Claire FountainSee more entrepreneur interviews here >>
Entrepreneur Spotlight
Allison Seboldt – Creator of PageFactory, which offers programmatic SEO without any coding
- Favorite Tools & Services: Evernote, Saas Pegasus, Heroku (why?)
- Where She Finds Talent: Personal network and hosting local meet-ups
- You May Not Know: Allison was a national finalist in speech and debate when she was in college.
“Being a software engineer, I was looking for ways to automate that, and stumbled upon a strategy called programmatic SEO.”
Allison is a self-proclaimed “software engineer turned entrepreneur” who is currently working on quite a few projects, one of them being PageFactory.app.
“My main project is called PageFactory, and it's a tool to help people automate content creation for SEO.”
Background
“Other people want to use this strategy, but it's kind of hard to do, so I built a tool to help them do it.”
Her most recent project, PageFactory, came about when Allison noticed a tedious aspect of managing other projects.
“I got into this because I was trying to do SEO for one of my other projects and realized it's a real grind to get traffic from SEO.”
Looking for a way to streamline the process and drive more traffic, Allison went looking for more options.
“Being a software engineer, I was looking for ways to automate that, and I stumbled upon a strategy called programmatic SEO, which is where you take data and apply it to templates to generate lots of landing pages.”
Noticing that the strategy was effective but not exactly easy for everyone, Allison drew on her experience as a software engineer to find a solution.
“I ended up discovering that lots of other people want to use this strategy, but it's kind of hard to do, so I built a tool to help them do it.”
Most People's Nightmare, Allison's Favorite Weekend Activity
Public speaking is many peoples’ biggest fear, but for Allison, it was an event she enjoyed and even excelled at.
“I used to compete in speech and debate in college in high school, and I was pretty good at it. I made the national final round in college four different times for three different events.”
The events themselves were an interesting mix.
“There was persuasion, which is where you create a persuasive speech, after dinner speaking, which is supposed to be a funny speech, and then rhetorical criticism, which was kind of like a mini-thesis, I guess you could say. You analyzed an event happening in the world and kind of discussed the implications of that event.”
Though many folks couldn’t imagine a worse way to spend a weekend, Allison still looks back on her days of speech and debate fondly.
“I used to spend my Saturdays in college dressing up in a suit and traveling to other schools to do something that most people would consider their biggest fear. I'm a little rusty these days. But yeah, it was super fun.”
Finding Talent
Favorite Place to Find Talent: Personal Network and Meet-Ups
“…Building my personal network online through Twitter and then in real life through meet up.”
“I do a pretty good job I think of building my personal network online through Twitter and then in real life through meet up. I go to a lot of meetups, and I also host a local meet-up for entrepreneurs in my area. This has worked really well to help me vet people beforehand and just to find cool people to work with.”
“Even if I'm not finding someone who has the specific skills I'm looking for, it's a great way to find someone who knows someone with the specific skills I'm looking for, and they've probably done the vetting beforehand.”
Allison's Toolkit
Favorite Note-Taking App
“I really like Evernote because that's a great place to just dump my thoughts into. I really like their text editor, it's very smooth.”
“Another note-taking app I really like is Notion. Notion has a little bit more complex functionality. You can do stuff like enter tasks and put those tasks in a can-ban board, so it makes it super easy to keep track of where everything is at.”
Favorite Software Boilerplate for Django
“This was super instrumental in my developing and launching my latest project, PageFactory, because it did a lot of heavy lifting for me. Things like authentication and subscriptions just come pre-built in it, and it really helped me get a head start.”
Favorite Hosting Tools
“The other tools that I consider really instrumental right now would be hosting tools like Heroku and Nullafi, those just make it so easy to launch stuff so it just makes it faster to ship for me.”
Where to Find Her
You can reach Allison Seboldt through her personal site or her company site, or follow Allison through her Twitter.
Want to be interviewed?
Fill out our short form here
