- 01Turn a free utility into a search magnet
- 02Script hooks around cost-agitation, not features
- 03Recruit unpaid creators from your own user base
- 04Stand up a lightweight affiliate rail once you have paying customers
01 Snapshot
The one-glance read on who they are and how they grow. Each point is verifiable from the receipts above.
An AI tutor and practice-exam platform for the SAT, ACT, SHSAT, and international exams (UTME, KCSE, NEET, CAT), with app store listings claiming 60,000+ students as of mid-2026 (self-reported, unverified).
Creator-led, with a founder-run X account layered on top and paid search still a rounding error.
~49,100 monthly visits (+49.8% over the last 3 months) as of 2026-07-25, an Instagram following of 10,787, $500K raised in February 2025, and 3 open roles.
As of 2026-07-25, Miyagi is running a single active Google Search image ad, live roughly 7 days, its only visible paid-search experiment.
Students film themselves using the free tool and tag the brand unprompted, and that TikTok volume, not content SEO or paid media, is what feeds the 53.3% direct and 20.4% organic-search share, mostly branded, of their traffic.
02 Traffic & channel mix
Estimated demand, the channel split behind it, and the keywords and referrers doing the work. Directional modeling, not audited analytics.
Traffic sources
Top search keywords
| Keyword | Volume | Weight | CPC |
|---|---|---|---|
| miyagi labs | 4.0k | $4.80 | |
| miyagilabs.ai | 710 | - | |
| miaygi labs | 240 | - | |
| predictive history course | 290 | - | |
| miyagalibs.ai | 210 | - |
Closest competitors by audience
Miyagi draws an estimated ~49,100 monthly visits, up 49.8% over the last 3 months as of 2026-07-25. Direct traffic dominates at 53.3% of the mix, consistent with students typing in the domain after seeing it in a TikTok rather than clicking a link, and search organic follows at 20.4%, almost entirely captured by the brand's own name. Referrals add 14.5% and social organic another 9.9%; the rest, email, AI-assistant referrals, paid social, and display, totals under 2%.
The keyword data reinforces the pattern: "miyagi labs" alone pulls ~3,900 monthly searches, dwarfing the next-largest term, while an unbranded query, "predictive history course" (~290 searches/mo), hints at demand outside the core SAT/ACT lane that the site is not obviously targeting. Among the named competitors, revisiondojo.com and testinnovators.com are direct SAT/ACT prep rivals fighting for the same branded and calculator-style search terms, while vedantu.com is a large India-based tutoring platform whose presence on the list lines up with Miyagi's stated NEET/CAT expansion into that market.
03 Organic content
The specific pages earning their organic search traffic, and the pattern behind why they rank. Adapt the format, not the topic.
A single page, the homepage, absorbs nearly all of the organic-search traffic Miyagi earns, while a handful of thin utility subpages (a SAT practice-test page, a general SAT hub, the login screen) trail far behind and each pull only trace volume. The keyword pattern matches: the homepage ranks #1 for the brand's own name, and the only non-branded traction visible is a SAT score predictor page ranking #9 for "sat prediction" and a SHSAT calculator ranking #17 for "shsat calculator." That is a brand-recall-driven organic footprint, not a built content flywheel: the wins are a couple of narrow, single-purpose utility tools that happen to match exact search intent, not a library of guides or comparison content.
Top pages by organic traffic
04 Channel map
Not traffic share. How much weight the growth system actually puts on each channel, with a one-line read on the role it plays.
What drove growth
05 Who they’re hiring
Open roles read like a roadmap: the functions they’re staffing show where the company is investing next and what stage it’s at.
3 open roles
06 The motions doing the work
For founder-led SaaS the breakdown shifts from ads to traction: where the first users came from, how the founder grows it in the open, and the compounding organic surface.
Miyagi's public traction runs through Y Combinator rather than a single viral launch moment.
Miyagi went through Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch and raised $500K from YC and SBXi, a fund focused on MIT-alumni-founded companies, around February 2025, giving the company capital and a network before any public go-to-market push.
The product originally launched as a tool that converted YouTube videos into interactive courses, then narrowed into focused AI exam prep for the SAT, ACT, and SHSAT plus international exams. That is a product reset, not a straight-line ramp.
Dig deeper+1▾
No launch-day traction event or press coverage appears in the evidence; the visible growth trail instead picks up later through app store claims of 60,000+ students and the organic TikTok creator volume described above.
Miyagi's build-in-public presence runs through the co-founder personally, not a polished brand feed.
CEO and co-founder Tyrone Davis III (the company's other co-founder, CTO Guang Cui, is not shown posting in the evidence) has published 412 posts on X and built 1,332 followers, with his bio linking directly back to the company handle and domain.
The company's own social accounts (X, Instagram, TikTok, all linked from the homepage) function more as landing points than active channels; Instagram in particular shows 10,787 followers against zero posts.
Miyagi's search motion is narrow: search organic is 20.4% of total traffic, and nearly all of it flows to the homepage on brand-name recall rather than a built-out content program. The two exceptions are the SAT prediction and SHSAT calculator pages described above, both single-purpose utility tools, not blog or comparison content, suggesting the playbook that works here is "ship a narrow free calculator" rather than "publish guides."
The site has Rewardful embedded site-wide, a plug-and-play affiliate and referral layer, but no evidence shows active recruiting or a named partner base yet, reading as infrastructure built ahead of a scaled push rather than a running program.
The single active Google ad (image format, no captured ad copy, live ~7 days as of 2026-07-25) run through an advertiser account tied to the domain looks like an early defensive or test buy on branded terms, not a demand-generation campaign at any real scale.
07 The playbook
The channels are not separate. They are one system where each stage feeds the next. Here is the read, then the plays to run tomorrow.
The inferred playbook
Miyagi's loop starts with free access, not paid acquisition: students post about the free tool, that volume feeds branded search and direct visits, and content SEO mostly harvests demand the TikTok layer already created rather than generating new demand itself.
Organic student TikToks, led by the 665-engagement clip from audrey, push viewers to search or type the domain directly, showing up as the 53.3% direct and 9.9% social organic slices of the ~49,100 monthly visits.
"Miyagi labs" pulls roughly 3,900 monthly searches and ranks #1 on the homepage, so the SEO effort is capturing demand rather than creating it.
Dig deeper+3▾
The SAT prediction and SHSAT calculator pages are the only evidence of intentional non-branded SEO; everything else in the organic mix traces back to brand recall.
Three open roles (Growth/Marketing/UGC, Engineer, Education) point to a small, founder-driven team still building rather than a scaled sales or marketing org.
exact subscription prices, the tutor marketplace's booking volume, and renewal or retention beyond the self-reported student counts are not shown in the evidence.
Turn a free utility into a search magnet
The proofMiyagi's only non-branded organic wins are a SAT score predictor ranking #9 and a SHSAT calculator ranking #17, both single-purpose tools, not articles.
The adaptationBuild one narrow free calculator or predictor page in your own category targeting a specific unbranded query pattern (an exam calculator, a pricing estimator, a "how much X do I need" tool), the same mechanism that pulled Miyagi's non-branded rankings, and ship it as its own page rather than folding it into a blog post.
Cost: under $500 · Time to signal: weeks · Works pre-PMF: yes, provided the calculation itself is something people already search for.
Script hooks around cost-agitation, not features
The proofMiyagi's standout organic clips use a specific structure: they agitate a cost or effort pain (an expensive bootcamp or tutor), then reveal the free tool as the fix in the same breath.
The adaptationWrite 3-5 of your own hooks using that same expensive-alternative-versus-free-us structure and hand the script to a friend, early user, or yourself with a phone camera rather than hiring a production team.
Cost: $0 · Time to signal: days · Works pre-PMF: yes.
Recruit unpaid creators from your own user base
The proofMiyagi's TikTok volume comes from real students like audrey and jas posting unprompted about a free tool, not sponsored creator deals.
The adaptationDM 5-10 of your actual power users, ask each for one honest "here's the free thing I use for X" clip in exchange for early access or a shoutout, and seed the organic loop before paying for any creator relationship.
Cost: $0 · Time to signal: weeks · Works pre-PMF: conditional, yes if the product genuinely saves users money or time, since the hook depends on real perceived value.
Stand up a lightweight affiliate rail once you have paying customers
The proofMiyagi has Rewardful embedded site-wide as of 2026-07-25, an off-the-shelf affiliate layer, ahead of any visible scaled recruiting push.
The adaptationInstall a similar plug-and-play affiliate tool once you have any paying customers, set a flat commission, and pitch your first affiliates from the same power users and creators the UGC play above surfaces, rather than building a marketplace from scratch.
Cost: under $500 · Time to signal: months · Works pre-PMF: no, this needs paying customers to fund commissions first.
Post the build under your own name before the brand has a voice
The proofCo-founder Tyrone Davis III's personal X account carries 412 posts and a bio that does the linking work back to the company, while the brand's own accounts read more as landing pages than content engines.
The adaptationStart posting under your own name about specific product decisions, numbers, and setbacks, and put the company link in your own bio instead of waiting for a branded account to have something to say.
Cost: $0 · Time to signal: weeks · Works pre-PMF: yes. Not transferable at an earlier stage: the $500K Y Combinator and SBXi funding, and the resulting network, are not available to a founder without that access, and the dormant 10,787-follower Instagram is an inherited or legacy audience, not a replicable acquisition tactic.
You just read how Miyagi Labs does it. Tomorrow it is someone else.
Every morning we take one company that is actually growing and break down where its customers come from: the ads still running after a year, the channel doing the real work, and the play you can run this week.
Systemaic · directional intelligence. Traffic, spend, and reach figures are SimilarWeb-style estimates and qualitative reads of public data, not audited numbers. Built on real public receipts.
// teardowns with a similar GTM motion
sources & receipts (11)
Live ad libraries: google ad library
Researched facts: Miyagi Labs raised a $500K pre-seed/seed round: $500,000 raised Feb 21, 2025, investors Y · Miyagi Labs went through Y Combinator's Winter 2025 (W25) batch: YC W25 cohort, category " · SBXi (MIT-alumni-focused fund) is a named investor: SBXi backs MIT-alumni-founded companie · Miyagi Labs launched publicly on Hacker News as part of YC W25: "Launch HN: Miyagi (YC W25 · Miyagi Labs originally launched as a YouTube-to-course AI product before pivoting to exam · Miyagi Labs has over 60,000-70,000 students using its app (as of mid-2026): App Store list · Miyagi Labs reported roughly $220K in annual revenue with a 2-person team, bootstrapped in · Team size is reported inconsistently across sources: Y Combinator's own Work at a Startup · Miyagi Labs also runs an expert human-tutor marketplace alongside its AI product: Tutor ma · App is distributed on both iOS App Store and Google Play: "Miyagi Labs: Exam Prep" app, de
Traffic, spend, and revenue figures are estimates as noted in the report; the links above are the primary public artifacts.