I asked, completely horrified.
, said Tim Soulo from Ahrefs.
There was a tone to his voice that I couldn’t quite make out… it felt like a sense of pride.
Ahrefs like to do things their way.
Since joining the business as Product Marketing Director (he was the only person in marketing) in 2015, Ahrefs has grown from 15 to just under 50 employees and over $40m in ARR (as per
from CEO Dmitry).
That’s approx. $800k in revenue per employee – the same as Facebook.
And the kicker?
They are 100% bootstrapped.
How?
This post explains…
I have spent the past few weeks combing through the Ahrefs site, content and team to try and understand how a business without funding and less than 60 people can grow to $40m ARR.
So grab a strong coffee and strap yourself in for a deep dive into one of the most unconventional SaaS growth stories of all time.
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I hate it when people tell you to focus on product quality.
Why?
Because it makes me feel insignificant.
90% of my last 6 years has been spent marketing software businesses. The other 10% was spent on making better quality products.
9:1 ratio.
I’m obviously biased.
Regardless, I am coming round to the whole product quality thing.
It makes our lives as marketers SO much easier.
Word of Mouth (WOM).
This happens when people feel like they got the “better side of the deal”.
E.g. – if you give people the better side of the deal, they will repay you with this magical thing called WOM: they will tell their friends.
This is exactly how industry leaders like Amazon, Apple and Facebook found success: They poured the majority of their early resources into building unprecedented products and services — not trendy growth hacks — that generated word of mouth advertising.
This became evident after a story that Tim (Ahrefs CMO) told me about his first month after moving to Singapore to join Ahrefs as employee #15:
And therefore, please read everything that follows with a grain of salt. There’s a good chance that the “unconventional approach to marketing” that they’re so proud of was only possible because of an incredibly strong foundation – their product.
There are standard ways (read: Groupthink) of doing things in every industry:
Ahrefs ignore conventional startup marketing wisdom.
And it’s working for them.
Here’s a list of the things that every startup marketing expert would laugh at you for not doing… that Ahrefs definitely are not:
And I think I know why…
It isn’t that these things are harmful, or will have a negative impact on their growth, it’s that they detract from the important things.
Things like:
The Ahrefs marketing team is not checking GA every hour, building custom audiences or writing long email nurturing campaigns.
They are doing things that move the needle.
Exhibiting at a conference is awkward as f*ck.
You stand there with your colorful stand, very environmentally unfriendly swag and wait to pounce on unsuspecting attendees, pitch, get their business card… only to NEVER hear from them again.
Is this something Ahrefs would do?
Obviously not.
Picture this…
It’s the final item in the agenda of the weekly marketing team meeting:
How do we maximize exposure at the world’s biggest SEO event?
BrigtonSEO is coming and Ahrefs need to make a splash.
So what do they do?
They add nerdy SEO data to the coffee cups:
I think we went a little too subtle with sponsoring coffee cups at
— Tim Soulo (@timsoulo)
Take a second to jump onto that Tweet and check the engagement…
As soon as Tim saw the excitement about the coffee stats on the day, he boosted his Tweet to all people interested in SEO in the UK to fuel the fire.
Of course, Tim wasn’t the only person Tweeting about the coffee cups that day:
— Spletnik (@SpletnikSI)
I spotted it!
Each of these Tweets is a mini, highly targeted ads for Ahrefs… disguised as nerdy coffee data.
Think about what’s happening here:
I am very confident that Ahrefs received the most effective ad spend (I think they invested a few thousand dollars on this) to awareness ratio at BrightonSEO 2019.
What will they do in 2019?
Check out this video from 4 years back:
A great first try?
These were Tim’s first attempts at YouTube… and yes he cringes now, but without this early grind, the channel would only have a fraction of the subscribers they do now.
This image shows weekly new subscribers:
Note this long trough of despair:
And the video shown above was released here:
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the majority of large social audiences take time and consistent action to build.
Ahrefs handed their YouTube channel over to Sam Oh at some point during this journey, though of course Sam could not have done it without Tim’s hard work.
Everyone has heard the light vs laser metaphor right?
No?
Ok, so the same type of radiation that can just about illuminate a small room, when focused into a laser beam – can cut through diamond.
Currently the Ahrefs Revenue Per Employee (RPE) metric is on par with that of a monopolistic social network that has received billions in funding.
How have they done that?
By focusing on what they do well:
Anything else is merely a distraction.
How do I know this?
I asked Tim.
I said,
He said no.
He explained that building and optimizing email nurturing campaigns for Ahrefs may require 2-3 new marketing hires.
He would need to:
(Not to mention that this would negatively impact their best in class RPE stat).
All that time and financial investment for something that may not actually move the needle?
And may actually just distract the team from what they know how to do best?
No thank you.
Ahrefs don’t spend on Google Ads:
CPC’s for their target keywords can cost up to $40, and with a relatively high friction $7 for a 7-day trial, their conversion rates vs competitors with a free trial won’t be favorable.
And as discussed in Strategy 1, Ahrefs don’t retarget as they don’t have the Facebook Pixel installed.
So how do they spend?
Simply by investing $5-10k in paid social, boosting their regular blog posts:
They do this to get more eyeballs on their actionable SEO content to add fuel to their extremely simple marketing funnel:
The final step is the most important as the majority of people will not convert on the first visit, they will need multiple more touches before they are ready.
So how do Ahrefs do this without retargeting?
Simple.
Either with the only other email capture offer on their site (more on this in Strategy 19):
Or they boost each new blog post on social to:
Check out the next strategy to understand why this strategy is so powerful for converting visitors into prospects and ultimately customers.
Here are the Ahrefs top 5 most engaged pieces of content:
How many of these do you think feature their product?
Want to take a guess?
Let’s have a look:
I scroll down 7% of the first post and guess what:
A little further on the second:
About the same on the third:
Very quickly on the fourth:
And about midway down the fifth:
Yep, they all feature the product.
I actually can’t find a post on their blog that doesn’t.
This is strange. Didn’t we all learn in Content Marketing School that our B2B content doesn’t have to… or even shouldn’t talk about our product if we want to aggregate mass attention?
This does seem very strange, until you map out the typical B2B SaaS content funnel:
Compare that to Ahrefs content funnel:
This also explains why Ahrefs don’t use any sort of pop up on their blog or site… they know that anyone coming onto their site or blog will get exposed to great content AND their product.
Why would they want to interrupt that journey with an annoying popup?
As per Strategy 5, they also know that if these people engage with them on any social channel, they will be repeatedly alerted when new content has been posted, so will come back to the blog… this time with a greater chance of embarking on the $7, 7-day trial.
As discussed, there are only 2 CTA’s on the Ahrefs site:
Very, very simple – we like this.
But why add unnecessary friction to the sign up process by asking for $7 when pretty much all your competitors in the space offer a free trial?
Well, as we discussed in SaaS Marketing Strategy 6, all Ahrefs blog content shows you how to use the product (remember their top two acquisition channels are SEO and Word Of Mouth).
Those prospects coming in from Word Of Mouth will have been told about the Ahrefs product in some capacity and those coming in from SEO will be educated on what the product does as soon as they land on the blog.
What I’m basically saying is that unlike most SaaS businesses, these prospects do not need a free trial to understand what Ahrefs does – they can clearly see from the blog content and landing pages.
If this is the case, then why clog up the inboxes of your support team with prospects that may never invest a single $ of revenue.
In fact, at the point where Ahrefs switched from free to a $7, 7 day trial, they had twice as many prospects on trial as they had customers. All of these people consuming both computational and human resources that could be better invested into paying customers.
“backlink checker” is a BIG keyword in the SEO software game:
And until recently, Ahrefs were floundering at the bottom of page one, picking up a measly few organic sessions per day.
Their landing page looked a little like this:
They had the perfect amount of copy, lightening page speed and LSI’s strategically placed throughout the body.
But it wasn’t working.
And worst of all, they didn’t know why.
Arguably the best SEO software business not knowing how to rank for a core search term?
Disaster.
But then they decided to check out the competitor pages that were ranking for the term.
They all had one thing in common…
They were free tools:
We all know Google is too good to scam. It’s crawling your site continuously to understand how visitors are actually reacting to the content you create.
Stuff like:
So what did Ahrefs do?
They took their backlink checker software, and threw a limited version up on that landing page so that people could test the software before jumping in for the $7, 7 day trial.
A classic case of “engineering as marketing”.
And guess where they rank now?
You got it.
Tim recently spoke at an SEO event in Singapore. At the end of his talk, Tim offered the Ahrefs “Blogging for business” course for free (normally $799) to anyone who emailed him and asked for it.
This is clever… just when people feel their warmest towards you at the culmination of your talk (for anyone who does public speaking, you understand), you hit them with a ridiculously good offer to further engage them with your brand.
But what’s even more clever… is the very expensive advertisement these individuals were given access too. Yes, I’m sure this course shares an incredibly effective process for growing your business blog but I’m also pretty sure that the Ahrefs software will be heavily featured within it.
Tim said that 50% of the 500 people in the room claimed the course by emailing him.
The marginal cost of this information is $0. The goodwill induced by giving the course away for free could be invaluable.
And of course… the course teaches SEO whilst using Ahrefs, so it’s likely that those event attendees will eventually become customers anyway 😉
As we have discussed above, the core drivers behind the growth of Ahrefs are:
Possibly the most un-actionable SaaS growth advice is: Build a better product.
Yep we get it.
If the product and engineering teams are insanely talented, you don’t actually need us marketers.
OK, I’m stopping this case study now, this whole marketing thing is a waste of time.
JOKE
There is another way to drive word of mouth exposure.
Give insanely good service.
In the SaaS marketing space, examples of great service could be:
And how does Ahrefs achieve this?
By putting marketers in their support team.
Imagine that you’re using Ahrefs and you have a small feature that you can’t figure out how to use… you contact support and almost immediately the chat window pops up with a friendly support agent that addresses your problem.
But they don’t stop there…
This agent then continues to understand what you were trying to achieve with that feature and then provides actionable guidance that will increase your ability to obtain your desired end result.
Whilst we are on the topic of Word of Mouth… Ahrefs are currently making a big deal about how much data their product crawls.
I mean, look at Tim’s Twitter bio:
Ahrefs know that Big Data is a “thing”, and will probably be a bigger “thing” in the future:
Why?
Because they know people talk about Big Data without really knowing what it means – it’s on trend.
The majority of people have no idea how Ahrefs do what they do… but if they can tag on a buzzword during their chat with friends whilst drinking a beer on a Friday night… it may spur more Word of Mouth.
Straight out of the Seth Godin playbook.
Trust in corporations is at an all-time low.
People are finally coming round to the fact that some corporations don’t actually exist, or give a f*ck about their employees or customers.
Trying to get people to trust in your fictional entity is going to be a long, hard slog.
There must be a better way?
There is – getting people to trust in your people.
Look at these author bio’s:
Ahrefs are not hiding their employees away in the sweatbox, pressuring them to pump out content to feed their SEO monster. Nope, they are embracing human to human marketing.
Sam Oh run’s their YouTube channel:
Tim Soulo does what he wants:
Si Quan is out talking at conferences:
Yes. Any of those individuals could leave Ahrefs and monetize the attention granted to them from the business. Dimitry doesn’t care.
He doesn’t care for two reasons:
The equation works.
The best SaaS businesses do this.
Long gone are the days when you are the anonymous slave to the magnanimous overlord.
Vive la employee.
Does anyone actually know what product marketing is?
I’m not sure.
But I think it could be this.
Let me know in the comments…
Check out the sidebar image on this
and tell me if I’m right:
Is that product marketing?
Ok well, whatever it is. It’s good.
The type of person reading an Ahrefs blog post, is the type of person that is interested in the amount of referring domains or organic traffic the post they are reading, is getting.
I’m going to official name this is a
.
Similar to how Google places tomorrow’s weather forecast on London’s Silicon Roundabout in Old Street.
Providing value through information, expecting that the discerning reader will inquire further as to where this information came from.
4 years ago Tim posts this on
:
Early adopter communities on subReddits like
LOVE to have their voice heard. Apart from being a lovely awareness driving post, Tim also received 122 comments with product feedback.
With a shedload of comments like this:
Providing social proof to those in the subReddit that had yet to sign up.
Two years later and he’s back:
And then again two years later:
To this day, all three of those posts are incredibly good social content pieces that no doubt sends a number of trials through to Ahrefs.
Though the real lesson here is not that you can get free exposure by repeatedly asking for feedback on Reddit… it’s that Ahrefs really care about how their product is being received by the market.
This is a subtle one.
A subtle trick that if you are not aware, could be stunting the growth of your content assets.
I’m calling it Content Segregation.
Ahrefs are growing the following content properties:
And on top of this, their team also publishes content through other channels such as guests posts, The Startup Medium publication and Tim’s podcast interviews (see Strategy 18).
Why?
Because they know that certain people like certain types of content, and a content asset is much more likely to grow if you remain intensely focused on the needs of a specific group.
LEARNING: How focused is the content on your blog/YouTube channel… and should you split out different types to focus growth?
Customers churn for a variety of reasons…
Most of these, you unfortunately can do nothing about. But there is a couple that do sit within your circle of influence.
And the lowest hanging fruit?
Product education.
A rational customer is NOT going to continue paying for something that they don’t know how to use.
If your job as a business to get people results… you can build an awesome tool, but if your customers don’t know how to use it, you will lose.
Ahrefs understand this and recently incorporated “How to use” links on a number of their key reports:
These tutorials also link out to related blog articles:
These “how to use” links are getting between 5-15% CTR – people are clicking and consuming the content.
Though this strategy won’t show an immediate impact on growth, it is very likely to reduce churn over time.
Tim completed 20 podcast interviews in 4 months.
He even got rejected from one:
(
)
But then managed to turn it around:
What was the upside from this campaign?
Well first, let’s understand the investment…
According to Tim, it takes approx. 2 hours per interview: 1 hour for pre and post communication and 1 hour for the interview itself.
Casting a very rough guess at the amount Tim costs Ahrefs, I think it would be fair to say he costs $250 per hour. This means that each interview is effective costing Ahrefs $500.
In order to get a cash ROI, Ahrefs would need to generate 1 customer that pays for 5 months of their lowest plan ($99 per month), per interview.
And if they do that, any brand benefits, or partnerships that result… are a bonus.
To put this into perspective, Ahrefs have been paying approx. $250-$1,600 per podcast episode when sponsoring podcasts. In exchange for this they would receive 1-2 minutes of audio coverage sharing the benefits of Ahrefs:
(
)
When Tim jumps on an interview, he shares up to 60 minutes of hard hitting SEO and SaaS growth wisdom.
And the results?
Ahrefs are getting registrations from podcasts:
(
)
Though these could have come from sponsored podcasts and guest invites.
I expect that Ahrefs are experiencing a better ROI from Tim’s time investment into podcast interviews than their paid advertising.
As we mentioned in Strategy 7, there are just 2 CTA” s on the Ahrefs site:
We now focus on number 2…
This lovely email opt-in ONLY appears at the bottom of a blog post:
Contrast this with most business blogs, that would have:
Ahrefs KNOW that their readers are being exposed to the product in the post itself, so do not have to push hard for a conversion. They are happy for a prospect to not transition into the $7, 7-day trial right away, this just means they need to consume more blog posts (and therefore be exposed to more Ahrefs use cases).
So they ask for the email address in a timely, non-intrusive fashion. They even pre-fill your email address if you have an account but are not on the “Blog Updates” email list:
And if they don’t want to share email?
Ahrefs know that they will most likely rank for the next SEO challenge they are searching for:
And there we have it… 19 SaaS marketing strategies from one of the most unconventional growth stories the world has ever seen.