Building an audience asset and an internal R&D habit inside an SEO marketplace

A marketplace operating in an industry being reshaped by AI search, needing both a distribution asset and a way to keep pace with the change.

Own a channel the company controls, and turn observation of the AI search shift into things the business can actually use.

Industry change was arriving faster than opinion could be formed about it. Meanwhile delivery bottlenecks were absorbing time that should have gone to strategy.

A newsletter is a research instrument as much as a channel. Writing weekly forces a position, and the reaction to the position is market feedback.

• Productised the newsletter — a consistent format, a point of view, and a schedule.
• Ran monthly AI visibility experiments to keep the opinion grounded in observation.
• Prototyped solutions to internal bottlenecks and handed them to partners for feasibility review.

• Wrote and grew the weekly newsletter past 15,000 subscribers.
• Shaped email campaigns alongside the head of marketing.
• Led R&D on AI-driven internal tooling; ran the experiment cadence.

• 15,000+ subscribers, with open rates held around 25% and sometimes in the high 30s.
• A monthly experiment habit that produced evidence rather than opinions about AI search.

Publishing on a schedule is the cheapest market research available. You find out what people care about by being wrong in public at a survivable scale.

• Search is becoming an answer, and that is a product problem
• Most growth problems are positioning problems wearing a costume