How Surfer CEO Lucjan Suski grew Surfer to $16M revenue and 4K customers in 2024.

Intro hey everyone so yeah my name is Lucia and I'm CEO and co-founder of surfer at B2B SAS product that we grew to 15 million ARR in around five years with less than one million dollar in of marketing spent in total at server we are building an AI SEO content automation platform that does all the heavy lifting around content ideation writing optimization and then performance measurement so that you can focus on the stuff that matters which is telling the story to your customers and we are taking care of making sure they can find it um somewhere or not okay so over the next uh 20 minutes I'm going to show you some marketing tactics that for us um were a waste of time and we didn't attempt them at all or we just attempted them and wasted some time uh there's some stuff that's usual uh yeah it can be tricky to execute or it's kind of like underrated so I'm going to talk about pricing a bit about affiliate marketing about building a community and finally we have some weird tactics that kicked us um we launched a Chrome extension to 500k uh with the active users we did a partnership with Jasper and then I'll share one simple trick how to make your G2 reviews go through the roof Growth tactics so is there our Revenue growth um we had like almost 1 million dollars in 2019 and last year we closed at around 15. and most of the tactics I'll tell I'll talk about today will be applicable across all of this range okay um but um if it's not then I will of course let you know um so yeah starting with tactics that can be a waste of time and the first one just I want to share the recent experiment that we did on like generic growth tactics which I use the term for like kind of like whether you are using a free new model a free trial demo or uh you know how do you convert your customers here's the recent experiment that we launched like a month ago so on the chart you see like in general conversion rate from signed up user so basically after they put an email and password sign up and then they have to basically choose the plan and then take out the credit card and pay so this is the conversion up until before the experiment we where we didn't have any kind of free trial so whenever you wanted to try Surfer you had to pay the money up front says roughly 15 and then we thought yeah maybe it's a good idea to let people try Surfer without you know paying up front fifteen fifty nine dollars uh just for like a credit card details we'll charge them after seven days that's probably going to make the conversion much higher and it didn't actually work like that the conversion rate almost didn't move and that really is a conversion rate not to the like the payment after you activate the trial but just to the trial so in general it seems like people at least for our customers it's kind of the same uh thing to just take 59 out of the pocket versus like if we charge them after seven days the conversion rate is the same but the idea here is um really if you are just starting or um if you are just below 10 million dollars ARR probably you should you should focus on building a Shut Up And Take on the money product so focus on getting those area adopters they will basically either buy your product or not they don't care about you know trials freemium if they believe in your value proposition they will pay for your product if they don't it's not a problem of bad marketing or conventional optimization but rather a product problem SEO um yeah so build the shutter Shut Up And Take My Money product and just charge your damn customers up front ideally annually uh another one is SEO and why the hell is CEO of an SEO Product Company telling you that SEO can be a waste of time well it was for us but we were in quite unique position so um just bear with me here's a decision uh making chart that you can use to tell if you should do SEO why we didn't do that because we are bootstrapping so we were kind of like short on money our Niche was highly competitive so we were to compete with hrefacm Raj HubSpot big domains big players so if that's the case you will need to wait for results for a long time like a year or so and you'll need to invest a lot of money and if you are bootstrapping you don't have this money and ideally you get your cash flowing from the get-go to just be able to to invest more on tactics that will um Compound on the overtime so yeah if you are profitable over one million dollar AR you do invest in SEO so we just waited for for some time if you if you're not bootstrapped if you have highly competitive Niche so you probably have to ask your investors are they willing to wait for results and if they don't you change your investors because you know it's a long-term game it's always a long-term game and uh the best marketing tactics uh compound over time so uh if you just focus on on stuff that's taking uh giving you immediate effect or are easily measurable then it's not going to work um so offline conferences um many people though we did the same like yeah a website let's go on the website it's so many people right so many potential customers will talk to you know different people they will buy our product well it doesn't work like that because out of those thousands of people on the conference there is just a little um just a little be really interested in your product be part of your idea customer profile and then out of those you'll be able to talk to like I don't know 50 and then there's just one person that will buy or ideally maybe it's not even one person so don't go to to like big conferences uh trying to sell your product if you're just getting started what to do instead go for a local Meetup you will be able to for much more intimate relationship with your customers area adopters it will compound over time as well much better or we also did um one big conference and it makes sense as long as it targets your your ICP um precisely like we went to the conference for SEO professionals decision makers about you know buying software and um that that can work but don't go to like generic website or SAS stock conferences so the usual stuff pricing how many of Pricing you experiment that changed your pricing over the last last six months 20 30 40 that's that's nice but everyone should do that really because uh it's it's a it's a huge a huge growth level for for any SAS company so uh here is the real world pricing survey outline that we just launched for our new product and the idea is to learn such a survey uh before you start working on on a product and not after or never because it's it will make you much easier to invest your time later on much more confident whether you are building the right thing and basically it will put you in the right frame of mind how to frame your value proposition to ask people like how much money are you willing to spend on it so get much more precise description of your what you are building and then the artifact from that it's like presentation or 50 slides are on different you know data points but this is one of the most interesting one um which shows you like in our case the Market penetration maximizing maximizing price was like 15 dollars per article but then we could charge much more to maximize the revenue much much less people will buy like 10 percent but the revenue will go go up so we'll have it will be much easier for you to decide like how how uh how you should price the product that you are launching and actually like besides besides conducting the willingness to pay research willingness to pay research before creating a new product you should start pricing higher and not like lower uh than your competitors because at the beginning you are looking for area adopters they will have higher willingness to play so you can just capitalize on this and just get some money to get started uh it's it's it's like if you are bootstrapping you should be looking uh for for exactly that don't use discounts don't do lifetime deals um next to affiliate affiliate marketing Affiliate Marketing so here is the slide is actually wrong because it includes Jasper partnership but cut it like in half and you'll you'll have an idea how much revenue does affiliate partnership along brick affiliate marketing brings us so roughly like a million and a half for 2022. and it's a it's a nice channel uh people are generally afraid of spending like 30 commission fee uh like someone will get 30 lifetime for my customers does a lot but if your price higher you have you'll have some leeway to do that so that's one and the actual commission is lower because if you if you trace like big Affiliates uh then you'll get uh brand awareness uh because you know they'll um show it to their Community spread the word so brand awareness is like you cannot measure that affiliate links are often often skipped as well so Community Building like Community Building there's one tip I can share that the the biggest one is that be authentic be real be memorable like this is our how to surf a weekly walkthrough with me how our our CPO and like you cannot not memorize this guy right so um it's like so so sad to see all those B2B startups SAS products have this boring marketing like just like anyone else nothing really you know you don't have to necessarily do that someone right be someone be where your customers are not like learn slack Channel because it's convenient for you if your customer is hanging hang around Facebook do the...