Google doesn't care about your job title

_{Day 103/100}

Hey—It's Tim. 

I’m in a basement office in London, 2013.
AutoCAD on one screen, Google Maps on the other.
I’m supposed to be modelling a fire-escape staircase for a 60-storey tower.

Instead, I’m typing “plumber hackney” and muttering:

And then I’d open another tab and Google:

Not because I was getting a dog or a tattoo.
Because I wanted to know why they ranked.

I was supposed to be drawing fire exit layouts.
I was doing citation audits in my head.

I’d look up a local roofer.
Check their backlinks.
Then the next guy.
Then compare categories in Yell.com.

At one point I printed out two Google Maps listings and tried to diff them like code.
Just to figure out why the guy with four fewer reviews was ranking higher.

I was obsessed.

After three weeks of begging execs I was finally given logins to our website for me to try my hand at this SEO thing myself.

In a little under 10 days -

Boom: #1 for “structural engineers london.”

No confetti, no handshake, just me fist-pumping under a fluorescent light.

That silent win proved two things:

1. Google doesn’t care about your job title.

2. Obsession beats permission, every time.

Cold-Email Boot Camp

I wanted to do this for other people, and figured I could just do the SEO freelance work in my evenings and weekends.

So evenings turned into cold-email marathons. Two hundred personalised messages a night:

If they said “yes,” then I wrote the audit.
Time saved, sanity intact.

First client?

A luxury property fixer who spent £780 on three door-hinge screws yet paid me the exact same amount for a month of SEO.

(Irony tastes like Red Bull at 2 a.m.)

I undercharged for an embarrassing length of time.
By the time I worked out my hourly rate was lower than the price of his fancy screws, his business imploded and the cheque stopped arriving.

Lesson learned: if the hardware budget outmuscles your fee, raise your prices yesterday.

When you’re obsessed, it’s not work.

It’s compulsion.

I didn’t have Semrush. I didn’t have tools.
I had a notebook and an Excel sheet with the title: “Things Google Likes?”

I wasn’t chasing money.
I wasn’t building a brand.
I was just completely and utterly hooked.

It was the first time in my life I was learning something without being told to.
And I couldn’t stop.

Fast-forward a dozen years: that late-night basement tinkering turned into a career, a SaaS, and this very newsletter.

I was obsessed then, I’m obsessed now.

If you’re secretly reading this on a second monitor while your boss thinks you’re formatting another spreadsheet, trust the itch.

It’s probably trying to hire you.

See you tomorrow.

✌️ Tim "Screw Loose" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. Send me a door hinge worth more than my old retainer and I’ll send you some goodies.

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