Jun 13, 2024 · 19m · top-founders
$50m Bootstrapped CEO Shares His First SEO Hire, Growth Tactics and Playbook
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Omnisend co-founder and CEO Rytis Lauris shares the comprehensive SEO playbook and operational framework that enabled his bootstrapped marketing automation platform to reach $50 million in annual recurring revenue.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Nathan holds 2.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Nathan as informed peer 0.0 Guest teaching 0.0 Guest disagreement 0.0 Nathan pushing back 0.0
speaking balance: gold is Nathan, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:02 Rejecting the 'bootstrapped' label
In a non-combative solo presentation, Rytis mildly pushes back on industry terminology by clarifying that Omnisend prefers 'customer-funded' over 'bootstrapped'.
Hardest push from Nathan ▶ 0:04 Introductory platform contextNathan provides the standard recorded show intro with zero interactive pushback during the rest of the monologue.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 14:05 Educating on global web traffic distributionRytis teaches the audience that 97% of global web pages receive zero organic search traffic from Google.
Nathan holds their own ▶ 0:04 Pre-recorded host data overviewNathan promotes his SaaS database metrics platform prior to the guest's presentation starting.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Nathan as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Nathan pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Omnisend's Bootstrapped Story and SEO Milestones | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Solo presentation monologue where Rytis outlines Omnisend's bootstrapped $50M ARR background and growth metrics with no host interaction. | |
| Navigating a High-Stakes and Competitive Market | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Rytis describes the competitive landscape against well-funded giants like Klaviyo and Mailchimp in a solo talk. | |
| Outcome-Oriented Philosophy and Lean Team Structure | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Monologue detailing Omnisend's outcome-based SEO philosophy and lean internal team structure. | |
| Tactics for High-Authority Backlink Acquisition | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Solo tactical explanation of high-authority backlink outreach and statistical content seeding. | |
| Adopting the 'Every Page Is an SEO Page' Framework | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Rytis explains the framework where every single page across the website is treated as an active SEO asset. | |
| Presentation Summary and Industry Collaboration | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Closing presentation remarks, thanking the internal SEO lead, and offering collaboration opportunities to the audience. |
Statements from this episode (14)
Omnisend reaches $50M ARR as a fully bootstrapped company
“So Omnisend is fifty million ARR organization. We are fully bootstrapped.”
Lauris: Omnisend's revenue grew 44% year-over-year in 2023
“And still last year we grew by 44% year over a year.”
Lauris: SEO drives 10% to 15% of Omnisend's new quarterly revenue
“SEO is a part important part for new revenue driving, and so now it's quite of a quarter of rise, but it drives us, like, 10 to 15% of all new revenue that is coming to Omnisend every quarter”
Lauris: Omnisend's monthly organic visits grew to 120,000 since 2019
“We started doing SEO in 2019, so not so far way ago, And you see that was kind of like zero traffic, zero organic traffic, now it's 120,000, ah, organic visits every month.”
Omnisend is the number two Shopify marketing platform, 10x smaller than Klaviyo
“So actually, our direct competitor, number one, is Klaviyo. Yes, they are bigger than us. They are like, 10, 11 times bigger than us. They are very big in Shopify ecosystem. We're number two. You know, 10 times smaller, but still number two in the Shopify ecos…”
Lauris: Omnisend wins 80% of competitive sales cases against Mailchimp
“Mailchimp, which is our direct competitor as well, but if we compete against Mailchimp, in 80% of cases we win against them, because we know that we drive way better value for those who sell online.”
Lauris: SEO Is a Repetitive Factory Rather than an Art
“In our philosophy, SEO is not an art. If, like, you would compare, if it's more a factory, or art studio, it's more a factory. So there are just a lot of repetitive processes, which sometimes could be quite boring, but you just have to do that. You have to out…”
Lauris: Omnisend's SEO Team Was Only Three People for Five Years
“Up until today, ok, now it's already five people, but we added two more people just this month, so we have a new vision, a new ambition, so, like, in the past five years, the team of SEO was three people only, and that's the team that accomplished those result…”
Lauris: Omnisend Never Hired an Agency for SEO
“So we never hired an agency but we have a lot of pools of freelancers and others who help us with backlinks, with content writing, et cetera, but we pay basically per results.”
Lauris: Omnisend Grew Domain Authority to 88 Across 14,400 Referring Websites
“Currently we do have almost 200,000 links that refer to omniscient domain. Our main website, our blog it comes from 14.4 thousand unique websites, including like PayPal, Hubspot, Mailchimp is even quoting us. Google in the articles is quoting us. I mean, those…”
Lauris: One-to-one link exchanges are dumb compared to circular link networks
“It's really dumb to do, like, one-on-one the same week or the same day, link exchange, but you build networks, and then you build circles that, you know, I give backlink to you give backlink to someone else, you give a little this, and we do it in circles.”
Omnisend earned free backlinks from Google and PayPal via statistics reports
“What really worked the best for us, and those what I mentioned, Google, HubSpot, PayPal, not talking about major media outlets, mentioned Omnis and Dame, just completely for free.”
Lauris: Omnisend built 200,000 backlinks from a small number of content pieces
“So basically for initial three years, we were mainly focusing on publishing very few content pieces, but seeding them and building a backlinks profile up to 200,000 unique backlinks that refer to our domain now.”
Omnisend treats every single website page as an SEO page
“Every page on our website is an SEO page. There can't be like, you know, SEO pages and other pages. Every page, every landing page, every product page, every block, Boast is an SEO page. So our SEO team writes, writes a brief for any page on Omnisend, and anyo…”