What's a question you are tired of being asked about your product?
I will go first.
"Do you do backlinks?"
Every week. Sometimes every day. From prospects. From agencies. From people who read one SEO blog post from 2018.
Backlinks are not the problem. Backlinks are a solution to a problem that has changed.
We are building Ranklink. A network of 20,000+ website and blog owners. Not a marketplace. Not a "buy links here" page. A community of people who want their content cited and are willing to cite others.
We ask them one question: "What topics are you writing about this quarter?" Then we match them with other owners in the same space. They link to each other. No money changes hands. No "guest post for $200." Just humans helping humans get cited.
The backlink industry is stuck in 2018. People still ask about domain authority. Page rank. Quantity over quality. The data does not support it anymore.
So here is my question back to you.
Do you still chase backlinks? Or have you found something else that works better?
Imed Radhouani
Founder & CTO – Rankfender
rankfender.com
Replies
For us the version of this is: is it just another AI image generator? The useful answer is workflow, not model output. A campaign asset only matters if it keeps the brief, brand context, channel size, variants, and publishing use case together. Otherwise the first image looks exciting and the tenth asset becomes manual work again.
Mine is "so I just set up a profile and receive alerts?"
The honest answer is: yes, kind of, but that's the floor. Nibble (food and drug recall alerts across 13 countries) does the passive layer well. Set country, set conditions, get notified when something matches.
The part the question skips is the active side. Scanning everyday products in your pantry or at the store before you buy them, so you catch something before you ever own it. Reading the Insights blog to see why a recall propagates across borders or which agency moved first. Checking a brand's recall history before you make it a regular purchase. The passive alert is the safety net. The active scan is what moves you from reactive to proactive.
The reason the question keeps coming is fair. From the outside, "recall app" sounds passive by definition. Most consumer safety tools are alerts-only. But framing it as "alerts" leaves out the half that's actually empowering, which is checking before something becomes a problem instead of being notified after it already is.
On your network design: the mutual-link approach you described sounds closer to academic citation networks than SEO link building. Citations work because the social cost of not reciprocating gets borne by the freeloader, not the host. Has the design held up against the obvious gaming patterns yet, or is it still pre-scale enough that nobody's tried?
"Is this like Apollo?"
Yes and no. Apollo is great for the US market. We specifically solve for India and emerging markets where global databases have 55-65% accuracy at best.
The real answer is: we're Apollo's cousin who grew up in Mumbai and actually knows where to find decision-makers here — including founders who don't exist on LinkedIn at all. But that's a hard one-liner to explain, so I just say "91% accuracy vs 60%" and move on.
"Is this like Apollo?"
Yes and no. Apollo is great for the US market. We specifically solve for India and emerging markets where global databases have terrible coverage.
The real answer is: we're more like Apollo's cousin who grew up in Mumbai and actually knows where to find the right contacts here. But that's harder to explain in a one-liner, so I just say "kind of, but 91% accuracy instead of 60%" and hope for the best.