From $180K a Month to $50M ARR: How Omnisend Built Its Recurring Revenue on $1.6M Raised

In August 2019, Omnisend was billing 7,200 e-commerce merchants an average of $75 a month. Nathan Latka started multiplying on air and guessed a little low. “A bit more than that,” Rytis Lauris said. “So being precise, 7,200 paying customers.” The month before the interview had closed at roughly $550,000 in revenue. A few months earlier, Lauris had turned down a strategic buyer.

Eleven months before that conversation he had told the same show he was doing about $180,000 a month off 3,000 paying customers. So in under a year he had roughly tripled monthly recurring revenue on two levers at once: he added about 4,200 paying customers, and he raised average revenue per customer from $60 a month to $75 — an ACV increase he put at 25%, driven by pushing upmarket and by moving standard-plan accounts onto a pro plan “a bit 2.5 times more expensive.”

The ladder, with a date on every rung

Two of these figures are monthly and the rest are annual, which is where this kind of story usually goes wrong. The $180,000 and the $550,000 are months. Everything on the chart below is a revenue or ARR figure from GetLatka’s dated metrics history for Omnisend — and the two match up: the $2.16M recorded in August 2018 is $180,000 × 12, and the $6.48M recorded on 26 August 2019 is $540,000 × 12. The database is carrying the same months Lauris described, annualised.

Nathan rounded the 2019 figure up on the tape, calling it about $6.5M of run rate. Lauris did not dispute it. After the $19.1M recorded in December 2020 the dated rows stop for three years, which is a gap in the record rather than a plateau in the business; the story picks up again at $50M. Run the same arithmetic backwards and $50M of ARR is about $4.2M a month of recurring revenue — roughly seven and a half times the month he was describing in 2019.

The first $6.5M came out of someone else’s app store

Asked in 2019 where 4,200 new customers had come from, Lauris named brand awareness, SEO, and one piece of luck: Mailchimp and Shopify had fallen out, and Mailchimp was no longer natively available in the Shopify app store. “It drives a lot of traffic for us on top of a funnel,” he said. Omnisend had over 3,000 reviews at a 4.8 average and was ranking at or near the top of Shopify’s email marketing category. In the September 2024 talk he was blunter about how long that lasted as the whole strategy: “we launched a company ten years ago, so in 2014… for initial few years, we really relied on app stores like Shopify app store, BigCommerce, WordPress app stores.”

The funnel he described in August 2019 was small and efficient, and he read the numbers off a dashboard mid-interview.

• 20,000 visitors a month — converting to 1,200–2,000 free trials, which he called roughly a 5% rate.
• About 400 new paying customers a month — near a 30% trial-to-paid rate on the low end of that trial range.
• Payback in about three months — on a $75-a-month customer, an all-in acquisition cost around $225.
• Gross churn about 5% a month — offset by roughly 70% expansion, for net revenue churn of minus 0.8% a month and net revenue retention near 109%.

What paid for all of it was almost nothing. In the month he described, Omnisend paid out about $10,000 to referral and agency partners, spent “six seven thousand” on retargeting and direct paid, and was on a G2 paid listing he priced at $10,000 to $12,000 a month. Against $550,000 of top line, that is under 6% of revenue in acquisition spend, and he confirmed the company was running above a 10% EBITDA margin monthly while reinvesting the rest.

The offer he said no to

At that scale — profitable, bootstrapped, ranked first in a category Shopify controls — buyers came. Latka floated a hypothetical of “50 million bucks to buy the company in 9 or 10x valuation” and asked whether he could resist. “Yes, we did resist,” Lauris said, a few months before the interview. He would not confirm the dollar amount, but he did confirm the shape of it: the multiple was “similar to what you have mentioned,” the consideration was a mix of cash and stock, and the bidder was a strategic. There had been three offers in a row; the private equity bids came in lower.

Strategic was with the best offer, but we stepped down.

Rytis Lauris, co-founder and CEO, Omnisend

His reasoning was that the market was moving his way: marketing automation was going vertical, e-commerce was growing on its own, and Mailchimp had walked away from the e-commerce niche to become an all-in-one SMB tool. He did name one version of the deal he would have taken — Latka’s hypothetical in which Shopify offers $50M in cash and threatens to buy a competitor and delist him otherwise. “It’s like in a mafia deal,” Lauris said. “I will take my money, take my bullets. So in that case I would probably take your money.”

He could say no because nobody else owned much of the company. On the 2019 tape he put the total raise at $160,000 of convertible notes from an angel round, most of which had already been repaid out of profits rather than converted. GetLatka’s record carries a single funding row of $1,573,530, collected 18 December 2019 — four months after that conversation, and the only round on file. Either way, the outside capital behind a company that would reach $50M of ARR fits in one line.

$1,573,530total capital raised on file, recorded December 2019

Then he hired one SEO person

The channel that carried the next leg started, on his own dating, in 2019 — “twenty eighteen ish, 2019, something like this,” as he put it in September 2024. Domain authority was 27. Articles were not being indexed at all. He interviewed agencies and disliked what he heard: “everybody was like pitching those creative ideas, oh we will be publishing topnotch articles… and you just have to write good content and Google will do the job, Google will love you.” He hired in-house instead, one specialist — who is now Omnisend’s VP of marketing — and pointed the whole effort at links rather than volume.

The part he kept returning to is how unglamorous it was. “SEO is not an art,” he told the Austin room. “If you would compare, if it’s more a factory or a art studio, it’s more factory.” His own contribution was to stand in the kitchen and ask the SEO team how many backlinks they had earned today, this week, this month. And it paid nothing for a long time: it took almost three years to get from zero to 40,000 monthly visitors.

• 2019 · Start Domain authority 27, zero organic traffic, one in-house hire, links over content.
• 2022 · Three years in 40,000 organic visits a month, built almost entirely on backlink outreach.
• Mar 2024 · Tripled 120,000 organic visits a month, domain authority 88, and an SEO team that had been three people for five years.

What $50M of ARR looks like from the inside

On stage in Austin in March 2024 Lauris gave the figure plainly: “Omnisend is 50 million ARR organization, we are fully bootstrapped” — though he prefers “customer funded” to bootstrapped. Growth in the prior year was 44%. SEO was driving 10–15% of all new revenue every quarter, from a team of five, two of whom had been hired that month. Klaviyo, his main competitor, was public and “like 10, 11 times bigger”; Omnisend was number two in the Shopify ecosystem. The keywords they were fighting over scored up to 95 on Ahrefs difficulty and would have cost $60 a click to buy — “not per install, not per paying customer, but per click.”

Six months later, in New York, the headline number had not moved: “50,000,000 ARR.” Two things had. Content and SEO, long the second-largest acquisition channel, had been overtaken by agency and freelance partnerships. And his link inventory came out smaller than it had in March: in Austin he cited almost 200,000 links from 14,400 unique websites, in New York almost 100,000 backlinks from 11,000 unique websites, without explaining the gap. Asked what he would finish the year at, he was noncommittal: “this year is a little bit more challenging, but it’s always the q four is what defines the year.”

“SEO is a math”

The September talk spent its last third on what generative AI does to all of this. Ask ChatGPT for the best e-commerce email platform and two names come back, Klaviyo and Omnisend — “if you are not listed here in this answer, you’re gone.” In Google’s AI overviews Omnisend was not in first position, and the fix turned out to be the old fix: Gemini pulls from the top ten organic results, so ranking is still the way into the answer. Meanwhile attribution is getting worse, because people search in a chatbot and then type the URL directly — “that’s what we see actually, the growth of direct traffic is growing.”

He is not, notably, betting the channel on AI writing the content. Omnisend ran one experimental branch of the site written entirely by AI. “It just got down to zero. No results at all, like penalized to zero.” Ten years, $1.6M raised and $50M of ARR later, his summary of the whole engine was the same as it was when he was hiring his first SEO specialist:

SEO is a math. It’s not much creativity there. There’s a lot of calculations. There is a lot of analysis, keyword analysis, competition analysis, and then very, very pure calculation.

Rytis Lauris, co-founder and CEO, Omnisend

Sources Rytis Lauris interviewed by Nathan Latka, August 2019; his SaaSOpen talks in Austin (March 2024) and New York (September 2024); GetLatka’s Omnisend company record — revenue rows dated August 2018, August 2019, December 2019, December 2020 and September 2024, and the funding row collected 18 December 2019.