How Omnisend Reached $50M ARR Bootstrapped and Grew 44% in 2023 (SaaS Open 2024 Talk by Co-Founder and CEO Rytis Lauris)

Introduction and SaaSOpen Context

Nathan Latka

00:00Quick 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.

Omnisend Overview and $50M ARR

Rytis Lauris

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

Bootstrapped and Customer-Funded Philosophy

Rytis Lauris

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

SEO as a Revenue Channel

Rytis Lauris

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

Market Overview and Competition

Rytis Lauris

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

SEO Team Structure and Outcomes Focus

Rytis Lauris

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

SEO as a Factory: Core Philosophy

Rytis Lauris

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

First Three Years: Link Building Focus

Rytis Lauris

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

Backlink Results and Domain Authority

Rytis Lauris

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

Tactics for Earning High-Authority Backlinks

Rytis Lauris

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.

Phase Two: Tripling Traffic from 40K to 120K

Rytis Lauris

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,

Every Page is an SEO Page

Rytis Lauris

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

Content Publishing and Update Cadence

Rytis Lauris

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

Three Pillars: Content, Recency, Backlinks

Rytis Lauris

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.

Closing Remarks and Team Recognition

Rytis Lauris

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

Invitation to Cooperate on SEO

Rytis Lauris

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.

Nathan Latka

19:12Hey, 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.

19:38So 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.