Yoast
company on 4 shows · 21 statements across 3 episodes · said 37 times in 4 episodes since 2020
Top Founders 26 
20VC 11 
We Live to Build 
the Startup Ideas Podcast
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Top Founders 2620VC 11
2023 13 mentions in 2 episodes 7 per episode
2020 24 mentions in 2 episodes 12 per episode
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21 statements about Yoast, every show
Yoast reached one million active users as a free hobby plugin
“Is that the plugin became really big, so it had like a million users. WordPress was growing quite fast, and I suddenly had on this free plugin that I built as a hobby, a million users, and I was spending way too much time supporting it.”
Joost de Valk: Headcount is the only major cost in plugin businesses
“The funny thing about our sort of business is that you, the only cost that you really have is people.”
Joost de Valk: Had Yoast planned for acquisition, he would have hired less
“Had I known in the beginning that we'd be selling the company at some point, and how this all would go, I might have hired a bit less people”
Joost de Valk: Yoast powers 13M websites with ~120 employees
“In terms of, or any more, it's not, it's a hundred people, but if you look at, like, thirteen million websites having a 120 or so people is really not all that much people, right?”
De Valk: Yoast reached €15M annual revenue across 11M sites at peak
“I mean, at its peak, Yoast was a fifteen million euros a year revenue when we sold. That's not a whole lot of money compared to the eleven million sites that we were running on at that time.”
Joost de Valk: Yoast never spent money on ads before its acquisition
“So that's one of the funny things when you start selling your company, people start asking for things like your cost of acquisition per customer, and we were like, we never spent any ads, so it, ah, how, how would you calculate this?”
Dimitrov: Stopped using Yoast because it offers little value
“No, I stopped using Yoast. I mean, I've been doing that for quite a bit now, so I don't see that much of a value.”
Joost de Valk: Yoast hit 1M users before launching paid tier
“I started out with a free plugin and had a million users and then decided maybe I should make some money from it.”
Joost de Valk: Free tiers should include essentials, paid tiers save time
“We have a pretty strict rule within the company on everything that we think every, every side on the planet needs to do the basic works we put into our free plugin and then stuff that saves you time we put into the premium plugin.”
Joost de Valk: Microsoft and The Next Web run Yoast software
“I mean, there are sites like thenextweb.com or microsoft.com that run our software, where there's hundreds of people working on that site, and it's only one site.”
Joost de Valk: Yoast did $12M in annual revenue with 100 employees
“We're now at last year we did about ten million euros. So about twelve million dollars in revenue. There's about a hundred people here.”
De Valk: Yoast grew roughly 60% year-over-year for five years
“We've grown about 60% year on year for the last five years.”
De Valk: Yoast suffered 70% annual churn under manual renewals
“For far too long, our term was of like, 70%.”
De Valk: Yoast subscription churn dropped to roughly 15%
“The first bunch of people that signed up to a subscription are now over a year in, and for them we only have, like, 15%.”