Stack Overflow didn't bootstrap to viability off Google traffic. The other guy brought Joel onboard to get his audience, no? Which is not to be critical of Stack Overflow, but it's a bad example, not the least because Google had to manually intervene to solve its SEO issues.
I think that supports Chris' point. He isn't saying SEO doesn't matter, he's saying that pursuing SEO as a marketing strategy means you have to be very aggressive in order to get any traffic. Which makes it a non-viable strategy for startups that care about the user experience.
My personal experience says he's right. And I think the Stack Overflow example does too. Even when SO redesigned itself to make the site more SEO-friendly it couldn't compete with some of its imitators -- presumably because Joel and team were averse to making changes that would hurt site usability and aesthetics.
> He isn't saying SEO doesn't matter, he's saying that pursuing SEO as a marketing strategy means you have to be very aggressive in order to get any traffic
SO got very significant search traffic with little apparent effort (that may be too harsh, but they were certainly not very aggressive).
It's probably fairer to say that Joel solved the chicken-egg problem by leveraging his existing community and fanning antipathy against experts-exchange. If the model was primarily SEO I'd expect them to have an easier time bootstrapping their non-tech related communities, especially now that they're investment-backed and can put money into user acquisition:
