My belief on life is people are too quick to give up.
Sometimes it takes repetition to find success.
Here are two examples.
The best backlink I got
Quick refresher – backlinks (one site linking to another) give a website authority in the eyes of Google. This makes the website show up for keywords (things people search) on Google. The higher the authority of the website giving you the backlink, the better.
Moz gives a 1/100 authority rating to every website.
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) connects journalists to experts. Currently, HARO is entirely free to use.
You tell HARO which industries are important to you, and each day, HARO sends you emails with journalists requesting quotes from experts.
If your quote is selected, it appears in the journalist’s publication.
In September 2022, I was living in Romania and working on getting backlinks to our self-improvement app, Commit Club.
Each day, I would dedicate a bit of time to this by responding to one journalist’s query.
I did this every day for 30 days. I got a bunch of backlinks, but one really moved the needle.
Healthline used my quote and linked to Commit Club with a “dofollow” backlink (this type of backlink passes SEO juice, whereas “nofollow” backlinks do not).
First, Healthline is a top website. 91/100 domain authority is ridiculously high – Facebook, for example, is 96.
Second, this top website is in our niche – health and wellness.
What did this do for us? This single backlink, within a week of getting it, increased the rankings of our keywords so much that, to this day, our SEO brings us users without me doing anything.
The SEO funnel, years after setting it up, just runs on autopilot. People find our app and try it.
However, I would not have gotten this had I not committed to repetition. I responded to one journalist query daily for 30 days in a row.
Sometimes it takes repetition to find success.
Making the most viewed video in the world on the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse
In March 2023, I was living in Warsaw, and I was a few months into making videos every single day.
March 10th, the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse began trending.
I committed to making four videos a day on the topic for as long as the collapse was trending (this turned out to be ~3 days).
Most of these videos got tens of thousands of views because the topic was so hot.
But one became the most viewed video on the subject.
@build_in_public Reading Bing AI’s explanation of the SVB collapse in “monkey banana terms.” Cred to Skirano. #svb #siliconvalleybank #technews #bingai ♬ Lo-Fi analog beat - Gloveity
It was possibly my laziest video on the collapse (I just read a viral tweet about it), and I made it right before going to bed.
I woke up the next morning to the video at 500,000 views, and over the course of the day, it kept increasing rapidly.
Now, across all platforms, it’s probably gotten around ~10,000,000 views.
Side note, for anybody outside the United States who feels stuck and thinks their location is a blocker to their success – this video I made from my living room in Poland was being shared with top founders, investors, angels, bankers, etc, in San Francisco, NYC, Miami, Austin, and all the top tech hubs.
I had funded founder friends all over the world saying their friends were sharing the video in their group chats, not knowing they knew me.
And it increased my followers tremendously – to the point where a few months later, I was recognized at an NYC tech event by somebody who first came across my content from that video.
Oh, and this person gave me Instagram advice, which I still use.
But this wouldn’t have happened had I not committed to multiple tries.
Here’s another example: I made three consecutive videos about a weekend AI app we released. Two-thirds of the videos failed, but one went viral enough to get the app 3,100 users in a single day.
Most people don’t commit.
Sometimes it takes repetition to find success.
