Sylvain Giuliani

This week, a former Sequoia partner told me something that stuck: “SEO is a black box. I do not even know how much I pay every month to my agency. But I am scared to stop, because I want to rank” That sentence perfectly sums up how SEO worked for years. I lived the same thing → You wire money every month → $2K, $10K, $30K.. You get a few blog posts, written by someone you never met, using keywords you did not choose. Then come the extras: - Overpriced backlinks - Slow keyword discovery - Outdated competitor analysis And once everything is “done”, you still have to publish it → If you are not technical, you bother engineers to publish it Worst part: -No clear ROI -No proper tracking -Just fear of stopping because maybe it works. SEO was not broken, It was opaque So we rebuilt it as a product. Not an agency, not a black box. One system: ✅ Self-serve ✅ Automated ✅ Fully trackable Content, publishing, backlinks, keywords. That is product-led growth applied to SEO. I put together a short guide explaining exactly how this model works and why it is replacing agencies. Want the playbook? ⭐ 1. Follow and Connect with me 2. Comment “LLM” and I’ll send it straight to your inbox. PS: Repost for priority access!

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What I learned about building a cult at YC Kickoff today One of the most powerful talks was about building community around your product. PostHog's approach is simple. They ship fast, even if their UX isn't great. And they're completely proud of it. Here's what that looks like: PostHog releases features that might be rough around the edges, but they get them out quickly. Instead of complaining, their community celebrates the speed. Most founders try to make everyone happy. PostHog does the opposite. They're so opinionated about rapid shipping that their users become evangelists for the entire philosophy. Their users will literally recruit other developers by saying "Yeah the interface is quirky but they ship features faster than anyone else." The founder showed us actual user testimonials where people were bragging about PostHog's imperfect UX because it meant they got new capabilities months before competitors. The big lesson: Let your founding team's personality shine through everything you build. Your "flaws" become your differentiators when you own them completely. What do you want your cult to look like?

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Most SaaS advice is quietly destroying your product. We learned this the hard way. A few months ago, we were “doing everything right.” Traffic was up. Signups were climbing. Then activation and retention tanked. That’s when we realized: “best practices” are often just common mistakes in disguise. Here are 3 SaaS lies you need to stop believing: 1️⃣ Just listen to your customers.  Building every request? You end up with feature chaos. Reality: Customers own the problem. You own the solution. Solve the core pain brilliantly or don’t build it at all. 2️⃣ Add features to increase value.  More buttons → more confusion → more churn. Reality: Value isn’t what you pile on. It’s what you make effortless. Simplicity scales; complexity is a tax on future growth. 3️⃣ Scale marketing to fix growth.  Pouring money into ads before fixing retention is like pouring water into a leaking bucket. Reality: Growth comes from your product’s ability to keep users coming back, not from your budget. The hard truth: Advice sounds smart because it’s easy to repeat. Blindly following it?  That’s the fastest way to slow your SaaS. 💡 Which “best practice” hurt your SaaS the most? Share below 👇

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Across our last 20 customers, 0 had the same pricing model and 76% changed it at least twice in the first 60 days. Flexible pricing isn’t a feature. It’s the baseline. That is why the smallest entity starts with features  A feature can be: - Boolean - Static - Metered From there, everything else is configurable. - Give a free quantity per feature - Charge overages after that - Run pure usage-based billing - Define custom units - Layer customer-specific contract overrides on top Same product. Different configurations. We didn’t build a fixed pricing model and add flexibility later. We assumed pricing, usage, and contracts will keep changing. That assumption shows up everywhere in the system: - You define how usage is measured - You decide how it’s aggregated - You configure how it’s priced - You override rules when contracts demand it All inside the product. Not in spreadsheets. Not in custom scripts. Most billing tools work best when your business stays predictable. Real businesses don’t. If your pricing needs to change every quarter, why is your billing still built for once a year?

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Every day you don’t A/B test, you’re losing money 💸 Let’s say your checkout conversion rate is 30%. That means 3 in 10 users who start checkout actually complete it. Now imagine you run an A/B test and improve that to 35% 📈 That’s about a 17% uplift in conversions, which means every new user who starts checkout now has a 17% higher chance of completing it. And once you roll out a winning version, it keeps making you money every single day. So if you’re not testing, you’re missing out on that compounding growth. Because the only way to get those uplifts is to keep testing all the time, especially on pages with lots of traffic and/or conversions. Even if you’re worried about hurting your current performance, start small. Test on a small percentage of users. But make sure you’re ALWAYS testing ✔️ The longer you wait to test, the more conversions you leave on the table. And if you want to test fast—code-free, without devs, or complex setup—check out Entail AI’s CRO software 🧩

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Most “deal sourcing” tools are just lists with a nicer UI. At Raylu, that never felt like what we were actually building. Recently, our Head of Growth Adedayo A. put the perfect name to it: Deal Engineering. Deal Engineering is how we design, build, and optimize an entire deal flow end-to-end - so investors can go from idea to signed deal with a level of precision and leverage that just didn’t exist before. Instead of: • Manually cleaning and filtering targets • Googling every company to figure out what they actually do • Hunting for the right email • Rewriting outreach from scratch • Updating the CRM by hand …we’re building an AI-native platform that turns a firm’s judgment into a durable system. For us, Deal Engineering means every step - from thesis to market map to outreach to IC - is: • Systematic: repeatable, not heroics • AI-native: agents doing the lifting, not analysts doing data entry • Firm-specific: encoding your edge, not generic filters On Raylu, that shows up as: • Thesis → market map in minutes • 360° intelligence on every target • Direct-to-CEO engagement at scale • A pipeline and CRM loop that actually learns from your wins and passes We’re not just another sourcing tool bolted onto a stack. We’re building the Deal Engineering layer for private markets - for VC, growth, PE, and corporate development teams that want more than “just another list.” Huge shoutout Adedayo A. for naming what we’ve been quietly inventing here at Raylu. If you’re curious what Deal Engineering could look like inside your workflows, happy to walk you through it! 🚀 Article in the comments.

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The "Showroom Paradox" is a classic growth bottleneck in the furniture industry. When your sales depend entirely on physical floor space, your scale is capped by square footage and expensive inventory. High-fidelity 3D visualization is the ultimate "pressure valve" here. We see manufacturers spending a fortune to display 10-20 physical sets, while their actual catalog offers thousands of configurations. By the time a customer says, "I love this sofa, but in emerald velvet with brass legs," and the sales rep has to pull out a tiny fabric swatch — the momentum is lost. In 2026, the real competitive advantage belongs to those who remove the friction between a customer’s vision and a final order. High-end 3D configurators allow you to stop selling just "what's on the floor" and start selling your entire manufacturing capability. It’s time to stop letting the limitations of physical space dictate your growth.

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