How Ahrefs Reached $100M+ ARR with 125 People and Zero VC Funding (Interview with CMO Tim Soulo)

Event Context and Introduction

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, sasopen.com. But for now, let's jump into the recording.

Ahrefs Overview and Revenue Milestone

Tim Soulo

00:21>> We're really popular software as a service SEO tool with a pretty unique story. Let's share some, I think some interesting things y'all will like here. So we're gonna talk about building a better product, how do you do that? Creating product led content, fun fact, we grew, I'll show you the numbers in a minute, we're over $100,000,000 we basically used word-of-mouth, blogs, and YouTube. We didn't have a sales team till we hit about $100,000,000 We don't do

Growth Philosophy and Unconventional Approach

Tim Soulo

00:55>> a lot of things that other companies are doing, a lot of the metrics and stuff that you're hearing here, we don't measure any of that. We just default to action basically, we go, we make the product better, we create content, we create the things that try and be where people are gonna be. And then I'm gonna show you how to incorporate your data into the content. So this is our revenue growth, like I say, I can't

01:21>> vouch for all these numbers, we're a bootstrapped company, no VC funding, none of that, but we have released some public numbers over the years. We're based in Singapore. I can't be sure if we released the numbers in Singapore dollars, US dollars, I tried to translate where we could. The last three are the only ones I can actually vouch for.

01:41>> Bootstrap from about $300,000 in personal funds. Our owner Dimitri, 2010.

01:50>> 2015, about 15 people who finally hired a marketing person. Think what was the revenue then? About 7,000,000 already. Finally got a marketer.

Revenue and Team Timeline 2010 to 2024

Tim Soulo

02:02>> Twenty eighteen, 45 people. Twenty twenty one, 90 employees, 50,000 plus customers, and we got our first salesperson. I think we're pretty close to $100,000,000 ARR at that point.

02:15>> 2022, we launched a search engine, yep.com. That led to some really unique opportunities for us. I'll talk some about that.

02:25>> Like I said, we're not conventional. We basically didn't do all the things that all the people here are telling you to do. Probably should have, might have grown a little faster. We even had a free trial. We even made a paid trial. It was $7 for seven days that got abused. We killed that off, so we don't even have a free trial anymore. So pretty much everything that is conventional, that everyone's like go do this, we

02:49>> did none of that. Bootstrapped, grew to 100,000,000, a little over ten years.

02:57>> How? Mostly product. The folks that didn't hear that are HRAS users, you love the product, I'm sure, right? Yeah. They're in there every day, constantly.

03:10>> So what we do, we get user feedback, feedback from our team, focus on the data and data quality. Last year, we shipped over 130 user visible features, lots more in the back.

03:25>> Our users tell us generally they want features that are in other tools. I think Eugene was just up there from Semrush, he's one of our main competitors. A lot of folks on candy.io just are like, can you do this like SEMRush does? It's okay.

03:41>> But if that was our entire product strategy, we would fail as a company.

What Ahrefs Does Not Do

Tim Soulo

03:48>> We have our own private road map. Actually a lot of stuff is coming to our pricing page or is already there, so you can kinda see a public version of this pretty soon.

03:59>> We ask people for feedback too. We get a lot of crap from this by the way. People are mean on Reddit. But every two years our CMO and he goes and asks, he's like give us feedback. Fun fact, I think this is how I got my job. I gave feedback for a couple years in a row. They like my ideas. I got a message like hey, wanna come work for us? And I was like, Okay, I'm

04:19>> a big fan, so sure.

04:23>> We get feedback from everywhere. Our sales team, our customer service team, literally Twitter, LinkedIn, we share all this. And we're like, okay, this seems like good stuff. We have a voting system basically and we can push things through if it's a really good idea. We also have our own team. This is me giving a suggestion, we launched this author report. It's like, oh these are the authors linking to this. And I'm like, well in our own

Product Obsession and Feature Shipping

Tim Soulo

04:50>> internal report, we have the authors and all the traffic and links and stuff that they're getting, but we don't have something like that in the tool. We use this personally, we create this, can we actually make this into a product? The answer is yes. So we got a bunch of feedback, people liked it, it's good.

05:11>> But that's kinda how we do it. Users I don't think will ever give you the next unicorn idea, the next great product idea. They're always like, this is what the other tools are doing, give me that basically. Want this use case. The best ideas in my opinion come from your own team, your power users, the ones that are using your product every day. It could be your sales folks even.

05:35>> We focus so heavily on product and data. This story got a lot of traction in the dev and DevOps community. We saved like 400,000,000 in three years by not going to the cloud. We built our own data centers. It's a little painful, we had some down times, we got some flack for it, but it was the right decision in the end. We scale so much data, this number is actually about 900,000,000 now over three years. We

06:02>> would not be a profitable company if we lived on AWS.

06:08>> And you can see tons of servers, tons of data, we store so much stuff, so much more than any other SEO tool, any of our competitors that it lets us do more and interesting things. So we are obsessed with data, we are obsessed with the product, and that is really what has led to our growth.

06:29>> We crawl really fast, one of the fastest bots on the web. The search engine has given us some very unique product features, some of which are launched, some of which are coming, but also let us have big plays. So Index Now is a partnership between Bing, Yandex, Naver, some other search engines. We were able to partner with that and now we are actually getting the data. So every time someone that's using the Index Now protocol creates

06:57>> a page, deletes a page, changes something on that page, it pings this, it tells us we can go recrawl it. That's extremely fresh data. We pick up pages fast. Any updates that marketers are making on their sites, we get it extremely fast. And then the site audit feature we have coming is actually going to give us a real time monitoring system, auditing system. So you make a change, it sends a thing, we check it. If something's

07:25>> screwed up, we tell you immediately. Something's screwed up. Like you've no index this page. Within a matter of seconds, you get an email. You go fix that before the search engines take you out of the index. Crazy competitive advantage.

07:41>> We benchmark our data, we do a lot of studies, there's a bunch of industry studies as well. We usually win these if they're fair comparisons.

07:51>> Now as far as how we get the word out about it, mostly blogs, video, free tools.

07:59>> So a lot of content doesn't get any traffic, this is from one of our own studies. 96.5% no traffic, crazy. So people do content poorly, we try and help people do it better. We get a lot of traffic, about 3,500,000 or so right now. It was recently as high as six, we had a pre rendering issue, a technical issue, dropped some but that will come back, no worries. One of the easiest things to do is copy

08:25>> the content your competitors have. They have successful pages, you can view it. Make the same things, easy win.

08:35>> You want to focus, get the intent right behind that, because a lot of people are like, I want my product page to rank for this thing and the thing, all the SERPs are like, what is this thing? Well your product page is not going to rank for that. Sorry, it's not going to happen.

08:51>> All of our content

Data Centers and Cloud Cost Savings

Tim Soulo

08:55>> incorporates our product. So we're like, here's a problem, we're writing about it, we're covering this topic in a blog, here's how you solve it in Ahrefs. It's a very simple formula, but I bet a lot of the folks out there that work in companies, they don't have their product actually featured within their content. I know I've worked enterprise and I didn't even have access to the products. I couldn't have done that. And it was a huge

09:23>> miss. This works so well. It's like here's the thing, here's the use case, I'm teaching you. That's our whole strategy. We teach SEOs. But at the same time we're showcasing the product throughout. And it doesn't come off as sales generally, Folks who have read our blogs and stuff, it's like it's a natural thing. Here's a problem, here's how you actually fix that in HRFs, or here's how you go look at that.

09:49>> Improve your existing content. This is a portfolio I made, we were running some tests on these pages, obviously everything was up. You wanna take a look every once in a while and say, this content's not quite working as well as it could, maybe it could do something better. Other times competitors, they come out. SEO content is like a race, everyone is constantly updating. So it's a very competitive market. We look at that and we're like, well

10:14>> if something's falling behind, maybe we need to go update it. Think about two out of every five blogs that we publish now are just updates of other blogs.

10:25>> Low hanging fruit keywords that are kind of almost there. You can probably improve the content around them or write a piece of content, prove that. We made a glossary. This is like an old school tactic. What is content? What is this? What is that?

10:42>> 65,000 monthly visitors.

10:46>> Now originally we were doing all this by hand, but a lot of the more recent ones are programmatic, generated, just a couple paragraphs honestly. It's not like long form content. I don't believe in using AI generated content long form. Don't think it turns out good. But crazy, we had that much uplift from just basic definitions pretty much.

11:09>> Comparison content, I'm a big fan. Control the narrative, don't let your competitors control the narrative. I don't particularly like all the, let's compare pricing and the product tables and all that. So we just kinda showed industry opinions, unique features of the tool. We literally have one page for this. Like It's 1,500 visitors a month. I wanna create a bunch more of these to be honest. We have more than a couple competitors that we feature there. I

11:40>> love this tactic personally and I think we will be creating more of those soon. Translate successful content. If you work in international markets, look, over half a million uplift just translating our content. We didn't do that for a long time. It's kind of a miss.

11:59>> We've also done some interesting niche programmatic plays. So this is something you might see typically from an SEO agency. We literally made articles like SEO for travel agencies, for insurance, for dentists, for orthodontists, for plumbers. And most of these are ranky, but this was all programmatically done. I think there's about 60 of these and they do pretty well. And the whole idea was, well, we'll show you what you should do. If you wanna try this yourself,

Content Strategy and Blog Traffic

Tim Soulo

12:29>> sign up for Ahrefs, we'll guide you through it. And that was the whole idea, was like lead gen. We do measure if we get leads from this by the way. Told you all, we don't really measure stuff.

Free Tools as Lead Generation

Tim Soulo

12:40>> But I think it works, pretty sure. Video, we have like a 550,000 subscribers on our YouTube. Part of that is because the guy that does our videos, Sam O, he is a phenomenon. He is absolutely incredible, personable, very talented.

12:59>> Lots of these videos, hundreds of thousands, millions of views on SEO stuff. Crazy.

13:07>> And in every one of these videos, he's doing the same as we do in the blog content. Showcasing like here's a problem, here's how to look at this in hrefs, here's how to fix it in hrefs. Showcasing the product throughout. So focus on the product, showcase what the solutions are. We have a bunch of free tools, these are literally What did I do?

13:32>> These are some of the most popular pages on our website.

13:39>> I don't know that I can fix this.

13:44>> Okay cool. Maybe. Are you all doing something back there?

13:54>> Okay, cool, thank you. Sorry, I don't know what I did.

14:01>> About half of our traffic right now is for free tools. We use these as lead gen. We give away some of our data but they're incredibly popular, incredibly used. We had a lot of abuse so we've had to back some of that down. But still, it's a great lead gen tactic. Again, we don't measure but we think it is, think it works.

Glossary, Programmatic, and Comparison Pages

Tim Soulo

14:20>> We even created a bunch of free writing tools. I think about 100 different writing tools last year that we launched, that's got us a lot of traffic, 700,000. We created some more on another site we have, wordcount.com. Again another 500,000 traffic there where we added some features, we added some more tools. I think we're gonna be productizing these. This just ended up being a completely different thing.

14:49>> But yeah, people really like these.

14:53>> We even do programmatic stuff. So we did top websites. So we're ranking for people's brands, ranking for people searching like website.com. It's an old alexa.com strategy. Really high traffic spike there, then we had some problems with our pre rendering. Again it's a technical issue but that'll come back up. I think this will end up being several million traffic. Now do I expect a ton of people to convert from this? No, it's probably gonna be an extremely

15:22>> low conversion rate. But it showcases our data, so someone might click that and be like, they have this data, I can use that for my work stuff. Cool, that's the whole point of it. We do a ton of data studies, we showcase our data throughout these. If you've got your own data, this is gold. These get links, these get shares. This literally is gold, use your own data.

15:47>> And finally, I've kind of already been doing this, but showcasing your data is really the important part. So focus on the product, we talked about the content that we're creating, but really just showing the data. Selling the solutions, have your data everywhere. So I'm gonna show you some of the ways we do this. I already talked about data studies, I already talked about within content and the blogs, the programmatic pages, the top websites. Again this is

16:12>> a lot of our data, we have traffic, traffic value, links, traffic by location. It's interesting data, especially if people don't know this exists. We've had some customers sign up that were like, oh, I didn't know this was a thing. But when they fill out the form, they're like, this is great. I can use this. Cool, that was the whole point of it. We didn't know if it would work for leads but it seems to.

16:36>> In presentations, showcase the data.

16:40>> Even our blog sidebar, we have a little widget where we're like, this is the traffic, this is the number of links, this is our own data. We're just showcasing literally on the side of our blogs. Our four zero four page, we have a product pitch for our broken link checker.

16:56>> Everywhere that we can do stuff like this, we do.

17:01>> Integration partners, so we actually let people get the data out into other tools like Screaming Frog, SEO Tools for Excel, there's 50 plus integration partners so they can pull our data into where they're using it. Lots of folks use different analytics tools, different dashboarding tools, they just pull our data in. So the data everywhere. So to summarize, build a better product, create content and then feature your data and your product within that content. It's not a

17:34>> complicated formula. Like I said, we we don't do most of the traditional marketing things, We never have. Hopefully, we start doing a few more because I think we still we potentially leave a lot of money on the table, but we're a very small team. We're a 125 people.

17:52>> And that actually includes all the people that work on our search engine as well.

17:58>> 125 people, well over 100,000,000 in revenue, and we did none of the traditional marketing stuff and yet we still have grown mostly because we are obsessive on making the product better and teaching people and in showing the product as we're teaching people. That's it. Thank you.

Nathan Latka

18:23Hey 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.

18:50So 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 founder path dot com for free to get your offer.