How OmniSend CEO Rytis Lauris grew OmniSend to $55M revenue and 100K customers in 2024.

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 going to spoil the beans let's just give a warm Round of Applause to the CEO of omen Rus Loris Rus come on [Applause] up thanks for being here man I got it right right 5 million 5 yes and what will you finish this year out you think yes we'll see we'll see this year is a little bit more challenging but it's always the Q4 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 and very clear seasonality stage is yours Co us up thank you thank you okay so hello everyone so thanks for staying here not going for a lunch so 20 more minutes uh yeah if you can start countdown thank you thank you very much so and thanks Nathan for inviting me and I will be talking about SEO so what Adam showed how to use AI to to ride listicles I would disagree to some extent or maybe at large so I will explain you uh soon why is it so okay so yeah 50 million AR I'm co-founder and CEO what do we do we do um we do do we do marketing automation for those who sell online so basically if you online store we 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 what where omniscent comes into play um yeah and one of the our marketing tactics which is very important for us and that helped us to to to grow to a certain stage is uh SEO on content yeah so this is probably kind of used to be for quite a while the second largest driver initially we truly belonged as you see we launched a company 10 years ago so in 2014 uh we started doing SEO in 201 18ish 2019 something like this so for initial few years is we really relied on App Stores like Shopify App Store becommerce uh WordPress app stores Etc then we started investing in in various other uh channels and activities to acquire our customers so content at SEO became number two now it's a little bit being outperformed by agency Partnerships so maybe next year or sometime ago I uh sometime in in the future I can talk about about why agency Partnerships and freelance Partnerships overtake uh overtake other uh go to market channels but let's get back to this so definitely like content and SEO help you drive traffic to a website Drive traffic to your blog and then convert into signups and of course into paying customers okay so in then next 20 minutes I will be talking initially about about omnison about competitive uh 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 definitely AI generative AI it's disrupting SEO industry and the searching industry in general so there are will I will share some insights some learnings but of course there are there is a stage of experimenting again and not as certain as it used to be in the past okay so uh a little bit about ourselves so competition is truly tough yeah so clavio mimp they are probably the main competitors for us those who serve directly exactly the same customers as 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 is not our direct competitor we you have players like marqueta who is not our direct competitors but at the same time we compete for the same keyword email marketing is very broad space email marketing software email email Etc is a very broad space so we compete with those big guys so keyword difficulty goes as 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 bucks yeah so okay on high seasons on low Seasons around 40 30 bucks for one single click so really really tough competition and uh yeah so definitely investing in organic is what helped us grow okay so key principles key principles uh what our team applies our content in SEO team applies initially we focus on outcomes not outputs doesn't matter how many articles you write it the only single medic that matters how much new revenue does vord bring so we we have ok across entire organization as a planning methodology so okar is usually if you're aware about okar methodology it's always about Moon chot yeah you put the the high ambition High ambition targets Etc in many cases you fail but sometimes you uh you you reach those and this is where the the Breakthrough moments actually happen and SEO is a math it's not much creativity there there is a lot of calculations there is a lot of analysis keyword analysis competition analysis is and then very very pure calculation how many articles have do you have to write how many backlinks do you have to collect how many referring sources do you get have to get in order to reach the set position on the search uh what is important here to say we always relied on internal team we never hired agency and this is that was a strategic decision we made and 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 we have a pool of Partners so freelance mainly freelance as are very small agencies that do write content for us and then do uh generate backlinks for us and AI is a good replacement for writing content I will touch in the third part so okay so first three years we just started doing uh investing in content SEO our brand Authority is um almost at zero so you know we have to start somewhere so if someone of you in in content SEO at the same state stage a similar stage early stage so this is the piece of advice that I will give you to you okay so initially initially took us all almost three years to get uh from 0 to 40,000 visitors to our website and blog yeah now 180 but as always it always compounds it always accelerates and initial initial stag is always the most difficult in business in Revenue in in website traffic growth Etc um so what are the few things which I learned at very beginning yeah so to be honest like being a a Founder CEO I thought okay I've heard like rumors okay you just write a good piece of content and 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 uh 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 uh 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 in-house team not agencies why inhouse 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 we do Outsource agencies mainly Freelancers mainly small boutique agencies to write content and to build backlinks uh but the rest is being done the keyword search what we want to achieve the target setting is being done uh inh housee 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 um so one tactic to increase the domain Authority domain Authority even until today in the world of AI it truly matters if your domain Authority is low uh 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 couple of days to get ranked in top 10 position with a some keywords of course if the highest competition keywords still takes times but but it it really really becomes easier so domain Authority it's very important thing um so the single tax itic that worked for us or the main tactic by far that worked for us is really 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 omnis and.com or block omnis and.com uh at the same time 11,000 unique websites do refer to omnison including like the ones like Bloomberg CNBC CNN Etc so Forbes so really really like the best ofor domains can you get get those referral links from those best Authority domains at 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 um like you know competitors do refer hopspot referring to us yeah so competitors uh di competitors so at least the keyword competitors do refer 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 uh shall you backlinks yes shall you buy from the low Authority uh website please don't do that because Google recognize it um 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 backlink so um just outreaching yeah and pro potentially you as CEOs maybe marketers Etc you keep receiving emails oh I would like to post this this this content on your blog you might find it span 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...