Rune Connor

🛠️ Solo builder and educator
💻 Currently making Rust language videos on Youtube

[Rune Connor @runeconnor]

👉 New Update (12/1/2023)

🛠️ Context: I have been running an SEO experiment with a 100% AI-generated site (https://t.co/rwfsnIopCQ) to see if Google would index it.

💻 Result (see video): AI-generated spam sites do not rank. Also sharing all my Python code below.

Next:
- I'll be working on an indie gaming and a game modding website
- Creating Hugo courses for YouTube and Udemy
- Learning React and UX/UI
- Continue teaching classes at the university

Stay tuned for more updates!

📋 Get My Python Source Code Here:
https://t.co/c4nWOTAk5q

📺 Link to Youtube Version of the Video:
https://t.co/vmz4cieB5m

[Niche Site Lady @NicheSiteLady]

I make $10k/month by posting my blog posts to my Facebook page. 🤑

Here are the exact posts that you should be writing if you want to make a lot of money...

(These work for ANY niche) 👇

[Rune Connor @runeconnor]

@jscix @AaronJay_ @alexalbert__ Exactly. The LLM is a complex mathematical entity with a gazillion parameters and layers upon layers of hidden nodes. People conflate the curve-fitting (aka training) with the underlying model, of which we know very little.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

People on here waiting months/years for "the right idea"

When the point is the right idea gets to you when you working on the wrong idea and even then it might not even be the right idea yet, it'll evolve 10 more times to become the right idea

Then it'll only be the right idea for a while and you can make money on it before you need to evolve it into the next idea

So the whole "right idea" approach is completely wrong, it's more like be on the "right flowstate journey" perpetually which involves tapping into what's going on around you (eg on here) well

[Rune Connor @runeconnor]

@TimothyBramlett @marclou It's not really a philosophy. As with all things, it all depends; mostly on your skillset, and how fast you want to move. If you are not an experienced programmer, by all means use a no-code solution. :)

[Rune Connor @runeconnor]

@TimothyBramlett @marclou I custom build everything, except maybe the server, itself. Not saying it is always the way to go, but being able to build whatever you want and doing it fast gives you control over every aspect of your design, which is appealing, if you have the skill for it.

[Rune Connor @runeconnor]

@marclou Do you recommend Screen Studio over OBS?

[Rune Connor @runeconnor]

@TimothyBramlett @marclou I doubt it took much time, as he explained

[Marc Lou @marclou]

Me in 2021:

- $0 income
- Depressed
- Living at my parents

Me in 2024:

- $55,000/month
- 69,000 followers
- @ProductHunt Maker of the Year

Everything improves when you show up daily

[Dan Kulkov @DanKulkov]

Message to all Founders stuck at $100 MRR.

Stop being obsessed with the "indie" part:
• PH upvotes
• build in public
• twitter friends
• 100% organic marketing

Focus on the "business" part instead:
• great UX
• social proof
• marketing funnel
• no-brainer pricing

[Shane Dutka @ShaneDutka]

Here's an affiliate website that...

1. Has a 5 year consistent upward traffic curve
2. Is 90%+ "best" affiliate content (1K+ pages)
3. Isn't DR60+ but ranks above DR90+ sites

babygearlab(.)com

My notes on their SEO strategy... 🧵 (1/9)

[Jake Ward @jakezward]

I pulled off an SEO speedrun that ranked a brand-new site in 24 hours.

- I bought a new domain
- I published 1,000 articles
- I got SEO traffic hours later

A world record? Let’s see...

Here’s how it played out:

[Prasad @theprasad_]

I simplified my 4 years of marketing lessons into minimalistic visuals.

1. We pay for logos, not for products.

[Dan Kulkov @DanKulkov]

21 marketing lessons from $0 to $20,000/mo journey

1. Marketing funnel eats launch days for breakfast
2. Selling a $99 one-time payment is easier than a $5 monthly subscription
3. If you are afraid of sending one marketing email, you don't have anything valuable to say
4. Most of your customers have never posted or replied online
5. Selling early bird deals is the easiest way to make sure you will ship the product
6. Don't measure metrics that you don't plan to act on
7. Good content marketing provides rational (tangible results) and emotional (how does it make me feel) value
8. Most marketing tasks (cold outreach, audience building, SEO) don't require any paid tools to get started
9. The easiest way to get backlinks is to do cool shit for 6+ months
10. Great landing page design will outweigh the lack of product features
11. Loom-style product videos will sell x5 better than generic illustrations
12. PageSpeed Report scores have nothing to do with SEO (it's all ego)
13. Adding Problem Agitation to your landing page will double your conversion rate
14. You don't get bonus points for ignoring discounts and ads
15. The more details you try to cover, the worse your copy will convert
16. A weekly newsletter will change your marketing funnel in 1 year
17. Not email-keeping free AI wrappers will triple their results
18. Endorsement from an opinion leader is worth 5 user testimonials
19. The more users you are willing to lose, the easier it will be to convert your ideal customer
20. The number of marketing experiments has a direct correlation with your MRR
21. Asking 20 users to roast your landing page will be painful and life-changing

[Rune Connor @runeconnor]

Competition (against humans) from AI is picking up.

[Santiago @svpino]

We are one step closer to having AI generate code better than humans!

There's a new open-source, state-of-the-art code generation tool. It's a new approach that improves the performance of Large Language Models generating code.

The paper's authors call the process "AlphaCodium" and tested it on the CodeContests dataset, which contains around 10,000 competitive programming problems.

The results put AlphaCodium as the best approach to generate code we've seen. It beats DeepMind's AlphaCode and their new AlphaCode2 without needing to fine-tune a model!

I'm linking to the paper, the GitHub repository, and a blog post below, but let me give you a 10-second summary of how the process works:

Instead of using a single prompt to solve problems, AlphaCodium relies on an iterative process that repeatedly runs and fixes the generated code using the testing data.

1. The first step is to have the model reason about the problem. They describe it using bullet points and focus on the goal, inputs, outputs, rules, constraints, and any other relevant details.

2. Then, they make the model reason about the public tests and come up with an explanation of why the input leads to that particular output.

3. The model generates two to three potential solutions in text and ranks them in terms of correctness, simplicity, and robustness.

4. Then, it generates more diverse tests for the problem, covering cases not part of the original public tests.

5. Iteratively, pick a solution, generate the code, and run it on a few test cases. If the tests fail, improve the code and repeat the process until the code passes every test.

There's a lot more information in the paper and the blog post. Here are the links:

• Paper: https://t.co/OFzeRGIYvz
• Blog: https://t.co/3BiAfpTFA2
• Code: https://t.co/rcGwx220lM

I attached an image comparing AlphaCodium with direct prompting using different models.

2024 has barely started, and we are making a ton of progress!

[Niche Site Lady @NicheSiteLady]

I threw up 60 AI-generated blog posts on a new site to see what would happen.

9 months later they’re making me $500/month.

So yeah, it works. Whether we like it or not.

[Nick Huber @sweatystartup]

A megathread of all of the services I'm using to grow my companies today.

Bookmark this.

All the tools, services and strategies (free and paid) I utilize across my 11 companies from launch to growth phases.

Lets go:

A web domain and website.

Customers find you on the internet. This is the most critical part of your business. Don't skimp here.

You need a clear, concise website designed to convert online shoppers to paying customers.

The scrappy way:

Go on SquareSpace (used to be Google Domains) and buy a domain and watch youtube videos to learn how to build the website on Wordpress or Webflow.

The ideal way:

Buy a premium domain on https://t.co/KsPiIY0JGO and buy a two word domain that is easy to remember with less than 12 characters.

Hire https://t.co/xxUE0xzRfS to build your website (they've built 10+ of mine). They focus on simplicity, conversions and SEO and they add design elements to make it look professional.

Make sure you have landing pages for each individual service you offer and each town you offer it in.

Get a good form on your site to collect customer info and use calendly to allow the customers to book sales calls with your team. Organize customer data in a CRM like Airtable or Hubspot. WebRun folks can help you with this.

Logo:

I use 99 designs for all of my logos. Not always perfect and you need to check for other trademarks using image search tool.

Google Business Profile:

Set up a google account and build your profile so local customers can search it. Get citations done (Bold SEO can help here). Get reviews from real customers ASAP. Use a service like NiceJob if necessary to collect reviews.

Phone number:

Get a company phone number. The scrappy way is Google Voice. Ring Central or other services are better for multiple employees, etc.

Email:

Set up a G Suite account and get an email address, calendar, Drive, etc with your company domain as the tag.

Search engine optimization:

Great landing pages and site structure is important. WebRun can help you with that. Google reviews and an optimized Google Business Profile is critical as well.

But you need a few backlinks to your website to increase your domain authority and get found online. Links to your site are votes of confidence in the eyes of Google.

The scrappy way here is to sponsor sports teams, donate to charities, ask your friends for links, go on podcasts, do guest posts, etc.

The easier way is to hire a link building service to do this work for you. I use https://t.co/4qtagQsWPx to source 50+ links a month across my portfolio to grow my domain authority.

Go to this site to check your domain authority vs your competitors. If you are lower than your competitors, get more links:

https://t.co/Q9aMZ2YiEE

Paid Ads:

You can watch youtube videos and learn to run your own paid ads on Google. If you do less than $1k per month of ad spend I recommend this or getting a friend to help you.

If you spend more than that I recommend hiring an agency to help you run the paid ads.

I use https://t.co/5y9gKmX3r7 to run $100k + of monthly adspend across my portfolio of companies. They set up Google Analytics 4 and help you get real data on cost per lead and cost per conversion so you can figure out your Return on Ad Spend.

Communication:

Get Slack so your company can communicate in an organized fashion.

Bookkeeping / Tax Returns:

Get an LLC created so you can open up a company bank account. I use https://t.co/BYm9owYXu6 to do my monthly bookkeeping and also create my K1s and tax returns for a monthly fee. My friend Mitchell Baldridge runs this company and he's a great guy.

Company insurance:

A general liability insurance policy is a necessity. https://t.co/69DR1tt7D8 does my GL and property and casualty insurance across my real estate company and others.

They specialize in real estate heavy businesses so you may need to contact a local broker on your own.

Hiring:

I think overseas employees are an excellent way to grow your business without increasing overhead. I use a recruiting company called https://t.co/0yF9bNSQE1 to hire them.

80% of my employees across my businesses are located in Latin America and the Philippines.

What they do for me:

- Customer service
- Collections
- Financial analysis / Underwriting
- Project management
- Web development
- Engineering
- Sales
- Admin assistant
- Management

And much more.

One of the employees I hired last year will definitely end up running one of my companies someday - an extremely talented individual.

A few more reasons:

80% less cost than US employees. Not entitled. Don't ask for a raise every 6 months. Team players. Positive attitude. Grateful to be a part of my company.

How did I find them?

I used a recruiting company called https://t.co/0yF9bNSQE1 to help me make the hires.

Recruiting US based employees:

The scrappy way:

Walk in every retail biz in town and hand cards to anyone who looks physically able.

Esp Starbucks, Walmart (watch the folks going out for carts and approach the ones who hustle).

“Know anyone looking for work? We pay $20 an hour.”

The applications will come.

The easy way:

I've used a recruiting company called https://t.co/YGUEvQnSTE to find and recruit US talent for my companies. Sales reps, engineers, managers, etc.

Hiring and delegation strategy:

Hiring and managing is hard. Here is a breakdown of how I do it:

https://t.co/ZmKDk2f6DP

Payroll:

I use https://t.co/edFynOfXEr to manage my company payroll, sick days, vacations, bonuses and more. It is a great service.

Payment processing:

I use https://t.co/QpY12DXqkv to collect payments at most of my companies. I encourage most $1k + ticket items to be paid with ACH or I add an extra fee for the buyer, which you can do on stripe.

Sales and executive coaching:

I hire executive coaches for all of my upper level management. I also hire sales coaches for all of my sales reps to increase their closing percentages and fine tune their strategies.

I use a company called https://t.co/xLUwe0piy0 (which I founded) to organize all of this.

It pays for itself quickly because the closing percentages increase drastically and my sales reps become serious assets.

Online banking:

I use https://t.co/SVXz9Tyxh1 to run my online banking for almost all of my companies. Many folks prefer Mercury and if you do local business you might want to just use a local bank.

I can move money easily, make payments, create credit cards for my employees, etc.

AI notetaker:

I use Avoma in all of my zoom meetings so I can get transcripts and keep notes of all the meetings that happen in my companies.

All of my teams are remote with no offices. This is critical.

A second monitor for everyone:

Sounds silly but no employees at your company should work for even a minute without a second monitor. If they don't have one, get them one.

What am I missing?

What are you using to help your company be more efficient or drive sales?

Disclaimer (I am an investor or partner in several of the companies mentioned in this post).

[Spencer Haws @nichepursuits]

We have a WINNER for the "grow an existing site with AI" challenge!

After 90 days, this person was able to generate over 100k organic visitors from Google with his AI content.

2nd place? Only 12k organic traffic!

Oh, and the winner reveals his site!

What started as 73 participants 90 days ago, ended with just 16 people completing the challenge.

Check out the full results in the next tweet.

[Rune Connor @runeconnor]

How to actually do marketing. Till that soil!

[Taylor Holiday @TaylorHoliday]

We sold over $100M worth of silicone wedding rings in 4 years with QALO.

We did it primarily with product on white ads like this one.

No fast edits, crazy hooks or fake UGC.

Here's how we made this ad so successful without touching the ad account...

[Connor Showler | SEO & Marketing Master @ConnorShowler]

Pro SEO Tip #1: 🕵️‍♂️ Build your own Private Blog Network. (Pt. 1)

This is a series that will run in parallel to the sneaky backlinks series. I decided to start with PBN since every Pro I know, owns their own private blog network..

In the begining you will inevitably have to invest in link building in one way or another, to power up your own private blog network (PBN).

Eventually the goal is to have enough juice within your PBN's that you're no longer fully dependant on outside sources to send authority to your "money sites". 💸

Owning distribution for your own links makes you a force to be reckoned with, and allows you to monetize your network in a multitude of ways including:

- Powering up your own money sites. (This is what I do)
- Ad revenue from your blogs.
- Affiliate revenue from your blogs.
- Selling PBN links as a freelancer on platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, Legiit & more.
- Selling PBN links as an agency.

As you can see there are MANY ways to earn from PBNs.

I've explained WHY you would want to have your own PBN.

But how do you go about setting it up? 🧐

If I were a complete newbie with zero web design skills, zero content writing skills, and zero SEO knowledge, here is what I would do step by step:

Step 1. Pick a niche & buy a fresh domain. ✅

Don't start with a general blog, pick a niche you're interested in learning about or have experience in, then buy a fresh domain related to it. Namecheap is dope, I use it for most of my domain purchases even when I don't use their hosting. (More on this below)

If you can learn to do this on fresh domains, you will easily graduate to buying and rebuilding expired domains with existing authority and backlink profiles.

Step 2. Host the domain. 🛜

For hosting you can use whatever you want but I like shared hosting from Namecheap especially if you're starting out. It's cheap and you can add multiple domains as "add-on" domains to the shared hosting, letting you host your sites for pennies on the dollar.

For the purpose of PBN I don't suggest hosting more than 10 domains per hosting environment because your competitors/Google are looking for this sort of structure so you run the risk of being ratted out/manually penalized + you run the risk of getting ALL your sites on that hosting plan hacked if ONE of them gets hacked (this has happened to me twice - it's a MASSIVE headache doing the cleanup and restoring backups after a hack).

Step 3. Build a website with WordPress + Elementor. 🪄

WordPress has its shortcomings but it's still the easiest, cheapest option for setting up websites with the customizability, ease of use and scalability needed to create and grow PBNs..

Namecheap shared hosting let's you easily install WordPress on your sites via cPanel. 👍

Take a quick YT tutorial on it if need be, but don't overthink this stage, it's not rocket science.

Elementor plugin for WP let's you design web pages with no code, and has MANY template options you can use to cut down on workload and learning curve.

Other plugins you should download:

- Smush
- Hummingbird
- Yoast
- Wordfence
- Really Simple SSL (if needed)

Ok time to publish a homepage, make sure your homepage doesn't LOOK like a PBN aka just a blank page with blog roll.. 🤖

Your homepage should have minimum 1-2k words of content and be structured to at least LOOK like an ecommerce store, small business website, agency website, directory, SaaS, etc.

Preferably it actually IS one of the above business models even if you don't have the associated product/service ready yet.

You can use GPT for the skeleton of your homepage content, but it should at least be put through minor editing by a human writer so it's not pure GPT shpill..

Make sure you're collecting emails with a lead capture form and call to action somewhere on the homepage. 📩

(Pt. 2 continued tomorrow)

[Daniel Nguyen @daniel_nguyenx]

Underrated way to find startup ideas:

1. Look for the feature request board of an established product

2. Find the most voted feature request that staling

3. Build the PoC with only such feature

4. Ask for feedback from people who voted for that feature (if possible)

✌️