Why I am moving to SF

My new role at Daydream, the Programmatic SEO startup.

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Hey — It’s Nico.

Today’s issue takes 10 minutes to read.

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Let’s get into it.

Investor-ready Startup Financials

Keeping up with your startup’s numbers can be a mess, especially as investors start requesting them.

  • How to forecast startup growth based on real-world data

  • Budgeting rounds of funding, and how long the capital should last

  • Defining + tracking your Core KPIs

  • Preparing an investor-proof startup proforma

Our alumni have gone out to raise over $300M in venture capital.

This Week In Startups

🔗 Resources

A step-by-step guide on how to go from 0 to $5M ARR.

Lessons from 20 founders on achieving product-market fit.

Best products built at the Llama 3 Hackathon.

📰 News

Autonomous vehicle startup Motional cuts about 550 employees

Norrsken VC raises for €320M for Europeans impact entrepreneurs.

Accel raises $650M to invest in early-stage tech companies. 

💸 Fundraising

Monzo raises $190M as it prepares for US expansion.

Indian social commerce platform Meesho reaches 150M users and raises $275M.

Butter Payments raises $10M to continue building its transaction platform.

Lucid Bots secures $9M to build robots for dangerous jobs.

Personal News

Moving to SF

Today, I have some pretty exciting news. 

If you follow me on Twitter you probably noticed that I have been posting several photos in San Francisco. 

The reason for this is that I’ve recently joined Daydream, a SF startup that helps companies automate their programmatic SEO campaigns

If you have been a long-time reader of Failory, you know how passionate I am about programmatic SEO. It has been Failory’s main acquisition channel for several years and is a strategy that I think few startups are leveraging.

So, today, I figured I could use the opportunity to talk once again about why programmatic SEO is so great, how Failory is using it, and why I joined Daydream to make pSEO a lot easier.

Programmatic SEO

If you have no idea what pSEO is, this article has all the essential information.

TLDR: Programmatic SEO involves using automation to generate hundreds or even thousands of pages or articles from a specific dataset. These articles aim to rank for long-tail keywords, which might not have high search volumes but are relatively easy to rank for.

For instance, consider the search query "FinTech Startups Pitch Decks." If you were to search for it, you would find a Failory article at the top of the results.

While this single article may not attract many users per month, the power of automation enables the creation of numerous similar articles with just one click. When combined, these articles can drive a significant amount of traffic to the website.

My Solution vs Daydream

When I started doing pSEO in Failory, I realized there was no great tool to do it. So, I had to build my own solution using Google Sheets, Make, and Webflow.

It was not the prettiest, most scalable solution, but it got the job done. 

The strategy worked, and as I saw how pSEO propelled Failory’s growth, I became quite obsessed with it. 

At that time, there weren't many companies focusing on programmatic SEO, so I started offering consultancy services to help businesses with their campaigns. 

That's when I crossed paths with Thenuka, who happened to be building the exact tool I had been searching for.

Daydream does everything my spreadsheets did, but it is much more robust and easier to use. Additionally, Daydream doesn’t just use data to create articles (as I was doing) but also leverages AI to make each article different from the others.

The Future

A few weeks ago, I was offered a Growth Lead position at Daydream. My job consists of helping clients with their pSEO acquisition channels, which is pretty much what I was already doing as a consultant.

So far, things are going pretty well. Here are the results of the first client I’ve been working with after one month:

Being able to live and work in San Francisco has been quite a surreal experience.

I have been writing about SF startups since I was 16, so getting to experience all of it firsthand has certainly been exciting.

You can expect more SF content over the following weeks once I’ve finished getting my Visa and I move to the states!

Trend

New GPT

Since ChatGPT launched, OpenAI's updates always blow me away. Every new model or feature feels like the start of something huge, like a tech revolution. Each time, I think, "This is it. AI can't get any better," but Sam Altman keeps proving me wrong. Last week was no exception.

Their latest announcement introduced GPT-4o, their most advanced model yet. It not only converses with you in real-time but also responds to visual input, sings you a happy birthday, and even shows excitement when encountering a dog. It's as close to human interaction as AI has ever come.

So, let’s analyze everything this new GPT has to offer.

Omni GPT

The “o” in GPT-4o stands for “Omni,” meaning GPT now accepts any type of input (text, audio, images, or video) and can produce any kind of output. 

This is not completely new. GPT4 was able to accept these types of inputs, but GPT-4o is so much better at it. Just look at this real-time talk:

To me, GPT-4o is astonishing for several reasons:

  • It’s incredible how fast it is now. One of the main reasons talking with computers never felt entirely natural was the long pauses as the AI processed responses. It made conversations feel disjointed and sluggish, constantly reminding me I was talking to a machine. But now, OpenAI claims that GPT-4o can respond in just 232 milliseconds, faster than the average human response time. What's more, you can interrupt GPT, making conversations feel less like sending voice messages and more like chatting naturally with a friend.

  • The voice is remarkably human-like. While I won't say it could fool everyone all the time, it's definitely convincing. The wide range of intonations, varied tones, and the ability to pause or emphasize certain words make it sound incredibly authentic. Look at how it is able to switch between sounding dramatic, robotic, or even singing.

  • It can actually see in real time. Remember when Google created the fake Gemini demo, making it appear as if it could respond to real-time video? Well, it seems like GPT-4o has surpassed where Gemini fell short. One of the most interesting applications of this feature is integration with the Be My Eyes app. This app will use the power of GPT-4o to help blind people navigate the world.

  • The new desktop application seems extremely convenient. It makes using GPT a lot easier by integrating it into anything you do on your computer. You can actually record your screen and show it to GPT in real-time so it can guide you through your work. Here is an example of how this could be extremely helpful when programming.

  • It is free (sort of). Free ChatGPT users will have access to the new model, but only for a limited number of daily messages. Paid users will have five times the number of permitted messages. This means that free users can now access many exclusive features previously reserved for paid users, such as web searching, file uploading, and data analysis. Additionally, the API is now half the price and twice as fast.

  • It is one step closer to the new AI search engine. Many were anticipating this announcement to unveil a new OpenAI Browser. Though that didn't happen, GPT-4o is a step in that direction, enabling all free users to utilize GPT's web searching features. This shift suggests that more individuals will opt for GPT's browsing capabilities, gradually moving away from traditional search engines.

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That's all of this edition.

Cheers,

Nico