The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 25 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ahrefs saved $400M over three years by avoiding cloud hosting
“We saved like four hundred million in three years by not going to the cloud. We built our own data centers. It's a little painful. We had some down times. We got some flack for it, but like it was the right decision in the end. We scale so much data. This numb…”
Suski: SEO in competitive niches is impractical for early bootstrapped startups
“Our niche was highly competitive, so we were to compete with Ahrefs, SEMrush, HubSpot, big domains, big players, so if that's the case, you will need to wait for results for a long time, like a year or so, and you'll need to invest a lot of money, and if you a…”
Latka: Export-heavy data SaaS businesses suffer structural churn
“So another good example, like you look at matter mark or a H refs, all these companies that provide data, especially the ones that offer an export option. You see this all the time. Login, sign up for the premium plan. They export all the data they need, then …”
Ahrefs grew past $100M revenue without a sales team
“Fun fact, we grew, I'll show you the numbers in a minute, we're over a hundred million dollars. We basically used word of mouth, blogs, and YouTube. We didn't have a sales team till we hit about a hundred million dollars.”
Stox: Best product ideas come from internal power users, not customers
“Users, I don't think, will ever give you the next unicorn idea, the next great product idea. They're always like, this is what the other tools are doing. Give me that, basically. Like, I want this use case. The best ideas, in my opinion, come from your own tea…”
Ahrefs study found 96.5% of web content gets zero search traffic
“So a lot of content doesn't get any traffic. This is from one of our own studies. On the, on 96 and a half percent, no traffic.”
Qureshi predicts BrandOverflow will match and eventually beat SEO giant Ahrefs
“I want to beat them. I want to be them. Then I'm going to beat them.”
Qureshi claims BrandOverflow data is almost comparable to Ahrefs and SEMrush
“We are comparable to, we're almost comparable to Airtress and SEMrush, judging by the reviews that I get by the customers themselves. We compare our data with Airtress and SEMrush.”
Stox: Ahrefs generates well over $100M in revenue with 125 employees
“We're a 125 people. And that actually includes all the people that work on our search engine as well. So, a 125 people, well over a hundred million in revenue”
Ahrefs gained over 500k monthly visits by translating existing content
“Translate successful content. If you work in international markets, look, over half a million uplift just translating our content.”
Siu: Content refreshes provide higher ROI than producing new content
“The more you actually refresh, the more bang for buck you're gonna get.”
Siu: SEO tools like Ahrefs and Ubersuggest report inaccurate keyword volumes
“And often times, when you look at the keyword volumes for these, on these SEO tools, whether it's Ubers.js or Ahrefs, they're often incorrect.”
Dickey: Legacy SEO tools only track owned domain performance
“And where those platforms fall short is they focus exclusively on how your website or your own domain is performing, which is just like one of many ways that a customer may find you.”
Standout CV organic traffic dropped from 300,000 to 110,000 monthly visits
“It's about a 110 K at the moment. It was, at its peak, it was around about 300 K.”
Ahrefs traffic dropped from 6M to 3.5M due to pre-rendering issue
“We get a lot of traffic, about three and a half million or so right now was recently as high as six. We had like a pre-rendering issue, a technical issue, dropped some, but that will come back.”
Stox: Ahrefs reached $7M revenue with 15 people before hiring a marketer
“Twenty-fifteen, about 15 people. We finally hired a marketing person. I think, what was the revenue then? About seven million already. Finally got a marketer.”
Ahrefs: 40% of published blog posts are updates to existing content
“Think about two out of every five blogs that we publish now are just updates of other blogs.”
Stox: Free tools drive roughly half of Ahrefs' traffic
“About half of our traffic right now is for free tools.”
Stox: Ahrefs bootstrapped with $300k in personal funds in 2010
“Bootstrapped from about 300,000 dollars in personal funds. Our owner Dimitri, 2010.”
Vora: Bootstrapped startup reached 1M visitors and 10,000 monthly leads
“Literally from scratch, we went from zero to a million visitors a year in two years. We, if folks are aware of Ahrefs here we had a DR of 84 in Ahrefs, which is well regarded. And a global rank, which is out of hundreds of millions of websites in the world, ou…”
Cognism generates $260K in monthly organic traffic value, doubling closest rival
“Currently we're about 260 K of value of from our organic traffic, that's about twice the value, you know, using, you know, tools like Ahrefs, it's about twice the value of our nearest competitor.”
Latka notes that SEO giant SEMrush has surpassed $100 million in revenue
“That just isn't that exciting because no one, no one's going to believe the fact that, oh, a single guy has better data than ahrefs or semrefs, which just passed a hundred million dollars in revenue, can afford to spend money on a hundred engineers.”
Ahrefs and SEMrush metrics diverge significantly, requiring operators to use both
“Well, you know, both of those tools are just estimates and one can be way off from the other. It's interesting how different they can be on some sites. So we really have to use both of them.”
Stewart: Ahrefs excels at link indexing; SEMrush wins for content analysis
“Ahrefs is much better for link indexing. SMRush is much better for content, keywords, tracking, competitors.”
Surfer SEO focuses on on-page content gaps rather than backlinks
“Like these tools are focused more on keyword research and on backlinks analysis, while we are more like a data-driven tool that gathers a lot of information from pages that are ranking the top 10 to tell you whether you are missing something or overusing when …”