ChatGPT didn't kill SEO - Elston Baretto, founder of Tiiny.host
Tiiny.host's Elston Baretto bootstrapped his way to 73,000 signups a month and a million users in the database, mostly through SEO and YouTube — and explains why a video about deploying to Netlify took 220 days to start trending.
Elston Baretto is the founder of Tiiny.host, the simplest way to put a file online — drag in an HTML file, PDF, or zip and get a shareable link in seconds. He's grown it to 70,000-plus signups a month with content marketing, entirely bootstrapped, while working alone for most of the journey.
We got into whether SEO is actually dead now that people ask ChatGPT instead of Google, how Elston worked out which keywords were worth chasing, the repositioning that took Tiiny from a technical 'static web hosting' pitch to a much broader, non-technical audience, and what changed once he went from solo founder to a small team.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
A friend of yours who's also in dev tools recently told me SEO is dead. Is he right?
Controversial. It's like when people said email is dead — email is definitely still not dead, and neither is SEO. I think it's transitioning, for sure, but we're in a bubble, especially in tech — we think everyone's using ChatGPT to find everything now, but my mom is barely using Google, let alone ChatGPT. And if you want to argue SEO is dead because everyone uses ChatGPT — where does ChatGPT get its information from? It's SEO. Ask ChatGPT the simplest way to host an HTML file, and we come up as one of the recommended options. We've done zero ChatGPT optimization — the only reason we're there is because we rank highly on Google for that topic. We've got 35 million impressions from Google over the past twelve months, and we're getting 50,000 clicks a month and growing. It's still a massive driver.
How do you actually work out if SEO is worth investing in for a new product?
Day one, get an Ahrefs subscription, put in keywords related to your business, look at what competitors are ranking for, and see if there are traffic opportunities — in a few hours you'll know whether there's potential. You need search volume in the thousands, and the higher the better — maybe 5, 10, 20, 40 thousand people searching a month in the US for your top keywords. If the big words are there, there's usually a lot of smaller opportunity words trickling down that are much easier to rank for. But if the terms you find are only one or two thousand searches, you're probably not going to rank for the big ones, and the smaller ones you can rank for won't move the needle. You have to be honest about whether the volume's actually there — it's at least three to six months of constant attention before you see results, so if you put all that time in and get a hundred visitors a month, you're better off finding something else.
How does your YouTube content compare to the written SEO side?
It's very overlapping — we cross-reference the topics we create to see if Google features videos for them, and now Google will often show a row of videos around the fourth or fifth position for a keyword, so we try to make a better video for that. We follow a fairly standard content ladder: a tweet is the lightweight, easy end, and if it catches on you turn it into a blog post, then a higher-production video using the blog post as a script, then cut shorts out of the video for Instagram and TikTok. One video we made about deploying on Netlify — I think it was a Vercel-on-Netlify tutorial — took 220 days to start trending. For 220 days it had 800 views, and now it's at 10 to 12 thousand and climbing. It's probably Google's algorithm picking things up later and starting to feature us in search, since YouTube is owned by Google. YouTube is like SEO in that sense — you create something, plug it in, forget about it, and a few months later you find out what's actually working.
How did you approach the actual landing pages — Tiiny does a lot of different things.
We followed the jobs-to-be-done framework — we market for when people need to achieve a specific task. If you want to upload a PDF, we've got a landing page for that and we're number one. If you want to host HTML, we're top three. I've started calling it just-in-time marketing: we're there exactly when you need us, but pretty useless if you don't. When I explain the product to someone who's never had the problem, they ask why they'd need it. But someone who has the problem goes straight to Google, types 'upload PDF,' clicks, and they're in our system. Running ads for something like 'upload a PDF' doesn't work the same way — nobody scrolling Instagram thinks, I'm going to upload my PDF right now.
You built this while completely bootstrapped, working solo for a long time. What was that journey like?
When we first launched, it was positioned as a very basic dev tool — simple static web hosting, modeled heavily on WeTransfer meets S3. It took about ten minutes to go live at first; the first feedback on Reddit was that it was great but too slow, so the first big change was making it fast — it's about five seconds now. But positioning it as 'static web hosting' meant technical people kept comparing us to GitHub Pages or Netlify and asking why they'd need us when they could just set it up themselves. Non-technical users, though, thought it was amazing. So I made the call to ignore the technical crowd and focus on non-technical users, repositioning from 'simple static web hosting' to 'the simplest way to host and share your work online' — eventually dropping the word 'host' too, since that's still too technical. Working solo for a long time really helped me focus on the core mechanics needed to grow the business — distribution and SEO — rather than shipping lots of different products. It took about eight or nine months of that before organic traffic really started flowing. I quit my job a few years in, and last year we started hiring — we're at four full-time people and four or five part-time people now, fully remote. We get around 73,000 signups a month and just passed a million users in the database.
What changed once you went from solo to having a team?
Solo, if you had an idea or needed to fix something, you'd just go and do it yourself very quickly. I've tried to keep that flexibility — I can still go in and fix or change things fast. But the team lets us work on longer-term initiatives in parallel: one person on GitHub integration, one on Outlook integration, one on LLM integration options. When I was solo, I never spent more than one or two days on anything before shipping it. Now we can spend a week on something and get it to production after a few days of testing. I'm a big fan of the phrase: if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. That's the goal of building the team now — really going far and becoming a bigger competitor.
What's the current focus — what features are you building now?
The biggest thing we did last year was going from three supported file types to eighty — we now have conversion pipelines that take a doc, PPT, or raw image and render it in a web-readable format in the browser. From a business perspective, the platform was originally built around quick, temporary hosting, which means high churn — fine as long as new customers keep coming in, but we want a more sustainable product. So we're focused on stickier use cases, like portfolio hosting — designers or developers who want a permanent place to put their best work — and things like one-click email capture on an uploaded PDF or site, which is useful for lead generation. We're also moving upmarket into large file hosting — we can now handle uploads up to five terabytes, which is useful in video and professional media, a space I think is really underserved.
A friend of yours who runs Veed gave you advice early on — what was that relationship like?
He was instrumental, honestly, and it's really down to the community — Ramen Club and similar groups. I met him early on when we were testing different strategies, right when they were seeing good results from SEO. He literally showed me how to build the right landing page — this was pre-AI, so he was doing everything manually, pumping out twenty or thirty landing pages a week by hand, and they got serious growth from it. Veed is an obvious example of where SEO makes a ton of sense — the keyword volumes around video are huge, in every language. For web hosting, it wasn't as clear-cut, so we had to expand the product more. Canva has run a similar playbook — a landing page for basically every possible thing you'd Google around modifying an image.
If you had one piece of advice for a dev tools founder, what would it be?
Try to find mentors just ahead of you. I was fortunate to find that in the community — someone told me about SEO at exactly the right time. Reaching out to someone who's already exited or made it doesn't really work, because they're dealing in problems way beyond what you're facing. But someone who launched a year ago and has some growth is the perfect person to speak to — the strategies and techniques are fresh in their head, and it's directly relevant to building something today. It doesn't have to be a lone journey — you don't have to sit on your laptop watching everyone on Twitter. Join a mastermind or an online community, speak to people, connect with them. I've met people, found growth channels, and hired through community, and I'm just so grateful for it.
Links & references
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