How Surfer Grew to 500K Free Users and a Jasper Partnership Driving 20% of Revenue (Talk by CEO Lucjan Suski)

Introduction: Surfer's Growth Story

Lucjan Suski

00:00Hi, everyone. So, yeah, my name is Lucjan, and I'm CEO and Co Founder of Surfer, a B2B SaaS product that we grew to 15,000,000 ARR in around five years with less than $1,000,000 in of marketing spend in total. At Surfer, 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

00:35story to your customers and we are taking care of making sure they can find it.

Talk Overview: Tactics That Worked and Didn't

Lucjan Suski

00:43Should I see that slide somewhere or not? Okay. So over the next twenty minutes, I'm going to show you some marketing tactics that for us

00:54were a waste of time and we didn't attempt them at all or we just attempted them and wasted some time. There is some stuff that's usual, yet 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 cheat tactics that kicked us. We launched a Chrome extension to 500 k with the active users. We did

Revenue Timeline from 2019 Onward

Lucjan Suski

01:27a partnership with Jasper. And then I'll share one simple trick how to make your G2 reviews go through the roof. So, these are our revenue growth. We had like almost $1,000,000 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.

01:59Okay. But

02:03if it's not, then I will, of course, let you know. 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, kinda like whether you are using a freemium model, free trial, demo, or in general, how do you convert your customers? Here's the recent experiment that we launched like a

Generic Growth Tactics: Free Trial Experiment

Lucjan Suski

02:30month ago. So, on the chart you see like in general conversion rate from sign 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 upfront.

02:59So it's roughly 15%. And then we thought, yeah, maybe it's a good idea to let people try Surfer without paying upfront, $59, 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

03:32trial. So, in general, it seems like people at least for our customers, it's kind of the same thing to just take $59 out of the pocket versus

Pricing Philosophy: Charge Upfront, Annually

Lucjan Suski

03:46like if we charge them after seven days, the conversion rate is the same. But the idea here is really if you are just starting or if you are just below $10,000,000 ARR probably, you should focus on building a shut up and take my money product. So focus on getting those early 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

04:20will pay for your product. If they don't, it's not a problem of bad marketing or or conversion rate optimization, but rather a product problem.

04:34Yeah. So, build a shut up shut up and take my money product and just charge your damn customers upfront, ideally, annually.

Why SEO Was a Waste of Time for Surfer Early On

Lucjan Suski

04:45Another 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, just bear with me. Here's a decision making chart that you can use to tell if you should do SEO. Why we didn't do that? Because we were bootstrapping. So we were kind of like short on money.

05:12Our niche was highly competitive. So we were to compete with Ahrefs, Semrush, 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 invest more on tactics that will

05:43compound over time. So, yeah, if you are profitable

05:51over $1,000,000 ARR, 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 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 the best marketing tactics compound over time. So, if you just focus on on stuff

06:21that's taking giving you immediate effect or are easily measurable, then it's not going to work.

Offline Conferences: What Didn't Work

Lucjan Suski

06:31So offline conferences. Many people though we did the same, like, yeah, Web Summit. Let's go to Web Summit. 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 of people on the conference, there was just a little just little be really interested in your product, be part of your ideal customer profile. And then out of

07:00those, 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, 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 form much more intimate relationship with your customers, early adopters. It will compound over time as well much better.

07:28Or, we also did, one big conference. And it makes sense as long as it targets your ICP, precisely like we went to the conference for SEO professionals, decision makers about, you know, buying software and that that can work. But don't go to like generic, website or SaaStock conferences.

Pricing Research and Willingness to Pay

Lucjan Suski

07:55So, the the usual stuff, pricing. How many of you experimented, changing your pricing over the last last six months? Twenty,

08:05thirty, 40%. That's that's nice, but everyone should do that really. Because, it's it's a it's a huge huge growth lever for for any SaaS company. So here is the real world pricing survey outlined that we just launched for our new product. And the idea is to launch such a survey 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

08:40more confident whether you are building the right thing. And basically, it will put 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 artifacts from that, it's like presentation over 50 slides around different, you know, data points. But this is one of the most interesting

09:08one.

09:11Which shows you like in our case, the market penetration maximizing maximizing price was like $15 per article.

09:23But then, we could charge much more to maximize the revenue. Much much less people will buy like 10%, but the revenue will go go up. So, we'll have it will be much easier for you to decide like how how how you should price the product that you're 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 than

09:56your competitors. Because at the beginning, we are looking for early adopters, they will have higher willingness to pay. So, you can just capitalize on this and just get some money to get started. It's it's it's like if you are bootstrapping, you should be looking, for for exactly that. Don't use discounts. Don't do lifetime deals.

Affiliate Marketing and Commission Strategy

Lucjan Suski

10:22Next to affiliate 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 affiliate marketing brings us. So roughly like million and 0.5 for 2022. And it's a it's a nice channel. People are generally afraid of spending like 30% commission fee. Like someone will get 30% lifetime for my customers. That's a lot. But if

11:01you 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 chase like big affiliates, then you'll get brand awareness, because, you know, they will 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 and Authenticity

Lucjan Suski

11:33community building. Like, there's one tip I can share that the the the biggest one is that be authentic, be real, be memorable. Like, this is our how to surf a weekly walkthrough with Mihaw, our our CPO, and like, you cannot not memorize this guy. Right? So, it's like so so sad to see all those b to b startups, SaaS products have this boring marketing, like, just like anyone else. Nothing really, you know.

12:08You don't have to necessarily do that. Someone. Right? Be someone. Be where your customers are. Not like launch Slack channel because it's convenient for you. If your customers hanging hang around Facebook, do the Facebook group. You need to test where is the the best where is the best for your for your customers.

Chrome Extension: Keyword Surfer Launch

Lucjan Suski

12:33And weird shit tactics. So, Chrome extension. We saw an opportunity. Keywords everywhere was, like a leading Chrome extension for, seeing basically seeing search search volume data directing Google. And one time they said it's going you know. You're going to have to pay for this. And we had we saw like huge backlash on Facebook like why do we have to pay for this? We don't want to pay. It was like $1 a week. But still it made

13:01difference to to to their customers. They had like, I don't know, 500k or so users and we're like, we have this data. We can build this. So, we did. In two weeks, we created Keyword Surfer, and we saw like articles, like this. It looks like keywords everywhere, but not completely. So we had a lot of PR from the get go. We

13:27reached 65,000 users like potentially interested in a product like seeing Surfer logo every time they open Google. That's that was powerful for brand awareness. Right now, it's like 500k users. And it's one of the reasons, why we are so, efficient, with our marketing spend. The enabler was that we had to make decisions decision about doing this immediately, fast, and execute fast. And just, use the opportunity that we that we saw. So, you cannot replicate that

Jasper Partnership: 28-Hour Build

Lucjan Suski

14:02probably. But you can replicate the decision making process, about looking for opportunity and executing as fast as you can. It doesn't bring a lot of direct conversions, but brand awareness is is there. Jasper partnership, same story. We met we met in the evening, like, in April with the CEO of of of Jasper because they saw, like, they saw a lot of customers asking for Surfer integration. We saw a lot of customers asking for Jasper integration. So

14:37we're like, yeah, let's do it. Twenty eight hours later, this ready made product, like, you could open Jasper, sign up with Surfer account, and boom, you saw all of our guidelines directly there. And it's crazy. Because 20% of our revenue is brought by Jasper. Brand awareness skyrockets. And so on. But it's kind of a threat if if you depend so much on one customer acquisition channel. Question? So people are using Jasper to write the article and

Nathan Latka

15:08then your software is telling you what keywords Exactly. Yes. That's us.

15:18Yes. Yes. So in Jasper, you can enable Surfer integration, and you'll see our guidelines how to write the content. Yes. So that it runs.

15:3030% commission, you know, it's it's freezing, but, it's worth it.

Lucjan Suski

15:38Is that my current commission? Yeah. Lifetime. Lifetime.

G2 Review Growth Tactic

Lucjan Suski

15:46How to make your reviews on G2 go like

Nathan Latka

15:52You see, like, between, like, February 2021 to June, we went from 20 to 120. Keyword Surfer reviews from 128 to 200 in in a month. What happened? One simple trick. Ask your customers a favor in exchange for a credit in your product. Like, get server certified, two content editor credits. Write a G2 review, one content editor credit, and and so on and so forth. You can figure out a lot of growth tactics around this

16:26framework, and it's working wonders.

16:32Your system works with credits? Yes, we have usage based. The thing is people are not using those credits anyway, because they have so so big limits, are using like 20% limits. They still do it. I don't know why. And the the thing is, if you ask them to write a G2 review, they won't do like one star, because they would feel bad about it. So, they either leave a good review or no. No review at all.

Lucjan Suski

16:56So it's great. People will do anything in exchange for free credits if your product is product is right. Yeah.

Framework for Choosing Marketing Tactics by Revenue Stage

Nathan Latka

17:15No. No. Jasper does this tactic as well. So, the great stuff was enabled by execution, speed of execution and creativity. You just wait for opportunity and jump on it and execute as fast as you can. And here's a really quick framework how you can figure out whether to invest in particular marketing tactics at any given revenue level. So if you are just getting started, you need immediate effect because you need the cash flow to get flowing.

17:45You need to be cost and time effective because, of course, you don't have any of those. But you also need a compounding or profound effect because if you are willing to invest in tactics that will bring your, I know, conversion 20%, if you have like 100 customers, that's not going to work. That's not how you build a big company. You need 10x. 10x stuff. Or stuff that will compound over time. If you're growing bigger, you can,

18:16you know, you can just do around effect and cost time effectiveness because you can invest over a longer time. You don't need this immediacy. And then, if you have 1,000,000 and above, you can just invest in stuff that's compounding, like brand awareness, or if they if it has a a big effect also. So, it's cost doesn't matter anymore. So, I showed you some tactics as well. Waste of time, usual trigger, underrated, and some weird shit stuff.

Lucjan Suski

18:53And thank you very much. Good luck, and have fun.