Last night I stared at my screen for two hours, not knowing what to choose.

In front of me was a Reddit post: a guy automated his entire SEO, including a "link exchange scheme," and got 450 clicks per day in 3 months. 407 thousand impressions. Top 7 in search results.

And me? A couple hundred clicks per day. 49 keywords. A 14-year-old domain (5,171 days), which I'm afraid to "burn."

You know what it's like — seeing someone get better results than you using methods you've forbidden yourself?

The Temptation Was Real

I opened my notepad. Started calculating:

• Buy 3 cheap domains: $30/year.
• Set up "Triangle Backlinks" (A → B → C → A): 2 hours of work.
• Launch automatic publishing: workflow already exists.

Total: $30 and one evening — and I could get 10x traffic.

Against this: months of work on widgets that no one has embedded yet. A "White Hat" approach that has so far yielded modest results.

I closed the notepad. Opened it again. Closed it.

Why I Chose the "Hard Path"

Not because I'm a saint. And not because I'm afraid of risk.

I remembered how in 2019 I lost my first startup. We did everything "fast and dirty": copied other people's features, promised what didn't exist, grew metrics at any cost.

Grew to 10K users in six months. Lost them all in 3 months.

Because when you build on lies (or "gray schemes"), the foundation collapses at the most unexpected moment.

With wr.io I have a 14-year-old domain (the company is 7 years old, but I bought the domain earlier). This isn't just an "asset" — it's trust. Google indexes us. Users register. Investors watch.

If tomorrow Google catches me on a PBN and bans me — I don't just lose traffic. I lose 14 years of domain history.

What I'm Doing Instead

My team and I launched the Competitor Gap Workflow. It analyzes blogs from Zapier, Make, n8n and finds topics they write about that we don't.

We started making AI drafts (like the Reddit author), but with one difference: A human presses the "Publish" button. Only after adding real screenshots of our product and personal experience.

We're developing Embeddable Widgets instead of "link exchanges". The idea is simple: if you analyzed a YouTube channel through our YouTube Analyzer, you can embed the result in your blog.

You get a beautiful chart. We get an honest backlink. Google sees natural growth.

Results? Yes, But Modest

Honestly: the results are modest so far, but positive.

In 3 days (January 3-6):

Yes, backlinks dropped (Semrush cleaned up spam). But AI Visibility grew by 27% — meaning WRIO is starting to be mentioned in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers.

Competitor Gap found 23 topics, but articles haven't been written yet. Embeds work, but they've only been embedded on 3 sites.

This is not explosive growth. This is slow, honest progress.

So why am I writing about this?

Because Build in Public isn't "look how cool we are." It's "look how we make mistakes and learn."

What's Next

In a month I'll publish a detailed report with charts and honest numbers.

For now — if you're also building a product and choosing between "fast" and "right":

Try our tools → Sign Up

• YouTube Analyzer
• Reddit Auto-Responder
• X Analyzer

Embed the results in your blog. Get an honest backlink.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the "Reddit guy" will turn out to be smarter in the end.

But I'm willing to take that risk. Because I'm not building for one year. I'm building for 10 years.

P.S. Our team wrote a detailed technical breakdown of this strategy. If you're interested in the details (workflows, code, architecture), read the main article:

👉 Read on wrio.io

P.P.S. If you're also choosing between "fast" and "right" — write to me. I want to hear your stories.