Ian Nuttall has used the powerful combination of coding knowledge and marketing skills to produce several impressive exits. He sold an education company for 7 figures and has a string of successes from tapping into SEO opportunities. Ian is a self-taught developer and he's going to tell you how to use AI to get ahead of the competition in 2025!
Can you give a quick intro?
I’m Ian Nuttall, and I’ve been building internet businesses for almost 20 years. I live in Nottingham in the UK, and I’ve worked from home for the last decade.
I’m currently working on a content marketing automation tool and my programmatic SEO course, as well as a handful of programmatic SEO sites that make me passive income (albeit at the whims of Google and their algorithm!).
Can you tell us what you’ve achieved so far as a founder?
I’ve built so many things over the years! For the sake of brevity I’ll give you the highlights:
- A $30k+ MRR education startup (acquired for multiple 7-figures). This was a membership community for teachers to download teaching resources.
- The most comprehensive programmatic SEO course on the web with 1500+ customers. I current merged my AI coding course into this and plan to do a lot more content next year. The course has made over $200,000 in revenue since I launched a few years ago.
- Cuppa - the AI content writer that pretty much everyone uses now!
- A no-code programmatic SEO tool to scale content for SaaS businesses. This is the content marketing tool I’ve been working on with my co-founder. We’re very close to $1k MRR and hoping to do a big push next year.
- Launched Keyword Metrics, an SEO tool to find keywords you rank for but could rank better for. This was recently acquired
- Launched URL Monitor, an SEO tool to get your pages indexed in Google. The app scaled to $8k MRR pretty quickly before being acquired for $250k.
- Created a library of video lessons on how to code using AI. These have now been merged into my pSEO course.
- Many, many (seriously MANY) programmatic SEO sites (the biggest was acquired for $500k)
How did you first learn to code?
I first learned to code after I acquired a WordPress site called OpenDesigns.org. It was a free library of open source HTML and CSS templates, powered by a custom plugin.
I had to figure out how to fix PHP errors in upgrading to the latest WP and then make changes to the plugin to add the features I wanted to the tool. This was back in 2006 before Stack Overflow and it was a real trial and error process.
I also built a UK tax calculator and ported that across many different languages, from PHP to JavaScript to an iOS app at one point as well!
If I could go back I probably would have taken some kind of fundamentals course earlier to really focus on the basics, but trial and error STILL works well for me all these years later!
