The Ledger
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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…”
Levin: SEMrush net retention tops 100%, a rarity for SEO tools
“So so that's slightly above hundred percent, which is yet again, really unseen in our industry.”
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.”
Staged capital tranches allow venture investors to optimize their IRR
“They had an obligation to fund in certain point, but there was no big difference if money sits on their balance sheet, or not, not, not even balance sheet, or on our balance sheet, or it sits with them. In this case, they can optimize their, you know, IRR, whi…”
Surfer SEO scrapped a fully built Semrush integration over legal terms
“We had everything ready, I can tell you. The design was done, ah, the product was done, everything was ready, and we had to turn it down, just because the terms and the legal stuff, we couldn't accept it.”
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.”
Levin: SEMrush net revenue retention is over 100%, much higher for 50+ employee firms
“In general, we are above a hundred percent. Okay. And then we also do segmentation like you know, if customers Work in a company with more than 50 employees, then it will be way, way higher than a hundred percent.”
Levin: SEMrush Left Its Entire $40M Funding Round on Balance Sheet
“We raised some money, but frankly speaking, we didn't touch You know, this round. It's pretty much all on the balance sheet.”
Levin: SEMrush will not hike prices to protect broad market reach
“Even, even if we at some point say, Hey,
It would make a lot of sense to hike prices.
we would not do this because the goal is to have very, very broad presence to have as many marketers as possible.”
Levin: Growing Companies Should Hold Cash Reserves Scaled to Expenses
“As company gets bigger technically you want to have certain amount of money on the balance sheet comparable to your revenue, like monthly revenue or, you know, better say monthly expenses. In case things happen, you want to be able to run the business for a wh…”
Eugene Levin says SEMrush would reject a $300M buyout from HubSpot
“No. I mean, no, no. It's just too low. You know, then they know that that would be too low.”
Levin: SEMrush counts 25 percent of the Fortune 500 as customers
“We have seven out of top 10 world biggest advertisers. We have 25% of Fortune, 500.”
Levin: SEMrush outspent all search niche competitors on Google AdWords
“We started spending a lot of money on on AdWords to the point where we realized we already spending more than any other company in this niche.”
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.”
Levin: SEMrush has over 200 product staff with ~75% writing code
“So in product department overall, we have more than 200 people. Now, out of them, how many write code? Probably 75%.”
Levin: SEMrush employs 800 people and is cash flow positive
“I mean, you see, we have 800 people and we are cash flow positive.”
Levin: SEMrush has over 5 million registered users
“We have over five million registered users and then, yeah, paying customers would be relatively small percentage of total registered users.”
Levin: SEMrush traffic analytics is among its fastest-growing product lines ever
“Our traffic analytics product. We, we've been building it for two, three years. It's extremely complicated technology. So it took us quite a while to get everything running. But now it's actually one of the fastest growing product lines that we ever had.”
Levin: SEMrush has enterprise customers paying over $100k annually
“We have customers who pay more than a 100,000 per year.”
Levin: SEMrush revenue per customer grew 6-7x since 2008
“If you look back, you know, to 2008, I think comparing to the first version of the product that we had our revenue per customer increased more than six times, probably closer to seven times.
after I joined, you know,
I want to say almost doubled.”
Levin: SEMrush is still largely founder-owned and founder-managed
“We we're still business that largely owned by founders, managed by founders and, you know, team of people who they assembled over, over time.”
Levin: SEMrush raised its $40M round across multiple investor tranches
“We didn't raise forty million from the very beginning, so we announced it later, but it was actually multiple different transactions with more or less the same group of investors.”
SEMrush hit 40% EBITDA margins and one-month CAC payback before Levin joined
“Company was growing back, back then more than 60% year over year 40% EBITDA margin and one month customer acquisition cost recovered.”
Levin: SEMrush has up to 50,000 paying customers and 2 million users
“So we have a more than two million users, adding a lot of new users every month in terms of paying customers. It's Let's say between 30 and 50,000.”
Levin: SEMrush recovers its customer acquisition costs in five to six months
“And we are still recovering in five to six months.”
Levin: Most SEMrush subscriptions cost less than $200 per month
“Majority of our subscriptions are still In you know, a little bit below 200 per month.”
Levin: SEMrush enterprise accounts are approaching $500,000 per year
“We have huge accounts that, that I approach in half a million per year.”
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 …”
Levin: SEMrush Operates Over 15 Freemium Conversion Funnels
“I mean, we have more than 15 different, different funnels.”
Levin: SEMrush employs roughly 60 quota-carrying sales representatives
“So we have, I think roughly around
60,
, I would say.”
SEMrush was a side project for four years before founders fully committed
“So the first version was in 2008. But till 2012, it was more like a hobby. Not, you know, not a serious business, and they used to have other businesses. And only 2012, they like really realized that SEM rush on its own is probably going to be bigger than ever…”