SEO for Start-ups and New Ventures

Our perspective is resources allocated towards SEO typically doesn’t make sense for new ventures (and startups). For new ventures, it’s typically an unknown whether product-market fit exists. Resources in terms of time and money won’t show tangible results for months or years. In the first few months, a new venture may discover that there is no product market fit. This effectively makes all the resources spent on SEO wasted.

Let’s backtrack a little bit. What is a start-up (or a new venture)? Steve Blank defines a start-up in this way: "a startup is a temporary organization used to search for a repeatable and scalable business model." It’s a definition that Iterate Growth believes in. For business models that are proven to be repeatable and scalable - SEO makes a lot of sense. But with start-ups, this is not the case.

A new venture is still trying to discover if product-market fit exists and may undergo multiple pivots before they identify product-market fit. This process can take months to a year. By that time, the SEO you’ve been working is for something that isn’t even related to the current business model anymore.