fashion” apps, just as we saw in the wake of the iOS App Store in 2008. The indie hacker community is ready and waiting, and we’re seeing new products spin up left and right.
On the other hand, the App Store also saw the birth of massive companies like Uber, Snapchat, TikTok — all of which thrived in a mobile first environment.
While vibe coding is not (yet) at a point where it can build true enterprise grade software, it is absolutely perfect for offering true value to users, gaining goodwill, and building credibility by demonstrating expertise in the market.
These are exactly the things SEO was great at in the early days, before it got sloppified! This means that startups — usually the first movers in any wave — are in prime position to demonstrate their authority and taste to build a suite of (free, publicly available) tools to create a new avenue for top-of-funnel.
Software is the new content.
Welcome to the era of vibe magnets
SEO has become synonymous with blogs and text, but there’s no actual reason this needs to be the case. Here’s how lead magnets measure up on some of the critical criteria for domain authority (disclaimer: heavy input from my friend ChatGPT Chad Gippity below):
Criteria | Blogs | AV (e.g., Podcasts) | Vibe Magnets |
Organic Discoverability | ✅✅ Easily crawled & indexed; great for long-tail keywords. | ⚠️ Search engines index transcripts; video SEO is weaker. | ✅ Strong if unique, due to backlinks. |
Backlink Potential | ⚠️ Only exceptional blogs tend to earn organic backlinks. | ⚠️ Harder to link directly, but can earn embeds. | ✅✅ More likely to attract organic backlinks over time. |
Differentiation | ⚠️ Commoditized, especially with AI-generated content. | ✅ Strong if personality-driven, a unique voice. | ✅ Harder to copy at scale. |
Engagement & Dwell Time | ✅ Depends on writing quality and structure. | ✅✅ Creates longer sessions, deeper engagement. | ✅ Higher time-on-site and user interaction. |
Conversion Potential | ✅ Blog CTAs work well with content upgrades. | ⚠️ Harder to link direct conversion paths. | ✅ Works well if a mix of open & gated tools. |
Evergreen Value | ✅ Strong for well-written cornerstone content. | ⚠️ Has a shorter shelf life unless evergreen topics. | ✅✅ Evergreen tools retain traffic for years. |
Production Effort | ✅ Scalable with content teams or AI. | ✅ Requires editing, equipment, unique voice. | ⚠️⚠️ Needs design/dev resources. |
Brand-Building Power | ⚠️ Diluted by content saturation. | ✅ Personality / face of brand matters. | ✅ Authority signaling via unique insight. |
Virality | ✅ Blogs rarely “go viral” unless unique (which is hard to repeat). | ✅✅ Social platforms boost video/audio content. | ✅ Tools can spread via word-of-mouth in niche communities. |
AI Visibility (LEO/GEO) | ⚠️ Text may get summarized without attribution. | ⚠️ Transcripts help but not primary. | ✅ Unique tools sometimes cited by LLMs in answers. |
Tools go toe to toe with text & AV content on every dimension except effort. With the cost of software going to zero, we should expect this to flip (if it hasn’t already).
We’ve been leaning into this, with Autograph Tools
We started in…
- April: a rebuild of the Fair Offer, 5M+ offer combinations via an algorithmic approach — for any title, any stage, anywhere in the world
- May: the Culture Compass, a Myers-Briggs-style personality test, but for companies
- July: the Weighing Machine, a back-of the envelope DCF to quick (and very accurately) estimate a company’s fair enterprise value
- Now (August): the Org Designer, giving finance execs / founders the ability to quickly design their dream organization in 15-30 minutes, without mucking around in spreadsheets
We’re aiming to ship one of these every month. There’s so much good stuff coming.
And all of them are free.
It’s early days, but it certainly appears that a) people find them useful and b) they endure in utility over time. Despite no attention to keyword management…
Fair Offer gets thousands of visitors a month.
The Weighing Machine gets hundreds of visitors and thousands of uses per month (week 35 = this week) over the last 2 months.
A hidden opportunity to undercut competitors: the best price is zero dollars.
If you want to play this game on hard mode, there’s no reason a vibe magnet needs to be an “applet.” With the state of vibe coding today, it is entirely possible to build full-fledged applications. And with dev cost trending to zero, you can give it away for cheap, or even free.
This is why we built the Org Designer.
Everyone ranging from a Seed-stage founder to a Series B CFO can use this to quickly model out their headcount by function, over time.
Thanks to a breakdown by initiative, it also forms a great start to the “use of proceeds” that are required during fundraising diligence.
You can design just one function if you’re an exec, or you can mix and match functions for a company-wide plan.
This is a lightweight version of many competitors’ apps. Our message is loud and clear. If we can give this away for free, imagine how powerful our actual product is.
Some ideas on how to run the vibe magnet playbook
Here are a few things we’ve learned in our 6 months building these:
- Leverage your expertise and hard-won insights. We tried very hard to build genuinely useful things — things meeting the bar that other companies charge for, but which we were able to build quickly because we just understand the space that damned well.
- Building something is easy. Building something good is hard. If you put out software slop, it’s not really much better than putting out SEO slop. Spend the time to build something incredible. If it’s successful, this will be the first impression that many prospects will have of your brand.
- 90%+ of carpentry is sanding. If you’re doing it right, the quick-and-dirty version might only take an hour… but the polish and care required for a really great resource takes 40-50 hours, and a really good app takes 100+ hours.
- Just because it's free to your customers doesn't mean it's free for you — especially in human capital. Quality products take time and care to build, and maintain. Ensure that you can spare the bandwidth.
- Charging for it might be more trouble than it’s worth. We had a serious debate over whether to charge for the Org Designer — we’re really proud of it. But if we charged for it, we’d have to provide proper support, keep improving it, get on sales calls… so we decided to price all of them at $0.
- Be careful about accepting sensitive user data. In order to limit distractions to the engineering team, we involved them only minimally when building our magnets. This means that we were cautious to avoid collecting any sensitive information from users. We took security precautions, but even so: the Org Designer doesn’t ask for employee info or personally identifiable info; just high level information about number of roles.
- Build for your persona, not for your product. Just like with content, don’t try to make things that are only directly relevant to your product. It’s okay to build adjacent things, as long as they still speak to your ICP.
- Your magnets should make each other better. Ideally, the IP from one product can be woven into another. For example, we’re going to reuse the Weighing Machine algorithm to create a fundraising strategy guide for CFOs & Founders. We’re going to combine Fair Offer and the QSBS Calculator into a net new employee resource.
- Distribute it, constantly. We regularly share the tools where it’s organic and relevant… on X, on LinkedIn, and woven into in-person conversations with customers or prospects.
- Capitalize on traffic. When you get high intent traffic, guide users to your product effectively. (We’re really bad at this…)
Final Notes
We might see the invention of a new job function. Just as “SEO Specialist” and “Growth Engineering” became job functions over the last 20 years, it’s likely that a new role will emerge to fill this role: someone with a terrific sense of product taste, quick at iteration, and effective at automation (to convert leads). That said — I think it’s likely that the best of these products will be built by founders. The farther it gets from the center of gravity for the company, the sloppier it will feel. Founders closest to the problem, and tend to be particularly good at taste and speed.
This too will turn to slop. Just as every wave in the past, we’ll see this gamed, too. But we’ll probably have a few years before everyone gets around to it.
Shoutouts to the trailblazers who did it before it was cool: The first ones to do this well were LTSE Tools (sadly, sunsetted). Many companies have done this in one-off ways that are powerful (Hubspot’s Website Grader, Canva’s Resume Builder, Grammarly’s Grammer Checker), or clever (Zapier’s “connect X to Y” programmatic SEO that blurred content and tooling). But just to give you a sense of how successful it can get… the most effective lead magnet is also the most successful product of all time: ChatGPT. So… yeah. It’s possible one of these is so effective that it drives your whole company forward.
Now that these can be built by someone non-technical in a few days… we should be excited to see what the most clever, scrappy startups produce in the months and years to come. As the saying goes, this is the worst it will ever be.
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