Hey there,

It’s Edgar from Engyne here. Every week, we send out an update on what we shipped, lessons we learned, and shoutouts we have for our community. Here’s the archive if you want to review our past issues.

Last week was a big one on the product and customer success side so let’s dive right in.

Wins and Updates

New feature alert 🚀

We’re excited to share that we’re expanding our vision from a niche Programmatic SEO tool to a full-stack platform to automate SEO and content marketing! So we built and launched an “Editorial SEO” feature that lets customers write opinion-based blog posts on topics that their ICP would be searching for using AI.

It was a massive feat on the development side, requiring updating 10K lines of code and 10+ hours of debugging to deploy correctly to production.

Now we’re on a demo tour and booked calls with 7 old customers to manually showcase this feature and onboard them. One customer had already pre-paid for this feature so it’s great to deliver within the month.

Revamped our messaging

To go along with our new feature and vision, we reworked our messaging and company blurb.

Here’s the new one: “Engyne is a platform that helps startups get customers through Google search using AI. We automate the process of brainstorming ideas, writing content, publishing SEO-optimized pages, and iterating using analytics so you can put organic growth on autopilot.”

We’re currently working on a new website to go with our public launch so you’ll get to see that very soon!

Supported our customers

From time to time, we analyze how our customers are doing and provide recommendations on how to improve their strategy. For example, VC10x is killing it. Here’s an example exchange between my co-founder Sukh and their team:

But they can do better. Much much better.

Keeping a pulse on how our customers are doing allows us to consistently go above and beyond with supporting them, and proactively reach out when necessary.

For example, another customer wasn’t able to use our custom domain feature on their own, given their complicated DNS setup. We helped get them going and now they’re live! If you’re looking for running shoes, check them out!

Learnings and Lessons

Build a platform, not a tool

The minute you position your software product as a “tool”, you get bucketed into a piece of a bigger workflow as you only solve a specific problem. Customers pay for tools. But they pay even more for platforms that manage the entire workflow as they serve the entire “Job to Be Done”.

For example, we’re building a platform that takes care of the entire workflow for growing organically with SEO including research, writing, publishing, and optimizing so we can be a full-stack solution for organic growth.

Ambiguity = Opportunity

You hear this over and over for SEO - “It’s an art, not a science”. That’s because based on your business, there are several options for implementing a content strategy.

As a software business, this is where we can lean in. We can collect data from all sources and give every customer exactly the kind of strategy that would work for them. It’s not exactly an easy problem to solve, but that is exactly why it’s a big opportunity.

Regardless of what market you’re tackling, areas that are obscure or complicated for customers are places where a startup can come in and build a 10x better solution.

Put product safeguards in place

When deploying the new feature, we accidentally broke part of the product database. Fortunately, we had already made a copy just before the mistake so it was easy to recover.

As the application gets more complex, we have to have better safeguards in place. These are regular challenges for scaling companies and being mindful of balancing speed with safety is key as our company grows.

Gratitudes

This week, I (Edgar) want to give a huge shoutout to my co-founder Sukh for the incredible work he’s been doing. The technical work he’s been shipping has been amazing and he’s really held the fort down (including writing the draft of this newsletter) while I’ve had limited availability due to family and personal travel. Grateful for you man!

Asks

• Have any feedback on our new company blurb? Shoot us a reply and let us know.

• You’ll notice we changed a few aspects of the format this week. Let us know if you like them or have other suggestions for future issues!

Thanks for reading to the end! If you have any questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to hit reply. We read every one :)

See you next week!

Thanks,

Edgar

Co-founder & CEO of Engyne