Kevin Indig was laid off from Shopify in July 2022, alongside more than a thousand other people. He posted about it on LinkedIn, which several people told him was a bad idea, and the post did over a million impressions. The consulting offers that arrived became the advisory practice he runs today. Hosted by Mark A Preston.
He climbed as high as he could on purpose. More people, more responsibility, more title, ending at an organisation of eighty to a hundred at Shopify. He is candid that he is happier now that he is not doing it.
You can climb down a ladder too. Just because you explore management path or individual contributor path for a while doesn’t mean you cannot switch.
— Kevin Indig
The structural point underneath is that most companies still only have one ladder. Even at the technology companies he worked for, a track that lets an individual contributor reach the top was a recent idea.
Think about how you’re wasting talent and skill away by forcing people to become managers to make more money.
— Kevin Indig
I think most companies would be way better by having more people operating in their zone of genius.
— Kevin Indig
His observation is that people who reach financial security tend to go and do something they are unusually good at, and become better at it still. He would rather companies got there first, by building paths that pay people well for the thing they are world class at.
It is very hard to see for yourself what you’re incredibly good at, because to you it’s so natural.
— Kevin Indig
Which is why he treats it as exploration work rather than an assessment. He says it took him until recently to identify his own.
There was no plan. He was part of a twenty per cent reduction at Shopify in July 2022, more than a thousand people, and he received four months of severance, which he notes is unusually generous in the United States.
I posted on LinkedIn that I was part of the layoffs, which a lot of people said was a stupid idea, but it got me over a million LinkedIn impressions.
— Kevin Indig
Executives who saw it asked whether he was free to consult. He took a few clients while looking for a permanent role, and the consulting outgrew the search.
The one thing I love about advising is I don’t have to employ anybody. I go in to advise companies that already have resources available, they just need direction and streamlining.
— Kevin Indig
As an advisor I focus completely on the strategic side of things. So I don’t do keyword research, I don’t do tech audits.
— Kevin Indig
He reviews roadmaps, critiques designs, questions engineering process, and takes the argument to the people who can actually authorise it. He acknowledges the slightly unfair advantage of being an outsider with a Shopify line on the CV, and says he prepares thoroughly anyway.
Making a business case is a skill. A lot of people think it’s just, oh you need to tell a good story, and sure that’s a big part of it, but you have to make it digestible and relatable, and you have to talk money.
— Kevin Indig
The reason so few people do it well is that search outcomes are probabilistic, and nobody wants to stand in front of a board and promise a five-times return on a million pounds. His answer is meta-thinking: keep asking why, start with a small percentage of the change, and make sure it can be reversed. If you have to put an actual number in front of a finance team, a worked method for turning organic overlap into a revenue forecast is one way to build it.
His advice for anyone who wants to do this work is unglamorous and free: carve out time each week to advise a company for nothing, in exchange for the reference and the feedback. Most of his own clients, he says, still arrive by referral rather than from the newsletter or LinkedIn.
| Time | What happens |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Mark A Preston introduces Kevin Indig |
| 01:30 | First paid SEO work in Germany, fifteen years ago |
| 04:00 | Enterprise clients as the accelerator |
| 08:00 | Starting at the bottom of an agency |
| 10:10 | Climbing to an organisation of eighty to a hundred |
| 12:14 | You can climb down a ladder too |
| 14:03 | Wasting talent by promoting experts into management |
| 17:18 | The zone of genius |
| 21:46 | Laid off from Shopify in July 2022 |
| 26:24 | What an advisor does, and does not do |
| 33:37 | Turning SEO into a business case executives can act on |
| 40:20 | Integrators and aggregators |
| 45:55 | Advising for free to build the practice |
| Entity | What it is |
|---|---|
| Growth Memo | His weekly newsletter, past twelve thousand subscribers at the time of this interview |
| Zone of genius | The work someone is world class at, invisible from the inside because it costs no effort |
| Integrators and aggregators | His two brushes for site types: companies that must create content, and platforms that inherit it |
| Individual contributor track | The career ladder that does not require managing people, still new in most companies |
| Meta-thinking | His method for de-risking a large decision: keep asking why, start small, keep it reversible |
| Mark A Preston, the host | His own archive of interviews on the same feed |
Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.
kevin-indig.com, plus X and LinkedIn under his own name. The newsletter is linked in the table above, and he warns that an unaffiliated outfit uses a similar name.
Indig, Kevin. Interviewed by Mark A Preston. “The Fortune 500 Growth Advisor Story of Kevin Indig.” Unscripted SEO, 2024. https://unscriptedseo.com/kevin-indig/
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