Julia & Serge

In this special episode of The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, we don’t just have one guest joining us, but we have two guests.

I wanted to invite Julia Nesterets, the CEO and Serge Bezborodov, the CTO of JetOctopus (an SEO tool supporting the technical SEO industry) as I wanted to get into what it is really like to build and grow an SEO tool from the ground up.

I got into their story of how they have managed to bootstrap (self-fund) the development and customer growth of JetOctopus, competing with the other SEO tools on the market who have deep pockets when it comes to budgets due to the investment they receive.

I (Mark A Preston) have always been a big fan of helping the unknown brands become well-known with limited budgets, so this conversation with Julia and Serge is one you will very much enjoy listening to.

The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast with Julia and Serge

Watch the interview

(click the ‘cc’ icon to view subtitles)

Listen to the podcast

(55 minutes long)

The unscripted questions Mark A Preston asked Julia and Serge

• Why did you originally decide to start building JetOctopus?

• From a technical perspective, how do you even start to think about building such an SEO tool?

• How much effort and resource goes into building a tool dedicated to technical SEO?

• How did you know when the right time was to launch JetOctopus to the public?

• What’s the differentiator of JetOctopus compared to all the other SEO SAS products on the market?

• What specifically makes JetOctopus a technical SEO tool?

• How deep does technical SEO actually go, as most tools on the market are very top level?

• How can JetOctopus help an SEO to structure their internal linking?

• What did the launch strategy of JetOctopus look like taking into account the competition with massive marketing budgets?

• How important was it to get the pricing model right to ensure you secure a constant flow of new paying customers?

• From a bootstrapping perspective, what low cost marketing ideas has been the most impactful?

• How has JetOctopus as a technical SEO tool had to change over time due to the conversations you are having with your customers?

• What’s your thoughts on some people stating that they used an AI tool to help them build a SAS product?

• As a bootstrapped company, do you have any regrests on not taking on investment to allow you to grow faster?

• Does being totally self-funded make a big difference in your decision making compared to if you were investment led?

• What are the top three things technical SEO specialists need to be thinking about?

• Do you offer a free trial so tech SEOs can see the benefits of JetOctopus before deciding to subscribe?

The unscripted conversation between Mark A Preston, Julia Nesterets & Serge Bezborodov

Mark A Preston: Welcome to the unscripted SEO interview podcast. Yes, it’s 100% unscripted, 100% unrehearsed, 100% unedited, and 100% real. I’m your host, Mark A. Preston, and today is a first for the podcast. We’ve not just got one special guest, but we’ve got two special guests joining us. We’ve got Julia, the CEO, and Serge, the CTO of JetOctopus. Now, rather than me making a trashy introduction, I’m just going to ask each one of them just to introduce themselves first and what’s their background and everything. So, Julia, welcome to the podcast.

Julia Nesterets: Hello, Mark. Thank you for having me today.

Mark A Preston: Okay, how long have you been in the industry? What’s your background? What’s your story? So the audience understand.

Julia Nesterets: Our story is really interesting; it is like written in the books. JetOctopus was born from our own pain. We are together with Serge for ten years already and our previous business was a big website, which is job aggregator. It had around 5 million pages, and we faced the moment when the SEO traffic stopped growing, and no agency helped us.  So they just didn’t know what to do, and we faced the need to dive deeper ourselves, and there was the need to make the technical SEO audit. And luckily, we’ve got a very expensive offer from the vendor of such cloud-based technical SEO crawler, and that was much higher than we expected and at the end of the day, Serge actually is a genius developer. At the end of the day, we developed some models that from the very beginning, the decision was just to make some models to make some prior on page SEO audit and at the end of the day, we found out that this is actually at least 60% of the core of the platform and we decided to make it a separate business and that’s where JetOctopus was born five years ago.

Mark A Preston: So, Serge, from a technical background, how do you even start to think about developing such a tool?

Serge Bezborodov: Ah, thank you for the question. So from general, from my background, I’m not like truly SEO.  But last five years I’m speaking on SEO like interviews, conferences, and probably I should go to some developer conference as well. But for last ten years, what I work in industry and with the big websites, I’m always was near technical SEO, because you know, it’s all about crawling, how your website performs, et cetera. And if you want to do something good, you should dive deeper and understand, not just me as a developer doing some SEO tasks and I always wanted to dig, to understand, and to improve what I’m doing. And as Julia said, I’m a bit… I can say like a stupid guy, but something like, if I have a target, we will go for this target and as per usual, when you started something, you don’t understand fully how huge it should be. You always thinking it should be more or less easier, the path should be more or less strained forward, but you just think on it and the reality came much harder. But anyway, you see the results and JetOctopus, for now, is a big tool for technical SEO, and it gives me also opportunity to talk with so many professional technical SEO guys and girls, and it’s really inspiring me to work harder and to implement new features and cool functionality into the JetOctopus.

Mark A Preston: Well, a few years ago, when I had my own agency, I did have my own developers, and I come up with this stupid idea of building this own tool. Then I realized the effort and resource that we needed, so I put a lid on it. So I can appreciate everything you go through to build such a thing.

Serge Bezborodov: I can say just few words, if you want to calculate everything before starting like you know all circumstances you will never start. You should be a bit I’m sorry, stupid like to start something brand new. 

Julia Nesterets: And I will add here we are lucky with Serge, being of different skills and it give us opportunity to launch a business just for two of us, like having two of us on board without hiring any additional resources and then when the business is growing to the level, when we can hire, we are doing it. So right now it is at least like ten people in house and a lot of outsourced people doing some part time job for us. So this is not just to be stupid enough to start something, but this is a very good thing to have a partner who is of different skills that you are in our case is like, really techy guy making really great stuff himself in terms of technical things and I am all about strategy, positioning, marketing, sales, people, hiring, motivating, et cetera, et cetera.

Mark A Preston: When you started building this tool, how did you know when the right time to launch it was to the public or to the industry? How do you know or is the no right time? We’ll just thought we’ll put it out and see what happens or what’s the thinking beyond that? Or when?

Julia Nesterets: I love this question. Two years before that moment, where we saw that we have already 60% of the platform of SaaS business. Two years before, I was in the conference SaaS Nation, and it was absolutely new for me because we have a job aggregator, it has nothing to do with SaaS, and I was really inspired by the companies speaking there, by the business model, et cetera, et cetera and I came back from this conference and said to Serge, that the next business should be SaaS. After a year, he went with me for this conference and he realized what I’m talking about, why SaaS is attractive and after a year, we have such a situation that we just born from our business needs. And we’ve been analyzing deeply the market situation at that moment, we knew our competitors to the details and we’ve just managed to make something dramatically better than the competitors have and at the end of the day, to make the SEO world a better place because we have the mission to make the powerful technical SEO platform affordable to all, not only to enterprise companies, because that was the moment, that was the pain where JetOctopus was born, because we were the company with the business needs for a powerful platform, because it was 5 million pages website and Screaming Frog is really useless there, really. And we’ve got enterprise price, really. So we had the business needs, but we couldn’t afford that and the initial mission of us was and is and will be to make a platform really powerful, which is capable to process hundred millions of pages and we have such customers with hundred millions of pages. And don’t charge Ferrari each month for this.

Mark A Preston: So regarding JetOctopus, obviously in the SaaS industry, within the SEO industry, there’s quite a number of names out there. What is it? What’s the differentiators with JetOctopus? I’m asking because I’ve never personally used it, so I really don’t know.

Julia Nesterets: The main difference is that, of course, we have to start with that our crawler is the fastest and it is dramatically faster like, we are capable to scan 250 pages per second. It all depends on your service but the most important difference is that we have all in one technical SEO platform, which costs five and sometimes ten times less than our competitors cost and it is not because of some damping policy. No, we are very okay with our ROI, with our margins, et cetera. This is thanks to that genius of our CTO, who made the architecture of the platform dramatically different and our cost line for processing this big data is ten times less, that’s why we are capable to charge ten times less.

Mark A Preston: Why would you say that it’s a technical SEO SaaS tool rather than a standard SEO tool? What makes it a technical SEO tool as opposed to just a normal, everyday, all in one?

Serge Bezborodov: I will say some controversial words, I hate links and of course I don’t want to make a second majestic second Hrefs for example. And as Julia said, from our needs and I remember five years ago I think a bit less, but everybody talked about backlinks some BBN (11:53) networks and gray niches probably do remember some content, high scraper, so on and so on, but when you have a big website, it doesn’t so much apply for you. You have millions of pages in index and you can’t put backlink to every page, right? and you have to do something with internal linking at least. And I saw our competitors in job aggregator, when perform way better and it started to dig and how they do it and how do you analyze your competitors with for example 5 to 10 million of pages? You have to crawl it, you have to build a graph to understand their strategy, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s one part and the second part. For me personally, technical SEO is very complicated thing, right? We are not talking now about fixing four or four pages and redirect chain, we are talking about interesting stuff and it’s very interesting and very hard, a lot of data analysis on and I love it, his answer.

Julia Nesterets: And it is always impactful on your SEO. When you do it right, your SEO will be growing and it is a long term approach. It is not just when you have these backlinks, it is growing. Technical SEO is different thing and when you do it right, your SEO will be growing.

Mark A Preston: So for the audience, who think technical SEO is just literally the basics and crawling and indexing, how deep does technical SEO go? So just for the audience to understand the technical SEO arena, I mean, how deep does it go?

Serge Bezborodov: As per usual, it depends and depends of your website, of course. So if you have a landing page with a landing website with a few pages, okay, you have another sort of technical SEO, which we can say on page SEO, about content optimization like tags, et cetera, and backlinks of course we can go without them. When we are talking about middle size websites, like 10,000 pages, 50 things became complicated and when we are talking about millions of pages, things became very complicated and the more pages on your website, the more attention should you pay for some parts and some obvious of them will be, for example, loading time. Like if you have a really huge website and you have problems with loading time for Google bot, you will never have good indexation because like physically, Googlebot can crawl your website fully just because of the time and Googlebot doesn’t want to slow down your web server, right? And after fixing some basic things like loading time content, in the end of the day you will come to internal linking, because it doesn’t work when you have a huge sitemap and your web pages are not linked at all like, sitemap doesn’t work in 2023, okay? And internal linking for me on big websites is the most difficult part and in few words, we can say like you may wonder why it’s so difficult because a few words like how internal linking work the more important your page is, the more internal links should point to this page, right? But when it came to real world, it became so complicated, so hard to build such internal linking formula, to have properly linked pages and proper distribution, because otherwise it’s always from experience at what I saw from our clients experiments, et cetera. So when you make your internal linking not fully, but like for example you did the task for 70% it doesn’t enough, if you should do it correctly, like, for 100% it will work and you will give results. Otherwise it will be just wasting of time, money and resources.

Mark A Preston: Just so I understand, how does the tool help you to structure your internal linking structure?

Serge Bezborodov: Easily. So we have a few models inside and each model responsible for own part. So, first of all, it’s crawler, right? Like everybody knows screaming frog, great tool and JetOctopus crawler is not a bit, but much more powerful and for example, you crawl your website fully, like and the word fully 1 million pages, you crawl it fully, 10 million pages you crawl it fully without any partial crowd; let’s crawl by directories, et cetera. For internal linking perspective, you should crawl your website fully. It’s a buzzword for me and in general, to realize how many internal links do you have? and after you go for distribution, what type of pages, how they link it, do they have enough links, et cetera. So you got the picture, it’s the first step, right? After you get the picture, you realize some ideas and you want to okay, let’s improve linking on this category, let’s add some new links. Okay, you made it. You put in your links and what, how can you check it? Okay, you can go to Google Analytics and to see probably some traffic increase or to Google Search Console but again, when we are talking about big websites, Google Search Console doesn’t give you all the data, right? Google Analytics if you got out of limits and you don’t use in Google Analytics 360 also leads to some problems and here comes locks to help you.

With locks you can easily in two weeks for example to understand does your new deal like your directory where you make some experiments with internal linking? Does it has increasing in crawling budget or decreasing probably or nothing had changed and with locks you just saving tons of time you don’t have to wait two weeks, one month, I don’t know, three months how many should we wait to some changes? You see, you made an experiment, google bot has scrolled your pages, nothing happens. Okay, your experiment doesn’t work. Let’s go further right and okay, after we can work with Google Search Console and I do recommend it’s for everybody like, add subfolders to your Google Search Console right now, like you’re listening to this podcast, go to Google Search Console and starting to add your subfolders as many as you can and as many we are talking about thousands. If you have a big website and you have directory structure, add thousand subfolders of your big websites and after write me on Twitter, send you search for that, you will have much, much more information about impressions in your subfolders. Like for big websites is mandatory and with help of three module crawl, analyze logs, analyze how it’s changed in terms of crawling budget and after in Google Search console, how it behaves insert like simple.

Mark A Preston: Simple?

Julia Nesterets: I just add one small remark. This approach makes your SEO not hypothetical, but fully understandable and predictable at the end of the day, because when you see the impact on Google bots behavior and he is actually your main customer here, because if it doesn’t visit your commercial pages, they will never be ranked, they will never bring you traffic. So he is number one customer, you should watch him, you should understand him, and you should try to control him at the end of the day. And our log analyzer is the most visualized, and it is not the techie process anymore. We are working really hard, a lot of time, making it visual for you to just understand the insights, where it is visiting, which pages are ignored and why, what you should change on these pages so to attract Googlebot there if you need it.

Serge Bezborodov: And five more cents here. Like, if you’re talking about big websites and, for example, our listeners working on them, they probably work in big companies, like big corporate companies, so on. And when you wanted to implement some task and you started it, I think it should help, or I think it should increase. Usually it’s not enough to push your task to developers or to other branches, and you have to talk about number, numbers like, okay, here we have 30% of our website with underlink it. We have like 20% of our website not corralled by Google bot at all and here we have opportunities like, here’s the numbers, here our possible increase, and so on.

Mark A Preston: Just to move away from the technical aspect for the moment; Julia, now, how do you launch a new tool into the space when you’ve already got massive brands with very deep pockets that you’re competing against? What do you do? How do you even start launching the industry?

Julia Nesterets: This is my favorite question, really and to cut a long story short, actually we’ve been pretty deeply analyzing the strategy, where to enter first, et cetera. And the book, like from Zero to One by Peter Thiel was pretty in place there and we thought that we found the right answer, where to enter, and actually there was the mistake in decision. We just didn’t get into account some factors. But at the end of the day, you are absolutely right that we are playing on the market with really big, big brands which have millions of investments. Someone already like up to 100 million of investments and we are still bootstrapped and we are succeeding and growing dramatically all these five years. So we’ve never had a day of negative economics in our company or the stage of saving our life, saving our life of the company. So from time to time, there are different companies coming to us and offering us investments and we feel okay in being just private company. So how and when and why, we just really understood and we realized that something is unfair on the market because there are a lot of ecommerce website, a lot of marketplaces classified, which can be not enterprise companies.

They can be just really big ecommerce websites, which don’t have the right tools to cover their SEO needs. Because as I said, the solutions are not powerful there. They cannot face these needs. And we knew how to change this situation and actually we became a game changer. We are actually a game changer because we gave absolutely powerful platform all in one, where you have crawler, you have log analyzer, visualizing, like crawler, giving you your SEO, health opportunities, errors, et cetera. Log analyzer, visualizing how search bots behave at your website, how all your changes impact its behavior, then Google Search Console giving you extensive analytics in terms of your surf efficiency, what is growing, what is dropping, why extensive keywords analysis, et cetera. Then you have your Google Analytics module here, and you have the Alerts module very powerful, which covers all these data sets; like, you can cover Google Bots behavior drops, any errors on page SEO, any drops in your surf efficiency, and you can merge this data just in one place without exporting it into Excel and trying to manually merge it. You can join this data set just at JetOctopus and extract in one place as many insights by this particular URL as you need. And it takes really literally seconds and less than seconds and it is handy. We sure it is handy, it faces the needs, and it is affordable to these guys that have the needs for such tools.

Serge Bezborodov: And if you’re looking to our pricing page, you see actually prices there like fully APAC pricing policy and I can say we are the last, we are the last technical. Yeah, from the big companies, we are the last with open it and fully APAC pricing policy and it’s our position. We don’t want,

Julia Nesterets: Our approach. Yes, they’re absolutely transparent and our pricing policy works as it is written on a website. It only matters on the volumes we process in our platform.

Serge Bezborodov: Doesn’t matter of your budget.

Mark A Preston: Yeah, I have signed up to other tools in the past. Then when I’ve signed up, I’ll say, well, I’ll need this, or you have to pay extra for that, or you have to pay extra for that. It’s very good, especially when teams are doing budgets that they understand their budget allocation. They need to know things, and obviously, budgets are tight as it is. So do you say that the pricing model you have is very much dependent on people signing up to your tool?

Julia Nesterets: It is very much more affordable than our competitors have, number one thing. Again, we don’t care about how many domains you process, we don’t charge you for extra domains. We only care about the number of pages you want to process with the help of JetOctopus, this is the only thing we care. We don’t care about the revenue you’ve had last year. And I will tell you that a lot of our competitors do care about that. And we have such not one client who came to us switching from some of our competitors, having not a big website, but he is very successful offline, let’s say, making revenue offline. And our pricing for his volume of pages was ten times less than he got at our competitors because his revenue level is high and their policy very dramatically based on the revenue level.

Mark A Preston: So down to the marketing side. You’re very much marketing, focus yourself, Julia. Well, what sort of things do you have to do? Do you have to come up with these gimmicks of let’s try putting together a list of the best people in the industry, blah, blah, blah? I mean, what sort of things, from a bootstrap point of view, I’m very much interested in, but for me, I love working with the unknown to make them the norm. It bores me working with a very big brand, to be honest with you. It bores me because that’s not a challenge. I love working with the small brands, the unknown brands, the people that have to make it happen, and bootstrap things. So just talk me through some of the things as a bootstrap company that doesn’t receive investment, the sort of marketing challenges.

Julia Nesterets: One of very, very lucky moment for us was at the very beginning when I reached you definitely know her, and I asked her for the platform review. She’s making from time to time, she’s making the product review and I asked her for the platform review and we agreed and she said that I’m okay to make it, but I will write everything that I saw, so if I don’t like something, I will write about it and we agreed on it and it was supposed to be the blog post at her blog, and we felt really okay. We felt really confident because even at that stage, that was a good platform. And at the end of the day, we’ve got such a flattering product review from her, it was not even satisfactory, it was not even just positive. It was like the fastest scroller on the market. And then it was very detailed and it is still leaf and it was very powerful tool for us at the very beginning to enter the market and we’ve got all these banners through the website where we show that un smarty gave such a mark to us, such a review. You can read it here, et cetera. So that was one of the scene.

As a bootstrapped company, you have to have a good imagination, you know, you have to play with different experiments. And we, for example, we went to our first conference, it was in (31:47 place name), and we launched the platform just one hour when the conference just started. So we just launched it, and then we entered this conference and we had very bright T-shirts, like yellow T-shirts on our back. There was ask me for 100K pages to crawl for free, like big letters. And before we just came, not in these T-shirts, we visited the stands, the boosters of our competitors asked all possible questions, trying to disconnect there as much as we can to understand this true pricing policy. At the end of the day, then we came back and changed these T-shirts just like presenting our own brand. And of course, during this conference we were two of us and the T-shirts were really bright and 200K pages to crawl for free is really catching, catching message. And at the end of the day, we even have some small cheating experiment at this conference. Some of our competitors at the end of the conference seems like closed already, liked and left. And we put our business cards near to his boost. And we came back after ten minutes and we saw that actually they are still working. In an hour this competitor was registered, of course, at our platform. But actually this conference with these bright T-shirts and this really vivid message, really catching message brought us at least more than 100 registrations overnight, just overnight.

And the very important thing there is that not just to attract, but to make this experience as easy to understand for them devalued during this free trial to get this value and to be able to make the decision yes, I like it. Yes, I want it. Then when the company was growing. Actually, we started from the content marketing because when you have small budgets for marketing, the best way to start is the high expertise content marketing, where the number one goal was to show our expertise that we are not just somebody from nowhere. But we do understand what we are talking about. And this is not just our point of view, but these are the insights based on terabytes of data and it is always different. And that was very successful approach in terms of building the expertise in our audience and actually educating the market, like, three years ago I made the decision, like, analyzing we are analyzing a lot, analyzing the situation with log files analysis and we are like the first who are very active promoting the log files analysis. When you work with the website with more than 10k pages.And, three years ago, I realized that the market is not educated yet. So our audience is not educated yet, when we speak about log files analysis and I’ve analyzed the top barriers when we are talking about log analyzer and we’ve been facing these barriers during this three year in different ways; like posting the article on search engine journal, posting the article on search engine, watch search engine land facing and proving that these barriers are not valid.

For example, log files analysis, it’s not secure. That’s not true because when we speak about SEO log files analysis, we need only access logs. We don’t need your users data. We never get that. Then log files analysis is very techy. I don’t know where to look at and what that actually means. At JetOctopus, that’s not true because it is like 100% visualized. You just get your site structure and then you get another circle of the pages which are visited by Google bot. And you see this overlapping. How much of this data is overlapping? And you see that like 10% of your website is only visited by Google bot. And this all part of the website is ignored right now. And then we have the section, where you have bots behavior by different criteria. And you just see that crawl ratio is more than 70% when the page is located not deeper than third click from the main page and you see that in your particular case when it goes deeper, like crawl ratio is like less than 30%. The inside out here is that you’d better put your commercial pages closer to third click from the main page. Another chart, and it is all in charts, not in words. Another chart like bot behavior by the number of internal links. And it is always different. This is not the benchmarks, this is how good Google Bot behaves at your particular website. And you get that you have to have at least 15 links on your commercial pages and it will have at least 50% of crawl ratio. So 50% of the pages which have at least 15 links, they are visited well by Google Bot. In terms of number of words on your page the same. So it is not takey, it is visualized; if you work in JetOctopus, then it is actually tough to get those logs. How to integrate it.

This is very tough. We are the most developed platform in these terms. We have all possible ways of integrations and we have all possible ways of customization. So we’ve customized like hundreds of hundreds different types and we are okay here. So that’s why and I do feel the difference. So, three years later, right now, if three years before out of ten target audience for log files analysis or like big ecommerce website or medium ecommerce website, out of ten SEO experts to whom we’ve been talking to about that. At two, maybe at the end of the day, would integrate these logs and would use this service right now. Out of ten, there will be at least nine who will integrate and will get value. So the impact of that activity we’ve been doing a lot is dramatic, and we feel the difference and actually, the last bright not this one, not recent one, but in autumn, Serge was talking at Brighton SEO with the presentation how to control Google Vote, which is based on log files analysis and that was like, wow, presentation.

Mark A Preston: Yeah. I was in the audience. In fact, me and my wife were sat next to you on the front row. So I can well and truly understand what you’re saying there.

Julia Nesterets: Oh, my goodness.

Mark A Preston: Now, I think myself, I’m an SEO mindset coach, and I’m a professional speaker. And as I feel as though now as a Mindset coach, that the industry needs it more than ever, because I’m seeing this I don’t know what to call it, but people are just lost in the industry because chat GPT, AI and recently with Google saying oh well, they’re no longer going to look at technical SEO speed and go web vitals and all that thing. Needless to say, it’s still very important ,but I do feel as though the industry is so lost at the moment. From your perspective, from a tool vendor, what are you seeing? What sort of conversations are you having at the moment? Have they changed in such a way? And how are those people thinking when it comes to these sorts of things?

Serge Bezborodov: In two words, a few words like everything became more complicated just from nothing, to be honest. And one of the thing before AI is JavaScript and like last three, four years, big brands and even new websites starting working like on JavaScript, fully JavaScript websites, not even with server site rendering, et cetera; and SEO specialists should become like a bit of JavaScript developer, not to develop, but to understand how the website actually works for now, how they render, what type of problems they can have, so on. And it’s really like huge pain for now when they see it from customers, not so many understand it well. And we’re trying to explain also like guys from only doing a great job, like everybody remember articles from Thomas Crutchley, et cetera. And it’s a huge part of new SEO reality and it will be it will not go this year or next year. And of course AI like modern topic, I can say nobody understands what will be, but as per usual, hype came, hype gone and it will be just a day to day tool. My opinion, because not everybody, but a lot of teams use it already. AI for generating text, it was a bit complicated stuff. I remember in 2019 presentation in Teka sio Boost in Boston and that year it was examples how to generate, how to understand text and how to improve your meta description titles. But it was so hard to implement even for me as a developer, and what we are talking about non developers. And but now it’s just, you know, fancy chat. You can ask, you can implement it very easily and probably this is a reason of hype; it’s just my opinion. I’m not thinking like everybody will lost their jobs, not for sure. Because even AI, it’s simpler than it looks, and everything will be good for sure in a world.

Mark A Preston: There’s a few people I’ve been seeing and looking into said, well, they’ve used AI to build this SaaS tool. And I’m not a developer. Surely they can’t be that good of a tool if an AI can build it.

Serge Bezborodov: Just a nice and bright title, my perspective of you for Twitter, et cetera.

Julia Nesterets: I absolutely agree that just to hype and to be on top of this hype, and I am a bit skeptical, actually, about such a value as it is discussed right now.

Mark A Preston: Right. So what’s the future for JetOctopus?

Julia Nesterets: Our main goal, which we will definitely reach, is to become number one platform, number one tool for big ecommerce websites like classified marketplaces. So we want to be number one because we keep doing our best, upgrading and adding more and more tools over there and giving everything you need and actually more, even more tools that you didn’t think about that. And actually, we didn’t spend enough time speaking about Jazz SEO, and we have a lot of tools helping the SEOs find these errors and to make your Jazz not harmful for your SEO. That’s why our future is to become number one platform for ecommerce websites.

Mark A Preston: Have you ever regretted not taking investment on?

Julia Nesterets: Not at all, actually and I can even say so this is like the first time I say it publicly and like on the podcast last year we had a very interesting offer from a well-known company like a similar web that wanted to buy us and we refused and we never regret it. And frankly speaking, more and more like the times goes, the brand awareness increases, the traction with the market increases, the database, the ARR is increasing and the more these companies are coming and offering something, we keep talking. So it’s just very useful to keep this conversation so to understand where you are like to get this estimation, et cetera, et cetera. But to say, to answer your question, we never regret it.

Mark A Preston: It must be a good feeling, because obviously people listening to this or watching they don’t realize the time, effort and blood sweat and tears that goes into this. It must be good when you get somebody coming and I’ll say I want to buy it or I want to invest it must have a personal positive feeling.

Julia Nesterets: Yes, absolutely. And you are absolutely right. Speaking about the resources and time spent on it and why we decided, for example, to refuse similar web, because the first reaction was like wow, it is similar web. Really, it is flattering for us. And the conversation, the communication was very long and they tried their best to close this deal. But why we refuse? As I just mentioned before, that we are such types of entrepreneurs who are not playing for all the money we have. So we are a very cost effective entrepreneurs. We are playing for our own money. We are very actively experimenting, trying different things, analyzing deeply if it works, if it doesn’t, we try to spend our budget on those channels we have, the more impact not just to throw wherever this money. And when we’ve got such an offer we just realized first of all, that we truly understand that we’ve made dramatically great platform, which has all chances to become number one platform in the world in this niche for big websites. And of course, we are proud of our self and we don’t know where we will be in two years. Just being ourselves, just going our past. We understand where we are, we understand our pros and cons, where we should spend and pay a lot of attention. Right now, we are working hard on these processes, so we don’t understand where to go. And we don’t have this situation where we just need money to survive. We never had such moment in JetOctopus. That’s why we don’t feel that we are tired, we don’t feel that we reached all the goals that we can reach. And we do understand actually, as I said, we are already for ten years together with Serge, we are close friends, et cetera, and we understand each other very well and we do know that to sell a company, okay, to get a lot of money, okay, to get this attention, that we are so great, to sell the company, et cetera, et cetera. But what’s next? We know that we are not such type of people that will just relax and relax and relax.  Okay after maximum, one month of this rest maximum, we will be like come on, let’s do something. And we truly understand that maybe we will not invent so great thing as JetOctopus is. Because we do understand that we succeeded here really greatly. That’s why we are there where we are.

Mark A Preston: All right, Serge, from a technical SEO perspective, for all the technical SEO people out there listening, what are your top three technical SEO tips?

Serge Bezborodov: It will be anti-tips. Do not fight for simple stuff like 404 pages, I don’t know, like redder exchange, et cetera. It will not give you so much uplift that you expect. If you want to have uplift, you should. Okay, so understand where your problems are and okay, it will problems with probability first of all, find them like what part of your website, what pages are not crawled by Google bot and of course not indexed by Google. Okay? And the second is make experimentation. Do not listen me. Do not listen anybody else. And I saw it true, like clearly, what works in top one website in niche will not obviously work in top ten website in niche. So only experiments on your website, like true experiments. When you make experiment group of pages, control group of pages and analyzing will lead you to results and to became a great technical SEO specialist, which not like his experiment not only came from Twitter, from influencer, but from good ideas and with proveness like what works, what no on your particular website is very important.

Mark A Preston: I tell you what, I’ve just loved this hour. I just love talking to people, that build something from scratch and really create it and for me, I love that whole persona and everything. And just sitting here listening to you is just so wonderful for me, gossip so many people that think, oh, well, I’ve achieved this and that, but we’ve got 50 grand here, we go underground here. For me, just to listen to some story of people building something that’s needed and getting it out there and it’s just been wonderful. So, for everyone listening to this, and you both have given your time up freely to be on this podcast, what can the audience do for you two to say thank you?

Julia Nesterets: Please use your seven days free trial without any options, limits. We don’t limit anything. So you have your opportunity to try it out and to have your own perception of the platform. Because we can talk a lot and we will be very grateful to get your feedback, because we are like one of the main values is the customer centric and it is in our heart. We are both like this type of people and we have a lot of features launched from the request of our customers and actually, inside the platform, we even write like, thank you, Huan, for this great feature request. That’s why we’ll be very grateful to get your feedback. Like, we have online chat or you can find us in Twitter.

Serge Bezborodov: I’m in online chat also.

Julia Nesterets: What do you say?

Serge Bezborodov: I’m in online also.

Julia Nesterets: You just use this option and give us your feedback and it will be super price for us.

Mark A Preston: Wonderful. And where can people find you and what conversations would you like to have with people?

Julia Nesterets: You can find us in Twitter like Julia Nesterets, or if you want to ask any questions dedicated to the platform or give the feedback just right away, you can use online chat. It is always responsive, it is always human and there will never be robots.

Serge Bezborodov: No AI.

Julia Nesterets: No AI.

Mark A Preston: Brilliant. Well, I really like to thank you both for coming on. And I really, from the bottom of my heart, wish you every success in the future.

Julia Nesterets: Thank you very much. That was absolutely great pleasure being with you today. I really liked all the questions. This is the most favorite question of mine, and I do feel the emotions you feel, and I’m just really inspired by that. Thank you for that.

Mark A Preston: No Problem. Well, thanks to both of you, and good luck

Julia Nesterets: Have a good day.

Serge Bezborodov: Thank you very much.

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