OmniSend Revenue & Funding (2024)

[00:00] How are they getting customers more efficiently than their VC backed competitors? And that's what I wanted him to teach, and that's exactly what he's teaching today. I'm not gonna spoil the beans. Let's just give a warm round of applause to the CEO of Omnisend, Raidus Loris. Raidus, come on up. [00:18] >> Hey, Nate. Thanks for being here, man. [00:19] I got it right. Right? [00:20] >> $5.00. $5.00. Yes. [00:21] And what will you finish this year out, you think? [00:24] >> Yes. We'll see. We'll see. With this year is a little bit more challenging, but it's always the q four is what defines the year. So still, we are only entering into the season, the high season for us. This is a very high seasonality, very clear seasonality. [00:38] So The stage is yours. Coach us up. [00:39] >> Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So hello, everyone. So thanks for staying here and not going for a lunch. So twenty more minutes. Yeah. If you can start, countdown. Thank you. Thank you very much, and thanks, Nathan, for inviting me. And I will be talking about SEO. So what Adam showed how to use AI to to write list of goals, I would disagree to some extent or maybe at large. So I will explain you soon why is [01:07] >> it so. Okay. So, yeah, 50,000,000 ARR. I'm co founder and CEO. What do we do? We do we do marketing automation for those who sell online. So basically, if you're online store, we'll help you to communicate with your existing customer base by sending email, SMS messages, web push notifications. Yeah. You get the customer, you need to retain the customer, and that's where Omnisend comes into play. [01:33] >> Yeah. And one of the our marketing tactics, is very important for us and that helped us to to grow to a certain stage is, SEO and content. Yeah. So this is probably kind of used to be for quite a while, the second largest driver. Initially, we truly belong. As you see, we launched a company ten years ago, so in 2014. We started doing SEO in twenty eighteen ish, 2019, something like this. So for initial few years, [02:00] >> we really relied on app stores like Shopify app store, b commerce, WordPress app stores, etcetera. Then we started investing in in various other channels and activities to acquire our customers. Content and SEO became number two. Now it's a little bit being outperformed by agency partnerships. Maybe next year or some time ago, I sometime in the future I can talk about why agency partnerships and freelance partnerships overtake other go to market channels. But let's get back to [02:29] >> this. Definitely, content and SEO help you drive traffic to your website, drive traffic to your blog, and then convert into sign ups and of course into paying customers. Okay. So in the next twenty minutes, will be talking initially about Omnisend, about competitive market we are at. Then the first three years, so that's that's the guaranteed thing. That's what we did. That's what worked for us. That's what I recommend. And the third part is about today. This [02:55] >> is definitely AI, generative AI. It's disrupting SEO industry and the search industry in general. So there are I will share some insights, some learnings, but, of course, there various stage of experiment again again and not as certain as it used to be in the past. Okay. So a little bit about ourselves. So competition is truly tough. Yes. So Klaviyo, Mailchimp, they are probably the main competitors for us. Those who serve directly exactly the same customers as [03:22] >> we do. But at the same time, we talk about SEO and the competition within the keyword space. We do have players like HubSpot, who's not our direct competitor. We do have players like Marketo, who's not our direct competitors, but at the same time, they compete for the same keyword. Email marketing is very broad space. Email marketing software, email, email, etcetera, is a very broad space. So we compete with those big guys. So keyword difficulty goes as [03:47] >> high as 97. And PPC value for click, not for sign up, not for paying customer, but just for one single click goes up to $60. Yeah. So okay, on high seasons, on low seasons around $40.30 bucks for one single click. So really, really tough competition and yeah. So definitely investing in organic is what helped us grow. Okay. So key principles. Key principles, what our team applies, our content and SEO team applies. Initially, we focus on outcomes, [04:19] >> not out. It doesn't matter how many articles you write. It's the only single metric that matters how much new revenue does the effort bring. So we we have OKRs across entire organization as a planning methodology. So OKRs is usually, if you're aware about OKRs methodology, it's always about moonshot. Yeah, you put the high ambition, high ambitions targets, etcetera. In many cases you fail, but sometimes you you reach those. And this is where the the breakthrough moments [04:48] >> actually happen. And 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. How many articles do you have to write? How many backlinks do you have to collect? How many referring sources do you have to get in order to reach the certain position on the search? What is important here to say, we always relied on internal team. [05:17] >> We never hired agency, and this is that was a strategic decision we made. And this, until today, we keep doing this. The team, SEO team is very small. Even today, there are only five people. And at the same time, have a pool of partners. So freelance, mainly freelance is a very small agency that do write content for us and then do generate backlinks for us. And AI is a good replacement for writing content. I will touch [05:43] >> in the third part. So okay. So first three years, we just started doing, investing in content SEO. Our brand authority is, almost at zero, so, you know, we have to start somewhere. So if someone of you in in content SEO are at the same stage or similar stage, early stage, so this is the piece of advice that I will give you to you. Okay. So initially initially, it took us almost three years to get, from zero [06:10] >> to 40,000 visitors to our website and blog. Yeah. No. 180, but as always, it always compounds, it always accelerates in the initial initial stages, always. The most difficult in business, in revenue, in in website traffic growth, etcetera. So what are the few things which I learned at the very beginning? Yeah. So to be honest, like being a founder, a CEO, I thought, okay, I've heard like rumors, okay, you just write a good piece of content and [06:39] >> Google bot will come, read it, love it, and will recommend to the entire world. No. Yes. The good quality of content is mandatory. You should not be any, at any point writing shitty content. Good quality is mandatory, but it's not enough at all. So SEO is not a free play at all. You could be a good writer, but if you don't buy backlinks, if you don't buy referring other domains, it will not work. So first thing, [07:10] >> in house team, not agencies. Why in house team? Because agencies, they have multiple customers and they are not that deep into your industry, not deep into your business. You cannot actually put the truly ambitious targets, revenue targets for outside outsourced agencies, if you outsource everything. Yeah? Yes, we do outsource agencies, mainly freelancers, mainly small boutique agencies to write content and to build backlinks. But the rest is being done. The keyword research, what we want to achieve, [07:42] >> the target setting is being done in house since the very beginning. And this is one of the good decisions that I would that I'm really proud of that we made and that's what I would recommend for everyone who is maybe just starting. And [07:55] >> so one tactic to increase the domain authority. Domain authority, even up until today in the world of AI, it truly matters. If you are domain authority is low, it will take you months to get your good piece of content to be ranked top in the top Google positions. If your domain authority is high, sometimes it takes you just a couple of days to get ranked in top 10 position with some keywords. Of course, if your highest [08:19] >> competition keywords still takes time, it really, really becomes easier. So domain authority, it's very important thing. So the single tactic that worked for us or the main tactic by far that worked for us is we're really building a big pool of referring domains and referring backlinks. Yes, so you see now we have like almost 100,000 backlinks that are referring to omniscient.com or block omniscient.com. At the same time, 11,000 unique websites do refer to Omniscient, including like [08:51] >> the ones like Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, etcetera. So Forbes are really, really like the best of four domains. Can you get those referral links from those best of four digit domains at the very beginning? No, you can't. It just takes time. Yeah. And you know, the best thing probably that we have Mailchimp referring to us, like, you know, competitors do refer HubSpot referring to us. Yes. So competitors, direct competitors, or at least the keyword competitors do refer [09:18] >> to us, and I will say how it happens. So backlinks really, really matter, and for us, it's really initial three years we focused on building backlinks. Shall you buy backlinks? Yes. Shall you buy from the low 40, websites? Please don't do that because Google recognize it, and then you can be penalized. Yeah. So if there is something for cheap in the market, usually, there is a trap. So tips how to build backlinks. So, just outreaching. Yeah. [09:50] >> And potentially US CEOs, maybe marketers, etcetera. You keep receiving emails, oh, I would like to post this this this content on your blog. You might find it spammy yourself, but believe there are a lot of people who actually accept your content to their blogs, to their websites, if you provide a good quality of content. That's okay. You don't put your name on it. It's it's like ghostwriting, but you still get the backlink and this is what [10:14] >> you want to do that. Another thing that works really well doing various research. In our case, at least once per year, we do email marketing ground up. What's happening in our industry? Whatever, you know, conversion rates, clicks, opens, what are benchmarks, etcetera. Or we just do something like the recent, like super successful research about why Americans are buying on Tamil, the Chinese marketplace. It has been quoted by Bloomberg, CNBC, Forbes, founder, etcetera, etcetera, a lot of [10:45] >> trusted sources. So if you provide interesting content, journalists will take, not from first time, sometimes you have to provide first piece, second piece, third piece. So this is where you get the high quality free backlinks. So you buy mid range backlinks, you basically, get good quality by providing a good quality research. So that's about kind of building authority. Now when you get to to go for it level, and it's today, you know, AI, generative AI, Charge, [11:15] >> GBT, Gemini, changes the landscape a lot. So what I'm gonna share now, it's more like experiments. Again, what we experiment, what works, what doesn't work, it's not set on stone yet because the industry itself is evolving very, very fast this year. So initially what happens, so more and more people actually do search not within the search engine. It's on Chargebeepti. You ask, what is the best email marketing solution on phones. ChargeBP on Gemini. And this is [11:46] >> and this is just a real example. Yeah? If if you ask what is the best email marketing platforms, and for ecommerce focused platforms, there are two recommended. There's Klaviyo and there's Omnisend. Klaviyo is way bigger, this is a public company, but at the same time, our main competitor. So if you are not listed here in this answer, you're gone. Yeah? So people will not visit your website, will not explore you. So this is very important to [12:09] >> get into the results and to get into the brain into artificial intelligence. As we can get into the brains in our true customers or prospective customers, we need to do the same to get into the brain into artificial intelligence. At the same time at the same time, even the Google, Google is embedding Gemini as a default search engine in Google. Nowadays, if people are googling this, AI overviews is the top result that is being shown. And [12:36] >> here you can see, you know, Omnisend is not already in the first position. Yeah. We are listed there in in the list down below a little bit, but like, you know, Brevo, HubSpot, other players are listed as a top player. So we really have to overcome this one. And how to do that? This is this is a trick question. This is a trick question. And, [12:57] >> you know, and initially what happened initially that Gemini especially and Google Charge GBD was was like maybe more accurate, but Gemini was totally inaccurate. And we took they they basically browsed the websites that in, like, in first, sometimes, you know, third, fifth, tenth page of Google search, and they made the, like Gemini made the conclusions based on that website data. But now the recent research shows that basically if you want to be recommended by AI tools, [13:30] >> you have to be in the top search positions. So Gemini now puts into the AI overviews the results from the the content they get from top 10 Google search positions. So still, what does that mean? But basically, you have to do SEO play in order to be listed on Google, in order for artificial intelligence to take those websites as a trusted source and to recommend you once people are asking. What is the best email marketing solution [14:00] >> for e commerce? So basically, that's where we get back to that like more traditional, traditional, SEO play. Still, you have to be listed in various listings. So top 10 content is the king. This is your goal to get. And again, the keywords, there are so many keywords. Yeah, I'm referring here and I'm showing examples of the most competitive keywords, but there are hundreds of other keywords, and in your case, that are not as competitive, and you [14:28] >> start there, and that's okay. Know? So another thing which really, really truly became super important nowadays and what was not the case in the past, the collaboration between teams. And look at this example, if you search for like email marketing software, a lot of top 10 results via affiliate place. You can see here PCMag, this is an affiliate play. Email vendor selection, affiliate play. Forbes is listed there. Zapier to some extent is affiliate. Yeah. So what [14:57] >> does that mean that your content or SEO team is not actually capable to get into those listicles because they ask you to pay to be listed there. Yeah? To pay revenue share, to pay upfront, etcetera, etcetera. And they only have like six or five recommended software in those listicles. So it's even the competition. It's not only the money you can buy the position there, you have to convince them. So in our case, what does happen? Like, [15:22] >> team makes the analysis. Look, we have to be listed in all top 10 results. A couple of those are our competitors, so we will never be listed there. Or even sometimes we make an agreement with competitor. Look, we list you number two. Of course, you will list yourself number one, but you list us number two, we list you number two in exchange. Let's do that. Yeah. And this is how you start dominating those results. At the [15:46] >> same time, SEO teams go to affiliate team and say, look, there are four affiliate websites we need to get into those listicles. And then affiliate team does the job in order to get into those listicles, and that's how help SEO team to drive their results. Second thing, what is very important, you know, the content which is owned by you, if you want in those top 10 positions to have at least one article, which is on your [16:12] >> own website or on your own blog, what Google requires more and more is actually to be authentic. So the the writers, the author, it has to be the real people, and they have to be authorities online. So this is just one example. We have few colleagues from from who will make them, like celebrities that Internet algorithms would understand that this is Bernard. He's a real person. He is, you know, writing about himself. He's talking on webinars. [16:38] >> He's talking the he's he's on podcast as a guest. Yeah. So I'm one of those faces and like other employees are other faces who write content afterwards. Even like, you know, about his personal life, he's talking to CNBC. So Google sees, okay, that Bernard is a truly like respectful person and he writes a good piece of content afterwards. So it's important. So that's another thing which was not was as necessary in the past, but actually became [17:07] >> very important recently. And backlinks still matter. Backlinks still matter. So if you want to come high into high positions with your own content, you write good piece of content, the offer writes good piece of content. The offer has to be authority. The quality of the content is good, but still you need backlinks to refer. You can wait organically, but usually have to accelerate this process in order to to have referring links and domains into your good [17:39] >> piece of article. So that's basically you know, about the listicles, what Adam was talking prior to that about this, like, AI writing listicles, and and content. So, we are skeptical. Yes, we do use AI to help us to assist the right piece of, like, content, good content, but AI should never be the full full full, or the only offer as Google just penalized so many websites that were producing a lot of good content, good content sometimes [18:11] >> even, very good content. But a Google was already able to recognize if it's AI, fully AI written content. I don't know how AI maybe is catching another AI. Yeah. But there there were so many websites penalized and like, you know, we had one experimental branch of website, which was a fully AI written. It just got down to zero. No results at all, like penalized to zero. Not so. That was that is our experience, and otherwise would [18:42] >> be not to rely too much on AI writing your your content. [18:47] >> Okay. So for the future, adapting to AI as your world, definitely, it will continue. It's just experiments. I share what works now, but it can be disrupted here in our upcoming few days. Being able to set, to attribute SEO effort will be more challenging just because if someone search and chat GBT or Gemini and then enters, your direct link into your browser, it's very hard to attribute. That's what we see actually the growth of direct traffic [19:16] >> is growing. There is a growth. So highly likely people search on AI. Collaboration across teams, it will the need will increase. And, you know, general brand awareness, which to be honest, myself as a founder was a little bit skeptical about, you know, general brand awareness initiatives. I will always love the market that is very, very attributable, that is very like tangible, it's very easy to calculate everything, etcetera. But, you know, now I believe that in the [19:46] >> world of AI, general brand awareness will become more important. It's the same as like human brain. Yeah. If artificial brain will not see you as a market player, they will never recommend you. That's it. Yeah, they have, I mean, they have, Gemini, ChadGBD, other solutions, they have to see you as a decent market player. Otherwise, they will just not recommend you. Doesn't matter if it may be very broad some sources who you who list. Yeah. So [20:15] >> in the last twenty minutes, so you know, doesn't matter if your competition is stuff you can do, and you can even like while bootstrapping without like over funding, just you have to be efficient. You have to look at SEO or entire marketing in my point of view as a math more than as a creativity. And of course, like AI is disrupting the world and then it's disrupting content SEO, but you can still conquer it. So this [20:40] >> is our small team, so thanks to them for doing a great job. Thanks to them for helping me to prepare this presentation, And thank you everyone for listening. Thanks.

[00:00] Quick context. This was recorded March twenty eighth and twenty ninth. So a couple weeks ago at my live event, saasopen.com. We had a thousand software CEOs there. If you missed it, we hope to see at the next one, September fifth and sixth in New York City, saasopen.com. But for now, let's jump into the recording. [00:21] >> I'm the co founder and CEO of omnisend. Omnisend is a marketing automation platform. Basically, we help those whom sell online to communicate with their existing customer base by sending emails, text messages, web push notifications. And you potentially have not heard about us, but I hope I will surprise you a bit. So, just trying to understand how this works. A little bit about ourselves. So why I believe we have some knowledge and we have some experience and [00:48] >> we can share. So omnisend is 50,000,000 ARR organization. We are fully bootstrapped. We call we don't like this bootstrapped term. We prefer to call ourselves being customer funded, basically to what Sam was talking about. So the main focus not on the investor's interest, but the main focus on your customer's interest and driving value to your customers is actually what helps us grow, be quite I mean, very profitable. And still last year we grew by 44% year [01:16] >> over year. So, it's not a hyper growth anymore, but in the days when everybody's really struggling, the growth was still quite good and we are proud of that. And SEO is an important part for new revenue driving. And so now it's quite a bit rise, but it drives us like 10% to 15% of all new revenue that is coming to omnisend every quarter. And this is an example. We started doing SEO in 2019, so not so [01:43] >> far away ago. And you see that was kind of like zero traffic, zero organic traffic. Now it's 120,000 organic visits every month. That's what we get, just purely SEO activities, and you see how did we achieve this. Yeah, so today I'm going to focus like three things. So a little bit overview of the market, competition, and the team. Who actually are those people who do the SEO inside omnisend? I will share lessons from the first three [02:09] >> years, as I mentioned, like we started in 2019. So, and there are two stages. First, initial three years, and then other two years. So, what we have accomplished. So, basically, those are three parts of my presentation. And starting with a general intro and general environment. So, where do we operate? Competition is really tough, and I will show you why. And then, what does that mean for us? And I will share key principles, what do we apply [02:35] >> when we think about SEO, and a little bit overview of our team. So, yeah. So, competition. So, omnisend operates in, really, email marketing. I mean, we call ourselves, and we are a marketing automation platform, but everyone, everyone, every search, I mean, 90% of searches still starts with very basic. People are looking for email marketing for SMS marketing. Although we think and we are way more robust platform, as our competitors are, but actually everybody starts searching from [03:02] >> very basic keywords. So, our direct competitor number one is Klaviyo. Yes, they are bigger than us. They are like ten, eleven times bigger than us. They are very big in Shopify ecosystem. We're number two. Know, 10 times smaller, but still number two in the Shopify ecosystem. And they are already public company, and they invested hundreds of millions of dollars in their go to market activities, including SEO, etcetera. Mailchimp, which is our direct competitor as well, but [03:31] >> if we compete against Mailchimp, in 80% of cases we win against them, because we know that we drive way better value for those who sell online. And there are other companies like HubSpot, like Constant Contact, that are not our direct competitors business wise, but they compete for the same keywords. So, the SEO world, they are still our competitors, because they compete for the same keywords as we do. And all of those are really well established brands, [03:57] >> very well known brands, and they have hundreds of millions in their pockets, as we don't have it. Yeah, now, keyword difficulty. To illustrate some of the most competitive keywords. So, this is Ahrefs' data. So, know, the most competitive keywords are as competitive as 95. So, this is Ahrefs' keyword difficulty score. And PPC value, if we would pay for some of the keywords where we are in the top three positions, we would pay $60 per click. Not [04:26] >> per install, not per paying customer, but per click. So, actually, like, you can imagine how much it would cost for us to buy this traffic just paying for Google. Yeah, and you know, so still, we managed to grow from, in this competitive environment, from zero to 120,000 visitors, organic visitors, every month. Key principles. What helped us to be there? So, first thing, our team, SEO team, all other teams of Omnisend focus on outcomes, not outputs. So [04:59] >> our SEO team, the key metric they are responsible for, it's the new revenue. Every quarter, we do use OKRs on quarterly basis. Every quarter, they know how much revenue they should drive. That ends up they know how much revenue they should drive. Every month, every week, they do report new revenue every lovely week and track it on a daily basis. So, I mean, you know, earning backlinks, publishing articles, it's important, but the most important metric and [05:27] >> the primary metric is still revenue. So, you know, focusing on this really helps to focus our team's mindset that way, and it's absolutely valuable. And [05:39] >> in our philosophy, SEO is not an art. If you would compare if it's more a factory or an art studio, it's more a factory. So, there are just a lot of repetitive processes, which sometimes could be quite boring, but you just have to do that. You have to outreach, outreach, outreach. You have to publish, publish, publish, publish, and that's it, you know? You have to do multiple times. I would reach thousands of times sometimes, but that's [06:01] >> what really works. And, yeah, so our SEO team, since the very beginning, there was one person who is actually now our VP of Marketing. So, he grew from the first SEO specialist, omnisend, to the leader of the entire marketing organization. And up until today, okay, now it's already five people, but we added two more people just this month. So, have a new vision and new ambition. So, like in the past five years, the team of SEO [06:28] >> was three people only, and that's the team that accomplished those results. And, of course, we do have a big pool of various partners. So, we never hired an agency, but we have a lot of pools of freelancers and others who help us with backlinks, with content writing, etcetera, but we paid basically per result. And, yeah. So, first three years. So, how did we start everything? So, as I mentioned, our traffic, organic traffic was zero. Our domain [06:57] >> authority was very low as well. And of course, any piece of article we published was just not indexed by Google at all. Not talking about getting it to some like top positions or so. So, we hired the first person, and the main decision we made that we have to build an in house team. The reason for that, because at that time, I was hiring that first person, and I was trying to hire agencies to do SEO, [07:21] >> etcetera, and everybody was like pitching those creative ideas. Oh, we'll be publishing top notch articles, you know. The good content space, and you just have to write good content, and Google will do the job, will love you, etcetera. And I kind of did not believe in that, and still, good quality content, it is very important, but it's not enough at all. So, that's why I made the decision, Okay, let's hire in house people and focus on [07:45] >> very practical things. Keywords or search, backlinks, buildings, etcetera. And, yeah, of course, it's not enough. You people can't do everything. So, we do have a network of copywriters. We do have a network of freelancers, those who help us build, acquire links, etcetera. But those are people who are basically paid, pay result. It's not kind of an agency you hire, you have a retainer, etcetera, but just you wrote a good quality of content, yes, we pay you. [08:14] >> You acquired a good quality of link? We pay you. Otherwise, we don't. So, it's actually based on result things, and that's what is very effective and that's what helped us since the very beginning, and it really works for us until today. [08:28] >> Yeah. And backlink partners, so I will talk about backlinks a little bit more just now. And, yeah. So, our authority was like zero, and to what I cert I mean, not not zero, but like 20 something, so super low. And to what I already mentioned, so like HubSpot, 40 to 90 plus. Mailchimp, 40 to 90 plus. Klaviyo, maybe at that time was 70 plus something, yeah? So, the competition is tough, and you just, it's impossible to [08:55] >> compete against those companies, and to be indexed, and to be ranked by Google as high as you would like to be ranked. So, basically, we just focused on one single tactic. We were not publishing too much content. The content pieces were very few, they were really truly good quality, but we focused on link building. And basically for initial three years, we were building backlinks. Profile, backlinks, backlinks, backlinks. Outreaching, outreaching, outreaching. And me being a CEO of [09:25] >> a company, I met like someone from the SEO team, like in the kitchen, what a cool conversation. So, how many backlinks did you earn today? How many backlinks did you earn this week, this month, etcetera? And it's kind of like, as I said, it's more like a factory, you're just reaching out to BDR activity, building backlinks. One day after another day after another day could be boring, but that really pays off. So, and after three years [09:48] >> of doing that and focusing on links building, currently we do have almost 200,000 links that refer to omnisend domain. Our main website, our blog, it comes from 14,400 unique websites, including like PayPal, Hubspot, Mailchimp is even quoting us. Google, in the articles, is quoting us. I mean, those are such high authorities, you would never get paid. They would never sell backlinks, but I will tell how did we earn this. And our domain authority currently is 88. [10:22] >> So now, we publish any article, it's being indexed by Google, just you know, in hours, or sometimes in minutes. Of course, it doesn't guarantee the top position at all, but it guarantees that it's already being indexed just right away after publishing it. [10:37] >> Yeah, so and like a few tactics to share. Okay, so we're here about, okay, how to build those links? Yeah, so first thing is really outreach, outreach, outreach. It's sales activity, it's BDR activity. You have to outreach thousands of potential websites. Initially, they ignore you. They ignore, they continue ignoring you, but after, you know, first, fifth, or tenth attempt, they start replying. And more backlinks you get from good authority websites, the easier it becomes for you [11:03] >> to acquire new ones. And another advice would be there are a lot of, like, you know, freelancers or authors who are responsible, or content editors who are responsible for a lot of websites, which have a quite good domain authority, and you just, you know, you give a good quality piece of content for them, [11:21] >> and they're happy, because we charge their customers for writing down content. And in exchange for that, you just ask to mention your brand name, and you put, like, you know, just a little bit of one backlink Nothing bad. So it's a win for them, it's a win for you. And then you start building, like, those networks to cooperate with others. Yeah, there are other websites. We do SEO well as well. You do link exchange. Yeah, so [11:44] >> it's really dumb to do, like, one on one the same week or the same day link exchange, but you build networks, and then you build circles that, you know, I give a backlink to you, you give a backlink to someone else, you give a little list, and we do it in circles. So, basically building those networks, building those circles, is very important. And good quality content, it is important. What really works the best for us, and [12:08] >> those what I mentioned, Google, HubSpot, PayPal, I'm not talking about major media outlets, mentioned Omnisend name, just completely for free. And you can see in this list, so it's all the in-depth researches. So, okay, statistics, annual statistics, seasonal statistics, okay, email marketing state, etcetera. And we started publishing it here. Like, year over year, season over season, and okay, first was ignored by everyone. Second was ignored by everyone. Third of half time, media outlets started publishing it, and [12:38] >> they understood this is a reliable source. And you can see that, like, you know, vast majority of referring domains and links to our pages is coming like omni channel statistics, statistics, statistics, etcetera. And, of course, it's not enough just to publish this quality content. You have to seed it. You have to outreach. You have to say, look, we have this infographic. We have the statistics. Look at it. Quote it. It's free of charge. Just use it. [13:02] >> Yeah? You have to do this job as well to seed this content. Yeah. So, that's where we started. So, basically, for our initial three years, we were mainly focusing on publishing very few content pieces, but seeding them and building a backlinks profile up to 200,000 unique backlinks that refer to our domain now. [13:24] >> Okay. So, we went initial three years from zero to 40,000 visitors, and in the past two years, we, since 2022, we managed it to triple it from 40,000 to 120,000. So, what did we change and what do we do now at this stage? So, domain authority is already there. But that's what we understand, and this is thesis on which is based on our current SEO activities, that a lot of websites on the web, or internet, have [13:53] >> been published once, or like pages have been published once, and never, never reviewed. And basically, only 3% of global internet pages receive at least one visit per Google per month. 97% of pages receive zero traffic from Google. Like zero. So, [14:15] >> based on that, we came up with a new principle. Every page on our website is an SEO page. There can't be like, you know, SEO pages and other pages. Every page, every landing page, every product page, every blog post is an SEO page. So, our SEO team writes a brief for any page on omnisend, and anyone who writes a content for that page has to include keywords, has to read competitors, because competitors do something good about [14:44] >> some keywords, etcetera, and that's where you can learn. And it is important. And, you know, every page is based on keyword research, and it has to be included. It's an SEO page. Second thing, what we changed, it's really we start investing in content a lot. So, now we are publishing truly a lot of content pieces, and we are renewing a lot of content pieces as well. So, yeah. So, we publish more frequently, and we renew, renew. [15:16] >> And, so, what does that mean, basically, on content? So, our goal is that if globally only 3% of pages receive some traffic from Google, on omnisend website, our goal that 100% of pages would receive some traffic from Google. So, we have hundreds of pages with an omnisend website and blog, but our goal is still any page should receive at least like, you know, a few maybe visits per month that they should receive. There should be no [15:47] >> dead pages. Second thing is like, know, SEO team is constantly reviewing and looking for new ideas, new keywords. And maybe you did analysis like six months ago, three months ago, and you think that it's already been covered. No. People's habits are changing. Market is constantly changing, and new habits and new terms arise, etcetera, and you have to constantly be reviewing everything you did until today. And the third thing is really focusing on those, and we're constantly [16:15] >> reviewing those pages who either been updated some, like, a whole time ago, or those who are the best traffic drivers to omnisend website, and those who drive the most registrations. There are top pages, of course. Like, you know, it's eighty-twenty principle. It works everywhere, and like 20% of our pages drive 80% of sign ups, and those are the pages on which you focus the most, while not forgetting others. And just an example, very practical. So, in [16:44] >> the single month of January, we published 22 new articles, and we updated five old articles, which is from this top three list, either old ones or the best performing articles. And some of the most competitive keywords, we update as much as like once per week. So, those that are like top, top, top competitive, so like this is an example of like WooCommerce plugins for 2024, when the third position, it's a very competitive keyword. You see web [17:10] >> data seven days ago. The one which is in second position updated five days ago. So, basically, the top performing articles and the most competitive articles you have to review constantly. Like, every week, at least once per month. And backlinks still matter. You publish good quality contents, you publish a lot of content, but still, I mean, if you want to compete, and now we have a very high domain authority, and our pages are being indexed, and our [17:36] >> content is being indexed right away, If you want to get to top five, top three, top one position, you have to build a backlink profile. So, basically, that still is in play, and we continue doing the same. Backlinks are still important, and if you want to rank high, you have to continue for each piece of article. Good quality article is important, recency is important, backlinks is equally important. So, basically, are three pillars on which we are [18:05] >> focusing. [18:07] >> Yeah. So, what I shared with you today, yeah, so this is a very tough competitive market where we operate, our direct competitors and our non direct competitors, which are competing for the same keywords. We're just like publishing good quality content, building your domain authority with backlinks and links, and it's what really drives you to success. And, yeah, this is the team members of the small team led by Laura, so really thank you for her. I'm not [18:38] >> an SEO specialist, to be honest, by myself, so she really helped me to prepare this presentation, so thanks for her. If any one of you is really keen on building, like, you know, doing SEO right and you would like to cooperate, so as I said, we have those SEO colleagues, networks, etcetera, where we help each other, so just please reach out to [email protected] and we, of course, can cooperate and build each other's website authorities [19:05] >> together. Yeah. So thank you. [19:12] Hey, folks. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latka. I launched and sold my first software 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 on to create founderpath.com. I raised a large fund to do non dilutive deals with b to b software founders. [19:38] So far, we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling a $150,000,000. Here in 2024, we're doing three to four new deals per week. So if you're looking for capital and don't wanna give up equity, go sign up at founderpath.com for free to get your offer.

hello everyone my guest today is reedus loras he's the co-founder and ceo of omniscient the powerful marketing automation platform that's focused on moving e-commerce marketers beyond the generic email marketing tools all right you ready to take us to the top yeah of course nathan nice to be here again you made the mistake of telling me that you're a listener to the show which means i don't have to do any work just tell me all your data right now okay sure so okay so what should they start from we have i'm agreeing i'm just kidding i'm kidding i'm kidding all right so so if you guys want nathan let's start with a famous five now there you go all right so hey so for people that missed your first interview right uh uh you know email you know marketing in general marketing tools it's very fragmented what space specifically are you targeting yeah that's good question so we are targeting towards e-commerce sites so those who sell online mainly physical goods we help those uh online retailers merchants to better do their retention marketing interest communicate with existing customers okay very good and so is this like is this like basically a better version of lifecycle emails yeah similar to that so we do combine uh lifecycle we do add uh campaigns on top and a part of emails so we have started as email service provider currently on the service email service provider on top we have text messages we do have facebook messenger messages would you have whatsapp and synchronization with facebook and google ads so it's kind of entire suite of tools for your retention marketing in one place and you have single customer profile and can choose a better channel to outreach your customers in the most effective way now you share last time you launched in 2014 at that time uh you had about 3 000 customers that was about a year ago how many customers today yeah more than 7 000. that's amazing okay good and then what are they paying once you're paying once sorry i say that again yeah paying once we talk about paying ones what do you mean paying oh oh paying customers i mean yeah we are freeman models so we have more like in active installs but yeah one year ago there were three thousand paying customers now we have more than seven thousand and are they all still paying an average of cost sixty dollars a month uh more seventy five now seventy five yeah we have not managed to include that trick which is which is really great as last year i told that we are at that time we have like starting to go up market and hunting after larger customers so we are kind of succeeding by doing that but you know acv that has increased by 25 percent which is quite a good number and we continue and it continued to grow like month on month uh but hcv so it's just great so ritus you know i'm gonna do the math 7000 customers 75 bucks a month that puts you out 520 000 a month in revenue is that right uh or are you below a bit more a bit more than that so being precise 7 200 paying customers yeah all right but is that number right last month you did about five you know 550 000 dollars yeah something like that i mean that's redus i mean that's really impressive growth just just about 11 months ago you told me you're doing about 180 dollars a month yeah that's correct that's incredible that's incredible growth how did you drive that growth uh so two factors here one is uh going up market increasing our cv and and then the and hunting uh logic customers as i have shared that like uh uh one year ago i have shared that you know those larger customers their churn uh is much lower so currently we do have negative churn on average it's just you know small like a little bit below the zero but it's like 0.8 minus negative a net churn which is which is great so you know are retaining more more paying customers it's one thing so like hunting larger and very another very important factor for us so it's a clash between shopify and the mailchimp yeah okay so you would credit most of your growth to moving you moved up market a bit but you also added over the past 11 months another like 3200 customers where are you adding so many customers from how are you finding them yeah so we have worked a lot on on brand awareness general fundability seo as well as shopify which is important platform for for us so uh i'm not sure how how much are familiar but like shopify and mailchimp they had a clash and mailchimp is not long anymore available on shopify app store you can use third-party apps to integrate those two tools but there's no native integration in place anymore so it drives a lot of traffic for us uh on top of a funnel how much per month it really varies it depends on you know shopify i have uh rankings and sometimes you're being more promoting some sometimes a bit less so there is no uh what was like give me a general range last month like how many how much traffic from shopify and how many new trials um that's a quick question i don't know this specific number currently while you're looking that up i'm going to read the listener i'll let you look up that data over here but guys when i go to when i go to omnisend on the shopify app store what you see is they've done a great job getting reviews over 3000 reviews uh 4.8 uh average out of five so i imagine you're ranked pretty high ritus yeah that's correct and especially like in email category email marketing category or marketing automation category however you call it away number one on shopify so it drives us a lot of traffic from there yeah i'm going to categories marketing and then email marketing what you're saying is mailchimp used to be uh kind of the number one uh you you are now ranked now how do you know how do you rank when you say number one you mean number of ratings or the the average the 4.8 yeah 4.8 well in position like shopify has algorithms so uh you see you see the ranking which you have not been logged in so if you log in so shopify has kind of based on relevancy what what do they recommend on the app store uh in in in which position so uh we usually kind of uh in in the top position in the listing in the recommendation list yeah this is this is interesting so you're up there with privy who we've had on the show and pagefly advance page builder reconvert post purchase up shell they're kind of like point solutions for different things a shopify owner might need yeah that's correct and if you go like on the home page like apps.shopify.com uh yeah so various kind of top email marketing solutions and and you know it it varies it depends on how you're logged in or not so understand is being quite usually uh promoting as like uh the best option for so so as a company as a company altogether with all of your channels how much traffic are you getting per month and how many new free trials yes so free trials uh currently we do get let me check that number uh yeah per month for rise like 1 000 200 to 2 000 free trials okay and how and how much traffic generates the 1200 new trials uh traffic like websites yeah to website so uh that's another yeah again it varies but it's like around like 20 20 000 visitors so okay so you have about you have about what is that a five percent conversion rate something like that yeah yeah which is yeah that's good so we kind of we we have challenges to increase the top of the final but uh but like conversion rate is really really good so we kind of managed to get uh to get uh visitors which are really willing to at least try this out and and yeah so we don't have problems with uh with conversion but our challenge is currently is really to expand the top of a funnel into outreach small so let's keep going down 20 000 visitors a month 1200 new trials of those trials how many convert to paid typically um let me check i have i have some statistics here so uh a month um what tool do you use by the way to track all this chart model yeah which is which is really good and once you're gonna ask a advent uh advanced uh would i recommend those that tool or like one specific tool so i would i would say yeah this is this is very handy still a lot of bugs in the tool but they're getting better so um which is which is really great yeah in terms of subscribers so let's say you know how many new customers were last yeah yeah you knew paying customers that was around like 400. okay again that's that's pretty good 400 on 1200 that's almost a 30 conversion rate from trial to paid so yeah your problem is how do you get more top of funnel yeah that's correct yeah interesting okay now when you look at your full funnel right what are you painfully weighted to get a new 75 a month customer yeah so our payback period is around three months so you can remember yeah that's what is that 225 right where are you spending most of that money uh so mainly it's uh seo we marketing remarketing channels we do pay commission for our partners what's the commission typically like 30 percent oh yeah up to 30 starting from 10 and going up to 30. and do you pay that in perpetuity or only for the first year it depends we have two different programs one is kind of referral program which is really generous so we pay uh three times uh three times what what the lead pays for first time so 300 percent of the first payment it's just one off thing it's mainly for referrals bloggers etc influencers and we have perpetual uh program for agencies so if someone so if a new customer referral person sends you an annual contract at 75 bucks a month right so it's about call it let's just make it easy 900 you pay them three times that per month so it's it's monthly so we pay it's 220 or so i see i see okay that makes more sense okay very good and how much so like last month how much told did you pay out to referral partners uh that was around around it was it was not much it was around uh yeah 10 000. okay that's not too bad and then how much when you look at all your retargeting and all your direct paid stuff how much was that last month yeah that's very good question i mean yeah the the expenditure was around six six seven yeah it were high six seven thousand per month okay that's still yeah this is very very little compared to your five hundred fifty thousand dollars monthly of top line so you're not doing a ton of paid stuff it's a lot of organic yeah it's a lot of organic get a lot of seo for a lot of listings like uh g2 captera getapp uh we are working with those we do have some uh some paid like retail dive of initiatives like uh good quality content we publish very good quality content and we drive they drive leads for us as well yep do you do are you on the paid portion of d2 crowd or the free one yes yes on paid paid yeah so i mean is that like four or five grand a month something like that it's small it's small uh i i'm not sure it's like 10 to 12 something something in that range yeah i guess it's kind of 12 but we managed to negotiate a little bit yep and if you're paying 12 000 a month do you know what you're paying like per trial from g2 crowd uh so we have just started uh two months ago so i don't have like proper data too yeah you've you've got other people ahead of you obviously hub spots paying a bunch active campaign market are the big ones and then already station clavio get response part sharp spring then you so this is actually considering how many total are listed here you're actually up pretty high obviously because you're paying two but i'd be curious to see how that performs over time yeah yeah so i don't have that data currently but yeah but a part of like you know last click or like first click attribution we see that like g2 or capterra obvious other listings video uh they do uh assist in the sales funnel uh maybe it's not like you can't attach your good directly to them but we see that you know someone has visited and especially when we have calls with uh with uh prospective customers like dark false democrats and we asked how did you find about us so they have mentioned they they usually mention like you know uh couple of like i have googled i have yeah i have really great view views on like g2 and then i booked a demo and read us are they sticking so look at your your churn your gross revenue turn over the past 12 months what's that at yeah so monthly it's uh it's uh 0.8 percent negative yeah yeah basically sorry what's gross so gross can't be negative what's your gross churn per month crosstalk you mean logo or revenue gross revenue turn per month yeah actually um i'm not tracking the data and that is the most important okay but what you're saying is net net wise when you add back expansion you said you're negative 0.8 yes that's correct okay so that would be negative 9.6 annually or the inverse of of net negative churn is your net revenue retention is about 109 yeah that's correct yeah okay interesting but do you have any you don't have a general sense of what your gross just your gross number is your gross churn um it's much higher because we managed to expand from a customer uh from yeah expansion is pretty good so gross gross it's around like five percent or so monthly monthly yeah okay so it's about 60 percent annual churn but what you're saying is you expand by about 70 so net revenue is 110 or it's negative point you know yeah that's correct that's correct yeah yeah that's good how are you expanding yeah larger customers very intent expense so we do charge for uh for the size of the list of your subscribers less so usually for like sustainable established businesses they grow their list and therefore they're paying us more uh it's one thing and i think we're upgrading from standard to pro plan uh so a bit 2.5 times more expensive plans so uh we you know adding more better features on pro plan and convincing them to to move pro when you were on last time you'd raise about 160 000 a little angel round have you raised any additional capital if so how much no no still 160 000 yeah still and actually from that we have paid off a lot as we had this opportunity and we're profitable so we kind of you know uh paid off vast majority of that 160. yeah so that was debt yeah that was convertible notes so you just paid it off instead of converting yeah yeah yeah and so when you say profitable i mean are you talking like 20 grand a month to the bottom line or 100 grand how profitable um let's keep this data for myself i guess what i'm really asking is are you letting money build up in the bank account or are you staying right about a break even uh no no i mean that's that's that's okay i mean we're reinvesting a lot so our goal is just to grow but but yeah i mean it's it's it's more than just you know just break even okay so i mean can i can we say more than 10 ebitda margin monthly yes we can say okay you know me i push but i won't push you harder because i like you because you listen to the show all right so more more more more more than 10 on 550 000 a month means your bank is growing by about 50 000 and cash every month potentially way more than that bad some math guys when you're good at math what about team size today how many people 51 51 okay interesting now do you do any kind of employee rev share programs um for sales people yeah okay how many sales how many quarter-carrying sales reps and yeah and a part of like only one we have only one okay how many engineers and the part of that we do have a program we kind of constantly increase our salaries and it's it's it's uh linked with a company results so if we achieve every quarter we have a goal for our growth mrr growth in general and then if we achieve that goal so the salaries are growing and each each team leader is agreeing on kind of individual programs so what what each employee expect the salary to grow in one year and then we divide in four quarters and each quarter we do uh like with inside the company publicly declare all the numbers like our armor our churn our new business again etcetera etcetera and if we achieve those goals uh salaries are constantly growing interesting now if you grow a salary that's like fixed cost are you paying this out as a bonus or our salary is actually like increasing yeah it's salary actually increasing yeah so i mean don't you get to a point where people are making like a million dollars a year uh not yet but if we're gonna be heading there so so really uh uh kind of some time ago i remember myself and my co-founder were talking that we would like to have uh ability to pay like netflix does you know paying the best salaries in the market and hiring the best talents in the market so at that time that was not possible for us but uh we're kind of heading uh towards that direction it's still gonna take some time but that's our dream to have best balance how many engineers are on the team uh so let's say half of the team is somehow related to product like engineers we have engineers product uh product uh managers designers etc and then the half is somehow related to administrative or go to market customer operations et cetera yeah now readers before we wrap up with a famous five i mean it sounds like you're doing 75 customers there's sorry 75 bucks a month 7200 customers 540 a month or about 6.5 million in terms of ar run rate right now i love the fact that your boots dropped your cash flow positive i mean someone would see this as a really great asset to add to their portfolio i mean if someone came and offered you something like you know 50 million bucks to buy the company in 9 or 10x valuation uh would you be able to resist selling at that price yes we did resist okay a few months ago what was the actual offer and was it verbal or an actual term sheet uh i mean i kind of disclosed all the data but yeah so valuation was something like you know the multiple was similar to what you have mentioned was it was it all cash or more like a stock deal uh mix okay it was a mix okay interesting and was it from uh was it from a strategic or a private equity firm that's strategic okay good yeah actually currently we have we have uh like for free free offers in a row we had free offers in a row so uh like private equities they didn't come with a bad good offer let's say and strategic uh was was with the best offer but we stepped down it does so we strongly believe that you know it's just the beginning of our agree journey if that 50 million ish offer had been all cash instead of a combination of cash and stock would you have been more likely to take i mean look because the upside here is let's say you get with a company that's much larger than you and you can grow amnesia like much faster you could still essentially have upside for you and the team inside of a bigger company just a question of strategically is that something you want to do or not no no i mean we see a lot of opportunities in the changing market as we believe that marketing automation is really going into into verticals and e-commerce is growing by itself and like mailchimp has moved from e-commerce vertical to like all-in-one tool for smb so we don't have that we don't have that huge push that we used to have from like the market leader which is mailchimp it's one thing so another thing we kind of have started uh feeling that it's really taking off like our brand awareness has increased and etc etc so we kind of still feel that it's just the beginning of um what if it sounded what if that deal sounded something like this it was shopify making the offer and they said read us listen we've decided we want to get into the email game we're buying a company in the email space we'd love for it to be you but you've got to accept 50 million in cash otherwise we're gonna go buy one your competitors and we're going to remove you from our app store uh i hope it would never happen you'd sell you'd sell to shopify if that was the term i mean uh you know it's like in a mafia deal yeah i will take my money take my bullets so in that case i would probably take your money instead of a wallet of course but i like that that's a good analogy all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh hard thing about the hard things the same as one year ago number two is their ceo you're following or studying um yeah a lot of them currently know one specific number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company besides your own uh char mogul is good and g suite is great number four how many hours you sleep to get every night ah six to seven and what's your situation married single kids married to one kid three years old boy i love that all right and how old are you 36 36 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh build a sass product guys omniscient freaking love this 7 200 customers paying 75 bucks a month doing 550 000 a month in revenue up from 180 000 just a year ago basically bootstrapped which i love so doing about 6.5 million bucks in ar really in the smb space relying on shopify as a partner launching now in g2 crowd and other markets to try and add additional customers per month currently adding about 1200 new trials per month 400 new paying customers as they look to scale payback period about three months again healthy economics they do have high churn 60 annually but they more than make up for that with expansion of 70 so 110 net revenue retention on their entire cohort 51 folks on the team as they look to continue to scale reedus thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan see you in one year