Hey and welcome to another edition of Founder to Founder 👋

Last time I told you how we got our first users through primarily doing things that don’t scale like posting in Reddit and Facebook groups (I share our process in this video). But then I was introduced to a marketing channel that certainly scaled (and soon became a key way we acquire customers)—SEO.

Fast forward to early 2020. We raised our Seed round and started getting early signs of product-market fit. One of the first things we did was invest in content & SEO.

And that investment paid off, big time.

So much so that content & SEO became our 2nd best channel of acquisition (after word of mouth) and got us to $10m ARR and beyond.

In this post, I’ll share what we did to get our content motion going in 2020 and how it's been holding up in 2025.

If you want to acquire customers through organic search (who doesn’t!) this post is for you.

📒 DEEP DIVE

Inside OpenPhone's early SEO playbook that got us to $10m ARR and beyond

Actionable advice for founders who want to grow through content.

When we started working on OpenPhone in 2017, I looked at the keyword search data for business phone solutions with excitement.

If we could somehow rank for those highly-searched terms, we’d get thousands of customers coming straight to us. That would be a dream come true for any startup...

We were so convinced of SEO's potential that we even mentioned it as a key acquisition channel in our YC application.

Talk about being bought in right from the get-go.

But it wasn’t until 2020 that we got serious about content & SEO.

How we got started

Prior to 2020, we focused on channels and activities with a faster payback time. SEO takes a while to work. And at the time we didn’t feel we could actually afford that.

So here are the 5 steps we took to get things moving:

1 - Set up our blog on WordPress

There’s debate whether WordPress is still the right choice in 2025, but in 2020 it was a solid option.

I made the mistake of publishing our first content on Medium instead of our own property. While Medium helped me refine my writing skills and get some initial traction, we were basically contributing to Medium's SEO rather than our own. Bad idea.

2 - Started writing articles for FAQs we would get from customers and prospects

Initially, I didn’t do much in terms of keyword research. I just relied on answering questions that I got from talking to customers or saw on relevant subreddits. (ICYMI I shared our Reddit playbook in the last post)

For example, some of the first articles I’ve written were:

• Using your personal phone number for business? Here’s why you shouldn’t.

  • At the time, I was pitching OpenPhone to a lot of founders who were using their personal cell # as the company number so I created a resource to help me sell.

• How to remove your personal phone number from the internet

  • I saw a post on one of the forums from a founder who mentioned how his personal cell was destroyed after using it as a company number. So I reached out to help him remove it from the internet and used that experience as content for a guide that I made for all founders in a similar situation.

Since I was the sole sales rep at the time, I didn’t have to wonder what marketing collateral would be helpful for sales. 😅

But as a self-serve, high-volume business, this wasn’t good enough. We needed to make sure that the content we were producing could be distributed through search engines too.

3 - Looked at the keyword data

This is when I started using Ahrefs and SEMrush. I still don’t know which one is better to be honest. Instead of relying on my intuition and customer conversations, I also started using search data to tell me what we should write about.

I was curious to see what terms our competitors were ranking for and where there was an opportunity to compete.

This led to us stumbling upon the “voicemail greeting” topic.

The reason we were drawn to this topic beyond the traffic opportunity is that we could also share this content with folks in-app who were thinking about what to say in their voicemail greeting.

We’d get a 2 in 1: SEO content & in-product guide for customers.

Initially, we created a list of 21 professional voicemail greetings (with audio examples that we recorded ourselves). Again, talk about doing things that don’t scale. 😅

That piece is now updated to 45 examples and continues to be a driver of useful traffic.

More so, it’s been upgraded to a tool—The AI voicemail greeting generator.

Instead of recording those examples yourself, you can let AI do the work for you.

4 - Hired someone to help

The first dozen articles or so were created by our Support Representative Stephanie and I.

Pro tip: Your early Support hires are great first content creators because they talk to customers all the time and know what issues they’re running into.

But at some point, I knew it was time to get more help. We didn’t know what help we needed exactly so instead of making a full-time hire we brought on a freelancer (shout out Taran Soodan) who helped us create some key pieces of content and also leveled up my thinking on content in general.

5 - Found our content wedge

One of the opportunities we uncovered with Taran was going after competitor content. I’m not talking about “OpenPhone vs alternative” type pages (though we created those, too).

We found that folks fed up with alternatives are good prospects for OpenPhone.

At the same time, there were plenty of use cases that we prioritized as a product and our competitors didn’t.

For example, we’ve always supported toll-free numbers where others didn’t. That creates a perfect window of opportunity to capture folks looking for a toll-free number with a solution that our competitors don’t offer.

So we went to work.

Over time, we’ve created a whole library of competitor content, deepening our own knowledge and getting in front of our ICP at the perfect moment (when they’re using a competitor for something it doesn’t support well).

Since we have an established process for porting customers’ phone numbers from other solutions to OpenPhone, this means we could also guide them through the switch process vs just dropping them on our home page.

This is a viable playbook for founders entering an established category. Feel free to steal it (just don’t use it against OpenPhone please 🙏).

This wasn't our only play. The key is finding your wedge and then growing from there.

Bringing SEO in-house

These early efforts gave us a strong start and most importantly showed us that SEO is a viable customer acquisition channel for the business, not just a way to get a lot of traffic.

The next inflection point was building out our content team in-house. This was when Phillip Paquette and Brian Wu joined us.

We could have probably waited longer before building out this function internally, but we consider SEO crucial for our business so the idea was to have it developed as a core competency vs purely outsourced.

There are 3 main types of SEO:

• Editorial: Content you produce and its quality

• Technical: All infrastructure of the site like load speed and performance

• Programmatic: Scaling page creation

From 2021 until now, Brian and Phillip helped us get major wins across all 3, allowing us to scale SEO as an acquisition channel and weather the storms from Google’s many algorithm changes.

Here’s a nice graph to illustrate our journey. While not without bumps, it’s amazing how we’ve been able to grow our presence on search so rapidly.

The wrap-up

SEO is a long game, but when it works, it really works.

And no, don't wait until you have product-market fit to start. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the second-best time is now. The same applies to content & SEO.

SEO is very different in 2025 compared to when we started in 2020. While the core principles remain the same, there are so many more opportunities to get in front of your ideal customers through search (both traditional and AI-powered).

To uncover this, in the next edition I’ll be joined by my friend and SEO expert Ethan Smith to dive deeper into how you can use SEO to grow in 2025. Stay tuned 😉

Oh and if you want to chat about content strategy for your startup, reply to this email. I love thinking through content ideas 🙂

Until next time!

Daryna