How Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko grew Ahrefs to $149.1M revenue with a 171 person team in 2024.

quick context this was recorded March 28th and 29th so a couple weeks ago at my live event SAS open.com we had a thousand software CEOs there if you missed it we hope to see at the next one September 5th and 6th in New York City SAS open.com but for now let's jump into the recording uh we're really popular software of service SEO Tool uh with a pretty unique story let's share some uh I think some interesting things yall would like here so we're going to talk about building a better product how do you do that creating product Le content fun fact we grew I'll show you the numbers in a minute we're over $ hundred million we basically used Word of Mouth blogs and YouTube we didn't have a sales team till we hit about $100 million we don't do a lot of things that other companies are doing a lot of the metrics and stuff that you here in here we don't measure any of that we just default to action basically we go we make the product better we create content we create the things that try and be where people are going to be and then I'm going to show you how to incorporate your data into the content so this is our Revenue growth uh like I say I can't vouch for all these numbers we're a bootstrapped company no VC funding none of that uh but we have released some public numbers over the years we're based in Singapore I can't be sure if we released the numbers in Singapore dollars US dollars I tried to translate where we could uh the last three are the only ones I can actually vouch for bootstrap from about $300,000 in personal funds our owner Demitri 2010 2015 about 15 people we finally hired a marketing person I think what was the revenue then uh about 7 million already finally got a marketer 2018 45 people 2021 90 employees 50,000 plus customers and we got our first salesperson I think we were pretty close to $100 million ARR at that point 20122 we launched a search engine yup.com that led to some really unique opportunities for us I'll talk some about that like I said we're not conventional we basically didn't do all the things that all the people here telling you to do probably should have might have grown a little faster uh we even had like a free trial we even made a paid trial was like $7 for seven days that got abused we killed that off so we don't even have a free trial anymore so pretty much everything that is conventional that everyone's like go do this we did none of that bootstrapped gr to 100 million little over 10 years how mostly product the folks that in here that are H users you love the product I'm sure right yeah they're in there every day constantly so what we do we get user feedback feedback from our team focus on the data data quality last year we shipped over 130 user visible features lots more in the back our users tell us generally like they want features that are in other tools uh you know I think Eugene was just up there uh from SIM Rush he's one of our main competitors a lot of folks on candy.io just are like can you do this like Sim Rush does it's okay uh but if that was our entire product strategy we would fail as a company we have our own private road map uh actually a lot of stuff is coming to our pricing page or is already there so you can kind of see a public version of this pretty soon we ask people for feedback too we get a lot of crap from this by the way uh people are mean on Reddit but every two years our CMO and he he goes and asks he's like give us feedback fun fact I think this is how I got my job I gave feedback for a couple years in a row they like my ideas I got a message like hey you want to come work for us and I was like okay I'm a big fan so sure but we get feedback from everywhere our sales team our customer service team um literally Twitter LinkedIn we share all this and we're like okay like this seems like good stuff we kind of vote we have a voting system basically and we can push things through if it's a really good idea we also have our own team this is me giving a suggestion we launched this author report and it's like oh these are the authors like linking to this and I'm like well in our own kind of internal report we like we have the authors and all the traffic and links and stuff that they're getting but we don't have something like that in the tool like we use this person personally we create this can we actually like make this into the product the answer is yes uh so we got a bunch of feedback people liked it it's good uh but that's kind of how we do it like we users I don't think will ever give you the next unicorn idea the next great product idea they're always like this is what the other tools are doing give me that basically like I want this use case uh the best ideas in my opinion come from your own team your kind of power users the ones that are using your product every day could be your sales folks even we focus so heavily on product and data this story got a lot of traction in the dev and devops Community we saved like 400 million in three years by not going to the cloud we built our own data centers it's a little painful we had some downtimes we uh got some Flack for it but like it was the right decision in the end we scale so much data this number is actually about 900 million now over 3 years we would not be a profitable company if we lived on AWS and you can see tons of servers tons of data we store so much stuff so much more than any other SEO tool any of our competitors that it lets us do more and interesting things so we are obsessed with data we are obsessed with the product and that is really what has led to our growth we crawl really fast one of the fastest bots on the web the search engine has given us some very unique product features uh some of which are like launched some of which are coming but also let us have big plays so index now is a partnership between like Bing Yandex uh neighor saym other search engines we were able to partner with that and now we are actually getting the data so every time someone that's using index the index now protocol creates a page deletes a page Chang something on that page it pings this it tells us we can go recra it that's extremely fresh data we pick up Pages fast any updates that marketers are making on their sites we get it extremely fast and then the side audit feature we have coming is actually going to give us like a real time monitoring system auditing system so the you make a change it sends a thing we check it if something's screwed up we tell you immediately something's screwed up like go you no Index this page within a matter of seconds you get an email you go fix that before the search engines take you out of the index crazy competitive Advantage we Benchmark our data we do a lot of studies there's a bunch of Industry studies as well we usually win these if they're Fair comparisons now as far as how we get like the word out about it mostly blogs video free tools so a lot of content doesn't get any traffic this is from one of our own studies 96 a half% no traffic crazy so people do content poorly uh we try and help people do it better we get a lot of traffic about three and a half million or so right now um was recently as high as six we had like a pre-rendering issue a technical issue dropped some but that'll come back no worries one of the easiest things to do is copy the content your competitors have they have successful pages you can view it make the same things easy win uh you want to focus like get the intent right behind that CU like a lot of people are like I want my product page to rank for this thing and the thing all the serps are like what is this thing well your product page is not going to rank for that sorry it's not going to happen all of our content incorporates our product so we're like here's a problem we're we're writing about it we're covering this topic in a blog here's how you solve it in h refs it's a very simple formula but bet a lot of the folks out there that work at companies they don't have their product actually featured within their content I know I've worked Enterprise and like I didn't even have access to the products I couldn't have done that uh and it was a huge miss this works so well it's like here's the thing here's the use case I'm teaching you that's how our whole strategy we teach seos but at the same time we're showcasing like the product throughout and it doesn't come off as salesy generally right folks who have read our our blogs and stuff it's just like it's a natural thing here's a problem here's how you actually fix that in HS or here's how you go look at that improve your existing content this is a portfolio I made we were running some tests on these Pages obviously everything was up you want to take a look every once in a while and say like this content's not quite working as well as it could maybe it could do something better uh other times competitors like they come out SEO like content is like a race like everyone is constantly updating so it's a very competitive market so we look at that and we're like well if something's falling behind maybe we need to go update it I think about two out of...