🪄 Crontab Guru: Dominating SERPs with Programmatic SEO

Hey,

The Spells Master is back!

Welcome to the 159th issue.

Today's topics:

1. Crontab Guru: Dominating SERPs with Programmatic SEO

2. A tool to Access Stable Diffusion & LLM API for Unlimited Uses

3. One recommended video on Managing 500+ Employees using "The Management Diamond" Framework

Crontab Guru: Dominating SERPs with Programmatic SEO

Cron Jobs are commands used for scheduling tasks to be executed sometime in the future. They are normally used to schedule a job that is executed periodically – for example, to send out a report of how many customers bought your SaaS this week or doing a database backup every morning.

Cron Jobs are notoriously difficult to write due to their specific format.

So Cronitor, , a developer-focused SaaS monitoring tool, acquired Crontab Guru.

It targets short and long-tail keywords for cron expressions. And receives approximately 388.3k monthly visits according to SEMRush.

Developers search for "cron every 5 minutes" or "cron every minute" on Google and Crontab Guru appears #1 to copy-paste the cron format.

In fact, Crontab Guru has a vast-array of pre-generated examples using popular time intervals.

It effectively targets developers through Programmatic SEO.

And since the best way to target developers is to rank on Google, Crontab Guru is actually doing a good job by ranking for all effective keywords.

Crontab Guru suffered from the 2nd-order effect of ChatGPT.

On July 2024, the traffic was 565.1K per month. But now its down by 31.3% (176.9K) since you can easily ask ChatGPT for a Cron Expression and get a correct answer. It won't take too long for the traffic to completely disappear.

In any case, by focusing on a niche developer need and leveraging programmatic SEO, Crontab Guru established itself as a go-to resource for cron job expressions and smartly promotes Cronitor.

A tool to Access Stable Diffusion & LLM API for Unlimited Uses

Models Lab offers unlimited access to Stable Diffusion & LLM API for approximately $150 per month.

The service likely has usage limits to the unlimited model but it is useful to avoid ~$25,000 charges for similar APIs.

SaaS works on the assumption that most users underutilize the service because others users aren't using as much as they can.

I recently paid around ~$105 ($30 + $5 taxes) per month for Midjourney for 3 months and I haven't even created more than 300 images inside it. There are users who are creating 10,000+ Midjourney images with just $30 per month.

Most SaaS users are just like me who offset the cost of superusers. This is one reason Hetzner offers $4 per month cheap VPSs as most IndieHackers have a dream but 0 users.

One recommended video on Managing 500+ Employees using "The Management Diamond" Framework

This video introduces "The Management Diamond" framework for managing employees effectively.

It covers the 4 main reasons why people don't do what you want:

1. They didn't know WHAT you wanted (solved by communication)

2. They didn't know HOW to do it (solved by training)

3. They didn't know WHEN you wanted it (solved by assigning deadlines)

4. They weren't MOTIVATED or something was BLOCKING them (solved by incentives or removing blockers)

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Astrology remains a massive market opportunity, especially in poor GDP countries. Hopium makes for a good business.

2/

Large, readable fonts improve user experience. Siege Media exemplifies best practices in blog design and UX.

Clone the format of their blog for your SaaS for better UX. My "Welcome Email" sequence consistently gets better reply rates than my original one because I cloned a successful strategy. Don't overthink it if you can clone it.

3/

🤣

Rabbit Holes

1. Decoding the SEO Success Secrets of Canva - Canva has a domain rating of 92, 17.6 million backlinks, and 5.7 million keywords, of which well over 500.000 rank in the first 3 positions on Google, and close to 1.5 million rank in the top 10. They must be doing the SEO thing right.

2. The Stair Step Approach to Bootstrapping - A 3-step framework for transitioning from side projects to full-time entrepreneurship.

3. Leverage, Truth, and Fear by Patrick Campbell (Founder of Profitwell) - Some harsh truths here like "Founders with hobbies and who score high on work/life balance grow slower."

Until next time,

Your Spells Master!

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Read all the old case studies here.

More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Submagic: From $0 to $83k MRR in 90 days (LINK)

2. OpenAI's Whisper Transcription SaaS for Adobe Premier Pro: $70,000 MRR in ~1 year (LINK)

3. 5,000 Leads. One Clever Google Doc Upsell. (LINK)