Eugene Levin
- President at SEMrush
GetLatka interview
How Semrush Passed $300M ARR With 107% Net Dollar Retention (Interview with President Eugene Levin)
Eugene Levin (President of Semrush) spoke to Nathan Latka on March 28, 2024.
Semrush figures from the interview
- ARR (2024)
- Over $300M
- Net Dollar Retention (2023)
- 107%
- Fortune 500 Accounts (2024)
- More than 30%
- Enterprise Accounts (500+ employees) (2024)
- At least 5,000
- Greycroft Funding Round
- $40M
“They're all tech engineers by trade. When they first launched semrush, actually, they used it for other businesses in traffic arbitrage space. So they need a research tool to figure out where to buy traffic and whom to sell it to. And data was just so good that a lot of people started approaching them and asking an access to this and that's how they've launched semrush.”
“The way affiliate marketing in in b to b SaaS works is not that people will sell your product for you, but if they want to write some kind of article, having affiliate program gives them extra incentive to write about you. So for us, it really helped to spread the message. It would never work if product was not good, but because product was so good, affiliate network was a huge boost early on.”
“We did it because maybe early on we're a little bit desperate. It was a phenomenal deal for affiliates. It attracted a lot of really great people. But perpetual fees, they sort of incentivize people to kinda grab something and do nothing with it because they just get paid forever.”
Bio
Eugene was one of the first investors to spot SEMrush. After joining the company as a Chief Strategy Officer he helped to more than quadruple company revenue and raised over $40m from Tier 1 investors. Before SEMrush, Eugene was a partner at Target Global, pan-european venture fund that invests in consumer Internet space. There Eugene was in charge of late stage pipeline and worked on number of notable transactions including Lyft and Delivery Hero. Eugene started his VC career as Senior Associate and then Partner at Foresight Ventures. Foresight Ventures was focused on early stage US technology companies and was ranked top 10 Russian VC Firm by Forbes In 2013.