Unscripted SaaS · Product & growth
A Product Beats A Content Site
with Christopher Gimmer — co-founder of Snappa and GoodMetrics
Christopher Gimmer has been running Snappa for around a decade, which gives him an unusually long baseline for judging what changed. Talking to host Jeremy Rivera, he was measured rather than alarmist — and that is what makes the conclusion worth taking seriously.
Why Pure Content Sites Are Struggling
He starts from a position of strength, which matters for what follows. Organic is “definitely still a primary channel for us… being around for ten years and having the backlink profile that we do, we’ve had pretty decent domain authority. We have a lot of posts we’ve ranked number one for ten years that we’re always updating.”
“That being said — between AI Overviews, that is definitely eating into some of that traffic. Our organic traffic has definitely gone down. Even though we’re ranking number one for some of these keywords, the AI Overviews are answering some of those things, and so we’re losing out on some of those clicks.”
— Christopher Gimmer, SnappaThe important word is even though. The rankings did not move. The position is intact and the traffic still fell — which breaks the assumption underneath a decade of content strategy, that position and traffic are the same variable observed twice.
For a business whose only asset is rankings, there is no lever left to pull. For a business with a product, the ranking was always a route to something else.
A Legitimate Product In A Specific Space
“I think that makes a lot of sense. There was definitely a lot of pure content sites that got hit over the last year or two. But it seems that anyone who’s had a legitimate product within a specific space tends to be doing much better than just a pure content site. So I’d probably agree with that.”
— Christopher Gimmer, SnappaTwo qualifiers are doing the work. Legitimate — not a lead magnet or a thin utility built for links, but something people use and pay for. And within a specific space — the product defines a territory it belongs to, which is what gives the content around it a reason to exist beyond traffic.
Snappa’s own origin is a good illustration of how specific that can be. Christopher is not a designer and was never good with Photoshop; his business partner was decent at it but it made no sense for him to spend time making graphics instead of doing development work. Every blog post needed a featured image and in-post graphics, and back then “just finding a stock photo, importing it into Photoshop, adding your text — it was a decent amount of work for an image that may disappear in a social media feed in a day or two.”
The result was “a graphic design tool for non-designers — not needing to know all the sizing and dimensions for all the platforms, having preset templates, having a library of free stock photos,” aimed at content publishers and online marketers. A named audience with a named recurring irritation.
Tools Earn Links That Blog Posts Do Not
His argument for why a product changes the link equation starts with what stopped working:
“Another benefit of the tools and stuff is that it’s hard to do traditional link building now, just because everyone’s inbox is full of spam. So I think people are more willing and likely to link out to a really good tool that actually solves a problem versus yet another blog post with a wall of text.”
— Christopher Gimmer, SnappaThe mechanism is about the recipient rather than the sender. Someone linking to a tool is doing their reader a favour — here is the thing that does the job. Someone linking to an article is offering more reading to a person who already came for an answer. The first is a service; the second is a referral to homework.
Kristiyan Yankov’s roundup argument from the same show points the same way: what makes a placement work is that the destination answers the question the surrounding content raised. A tool answers it more completely than an article can.
Adding A Product Surface To A Content Business
Practitioner guidance from us. Christopher describes the pattern; he does not prescribe how to retrofit it.
If you are on the content side of this divide, the useful question is not “what product should we build” but “what do we already know that could do work instead of describing work.”
Look for the article that is really a calculation. Any post explaining how to work something out is a tool wearing a paragraph. Pricing, sizing, conversion, timing, break-even.
Look for the data you sit on. Benchmarks, ranges, typical values from your own operations. A comparison somebody currently makes by hand is a product surface.
Scope it to one input and one output. Snappa began as one irritation for one audience. A tool that ships in a fortnight and does one thing will outperform an ambitious one that never launches.
Christopher’s own newer venture, GoodMetrics, follows the same shape — and Jeremy named the structural reason it works during the conversation: a subscription product “focuses in on a particular pain point… so you have to keep iterating on how you address that pain point over time. You release new features, you continue to be better than the other guys.” A content site has no equivalent forcing function, which is why it is the model with less to defend when the traffic moves.
Full recap: Christopher Gimmer on bootstrapped SaaS and AI Overviews, or the episode. He is on LinkedIn.
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