The Ledger
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Suski: SaaS Under $10M ARR Should Charge Upfront Instead of Free Trials
“If you are just starting, or if you are just below ten million dollars ARR probably, you should focus on building a shut up and take money money product. So, focus on getting those early adopters. They will basically Either buy your product or not. They don't …”
Suski: Startups should wait until $1M+ profit before investing in SEO
“If you're profitable over one million dollar a year, you do invest in SEO, so we just waited for some time.”
Suski: Offering 7-Day Free Trial Did Not Increase Surfer's Conversion Rate
“And then we thought, yeah, maybe it's a good idea to let people try Surfer without, you know, paying up front 15, 59 dollars just for, like, a credit card details. We'll charge them after seven days. That's probably going to make the conversion much higher. An…”
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…”
Surfer SEO dominated search by having 3,000 affiliates write review articles
“Out of these 3000 affiliates Every single one created Surfer SEO review, targeting keyword surfer SEO review, which made us really dominate the SERPs with the message that we wanted, because we, they are our affiliate.”
Suski: Early-stage startups should prioritize local meetups over giant conferences
“Don't go to like, big conferences trying to sell your product if you're just getting started. What to do instead? Go for a local meetup. You will be able to form much more intimate relationship with your customers, area adopters. It will compound over time as …”
Surfer's Writesonic integration generated trials but zero conversions due to pricing
“Jasper costs similar amount as Surfer, while Ritesonic is a few times cheaper. And, well, they bring the leads, they got the trial, and no conversion. So, well, it didn't work because of the pricing.”
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.”
Un-tracked organic halo traffic lowers Surfer's effective affiliate cost to 15-20%
“If you consider that not everyone is really following the affiliate links, you got a lot of press, you got a lot of reviews, but not every single person is using the affiliate link, so you can consider impact of affiliate marketing two times bigger than the co…”
Suski: Surfer reached $15M ARR on under $1M marketing spend
“So yeah, my name is Lucia and I'm CEO and co-founder of Surfer, a B to B SaaS product that we grew to fifteen million ARR in around five years with less than one million dollar in, of marketing spent in total.”
Surfer SEO has never had a month of decelerating revenue growth
“Sometimes it was even 20% month to month, and we have never experienced a month that was slowly, slower growing than a month before.”
Surfer SEO caps expenses at 40% of recurring revenue
“We try to spend no more than 40% of the recurring revenue, so we have this pillow that will help us through hard times when they come”
Surfer SEO manages 3,000 affiliate marketers with a single part-time employee
“And as you can see right now, 3000 affiliate marketers. So we partner with 3000 affiliate marketers. A single half-time person is managing this, ah, this whole, ah, process.”
Tracked partnership commissions generated $3.5M for Surfer SEO last year
“As you can see, three point half million last year, it was over 30% of our revenue in total at Surfer. And it was all brought only by commissions that were tracked.”
Surfer SEO built and launched its Jasper integration in 28 hours
“28 hours later, we've managed to introduce the integration to the market that was really doing great.”
Surfer SEO launched its affiliate program with a 30% recurring commission
“We started with paying 30% recurring commission.”
Only one of Surfer SEO's 20 product integrations actually performed well
“We've did, like, 20 integrations, and only one is really doing great.”
Suski: Keyword Surfer Has 500K Users Driving Marketing Efficiency
“Right now it's like 500 K users, and it's one of the reasons why we are so efficient with our marketing spend.”
Suski: Surfer Converted ~15% of Signups to Paid Upfront Without Free Trial
“Where we didn't have any kind of free trial, so whenever you wanted to try Surfer, you had to Pay the money up front. So it's roughly 15%.”
Suski: Surfer Generated Roughly $1.5M from Affiliates in 2022
“So here is, the slide is actually wrong because it includes Jasper partnership, but cut it, like, in half, and you'll, you'll have an idea how much revenue does affiliate partnership along affiliate marketing brings us. So roughly, like, million and a half for…”
Suski: Surfer Pays 30% Commission for Jasper Customers
“30% commission, you know, it's freezing, but it's worth it.”
Surfer SEO reached $3M ARR without a dedicated sales team
“No, no sales team. Oh, yeah, that's a good moment. I'm looking for a super professional sales, head of sales. So, yeah, no sales, and we would love to start it.”
How a Facebook group ban helped launch Surfer SEO
“I was commenting on Facebook groups, and so on, but actually, I got a ban for self-promotion on one of the biggest SEO groups. Which one? SEO Signals Lab. SEO Signals Lab. That was fun. And through that ban I got known Stephen Kang, who is the owner of that gr…”
Surfer SEO bootstrapped after VCs delayed a six-figure check
“We had the term sheet, but in the end it wasn't finalized just because we didn't receive the money. And in the meantime, we started selling early access subscriptions that gave us this initial boost of cash.”
Surfer SEO generates $25K MRR from affiliates, paying out $8K
“Monthly recurring revenue, 25 K, or maybe this is how much they generate, so a third of that is how much we pay, so slightly less than 10 K USD we pay every month. Yeah, that's correct. 10. Yeah. We can say eight, 8000 us dollars.”
Surfer SEO pays a 30% recurring commission to affiliates
“It's 30% recurring commissions, so they are really into selling our product.”
Surfer SEO's customer lifetime value is approximately $800
“Yeah, LTV is like 800 dollars, I think. Yeah, it is 800 dollars in LTV, and if you calculate an ROI of an ad it will be 10 bucks.”
Surfer SEO built its Keyword Surfer extension in two weeks
“There was super popular keywords everywhere extension that become paid. And in a two weeks from that point, we released our to fill the gap of a free extension that shows the search volume of a keyword.”
Keyword Surfer Chrome extension has over 200,000 daily active users
“So we released a free SEO tool, Chrome extension that is used by over 202 150,000 people. Every day”
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 …”