How Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko grew 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 every five blogs that we publish now are just updates of other blogs loing FR keywords that uh are kind of almost there you you can probably improve the content around them or write a piece of content improve that we made a glossery this is like an old school tactic right what is content what is this what is that 65,000 monthly visitors now originally we were doing all this by hand but a lot of the more recent ones are kind of uh programmatic generated just a couple paragraphs honestly it's not like long form content I don't believe in using AI generated content long form don't think it turns out good but crazy we we had that much uplift from just basic definitions pretty much uh comparison content I'm a big fan control the narrative don't let your competitors control the narrative and I don't particularly like all the like oh let's compare pricing and the product tables and all that so we just kind of showed like industry opinions unique features of the tool um we literally have one page for this it's like, 1500 visitors a month I want to create a bunch more of these to be honest like we have more than you know a couple competitors that we feature there uh I love this tactic personally and I think we will be creating more of those soon translate successful content if you work in international markets look over half a million uplift just translating our content we didn't do that for a long time it's kind of a miss we've also done like some interesting Niche Niche programmatic plays so like this is something you might see typically from like an SEO agency we literally made articles like SEO for travel agencies for insurance for dentists for orthodontists for plumbers and most of these are ranky but this was all like programmatically done I think there's about 60 of these um and they do pretty well and the whole idea was well like we'll show you kind of what you should do uh if you want to try this year s like sign up for HF will kind of guide you through it and that was the whole idea I was like lead gen we don't measure if we get leads from this by the way told you how we don't really measure stuff um but I think it works pretty sure video uh we have like a 550,000 subscribers on our YouTube part of that is because the guy that does our videos Sam o he is a phenomenon he is absolutely incredible like personable uh very talented all lots of these videos hundreds of thousands millions of views on SEO stuff crazy and in every one of these videos he's doing the same as we do in the blog content showcasing like here's a problem here's how to look at this in HRS here's how to fix it in HRS showcasing the product throughout so focus on the product showcase what the solutions are we have a bunch of free tools uh these are literally what did I do these are uh some of the most popular pages on our website I don't know that I can fix this oh okay cool maybe are youall doing something back there okay cool thank you sorry I don't know what I did uh about half of our traffic right now is for free tools we use these as lead gen we give away some of our data uh but they're incredibly popular incredibly used we had a lot of abuse so we've had to back some of that down but still it's a great lead gen tactic again we don't measure but we think it is I think it works we even created uh a bunch of free writing tools I think about 100 different riding tools last year that we launched that's uh got us a lot of traffic you know about 700,000 we created some more on another site we have work count.com again another like 500,000 traffic there where we just we added some features we added some more tools uh I think we're going to be productizing these like this just ended up being a completely different thing uh but yeah people really like these uh we even do like programmatic stuff so we did top websites so we're ranking for people's Brands we're ranking for people searching like websites it.com it's an old alexa.com strategy really high traffic Spike there then we had some problems with our pre-rendering again it's a technical issue but like that'll come back up um I think this will end up being like several million traffic now do I expect a ton of people to convert from this no it's probably going to be an extremely low conversion rate but it showcases our data so someone might be click that and be like oh like they have this data I can use that for my work stuff cool that's the whole point of it we do a ton of data studies we showcase our data throughout these uh if you've got your own data like this is gold these get links these get shares this literally is is gold use your own data and finally I've kind of already been doing this but uh showcasing your data is really the important part so focus on the product we talked about like the content that we're creating but really just showing the data selling the solutions have your data everywhere so I'm going to show you some of the ways we do this I already talked about data studies I already talked about within content and the blogs the programmatic pages the top websites again like this is a lot of our data we have traffic traffic value links traffic by location it's interesting data especially if people don't know this exists uh we've had some customers sign up that were like oh I didn't know this like this was a thing but like oh when they fill out the form they're like this is great like I can use this cool that was the whole point of it we didn't know if it would work for leads but seems to uh in presentations showcase the data even our blog sidebar we have a little widget where we're like this is the traffic this is the number of links this is our own data we're just showcasing literally on the side of our blogs our 404 page we have a product pitch for our broken link Checker everywhere that we can do stuff like this we do uh integration Partners so we actually like let people get the data out into other tools like screaming frog SEO tools for Excel there's like 50 plus integration Partners so they can pull our data into where they're using it uh lots of folks use like uh different analytics tools different dashboarding tools uh they just pull our data in so the data everywhere so to summarize build a better product create content and then feature your data and your product within that content it's not a complicated formula like I said we we don't do most of the traditional marketing things we never have hopefully we start doing a few more because I think we still we potentially leave a lot of money on the table but we're a very small team we're 125 people um and that actually includes all the people that work on our search engine as well so 125 people well over 100 million in revenue and we did none of the traditional marketing stuff and yet we still have grown mostly because we are obsessive on making the product better and teaching people and showing the product as we're teaching people that's it thank you hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan ladka I launched and sold my first off company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software Founders so far we've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four new deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up Equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer