An Accidental Teenage Beginning
Mark Williams-Cook got into SEO the way a lot of people did around that time: by complete accident. As a teenager, he ran a website with Amazon affiliate links on it — selling a DVD player or two a day, he recalls — and installed the analytics tool AWStats to see what was happening. The traffic was coming from search engines. He never left.
That idle curiosity became a career. On the PageTraffic podcast, he described roughly two decades in SEO, 16 to 17 of them inside agencies. The kid checking AWStats logs grew into an agency director — but he was never going to stay an employee forever. Before SaaS, he worked as an affiliate marketer, the kind of operator who learns fast because every ranking is his own money.
His name doesn't appear on the AlsoAsked website. But multiple independent sources — a GoDaddy tool guide, SEMrush's AI SEO roundup, and podcast transcripts — identify him as AlsoAsked's founder. The story that follows comes from those interviews, in his own words.
Twenty-Two Years in the Trenches
By the time AlsoAsked existed, Williams-Cook had spent 22 years in SEO. That's an era-spanning career: from the directory days through Panda, Penguin, mobile-first, and now AI search. The path he describes on Marketing Speak #530 runs agency director to affiliate marketer to SaaS founder — each step closer to owning the product, not just renting the traffic.
That depth matters for AlsoAsked, because the tool isn't a generic dashboard. It maps the questions real people ask Google — the "People Also Ask" boxes — into branching trees of intent. It's the kind of product that only a practitioner would build: someone who spent two decades thinking about what searchers actually type, not what keyword tools guess.
And it started, as the best tools do, as an internal utility. AlsoAsked was founded in 2019 from a tool the agency used for its own clients. The question wasn't whether it worked — the agency already knew it did. The question was whether the world wanted it.
The Alpha That Nearly Bankrupted Him
The world wanted it a little too much. "We made the alpha version of AlsoAsked, which was wildly popular," Williams-Cook told Marketing Speak. "We were doing hundreds of thousands of searches in a few weeks."
Wildly popular turned out to be a problem. Each of those searches had to be scraped live from Google, which meant proxies — and proxies cost money. The alpha was burning more than £1,000 a month in proxy costs alone, with no revenue attached. It was his first foray into SaaS, and the first lesson was brutal: in a data-hungry product, your cost of goods sold can eat you alive before you ever charge a dollar.
So he did the painful thing. He shut the alpha down. Hundreds of thousands of searches of demand, killed by its own success — because virality without a business model is just an expensive hobby. It's a story every API-dependent founder should tape to the wall: demand is not the hard part.
Two Years to Build the Real Thing
"We built this in like three months," Williams-Cook said of the original tool. "It was pretty much two years before we had the kind of final one." Those two years were not spent polishing features. They were spent on the unglamorous infrastructure of a real business: global tax compliance, security, and the engineering needed to make the economics work.
This is the part of the founder story that rarely makes the headlines. The alpha proved demand. The two-year grind proved the business. A side project with £1,000-a-month proxy bills had to become a company that could charge for data without losing money on every query — across tax jurisdictions, with real security posture, as someone's first SaaS rodeo.
It's also a study in temperament. Plenty of founders would have either abandoned the tool or kept the alpha limping along. Williams-Cook treated the shutdown as a comma, not a period, and spent two years on compliance and security — the two things users never notice and businesses never survive without.
What AlsoAsked Became
AlsoAsked today is a People Also Ask question-mapping tool with live, geo-specific PAA data — you can see what people ask Google in a specific location, right now, mapped as branching trees of related questions. Pricing starts at $12 a month with free credits, deliberately low-friction for the SEOs and content teams who were its first users.
The arc is almost a parable for the SEO industry itself. A practitioner spends 22 years in the trenches, builds a tool for his own agency, watches an alpha explode to hundreds of thousands of searches in weeks, kills it over £1,000-a-month proxy bills, and then does the two years of hard, boring work to make it a real company.
The lesson he hands other founders, whether he states it or not: build the thing you'd use, validate with real demand, kill what's uneconomical, and don't skip the infrastructure. AlsoAsked isn't a startup story about raising money or moving fast. It's about a veteran who knew exactly what the industry needed — because he'd spent two decades being the industry — and took the time to build it right.
The playbook
- Build tools for yourself first — AlsoAsked started as an internal agency tool in 2019 — validated on real client work before it ever had a landing page.
- Treat virality as a stress test, not a victory — Hundreds of thousands of searches in weeks exposed the cost structure; Williams-Cook read the proxy bills as data and shut the alpha down rather than subsidize free users.
- Price the unit economics, not the enthusiasm — Live PAA scraping burns proxies per query — the two-year rebuild was largely about making the economics of each search sustainable.
- Do the boring infrastructure early — Global tax compliance and security took the bulk of the two-year rebuild — invisible to users, fatal to skip.
- Price low with free credits — From $12/month with free credits, the pricing matches how practitioners actually adopt tools: try free, pay when it's in the workflow.