While not a huge deal, one of the bigger challenges of building SaaStr has been the changing winds of social media.
SaaStr started as a blog and I never really thought of that as “social media”, but even then it was. Because you need the social part to get scale. Be it SEO, or promotion, or Likes, or Upvotes, etc.
Over the years, basically everything has gotten harder on social:
🧏 SEO still works very well. But not as well.
Between Google ads filling the top of every page, and other changes, it doesn’t work >as< well.
🎣 Quora was huge for us in the past — but then mostly died
We used to get millions of views a month on Quora, and from the very best, including the CEOs of Slack, Zapier, HubSpot, and so much more. Quora changed and dropped tech, and half our readership was lost.
🤷♀️ Twitter and LinkedIn are great but don’t really allow you to link to your own posts anymore
This led to a 20% hit on SaaStr traffic. There’s almost no point in putting up a link to your blog post anymore.
🤔 Podcasts have gotten much better, but have evolved into entertainment
The SaaStr podcast is pretty good and remains Top 50-100 in Tech. But it’s pretty dense and hasn’t evolved into entertainment. So growth is fairly flat.
🛫 Events are great, but fewer folks are leaving home overall
SaaStr event attendance has held its own, but the composition has changed. We expected more folks to get together IRL in a distributed world, and they are. But also — more folks are simply never leaving home. It’s a wash. Really, it means we have to just work even harder here.
📪 Newsletters have exploded, they’re everywhere
SaaStr sends 750,000+ emails a week so we’re part of this. But it also makes it harder to stand out in the inbox.
So no complaints or issues here. It’s just another example of having to work harder to get the same output.
A related post here:
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Jason Lemkin, Khareem Sudlow
