Kyle Platt

Figured now is a good time to share my current startup backstory and what I am working on. Have built >20 products/tools at this point and found some snippets of success! Here they are: 🧵

The underlying engine of Evergreen is becoming quite strong. Allows me to layer better features on top of it! Dont want to wait for evergreen to write about something? Just enter your idea or use our advanced mode to have a little more control! #buildinpublic

Free tool to run some AEO readiness checks on your pages! tryevergreen.ai/aeo-page-che...

Adding more indexing power to Evergreen AI! #buildinpublic

Looked at our signups since August Business email: 15 of 15 added their website and ran the product. Gmail + one-click Google sign-in: 49% never got past the first screen. Same page, same product. The email address predicted intent better than anything else we track. #buildinpublic

Been very busy the last couple weeks trying to scale Evergreen AI. Surpassed 1k MRR which is a great first milestone! Now comes the hard part of making sure conversion rates improve, keeping customers happy and constantly improving the product. Its a fast moving space. #buildinpublic

Researched ~50 tools in our category. One source that came back was our own page ranking for "best Outrank alternatives." Forgot we wrote it. Someone searching a rival's name + "alternatives" has already decided to leave. The rival can't rank for it. #buildinpublic

We cut features out of Local Leads and it started feeling more premium, not less. We'd built v1 with sales knowledge baked in, because our team had it. The customer is a plumber who's never run outbound. Every setting you remove is a decision you make for them. #buildinpublic

61.7% of AI citations are "ghost citations." The model used your page as a source and never named you. You're not invisible to AI search. You're being consumed by it while the answer recommends someone else. #buildinpublic

Read our own upgrade screen this week. It said run, questions, keyword gaps, measured. Every one of those is a name for a piece of our machinery. None of them mean anything to the person deciding whether to pay us. #buildinpublic

Working on some features that actually showcase some of the power under the hood of Evergreen AI. Fine balance to walk between being easy to use and not being so easy that it doesnt look like it does much haha #buildinpublic

Cut our free run in half. Cost went from about 80 cents to about 46. What I found while counting: every question we rule out costs a third of a cent, and we were throwing that answer away. A no is a finding. The cheapest one you will make. Count your rejects. #buildinpublic

Every project has two timelines. The one I tell people, and the one that starts the moment I open the documentation and find out the endpoint I need was deprecated in 2023. #buildinpublic

I researched about 50 tools in my category. Roughly 20 already advertise the exact thing I called my differentiator, right on the homepage. Nobody buys because you claim to be different. They buy because you showed them. Stop stating it. Ship the artifact. #buildinpublic

Highest return hour in SEO isn't writing anything new. Filter Search Console to queries where you sit at position 5 to 15. Those pages already have authority and relevance. They're one edit from the results people actually click. Everyone publishes. Almost nobody goes back. #buildinpublic

Made the Evergreen AI free tier deliberately small. A couple of keywords, one article. I'd rather have 5 customers arguing with me about the output than 500 free accounts sitting idle. Signups aren't demand. Complaints are. #buildinpublic

We stopped treating our software as separate products. It's one Engine. Rule: every tool has to feed another. Local Leads runs our outbound, that outbound sells BluePilot. Evergreen AI runs the SEO that feeds all of it. Each tool's first customer is another tool. #buildinpublic

Built Local Leads because our agency needed better local leads. The data was good. It wasn't enough. Quality data isn't a strong enough reason to leave a tool you already have set up. So we moved from finding leads to sending the emails too. Execution beats better inputs. #buildinpublic

Most SEO tools open by asking which keywords you want to target. If you run a plumbing company, how would you know? Your three closest competitors already answered that by ranking. The gap between theirs and yours is your content plan. Read their answer. #buildinpublic

Built a signup funnel view for Evergreen AI. "Signed up and did nothing" was three unrelated problems wearing one label. Confirmation email never landed. Stuck on the terms screen. Abandoned the domain form. Three fixes. One number hid all of them. #buildinpublic

61.7% of AI citations are "ghost citations." The model used your page as a source and never named you. You're not invisible to AI search. You're being consumed by it while the answer recommends someone else. #buildinpublic

Launched on Theres An AI For That today! theresanaiforthat.com/ai/evergreen... Check it out if you get a chance. Already seeing a nice little traffic spike 🚀

Six CMS integrations shipped for Evergreen AI. Every one has its own auth, field mapping and failure modes. Squarespace doesn't even have a publishing API. So the seventh isn't an integration. It's a signed JSON envelope POSTed to an endpoint you control, with a public spec. #buildinpublic

Shipped Shopify, Ghost, Webflow and Wix integrations for Evergreen AI in four days. Then closed a ticket literally named "Connect Evergreen AI to Evergreen AI" and let the product publish its own content. Pointing a tool at itself finds things a month of internal testing does not.

Yesterday I soft launched Evergreen AI. Today, the longer version of why. We're an agency and a product studio at the same time. We did the same manual SEO work by hand for the fifth client in a row and finally admitted it should be software. kyleplatt.substack.com/p/we-built-a...

Soft launching Evergreen AI today. Built it for our own agency clients first. You give it your site and your competitors, it finds the keywords they rank for and you don't, then writes and publishes the content to close the gap. Been running it live for months. Now it's open. tryevergreen.ai

For the past week I have been gearing up for the launch of the new product I have been working on. Classic last 20% taking 80% of the time... Going to hook up to stripe shortly for an early release and then tweak over time. Stay tuned its pretty awesome!

I cant believe squarespace purposely doesn't have an api for publishing blog content... Lots of our agency clients on squarespace and it really would have helped. I reverse engineered their request system, but that is always finnicky 🤷#buildinpublic

Im at the hardest part of building a product... Naming it. 😱 #buildinpublic

SEO tool is chugging along nicely. Internal use only but that means I can iterate very quickly on feedback and not worry about breaking things. Its nice when you/your team represent a core customer base #buildinpublic

one marketing channel is a bet. five running at once is a system. feels like most people never make the jump.

Been heads down grinding for the past two weeks. SEO project is coming along nicely 💪. Think its going to help our agency work significantly!

Have a big new project on the go! Priority #1 is building something that is directly useful for my team at Tactycs. To help with SEO/AEO Still early but looks very promising so far 🏆 #buildinpublic

A quick retrospective on how creating a marketing agency out of our saas product saved Tactycs! kyleplatt.substack.com/p/how-we-sav...

Pulled in five directions this week. Got through maybe two of them. Somehow still feel like it was a productive week. That's just building, I guess.

Quick little lesson on engaging users even when they aren't coming to the app open.substack.com/pub/kyleplat... #buildinpublic

Still figuring out the balance between leveraging AI and what brought me success in the past. Mixed opinions out there, but shifting focus to product over code specifics feels right to me. Where do you draw the line? 🧠

slowly wiring Claude up as my actual AI assistant. vault, calendar, ClickUp, Stripe all connected so it has real context each session. still figuring out the right workflows but already feels less like a chatbot and more like someone who knows my stuff. curious where this ends up

Decided to start blogging my build journeys again. Just a good way to retrospective your own thoughts. I have my ghost site but am considering just switching over to substack at kyleplatt.substack.com

Now that we've gone through a proper round of beta testing at Local Leads I have some more big improvements coming! - simplified pricing model - double down on autopilot - unlimited search - improved contact data These changes not live yet but progress is going very quickly! #buildinpublic

I post about a lot of building or product stuff but I want to join more discussions/communities about my hobbies too! Big one for me is golf. Cooped up in Canadian winter but golf season is fast approaching! Hoping to make another handicap jump this year. Ended last year at 6.5! Other golfers here?

Local Leads is legitimately becoming powerful now 💪 Set up a campaign and watch it naturally spread its lead finding efforts city by city. Also sends out emails for you! We always run into the issue of waning outreach efforts when busy at Tactycs. Now it is officially solved #buildinpublic

Made the decision to pivot slightly on Local Leads to truly maximize its effectiveness. The ability to find new companies is very cool but I don't like how region locked it is right now. Focused on execution features. It now spreads city by city finding leads and sending emails. All automatically

Changing up our software approach a bit this year ⬇️ Building what I am calling "The Engine" 🚂 Tools that we turn on internally, that help sell/grow other tools. i.e Local Leads automated email helps sell BluePilot Each added tool supports the others. Execution focused features only #buildinpublic

Local Leads is improving rapidly! Our internal use is really starting to ramp up and thats how I know it is genuinely useful. New UI updates to show email campaign progress 📈 #buildinpublic

Look how simple it is to start an email campaign in Local Leads! #buildinpublic

Since im adding bulk emailing functionality to Local Leads I first needed to add a way to disqualify leads -> #buildinpublic

Good progress on more Local Leads features. Tomorrow I will be launching the ability to connect and send emails right from Local Leads with just a click. Pretty exciting! #buildinpublic

Tough pill to swallow... Local Leads isn't where I need it to be. Getting quality leads is great. But its not enough to break the stickiness of people using more established tools. Good news. I have a plan. Local Leads is going end to end. Sending emails automatically. Stay tuned! #buildinpublic

Local Leads now sends new company leads straight to your inbox! Pretty important step of simplifying the workflow and making it super easy to use #buildinpublic

Local Leads improvements are chugging along nicely. - Setting up new PSEO system - Added another 1k+ New Business leads - Testing Ad flows - Team working on regular SEO #buildinpublic