Case study

How Guardian's co-founder grew their pipeline from €0 to €120K through

…without any prior SEO experience.

Published Oct 5, 2026

€120K
in pipeline from Google: 11x
more clicks from Google, April to September: 5 months
since starting with RankUp in May: 27 days
from starting with RankUp to the first demo

The challenge

With three months of runway left, Guardian needed deals from a market it had just entered, ASAP

Alonso Solis and Aleks Timm started Guardian in February 2024 to help families look after an elderly relative living alone.

With a €100K pre-seed, they bought the first sensors and spent 2024 and 2025 selling to families through ads, social media and their own network.

Meanwhile, they took Guardian to health tech events, and in May 2025 it won the Novartis challenge at the first Health Founders Estonia bootcamp.

Guardian's founders on stage with the Novartis challenge winner's cheque at the Health Founders Estonia Startup Bootcamp

There they met companies in Estonia and abroad that had built successful businesses selling to care facilities instead of families, which got the founders wondering whether they were selling to the right buyer...

Only a handful of families bought in two years, so in early 2026 Guardian pivoted to selling to care facilities

	Before pivot	After pivot
Who buys	Families with an elderly relative at home	Care homes, home care and hospitals
How they buy	Order online, one monthly fee	A ward pilot, then year-long contracts
Worth per customer	€20-26/month per home	About €10K a year per facility
Who bought	A handful of families, all from the founders' own network	No deals yet

The pivot started the pipeline at zero, with most of the €100K pre-seed spent

€100K
pre-seed, most of it already spent: ~3 months
of runway left in May 2026: 0 deals
in the pipeline when Guardian started with RankUp

So they chose search to reach care facilities that were already looking for a system like Guardian's

“Search is very intentional, and you get the right people at the right time when they're looking for a solution to their problem. And with social media it's more like you catch them maybe in this time and maybe not. You're going to get a lot of people there that are, in a way, decoys. They don't really want to buy your product, or they are never ever going to buy your product, because they're just not a persona that would even buy the product. And so the chances of having the exact right person come to your website that would be the core buyer for something as niche as a B2B elderly care monitoring platform, then search is the way to get these people there.”

Alonso SolisCo-founder and CTO, Guardian

But they could neither afford an SEO team nor take the time to learn SEO from scratch

“We couldn't build an SEO team, or GEO team, or whatever you want to call it, because we are a startup. So a startup cannot build a team, and also a founder cannot do it manually from scratch, because we're literally two people, two core founders working. We use some freelancers, but we don't actually have the time to actually do it. And it would take a lot of learning as well to do the whole process manually and actually do it well.”

Alonso SolisCo-founder and CTO, Guardian

The solution

So Alonso turned to RankUp

Alonso came across RankUp while working out how to start on search. At the start of May 2026 he signed Guardian up, and he ran it himself, next to his work as CTO.

They signed up because RankUp gave them the SEO team they were missing, at a price a startup could afford

“And so when we stumbled into RankUp, it was a no-brainer. I mean, for us, just paying this amount that we pay was a really good way of already going with a lot of intensity towards a channel with a really affordable budget.”

Alonso SolisCo-founder and CTO, Guardian

Each month, RankUp's team of specialist agents helped Alonso plan, write and update articles

1. Content planningThe strategist agent found the keywords care facilities search for and added new ones every month from Guardian's product priorities and content gaps, going deeper wherever Guardian's articles performed best.At the start of each month, it proposed a content plan for Alonso to review.
2. Article writingThe writer agent prepared each draft by reverse-engineering the top-ranking pages, researching the topic and interviewing Alonso, then wrote it following Guardian's brand guidelines.Each interview taught it more about Guardian's product and industry, which carried into every article after.
3. Content refreshingEvery month, the content manager agent audited the articles and proposed edits to the ones losing traffic, missing from AI answers or not converting, in order of expected growth.Alonso approved or rejected each one, and the edits that lifted a page's rankings, clicks or conversions were proposed for other pages where they fit.

In five months, Alonso published 80 articles and updated them 123 times. He did it without a single SEO hire, as his CTO duties kept growing

Guardian's RankUp workspace, Your content: 80 articles live since 1 May and 123 page updates, to the end of September

The results

Guardian's search clicks grew 11x and its pipeline went from €0 to €120K

The first articles went live on 1 May. Here's what happened next:

27 days later, a care facility booked Guardian's first demo

“And already the impact came around the first month. You know, we started getting leads, and we're currently feeding the pipeline with this. So this is one of our main channels and constantly growing. And I think it's something that compounds really well.”

Alonso SolisCo-founder and CTO, Guardian

By the end of September, Guardian ranked in Google's top 5 for 144 search terms, 71 of them in the top 3

Google results for wellsky competitors, scrolled past the AI Overview: the first result is Guardian's article, 11 WellSky Competitors Compared by Care Model

Google results for ascom alternatives: the first result under the AI Overview is Guardian's article, 7 Ascom Competitors and Alternatives for Care Settings

Google results for hillrom alternatives, scrolled past the AI Overview: the first result is Guardian's article, 9 Hillrom Competitors and Alternatives for Care Homes

Those rankings took Guardian's search clicks from 103 in April to 1,145 in September

Guardian's Search Console, the clicks figures highlighted: 1.14K clicks in September 2026 against 103 in April 2026, by day

Guardian's Search Console, clicks by day from 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026, flat until May and climbing after it

Most of the search terms Guardian's articles target get 100 or fewer searches a month

Guardian's Topic List in RankUp: keywords with their monthly searches in the US and worldwide, most of them under 100

Leads came from care facilities across Europe and the US, including a pilot application from the NHS

A pilot program application to Guardian from SWLSTG in the NHS: interested in a discussion for potential use in an NHS ward. The name and the part of the email before @swlstg.nhs.uk blacked out — The NHS is the UK's public health service and one of the world's largest employers. A pilot on one of its wards is the first step towards a contract.

In September, Alonso started using RankUp for his second company, SilverWise, too

SilverWise's website: Time back for better care, with its care home app on desktop and phone

40+
care organizations use it: 2.7M
care activities done in the platform: 3.5K+
people registered, giving or receiving care

How Guardian's co-founder grew their pipeline from €0 to €120K through

With three months of runway left, Guardian needed deals from a market it had just entered, ASAP

Only a handful of families bought in two years, so in early 2026 Guardian pivoted to selling to care facilities

The pivot started the pipeline at zero, with most of the €100K pre-seed spent

So they chose search to reach care facilities that were already looking for a system like Guardian's

But they could neither afford an SEO team nor take the time to learn SEO from scratch

So Alonso turned to RankUp

They signed up because RankUp gave them the SEO team they were missing, at a price a startup could afford

Each month, RankUp's team of specialist agents helped Alonso plan, write and update articles

In five months, Alonso published 80 articles and updated them 123 times. He did it without a single SEO hire, as his CTO duties kept growing

Guardian's search clicks grew 11x and its pipeline went from €0 to €120K

27 days later, a care facility booked Guardian's first demo

By the end of September, Guardian ranked in Google's top 5 for 144 search terms, 71 of them in the top 3

Those rankings took Guardian's search clicks from 103 in April to 1,145 in September

Most of the search terms Guardian's articles target get 100 or fewer searches a month

Leads came from care facilities across Europe and the US, including a pilot application from the NHS

In September, Alonso started using RankUp for his second company, SilverWise, too

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