How SurferSEO earned $7 million ARR in 3 years
Original Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFgxDYDJlyg&list=PLPmrHP-Q76Q0untgIGcOAxcGkUOjECUV
Key
Introduction
Lucian was a developer for almost 10 years professionally (not counting freelancing gigs) from even earlier than when he was in high school
Saas
His brother was in marketing agency in his hometown in Poland. And he became the head of SEO soon
The company's main work was to analyze competitors.
factors of highly ranked site
How many words, what kind of words
How do they structured
-> but it was non-obvious way back then (and manual)
Only backlink was the obvious one
So the company started to make this as a internal tool
Lucian watched the opportunity this as a business and created this into an application. (if it works at this agency, it would work )
And it worked!
The start of SurferSEO was
Still they kept it as a side project.
September 2017
They participated SEO conference in that november in poland.
Suavec was presenting (CEO of SurferSEO). 3 co-founders
Closed-beta then
100 people signed up in 30 seconds after the presentation
A bit of luck.
Figure out you have solved a problem
The market is ready
They were not the first one in the field.
quora seo? started at US
they didn't know each other but they were targetting same customer base (SEO experts)
not all expert have the time to dig in. So SurferSEO wanted to onboard users quickly.
All the SEO softwares had multi-step, complicated onboarding processes
In SurferSEO: less than 5 min
After the presentation, sitll they were doubting because
it was free to use
Didn't observed the retention yet
Investment failure, Staying bootstraping
20-30 people used it regularly.
They started to look for investers. Just after launching the beta version.
A guy from the table next to them at the restaurant was running a VC.
But they stayed bootstraping
Black friday happend. Even they signed the term sheet, they were late the money.
But the company was growing. So they decided to cut their salaries to zero for 1 year.
They are still friends with those investors.
Restospecting, it was ideal. The risk was much lower. They could continue their main job and do SurferSEO as a side job
You shoud invest most of your resource solving problems of your customers.
There is some rate of organic growth for the organization.
They are not sure if they could have made the healthy growth as they earned until now with investors' money.
Product Evolution
The product now is so different from the one they started
They saw the usage of the product
instead of adding more functions, they tried to find the way to penetrate the market with the small product
SurferSEO was a tool analyzing the data and telling what you should do to rank higher (Like Yoast?). On-page factors (wording, word that competitors use)
Made it simpler, mre approachable
democratizing the tool from the expert to general users
how long did it take you from this original idea of a technical seo tool to actually realizing you need to analyze the text right and focus on content and democratize it?
"2 years"
To-do list for a website
content guidance tool
and they found it
How to get traction
They never did conventional marketing (including ppc, ads, even contents!)
They never invested heavily in content (even they made the tool for content!)
How to become more credible company (not some weird one from Poland)
Polish market was just a step. (So they never translated the product into Polish). They tried but they expected it would slow them down.
Influencial neighbors became the active users
They could make users from there referral? in UK
Chiang Mai SEO Conference. One of the biggest one. CEO's of SEO companies take part
They went there and everyone was talking about them (they didn't expect)
They made another deals. It was the biggest channel they got until then.
influencer marketing
The breakpoint
after 2 weeks they charged
They created early access plan (500$ a year, price guranted for 3 years)
25 people bought it
After 1 month, they found 150-200
Because free users in beta mentioned them.
People started to promote them naturally
Because they were different from ahrefs, semrush. It was easy to use, fast, way simpler than others with great UX.
Q. How are you different from Ahrefs?
A. Simpler, great UX
Bootstraping
Black friday happend. Even they signed the term sheet, they were late the money.
But the company was growing. So they decided to cut their salaries to zero for 1 year.
They are still friends with those investors.
Restospecting, it was ideal. The risk was much lower. They could continue their main job and do SurferSEO as a side job
You shoud invest most of your resource solving problems of your customers.
There is some rate of organic growth for the organization.
They are not sure if they could have made the healthy growth as they earned until now with investors' money.
Hopin Story
2020 launch
2021 140mil -> 5bil
12% firing of their team
Having limitations, constraints forces you to be more creative
Building something just because you can is toxic
Competition now
Now there are around 15 competitors in the market.
They never really worried about competitors. They just focused on their users.
Competitors only can copy them after they launch something. But they always have the next step before them.
Next step
How to replace works people are doing manually.
If you want to start blog and be ranked
5 years ago, you needed to hire content marketing, copywriters, and so on..
If one wants to start traffic, buy SurferSEO click here, click there, spend 5 min, then it raise traffic.
Hiring in SurferSEO.
Making more approachable for business owners to create their own blogs
QnA
Q. How has SurferSEO's retention rate increased over time, and what strategies is used to maximize it
A. We don't think about it to much. Retention is all aboout product. People have to use it everyday every week ideally. If it's used with their colleague, even better.
Watching retention only is too short-sighted.
We don't believe in sending emails to people. It's to tactic-based, short-term solutions.
We only do something expected to have huge impact.
small impact is easy to measure. but is it really effective? it trumps everything. people are not sure if they can't measure it. But we are not afraid of it.
Pursuing bold ideas that you cannot really measure.
Q. roadmap to
A. We don't really have a long-term roadmap.
We tried, but none of them make sense after few months of executions.
You can find any good ideas while you're making it. You don't have to stick in the original
Q. Hiring
A. We hired among friends at the begining
Attitude matters.
p.s: linkedin is his main channel