Ryan Castillo
@rmcastil.bsky.social
- Helping SaaS’s track how AI's represent them with knowatoa.com - Been programming for 25+ years - Believes being a dev is a marketing/sales super power
That moment when you discover the Wikipedia app has tabs. Holy moly I had 70+ open.
I feel so lucky to have made super-talented friends who I'm constantly learning from. Sitting here working in @jessehanley.bsky.social's Bento while listening to @iamcoreyg.com's newest album.
It's tough balancing product, marketing, and sales. At Knowatoa, we always try to focus on two of the three. Pretty impressed with how @buckbee.bsky.social has led the product team over the last couple of months.
Do I know any founders who write their own content and would participate in a UX interview for Knowatoa's new onboarding for $$?
Listening to how angry my son gets when Alexa tries to wake him up gives me hope of a rebellion against our eventual AI overlords.
Brackets city has been my new daily. Last couple of days have been beginner friendly if you want to try it out www.theatlantic.com/games/bracke... Rank: 🔮 (Puppet Master) 🎹 Total Keystrokes: 56 🎯 Minimum Required: 56 Total Score: 100.0 🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪
Bracket City - The Atlantic
Solve nested clues to reveal a satisfying fact about this day in history. Climb the ranks from tourist to kingmaker (or beyond?).
theatlantic.com
The kids are all back in school and I'm finally coming back up to breath. What's everyone been up to?
The #1 spot doesn’t matter if nobody clicks. Most rank tracking tools treat visibility like a scoreboard. You either “won” the SERP or you didn’t. But that mindset falls apart when AI Overviews and chats give people an answer without ever clicking anything. At Knowatoa, we think of rank-
Knowatoa - AI Search Discovery
Find out if AI search services correctly describe your company's products and services, consider your company positively, and how to outrank your competitors.
knowatoa.com
We’ve spent years teaching site owners to block anything that isn’t Googlebot. Now? That mindset might be costing you visibility. Most AI crawlers like OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic behave a lot like traditional bots. They crawl your content to understand it and potentially cite it. Not to-
Everyone’s debating whether LLMs are “creative” or just remixing, but here’s the thing: what they’re remixing matters. The top sources cited by AI tools in June were Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google, and Yelp. That’s a pretty human-centered set of inputs: lived experience (Reddit), structured-
Google’s AI Overviews are changing the rules. You can rank #1 today, and tomorrow the same query is answered by an AIO with no mention of your brand, no traffic to your site, and no clue that anything changed. That’s why we added AI Overviews to Knowatoa. Not just to keep up, but to help teams-
Before this, tracking AI Overviews meant manually Googling questions and hoping you’d spot one in time. Now it’s something you can actually track. With Knowatoa’s AI Overviews, once you define the questions you care about, we’ll tell you: - when an AI Overview appears - whether your brand is cited
You don’t need to guess whether AI Overviews are cutting into your rankings. Knowatoa now flags when an Overview appears for your tracked queries, and whether your brand is mentioned in it, left out, or misrepresented entirely. That means less digging, fewer surprises, and faster decisions for-
Knowatoa - AI Search Discovery
Find out if AI search services correctly describe your company's products and services, consider your company positively, and how to outrank your competitors.
knowatoa.com
By far, my favorite pattern of programming with an AI is the Ping Pong Pattern. I have it write several tests based on a description. I use that to TDD some methods, and boom, we're done.
Putting my money where my mouth is. 90% of the research I did for our new HVAC unit and mini split was done in ChatGPT. It was a blend of information and consideration questions. And this is why we spent so much time building out categorization in Knowatoa.
I've recently discovered Swedish Electric and have been listening to Little Dragon non stop. Anyone got other recommendations?
Going to fill in for Mike on the Twinning Strategy pod. You can see us live today at 3pm on YouTube or LinkedIn www.youtube.com/live/rSSnKRN... www.linkedin.com/events/episo...
Episode 65. Winning the AI Search War
Ryan Castillo of Knowatoa joins the Twinning Strategy crew to talk about how AI is changing the way we search for information and what this means for compani...
youtube.com
Why does it sound like noise when my kids play it versus music when I play the same thing. Am I old now?
There's all this debate on whether AI generated code should be used or not. I look at it as another tool. I'm giving our junior marketer access to our backroom to retrieve some metrics for our weekly report. The report doesn't have to be 100% bug proof or elegant, it just has work.
One of the most essential skills you need to develop as a founder is to differentiate whether people are excited to work with you vs your product. With the former, it can give you false momentum and leave you wondering why people aren’t buying your product.
I was taught about watering holes a decade ago by 30x500 via @amyhoy.bsky.social and @alexhillman.com. For freelancers, I used Reddit. For devs, I used Twitter, Bsky, and Conferences. LinkedIn and SEOs/agencies is a another level. My inbox is filled with 100s of convos.
Monthly occurrence of a one character update, causing me to wonder why something isn't working for a couple of days. I've have the unit tests for this all stubbed and mocked out. Maybe I should have reached for VCR.
Just updated this on the pricing page. It's not a feature in the traditional sense of the SaaS but our customers have been happy with it. We're in a shipping cycle so expect a number of new features in the next couple of days/weeks.
We ended up going with Close because a number of people we trust recommended them. Still using Apollo for enrichment.
Ryan Castillo@rmcastil.bsky.social · 2y agoCurrently evaluating three CRMs for our company. Should I be sharing the evaluation process here?
It did not go well. I blame the other guy.
Ryan Castillo@rmcastil.bsky.social · last yr.Haven't had time to fill out my March Madness bracket and it's getting down to the wire. So I told ChatGPT everything I knew about winning basketball and had it use deep research to make the picks for me. Will report back in a couple of days to share how we did.
There's an argument of whether AI search will be the death of Google Search. Looking at my search behavior over the last 24 hours I see a several patterns: 1. Instant searches are still won by Google (images, spelling, who a person is)