Jacky Chou (buying online businesses up to $1m)
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We buy and operate incredible online businesses in public.
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here's how you can do local seo for $100 in 2026 and outrank 90% mfs out there the $100 stack, itemized: citations and foundational links from LocalRank.so, indexing for basically a dollar with indexchex, tier 2 links pointed at the citations for $10-50 depending on the provider, and the website runs free on github, vercel and cloudflare, $10 if you need the domain. all in you're spending $31-71. every good SEO pulls the same simple levers, the complicated stuff is theater to justify a fat retainer. the sequence matters more than the spend. citations first with consistent name, address, phone number, then index every single one because an unindexed citation does nothing, then tier 2s pointed at the citations, never at your own URL. wait one to two weeks and let it marinate. pillow links fill the gaps: ask claude or codex for a hundred industry directories in your niche and city, list yourself everywhere. and if you can stretch past the hundred, a better business bureau link is getting cited like crazy in AI search right now. the website is basically free now. before AI it wasn't unrealistic to spend thousands, now github plus vercel plus cloudflare whips one up in an hour. taxonomy is who you serve and where: bookkeeping for construction companies in fort worth is a page. the organic build won't guarantee number one in maps, it raises the floor and catches everyone who skips the map pack. and tristan's noticed organic climbing seems to drag the GBP up with it, an HR client with four reviews watched her maps rankings follow her organic. no google business profile? that's the one thing $100 can't solve, but it's cheaper than you think: call around for dormant commercial offices, most charge $500-800 a month, and haggle. "I know this has been sitting empty, I just need it for a month" works more often than it should. reviews are still the entire game and the tactic is going analog. friends and family first to get the ball rolling. in unsaturated niches 3-5 new reviews a month gets you in the door. in home services where competitors have 300-1000+ reviews, the play is door-to-door free estimates: give the free roof inspection, and when you're face to face say you're trying to get your name out and would appreciate a review. never text it, never email it. ask in person, make it as hard as possible to say no, and hand them the phone right there. the receipts: the vet clinic owner literally became the receptionist, sat there texting and asking every happy customer for a review, paid nothing, and average positions moved up across the board in one week with tracked keywords sitting at 1, 2 and 3. he just hired six people for the demand. the physio clinic hit almost 700 business interactions in 23 days, nearly double april, and active rehab near me jumped 18 spots since the last scan. both businesses are hiring like crazy. total spend: under a hundred bucks plus sweat. full $100 playbook with Tristan Zheng | SEO Consultant, and we just took on local business owners in local rank academy to run the same system tracked in public. watch/listen ↓
Jacky Chou (buying online businesses up to $1m)12,699 Aufrufe • vor 7 Tagen
copying indiehackers on trustmrr is the EASIEST way to make $$ because they're are allergic to running ads. here's everything from this week: jacky's startup sourcing method is verified stripe-connected revenue that indie hackers share in public. filter for products between $1K and $20K MRR, because that's proven demand someone ground out for years organically, then you skip the line with paid traffic. the receipts exist: outrank took an AI writer, connected it to your site, called it SEO on autopilot, ran ads, and now they're doing $300-400K a month. the builders build, the marketers get paid. one catch: when you run ads, the landing page has to be hella saucy, and every single one needs a VSL now. jacky used to think small services could self-checkout off text alone. wrong. even a 60 second AI-generated VSL that autoplays converts better. nobody knows what happens in the human brain when a VSL plays, it just works. exhibit A: a 10 minute claymation ad about a guy who gets cucked, gets jacked, and sells you oil of oregano. jacky watched all 10 minutes and nearly bought. the infomercial never died, it just moved to meta. tom's startup idea is dropshipping designer furniture from china. his buddy anton furnished his ENTIRE house, kitchen, office, bedroom, outdoor, marble and all, custom made for $20K USD shipped to his door. the positioning writes itself: looks identical to CB2, you skip the logo tax, ships direct with customization, save 70%. it's the quince model applied to a massive category AI can't touch, and crate and barrel's three month lead times mean the incumbents are already shipping from china anyway. low margin, high ticket, easy eight figures. the copywriting masterclass needs to be clipped. tom's framework: what happened, the pain points, the solutions you tried, why they failed, the pivotal moment you found the real fix, and why it worked when nothing else did (always the root cause, not the symptoms). the cheat code: go to any pain subreddit, joint pain, acne, arthritis, and read the success story posts. none of those people are copywriters, and every single post is a finished VSL script. storytelling is thousands of years old, the software in your head hasn't updated, use it. the rank surge numbers got fully opened up: roughly $30K a month, $387 a day on ads, 13-23% opt-in rates, 15% self-checkout with sales guys hitting the other 85%. the uncomfortable part: net margins are sitting at 10-15% and jacky said the quiet part loud, "if we scale to $100K a month at ten percent, we've got a full time job, bro." tom's goal is $100K by october 1 at 30% net. also the ROAS psychology bit: jacky told the media buyer to aim for 1.5 and tom immediately DMed him to change it to 2, because whatever number you give them is the ceiling they'll hit. the AI segment had the line of the episode. most people prompt like "I'm hungry, cook me something," then get mad when the AI makes steak for a vegetarian. give it your constraints, your tastes, your context, and it delivers. same with image gen: never create from scratch, screenshot a trending ad from the meta library and tell chatgpt to swap your product in. meanwhile jacky's vibe-coded dashboard read its own data, noticed abandoned cart SMS wasn't running, and built the automation itself. tom's counterweight: make the AI show you where the data came from, because hallucination is real and revenue data can't be vibes. bonus: tom tried to schedule a team dinner and jacky said his calendar is packed for two weeks. tom's response: "bro, you don't have any employees, you just talk to claude all day, what are you packed with?" the answer was dinners with his parents twice a week and friends every other night. also ryan clogg commented on the last episode asking to come back and just shoot the shit because tom pounded him with too many questions. NGMI with Tom Wang, tony was at a company rally call. watch/listen ↓
Jacky Chou (buying online businesses up to $1m)33,780 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
a $100M founder told us his exact meta ads strategy on mic and my CPMs dropped 50% the same week. here's everything we covered: 1. bid caps are the meta ads cheat code nobody talks about. set your budget to something insane like $1M/day and your bid cap to the max CPA you'll accept. it signals to zuck you've got big balls and opens up the entire auction. my CPMs dropped 50% overnight and I went from burning cash at $1K/day to printing at sub 2 ROAS. if you're raw dogging meta with no bid cap you're lighting money on fire. 2. the $500/week creative team hack. post a job on upwork, get 50 replies, filter to 10 decent ones, pay each $50 for a paid test project. 7 will suck, 3 will be great. you just hired a full ad creative team for $150 in test costs. they care about their star rating so if they bomb you just ask for a refund. tom's pumping out 10-15 ads per week with this setup. 3. AI avatars are replacing UGC creators but most people are doing it wrong. don't just tell chatGPT "generate a girl in a park" — it looks AI as hell. screenshot a viral tiktok, feed it to chatGPT image gen, ask it to keep the same background and lighting but change facial features and clothing. the ads that convert are the ones you can't tell are AI. 4. I'm making $50K/mo from one SEO page. ranked for a top keyword in my industry, sold the #1 spot to a competitor for $14K/mo, put myself at #2, and filled slots 3-8 with affiliate offers pulling $5K/mo. plus $30K/mo from my own offer. one page. purely organic. 5. hire from pakistan. not a joke. $100/page shopify devs that are cracked. entire teams doing cashflow management. the philippines got complacent — pakistan and bangladesh are the new alpha. train them with claude, throw them in the deep end, and they'll 10x output because they have zero ego about using AI. 6. the best heuristic for teaching anyone AI: don't think, just ask. outsource your thinking but never outsource your knowledge. your VA doesn't need to be smart — they need to follow instructions and not have ego about asking a machine for answers. that combo beats a $150K/yr employee who "prefers to think with their brain." 7. AI layoffs are just starting. coinbase drama. cloudflare cut 2000 citing AI directly. the dream job kids — CS degree, S&P 500 company, mid six figures with options — they're the ones getting cut first. meanwhile landscapers, barbers, and locksmiths are thriving. tom is bullish on businesses that require hands. ep 4 of NGMI with Tony Yu and Tom Wang watch/listen ↓
Jacky Chou (buying online businesses up to $1m)77,870 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
RIP local SEO agencies. claude just one-shot your entire job and it took one prompt. here's the full breakdown: the workflow is stupidly simple. jacky didn't even look at the client's site. he transcribed the previous episode, exported the local SEO ebook, gave both to claude and said fix this. out came a massive document: hero section changes, schema gaps, missing pages, internal linking fixes, and a full build order of what to ship first. next step is feeding this call's transcript back in, getting the final mockup, and handing it to the team to one-shot. claude suggested pages that didn't exist and they're genuinely smart. practitioner pages so the clinic ranks when someone googles their physio by name. neighborhood pages like "physiotherapy in killarney, 7 minutes from our victoria drive clinic" to capture every surrounding area search. pricing FAQs. the neighborhood play works because people search their specific scenario now, and AI search made long tail queries explode. the one warning: don't blast 60 boilerplate pages at once. tristan audited a member's site this week that got deindexed for exactly that. the guy one-shotted the whole site with templated content and google sandboxed it, and it's way harder to come back out of the sandbox now. rewrite every page, phase them in, be surgical. the interlinking structure is the actual sauce. service pages stay location neutral (no city terms in the H1 or you cannibalize), then link down to their east vancouver and mount pleasant versions. each location page links back to its respective service area pages. one to one targeting in every area. tristan's words: once your authority and reviews build up on top of that structure, it's game over. RIP wordpress too while we're at it. the only clients still on it are the ones whose teams can't leave. everything new runs out of github and cloudflare, changes ship in one sentence to claude ("put these six service pages in the menu nav and deploy"), and the sites look infinitely better. one advise member keeps a stack of HTML templates and just runs one up every time he finds a rank and rent. that's the stack now. the meta lesson: tristan's buddy in singapore watched the last episode, took the transcript, and had his codex agent running all day shipping every change to his new jersey site. citations in, indexed, tier 2s queued. he's probably gonna make it. the era of watching a youtube video and having AI implement it before the next episode drops is fully here. next up: a live rank and rent case study, national level, built in public. niche suggestions wanted. full claude local SEO takeover with Tristan Zheng | SEO Consultant watch/listen ↓
Jacky Chou (buying online businesses up to $1m)24,078 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
How to actually make money in 2026 if you're starting from zero. a 9-figure founder and a random seo guy walk you through it: 1. software has no moat anymore. if a guy who vibe codes "absolute trash" can build an app, so can 10 million other people. money is rotating out of software into physical goods. 2. the move if you're broke: dropship first to test the idea. spin up shopify, connect alidrop, run ads. validate unit economics before you spend a dollar on inventory. you can launch in under a week with AI. 3. AI creatives on meta are the current arbitrage. but every arb burns out faster now because AI lets everyone flood the market at the same time. the person who gets the cheapest targeted distribution wins. 4. the one-person agency play is underrated. one person armed with claude max posting one short a day. no team, no overhead. stack skills, not headcount. 5. we went to tech meetups in vancouver. half the devs are job hunting. the other half say they "prefer to think with their brain instead of using tokens." that's NGMI energy. 6. to win in business you only need one of three Ds: data, distribution, or deal. you don't need all three. you just need one. 7. the real moat in 2026 isn't code. it's speed to market + customer acquisition + a barrier AI can't copy overnight. physical goods still have that. software doesn't. first episode of NGMI with my boy Tony Yu. if you want more raw unfiltered takes on AI and making money let me know what topics you want us to cover next this might be the most honest "how to make money" conversation on x right now. watch/listen
Jacky Chou (buying online businesses up to $1m)45,417 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
Gun to my head, if I needed to get a client in 90 days with zero case studies, here's our playbook: 1. stop chasing the industries every guru tells you to chase. if "industries that need SEO" already has the niche on a listicle, it's because every agency already ran it dry. the real money is in boomer industries — industrial, commercial, the most unsexy niches you can think of. tristan's rule: ask claude for industries where the average owner is 65+. one guy tested the list cold calling and converted at 3X his residential rate. ticket sizes are 2-3X higher with a third of the competition. 2. the no-GBP cheat code. got your google business profile clapped for using a PO box or coworking space? build a service area page for every service in every surrounding city. austin agency targets georgetown, round rock, pflugerville — "tax prep pflugerville," "bookkeeping pflugerville," "financial planning pflugerville." scale it to 200-300 pages, link them all internally, and you collect every lead outside the GBP radius. organic SERPs are localized now so you rank for the broad term too. 3. this also wins AI search. chatgpt weighs relevance as heavily as authority, and nobody's spamming listicles for local queries the way they do for ecom. reverse engineer the long tail — someone types "i have two W-2s, a 1099, and stocks to sell, who helps with that" — and put all of it on your service page. tristan tested it: page goes up, prompt gets pulled, you show up in the answer. 4. never pitch on the first call. get them on a second call to qualify. how many SEO agencies have they used? above three is a red flag. figure out their ticket size, then send an audit showing exactly how much revenue they're leaving on the table. price local SEO at $1,500/month minimum, up to $3,500-5,000 for lawyers and competitive markets like dallas or houston. 5. first 90 days is offense and defense at the same time. defense: lay out a week-by-week game plan so they know exactly what they're paying for. offense: fix all the money pages first, then show leading metrics. impressions is the easiest early win — page starts ranking, impressions jump, and you can show "up 300% month over month" by end of month one. months two and three are content and links. 6. the biggest agency mistake both of us made: taking clients you can't service. jacky took a $10K/month client he didn't have capacity for and it gave the agency a bad rap in their whole industry. tristan's churn killer: stop assuming the client knows SEO. lead every deliverable with "this is a first draft, we need your feedback" instead of dropping a link with no context. that one habit cuts churn by 25%. bonus: systems are overrated. you can brute force an agency to mid-seven figures with five URLs, some spreadsheets, a phone number, and an AI subscription. tristan fired two people he'd built systems around and hired one killer instead. it's never the systems — it's the people. second eps with Tristan Zheng | SEO Consultant watch/listen ↓
Jacky Chou (buying online businesses up to $1m)16,582 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
this viewer made over $500,000 from seo before graduating. here's what he's doing differently than most agency owners in 2026: 1. he picks under-saturated local niches on purpose. not window replacement in Dallas where you're fighting for 6+ months. tax firms, HR companies, white collar services — markets where the top competitor has 10 reviews max. results in 2-3 months. 2. he shows clients wins in month one, not month six. even if it's just "someone clicked from a keyword search." business owners don't need leads day one — they need proof something is happening. that kills churn. 3. 80% of VA work is cooked. he's already cut most of his VAs and replaced them with AI agents. content creation went from a week-long process to 30 minutes. reporting went from 4 hours per client to 30 minutes. he has an AI agent named Karen that schedules all monthly reports. 4. for AI search (ChatGPT rankings), local is way easier than national. run up a Reddit thread, a Facebook group post, optimize the GBP with reviews — and ChatGPT suddenly has four places to pull your client's data from. 5. the common denominator of everyone he's seen succeed: they don't overthink. they follow the checklist. if something breaks, they figure it out. that's it. watch/listen here
Jacky Chou (buying online businesses up to $1m)21,298 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
here's what's actually working in SEO in 2026 vs what's getting people cooked: 1. small sites blasting AI content on their own domain are done. the algo update is sharp — you'll see a euphoric jump on ahrefs, your team will be doing high-fives, and one week later you'll never recover. one article a day max. manually edited. don't blast your URL or you don't come back. 2. content quality is fully commoditized. google can't tell good content from bad anymore so it just defaults to ranking the biggest domain. a blog post on a high-DR site with literally just a title in the body will outrank most of the internet. domain authority is the only tiebreaker left. 3. parasite SEO is the cheat code. listicles on publications you have an in with. facebook groups. reddit threads. quora. medium. linkedin posts. anywhere big that lets you publish — write it, index it, send real chrome traffic to it (google reads chrome data as a ranking signal), and it ranks. 4. AI overviews CTR went from 1% to 2.4% on cited pages. sounds like a recovery. it's not. position one used to get 30% clicks. publishers are still cooked. brands and end users win, everyone in between gets eaten. 5. people freaking out about their search console impressions exploding are NGMI. half of that is bots, scrapers, rank trackers, and chatGPT itself doing a search every time it answers a query. it's not real demand. bonus: starbucks launched a "describe your mood, get a drink" feature on chatGPT. peak NGMI. there are 50 better AI use cases for them — push notifications based on purchase history, revenue optimization — anything other than vibes-to-latte. watch/listen here ↓
Jacky Chou (buying online businesses up to $1m)17,360 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
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