What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet
businesses, and I tried to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How
do they get to where they are today? How do they make decisions both at their businesses
and in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal
here is always so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build
our own profitable internet businesses.
In this episode, I'll be chatting with Tim Solo, the CMO and product advisor for a company
called Ahrefs. Ahrefs is an SEO company, or SEO stands for Surgeons and Optimization.
They provide a collection of tools that help you grow the traffic to your website that
comes from the billions of people who are searching Google and Bing every day, as well
as some tools that help you research your competitors, see why they're ranking high
on Google, and find out what you need to do to outrank them. So obviously, this is massively
useful stuff, if you're a founder trying to build and grow your online business. Tim,
welcome to the In the Actors podcast, and thanks so much for joining me.
Thanks so much for having me.
Let's talk about Ahrefs. You and I caught up a little bit last week, and you told me
some stats about your company Ahrefs, and you guys are killing it. You're a 45 person
company, you're bringing in over $40 million a year in revenue, which is pretty close to
a million dollars in revenue per employee. Yeah. And yeah, it's pretty amazing. And despite
being so huge, you're still growing 60% year over year. And so you're the CMO sitting on
top of this rocket, you're in charge of marketing, you're in charge of growth. And you're also
in many ways, I think the face of Ahrefs. I mean, literally when I open the website,
a little window pops up in the bottom right and it's your face telling me about new features
and asking me if I need any help. So you're really front and center. How did you get here?
If I would share the short story, Dmitry, the founder and CEO of Ahrefs comes from Ukraine.
So he's a Ukrainian. And I'm a Ukrainian myself, as you can probably hear from my accent. And
Dmitry, because he's like a super technical guy, he was able to create a pretty badass
product with pretty badass data that was like one level better than what was already there.
And he was able just with awesome product and like no good marketing, he was able to
get it to a certain level. But then he realized that he won't be able to grow the company
unless he does something with marketing. So he started looking for people who could potentially
join the team and fill that gap. At the time, there was a website called inbound.org where
marketers were discussing like newly published articles or sharing their opinions, doing
polls, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it was asked me anything session by
N Smarty, who is also from Ukraine. And Dmitry knows her. So he was reading her MS session.
And within that session, I was asking some questions to N Smarty. And I was saying that
I'm glad that she's from Ukraine and she's doing so well among the SEO specialists that
she's so visible, et cetera, and that I'm also from Ukraine and I'm doing my first steps,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So this is how Dmitry noticed me. And he enjoyed the
fact that I'm also from Ukraine because he feels more comfortable to talk to his employees
in Russian than in English. I mean, he knows English very well, but it's just easier for
him to explain to himself in his native language. So he started digging on me a little bit.
He found that I did an article for Moz that in 2010, it was the top article of the year.
It won like three nominations out of four, something like that. He also found my personal
blog where I was writing some articles about marketing and where I was creating my own
WordPress tools. And they also launched an online tool, which was kind of similar to
what Ahrefs was working at at this time, but like not the same level of sophistication,
of course. So he reached out to me and asked if I'm interested to like do some freelance
work, like write, write some articles, give him some feedback within just, I think, two
or three weeks. We realized that we're a good fit for each other and he invited me to Singapore.
So that's, that's the story.
How big was the Ahrefs team at the time that you joined? And do you remember how much revenue
you guys were doing back then?
No, I don't remember the actual revenue, but I remember that there were like 15 people
in the team and now we're 45. So, and basically some of the people that are in the team today,
not even in the marketing department are the people who I brought in. So even though I'm
a marketer, I actually hired an awesome web designer who joined our team and then he brought
his friend. And now we have two amazing web designers and they also, this is the fun part.
I also brought in a data scientist over team. While I don't have a clue, like what is data
science and what they should do, but just by like watching applications, like job postings
of other people, I created a job posting. I found a few people that seem promising and
I just forwarded them to our team and they did the wedding. So yeah, I kind of participated
in hiring the data scientist.
Cool. So you're really doing a little bit of everything at Ahrefs.
Yeah, that's, that's the virtue, virtues of being in, in a small company with not a lot
of people. This means that you can apply your talents everywhere you want, everywhere you
see that, that you can do some damage and you just go and do this. I like it a lot because
before that I worked in kind of bigger companies with like 300 plus people and they didn't feel
like any responsibility on me. So whether I do good in my job, whether I do bad, this
wasn't affecting the bottom line at all. I, the traps is like totally different. So like
every, every little thing I do, it may have a strong effect on the bottom line.
Well, there is a lot I want to get into. I want to talk about all these little details
about how you've helped Ahrefs grow into a $40 million a year business. I want to talk
about the strategies that you've used that we can apply to our own businesses to grow
them a little bit faster and more effectively. But first, I want to dive a bit into your
history. We've talked about having a blog, you talked about having a marketing product
that you were selling. How did you get into entrepreneurship? How did you get out of working
for these bigger companies and go on to being self employed?
Yeah, well, the part of the story I already kind of hinted whenever you work for a big
company, and they don't give you the responsibility, they, they don't help you work on your ambitions,
you start doing something on the side. That's, that's what always happens. And I wasn't lucky
enough to join any good company early that would give me a chance to shine, so to say.
So naturally, I was always looking to work on my own ideas to apply the knowledge that
I have and that I couldn't apply within these companies that I was working at. So I started
a blog like the best thing you can do to to wrap your head around like online business,
online marketing, etc, is start doing something. And they started the blog actually as a bat
with my friend. So we had a bat like who will be able to launch a brand new blog and generate
more traffic in six months. Long story short, I wanted bad, but not because it was so good,
but because he abandoned his blog. Eventually, you want by default? Yeah, I want by default,
you could say so. But yeah, from there, I just naturally enjoyed blogging, I naturally
enjoyed figuring out how I could get attention, how I could get some traffic to my website.
I started learning SEO, I started like learning how to build backlinks, where to get them,
how they helped me rank, how to do keyword research, I was reading Moz, I was reading
smart passive income by Pat Flynn, I was trying like to build sites for AdSense, like
I was trying to build sites for Clickbank affiliate stuff. So I was trying a little
bit of everything. And as part of my journey, I was sharing on my personal blog. And eventually
I decided that I don't quite like kind of promoting products of other people because
I don't have any kind of influence over the actual product. And they saw that. And they
always had like many ideas of how to improve them. So I decided that I should actually
launch my own products and not be just a marketer, but kind of product manager, product owner.
So I simply went, I had a few ideas. I went to Upwork, I found a few developers, and they
started working on WordPress plugins. Then I set up simple landing pages, connected them
to Clickbank because it was the easiest way to handle billing and started selling my products.
And like, this was a huge learning experience. Because if you're doing all of that yourself,
if you're doing marketing yourself, if you're like working on the product yourself, managing
a team, trying to sell it, etc, etc, etc. You learn a lot about like marketing about
business about everything. Yeah, like you can read 1000 books, but unless you start
doing something again and get the real experience, you won't be good at it.
I'm curious, I was driving you during this period, you talked about how you started this
blog competition with your friend and you want and you found out that you really liked
blogging. And I've talked to a lot of people, founders even who hate blogging, it's their
least favorite thing. And here you were reading about blogging and learning how to do all
these tactics. What do you think was driving you? What motivated you to keep doing something
that a lot of people don't really enjoy?
That's a great question. And to be honest, I don't know, probably there is something
in my nature. Because before joining SEO and starting blogging content marketing, and getting
myself out there, I actually was a DJ. So I kind of enjoyed being on stage playing music
to the crowd and people who knew my name. So it was quite awesome. Like I was getting
messages from people, they were giving me props on the music that I was playing. I think
that is somehow connected. So I kind of like, I don't know, having a spotlight on me or
whatever. I think this is why I enjoyed blogging and I enjoyed like sharing like what I have
being public. I think I don't have any fear of being public. And they genuinely like kind
of sharing my knowledge with people. So I think this is what kept me going. I think
this is this is just something in my nature. I like to be helpful. And I like when people
know me for something.
I think one of the things one of the algorithms that a lot of successful entrepreneurs run
is this sort of exploration phase where they'll try a lot of things, and they won't like some
of them, but they eventually find something they really like and they stick with that.
Did you try other things besides blogging, besides starting your own product that didn't
resonate with you that you didn't enjoy doing and that you eventually quit?
To be honest, coming from Ukraine, which is not as developed as some other countries in
the world, you have to have some grit. So I really didn't think much of the things that
I enjoy or not enjoy. I just had like, I don't know, my ambitions, my goals. So I wanted
to achieve something. I wanted to be, I don't know, one level above my friends, like who
are working at nine to five jobs, et cetera, et cetera. I wanted to like take a step further.
So even if I didn't enjoy something, I just pushed myself through it. And like, usually
when I talk about this stuff, I like to do analogy with boxers because like I'm a fan
of boxing, not a big one. So I don't watch every boxing match, but in Ukraine, we have
two guys that are dominating the pound for pound list right now. And I'm like watching
them because they are fellow Ukrainians and they have pride in that. So like the analogy
with boxing is that those guys, they don't really enjoy working super hard in the gym
because like they are under the spotlight. I don't know, two, three times per year when
they have the boxing match and like all eyes are on them. But then there's a ton of hard
work that happens in the gym and no one is watching them. No one is really like giving
them a pat on the back. Well, maybe their trainer at least. So I just think that if
you want to achieve something, if you want to be successful at something, you have to
live with the fact that you might not like doing some things and you have to push yourself
through it. So like, I think there are different opinions about this. Some people say that
that you should only do things you like and this is the only way to succeed. I think that
the only way to succeed is to push yourself through some things that you don't like in
order to eventually be able to do things that you like. So this is my kind of vision for
that. You know, I've had a few experiences where I felt a bit like a rubber band. I got
stretched so far that I kind of retained this new shape where I was just pushed to work
so much harder and have so much more discipline than I normally would have had. College comes
to mind. I'd always considered myself to be a pretty lazy person before college. And by
the time I graduated, I had a new identity of being a hardworking person. And I meet
a lot of founders who would describe themselves as hardworking people. And I think it's super
useful because when you come up against these new challenges in the future, they don't look
quite as scary. You can tell yourself the story that, hey, I'm the kind of person who
can do this. Or you can look at your past history and say, hey, I've already done harder
things in this in the past, so I can do this too.
Yeah, exactly.
Let's talk about your first product business where you decided to stop selling other people's
products and start selling your own. You talked a little bit about how you got started with
that. How did you end up finding your first customers and what became of that business?
So the first product that I created was actually within a company that I worked for. So I worked
for a company that was selling website templates and they wanted to expand. They were selling
at an award press, Joomla, Presta shop, etc, etc, etc. And they were always looking for
ways to expand their product lines. And this was at the time where Facebook introduced
their pages and they allowed you with the code called FBML, Facebook Markup Language
or something like this, create kind of custom layouts for your Facebook pages. So whenever
people land on your Facebook page, you can show them like some beautiful stuff, have
some buttons, forms, etc, etc, etc. So since I was kind of a marketer and I was interested
in all those things, I suggested these guys to start producing Facebook page templates
because I could see that it was like a big hit at the time and no one was really doing
it. So that was kind of search demand for it. People were searching for it in Google,
but no one was really selling them. So we quickly made like 10 of them, listed them
on the store. And within a week, those Facebook templates, they became the top selling product
on their store. So this was quite fun. The only problem was that the more advanced templates
that they're selling that had some flash animation at the time, etc, etc, were costing like
200 plus dollars. But Facebook templates were like 10 to $15 because they were simple. Nevertheless,
they were super successful. And I had quite a few ideas on how to like create more advanced
Facebook templates, what kind of things we could integrate there and kind of ramp up
the price and earn more. But the only thing that I got for introducing that product to
their market is like one time bonus of $100. So like, when I realized that I just suggested
them a product that became the top seller within their store, and they had a lot of
ideas on how to develop that product. And they only gave me like one time bonus of $100.
I realized that I need to quit at this time. So I quit and I started with with my friend
who actually worked at that company as well our own store for Facebook templates. And
I think within less than three months, we were making like 2000 plus dollars in revenue.
And it just kept growing the demand just keep what was was rising all the time. So I think
this is this is the first product that I started selling. And it wasn't that hard for me to
get customers because like I said, people were actually searching for that in Google,
because no one was really targeting these search terms. It was like super easy for us
to rank for FBML templates, Facebook page templates, etc, etc, etc. So customers were
finding us and we're buying our products. And from there, once you buy Facebook page
template and put it on your Facebook page, other people start seeing it and they are
asking you like, where did you get the template? Like who designed it for you? So word of mouth
also started kicking in. And other customers were coming to our store based on the recommendations.
So it was quite easy. And actually, this is the same strategy that we use today at Ahrefs,
we have a blog that targets a lot of like SEO related questions, problems, etc. So people
land on our blog, they see how we suggest to solve their SEO problems with the help
of our tools. So they sign up. And then once they get results with our SEO tools, when
they once they start growing their own traffic from Google, they tell to their friends about
it, they are word of mouth. And these are our two biggest channels of customer acquisition
at Ahrefs searches in Google and word of mouth.
I bet it felt amazing to go from working at a big company, which you didn't like to having
thousands of customers coming into this product after only a couple of months.
It felt like we're on to something. But the story didn't end well, because that guy, he
actually changed all the passwords and disappeared.
Oh, no, you're so called friend.
Yeah, yeah, so called friends. Yeah.
So you had this huge exploratory period before joining Ahrefs, where you were working at
other companies and helping them grow their products. And you were, you know, meeting
up with, I guess, some shady figures and starting successful companies and having them stolen
out from under you. What do you think were the most significant lessons that you learned
before joining Ahrefs that you have subsequently applied to your work at Ahrefs?
I think the the most significant lesson that I've learned is that I want to work on the
actual product. I don't want to be just a marketer who like sells whatever boss will
tell him. And I don't want to be a marketer that will do like whatever boss will tell
him like the boss will tell we need descriptions for our website templates. And I would sit
and like, create those descriptions. I hated that. I understood that not only I can kind
of promote something, not only I know a little bit of SEO, and I know how to rank things
in Google. I actually know how to create products that people want. I know how to communicate
with people and get their feedback that would then drive product development. So the ideas
that I had about Facebook page templates all came from our customers because I didn't have
my own Facebook page. I didn't have my own Facebook page template. So I had no idea what
I should have on those like Facebook page templates. But because I was talking to the
customers, I was trying to understand their businesses, what they're looking for, I got
some ideas which we implemented in the products. And the products were like, super hot. So
yeah, my biggest lesson is that marketing is not only about promoting something, marketing
is about creating a better product for your target market.
So you say that you know how to create a product that people like and you know how to talk
to customers and get their feedback. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, especially people
just starting out, don't know either of these two things. These are very difficult things
to do that might sound easy in theory, just talk to people. But in practice, it could
be really hard to do. It's scary to talk to people. And it's easy to talk to people and
come out the other side of those conversations having learned the wrong lessons because you
ask the wrong questions, you talk to the wrong people or something like that. What are some
things that you learned about talking to customers and about creating a product that people like
early on in your career that you think most novice entrepreneurs don't know, or that maybe
you didn't know before you first got started?
Yeah, so I think one one cool lesson that I can share from the top of my head is that
you don't necessarily have to listen to what your customers or people that you communicate
to like your prospects are saying directly to you. But you should look for kind of side
clues. For example, when I started to sell my WordPress plugins, of course, whenever
I reached out to people and asked them to give me feedback on my plugins, people either
didn't reply or said that those are nice plugins. But what I was looking for is whenever I gave
my my plugin for free to someone, because blogging was like a super hot thing back then
and people were writing articles about whatever was happening in their lives. Some of these
people actually posted on their blogs that they started using this plugin and here are
the results they have, etc, etc, etc. So these were the clues that I was looking for because
there people were actually telling their honest opinion, and they were telling their honest
use cases. And they could see what what people are actually using your product for not what
they say they like not what they say they would do, but what they actually do. And this
is super important and also the results that they get. And once you see what people actually
do with your product, and not just like pretend to do, you have like a good vision of where
you should take your product next.
Let's talk about your transition into running marketing at Ahrefs. I think by the time you
joined Ahrefs, you're already you guys already and kind of a crowded market. There's a lot
of other SEO tools, a lot of other SEO firms, there's Moz, there's Simrush, that are huge
that people are using to basically improve their SEO. How did you guys stand out from
the crowd and sell a product that people liked in such a crowded field?
Yeah, it was quite a challenge. And I remember when I just joined Ahrefs, Dmitry, our founder
in the show, he said something like, Moz has marketing on a scale from zero to five
at five. But their product is at three at best. Ahrefs has product at five on a scale
from zero to five. But marketing is like at one at best. So like all we need to do is
like ramp up our marketing to three and we're all and we'll already be like one level above
Moz. So that's the long story short, because we have such an awesome product. We didn't
have to be even the best marketers in the field, we just had to have decent marketing
and multiplied by an awesome product. It started kicking off. To be honest, I think there was
also a level of ignorance. So I didn't quite understand what I was up to and who I was
against. I didn't think about it much. I just wanted to do good work. I just wanted to do
what I was what I was best at. So I didn't really think that we have those big competitors
that they have resources that Moz has like millions and millions and funding huge team
like Rand Fishkin, who's the one of the top people in the field with like huge following.
I didn't think about all these things. I was just thinking like, how do I let more and
more people know that Ahrefs is amazing that Ahrefs is awesome. So that's basically it.
That's so much pressure to put on your shoulders. I mean, talk about lighting a fire under somebody's
ass to come into a new company and say, hey, we're pretty much a five out of five on product.
But you're the new marketer guy. And the only thing that we really need to succeed is badass
marketing. So get to it. That's a lot of pressure. Let's talk about this this one out of five
state that Ahrefs was in. What were some of the things that Ahrefs was doing wrong when
you joined?
Yeah, so first of all, because I had so much experience with blogging, I thought that the
blog wasn't doing good, because like, they were doing maybe 10 or 15,000 visits per month.
And they were publishing three articles per week. And the quality of these articles of
those articles was like, not super good, because they were actually employing some people from
the SEO space. I don't even remember the names of these people. And these people were only
interested to quickly create an article within an hour, publish it on Ahrefs blog and get
like 300 euros for that article. So I saw that this is not how blogging should work.
This is not the strategy. So the first thing I did when I came to marketing at Ahrefs,
I fired those freelancers. I told them, okay, we are like canceling contracts with you.
We no longer want to follow this strategy. We are going to redo our blog. And I started
looking for people who are first have firsthand SEO experience, who are actually practitioners
and not just writers. And second, who had a track record of publishing like amazing articles,
not just any articles on any blogs, but the articles that I would read and say, Whoa,
I want to have that person on my team. So yeah, that's, that's basically the trick plus
with our blog. Before that, the content strategy was just random. So these writers were allowed
to write on anything that they wanted. So whatever was hot at the time, I don't know,
mobile SEO or whatever schema, they were writing about it. And those pieces were mostly kind
of opinion. So I think that mobile SEO is headed there. Here are five tips on like optimizing
your website. So not the stuff like you will read. What I did is that we started doing
like keyword research. We started figuring out what kind of search queries, what kind
of things people are actually looking for in Google in regards to SEO. What is the kind
of search potential? What is the traffic potential of these topics? And if these topics can feature
Ahrefs tools, because I realized that we are a small team. Actually, when I joined Ahrefs,
I was a single marketer. And I realized that we don't have like a huge team of writers
to cover every imaginable topic. So we had to focus on topics that would bring us customers
and that meant that these topics should be related to SEO, which our product does. And
these topics within those topics, we should be able to pitch our use cases. Because I
think I've heard a nice phrase somewhere in some books that the first time when people
use your product is in their heads. So this was my objective. My objective was within
an article to make people envision themselves using Ahrefs to show them use cases. And they
were they were searching in Google for some kind of problem they have with SEO. And my
goal was to show them how to solve that problem with Ahrefs so that they would be naturally
interested to sign up. So that's that's the first thing I did. We we kind of changed the
direction of our blog from publishing publishing random stuff to targeting super specific searches
and showcasing Ahrefs within those articles. And we're doing this till this date. And we
recently surpassed 200,000 visitors from Google search alone. So the total traffic is much
bigger. And within like if you go to Ahrefs blog, like open any article, and there would
be some use cases of Ahrefs. I don't think like we have even like 3% of our articles
that don't mention Ahrefs. So most of them do have use cases for Ahrefs. So this was
one of the first thing that they were doing wrong. And I kind of corrected it.
One of the things I know about you that I think sets you apart from a lot of other expert
marketers is that you're not really into metrics. You're not fanatically tracking every single
user behavior through every single funnel on your site. You're pretty happy not looking
at a lot of that stuff at all. Why aren't you into metrics? And how do you compensate
for not tracking this kind of stuff?
Yeah, well, if I know metrics, or if I don't know these metrics, that doesn't really change
what I do day to day. So we knew that I want to create content around specific searches.
I knew that I want to push Ahrefs within those articles and show people how to use it. And
because like people were signing up, and I was also doing some support to better understand
our customers. And they were saying like, I've read about you in that article, and you
showed this use case, and I want to apply it for my website. So I kind of knew by these
side clues that my strategy works, because when people were were signing up, they were
actually telling this to me. And some people they were even sending direct emails to me
saying how much they enjoyed some of our articles, and they that they started applying these
things for their business and it works. So I knew it works. And like, I didn't care like
what was the conversion rate from my article into a chef subscribers, and they didn't care
like what was the I don't even know like what's the total traffic to our blog right now, because
I don't understand what what it would change. I can only see that our search traffic that
we care about the most is growing, I can see that people are consistently finding us in
Google whenever they have SEO issues, they land on our blog, and they learn about Ahrefs.
That's all I need to know. And one other fun story is that, again, when I joined Ahrefs,
I of course started like learning everything about SaaS marketing, sales funnels, conversion
funnels, tracking every metric, etc, cohorts, churn, etc, etc. There's a ton of stuff to
learn actually, at a certain point, we kind of started to apply this. So for example,
we tried to measure the conversion funnel for Ahrefs, this is when people land on your
homepage, then they click the trial button, then they enter their information, then they
confirm their email, and then they do some steps of onboarding. And finally, they have
a registered trial. So we wanted to track every step in that funnel. And what we did,
we actually signed up for three different tools, three different analytics tools. One
was kiss matrix, other one was whoopra. And I think the third was mix panel. And we there
was also a tool called segment, where you can funnel your data and and then segment
connects to all those different tools and sends them the exactly the same data. So we
knew this, this setup for all three tools was exactly the same because we were using
a single tool to feed those three analytics tools. But what we discovered after setting
up that thing is that the the numbers in the conversion funnel, like how many people go
from step one to step two from step two to step two, step three was actually different.
So numbers different by like, one to 3%. And we realized that if numbers between those
three analytics tools already different by 3%, what's the point for us to trying to ramp
up the numbers in our conversion funnel by 3% by like obsessing over A B testing doing
different copy, etc, etc, etc. A better use of our time was to simply create the onboarding
on our conversion funnel in a way that we think is logical and convenient to people.
And then focus on the actual product focus on bringing value to the people who signed
up and trying to use us other than trying to like get more people into the product that
is not as good as it could be if you would invest all the time there. So this is our
kind of policy with obsessing over all these analytics things. But on the other hand, like
I can't say that we don't track anything at all. Because for example, if you want to change
some feature within a tool, we won't be kind of ignorant about it. So we will set up kind
of internal tests, internal tracking. And we will measure like how many people open
this report, how many people click on this button, how many people like add something
to something. So we would know like the usage of that feature. And we would know what what
to do like how popular it is among our customers and what to do next. So it's not that we ignoring
like all measurements, we only measure stuff where we know that we can actually then based
on these numbers, we can actually do some takeaways. And this will kind of change the
way we work with that feature further.
Everything you said resonates with me so hard, because I've read over and over online that
you shouldn't track any metrics that aren't actionable, you shouldn't track metrics that
you're not going to actually change your behavior once you see the result of but I can't tell
you how many charts I set up on Google Analytics or mix panel or amplitude and then just never
looked at it again.
And anything as a result of it. And so exactly a total waste of time. Let's talk a little
bit about word of mouth as a strategy. In addition to all this content marketing that
you're doing, you mentioned earlier that sort of the two things that helped your template
business run were the content and the word of mouth people liking your product and talking
to each other about it and sharing it with each other and writing blog posts about it,
etc. I imagine that's a pretty huge driver of growth at hrefs too. I know I started using
hrefs because a friend of mine told me to start using it. How do you actually intentionally
harness word of mouth? How do you get your customers to talk about the product that you're
building?
Yeah, so there's a story to it because like, I wasn't that smart from the start, I actually
learned everything the hard way. And the story is when I came here to Singapore, I was happy.
I was lucky to meet a guy Eli Schwartz. He's, I think he's head of SEO at SurveyMonkey.
Well he's for sure at SurveyMonkey. I just don't remember his exact title. And when I
met him, he introduced me to kind of local Singaporean group of marketers. And we started
to have hangouts now and then to like drink beers and talk about marketing. And on one
of these hangouts, the guys started asking me about hrefs like, Tim, what do you think
like is great about the tool, about the company that you've joined, etc, etc, etc. And I simply
started bragging about our technical team, about Dmitry, our founder, who is super technical,
who is super knowledgeable with all those, I don't know, servers, programming languages,
etc, etc, etc. And the kind of level of knowledge of our development team, they are coding in
programming language called OCaml, which is like not super famous, but it's like very,
very effective and very hardcore. And I was bragging about the quality of data that we
have, like the size of the data that we have, and that we have like an awesome crawler,
etc, etc, etc. And the guys were simply kind of dropping their jaws. And I remember like,
like it was yesterday that Eli actually asked me, like, why don't you tell this to like
everyone online? Why are you sharing all that stuff with us now? And this, this is like
super impressive to us. But like, there's no way to learn about all these things, unless
you actually talk to you. And I was like, okay, now I'm on to something. So I realized
that I was actually in personal one on one conversations, I was bragging about the chefs,
how good is our data? What like separates us from the competition? What are our kind
of unique selling propositions, etc, etc, etc. But I didn't do this in my marketing.
So this is when I started like, plugging into our content, some references about the tech
stack that we have about the quality of data that we have about the size of the data that
we have. And today we actually have a dedicated page. So if you go to a chef.com homepage,
this is so important to us that I actually created a dedicated page called our data.
And once you click it, you can see like, the numbers of how many backlinks we have in our
database, how many keywords we have in our database. And these are like huge and impressive
numbers. And we also have an information about the amount of servers that they that we have,
which is also huge, like our infrastructure is super huge. And it impresses people and
they realize that they are not just using a tool that was made by a few freelancers,
but they are using like a sophisticated tool that costs kind of millions of dollars literally
to maintain. And they can get access to it for like $100 per month. So yeah, I started
integrating those clues into my marketing whenever I was doing an interview, whenever
I was recording a video or writing an article or talking to people on Facebook. And like,
I saw that it resonates with people. So this is how like, I kind of generated some some extra
word of mouth because when when your customers will talk to their peers, they need some kind
of arguments as to why the tool that they're using is better than the tool that their friend
is using. So my job was to give them those arguments. Other than that, we were super lucky
that some guys, I think they own some content delivery network or something. Long story short,
they have access to analytics of 100,000 websites. And what they did, they did a small research
to see which kind of search search bots search crawlers were most active on, on their websites
on 100,000 websites that they have access to. And the traps turned out to be the second
most active crawler after Google. So we were visiting kind of more pages and updating pages
more frequently than I don't know, being Yahoo, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So immediately
I started using this heavily in our marketing that a stress has the second most active crawler
after Google. And we integrated this again into our content, uh, into our, I don't know,
promotional materials. And they saw that people started telling this to each other. So whenever,
uh, if there was an argument about like who has better link data, who has better crawler of the
web, they were like, people were just sending each other a link to, to that research and saying,
look, uh, it shows has the second, the best crawler after Google. And it's not a research
that they've done themselves. This is a third party research, which is not in any way affiliated
with Ahrefs. So it seems like you have this, this repeated process where you would interact
with customers and talk to them. You would see through their reactions, what impressed them the
most about what's going on at Ahrefs. And then you'd work that into your marketing material to
sort of blast that out to everybody instead of just keeping it contained in these one-on-one
conversations that you're having or these small research projects that you're finding.
Now that you're saying it, yeah, I think that is the process, but actually I never think of,
I never thought of it this way. So it's not intentional that I would talk to people and test
their responses on whatever I was sharing. So it happened naturally. I was kind of sharing what,
what was impressive to me. And then when I, when I got reaction, like, like a normal,
normal human being, I was making a mental note, like, Hey, this works. I need to tell about this
to more people. And so that's it. Exactly. You mentioned that when you joined Ahrefs,
you started learning everything you could about SaaS marketing. You started reading about sales
funnels and conversion funnels and cohort analysis, et cetera, et cetera. Let's say
people are listening to this right now and they have no idea about any of this stuff.
They've never marketed anything in their life. What do you think are the most important concepts
for them to understand? Oh, that's a super good question. I think the, the most important concept
is there are just two ways to reach people online. Okay. Three ways. The first way is when they
search for you. Like I said, whenever people have a problem, what they do, they go to Google and look
for a solution. So if you show up there, you automatically get customers. So this is the first
way. The second way is ads. So people are hanging out on Facebook. People are hanging out on Twitter.
People are hanging out on different websites that have banners, et cetera, et cetera. And you can
like pay for placements on those websites, or you can even pay for, I don't know, dedicated email
blasts to someone's audience. Like in other words, you can pay to tap into someone's audience and get
your message in front of people. That is not as effective as when people purposefully search for
you because like it is what says Godin calls permission marketing versus interruption marketing.
When people search for something in Google and land on your article, they kind of give you permission
to market to them. You have their attention and they like want to learn from you and want to hear
what you say. When you send people an email blast with your offer or whatever, this is interruption
marketing because people are into whatever takes their mind at this point in time and you're trying
to interrupt them with your message and you're trying to get them interested. So the conversion
rate is not even like close to what you can get from traffic from Google. And the third way is
something that we just got quite a few times already is word of mouth. So if your product is
really helpful and if you can educate people on how your product is helpful, they're going to
recommend it to their friends. So this is super important. One other important thing, one other
important takeaway that I've learned and they don't see a lot of people talk about it. So usually when
you start learning like SaaS marketing or like product marketing, et cetera, people obsess over
that aha moment. The moment where like people start using your tool, they click a few buttons
and suddenly they realize how to use it. Like a light bulb switches on and they, they are your
customer for life. And there are a few like success stories like Twitter had to make people
follow 10 other people. And this what made them stick with Twitter or Facebook made their users,
their new signups, like also befriend like 10 people. And this what made them stick. I don't
see like any other kind of case studies of such sort. So I don't really buy the thing that I think
that product education, it happens before people sign up for your product. Because like
for Ahrefs, I don't know, maybe for simple products that aha moment works because like Twitter is
quite a simple concept. Like there's, there's not much to learn there, but Ahrefs is quite
a sophisticated tool. We have like a lot of different tools. We have a lot of different
reports. You have to really dig into it to understand like what kind of value you can get.
So people won't just sign up for Ahrefs, like browse around a little bit and suddenly a light
bulb switches. It doesn't happen. In our case, we first try to educate people. So we have our blog
where we have articles about different problems and different concepts. We have our channel on
YouTube, where we also teach different things. And we also want to collect search traffic from
YouTube. So people are actually searching for solutions to their problems on YouTube. And we
have videos there. So people first, they learn how to use your product to solve whatever issue they
have. And then they will sign up for your product and look like, okay, I saw that video and he went
here and he did that. Let me replicate it. So this is how it happens for us. This is what I believe
in. And that is why we mostly invest our efforts into educating everyone before they join. Like
even more, we have a trial, but it's a paid trial. You have to pay $7 to use Ahrefs for seven days.
I don't think I know any other SaaS companies that will charge like $7 for their trial. So you
actually have to pay to even like take a look inside our tool. Would you pay for something that
you don't even know how to use? Of course not. So first you have to understand what are you paying
for? You have to understand what kind of use case you are going to act on. So first people learn
about Ahrefs and how to use it. And then they invest those $7 because they already know what
they're going to get inside. So this is very important. That makes a ton of sense. I think
most people, at least people that I see on the Any Hackers Forum, people that I see posting on
Product Hunt have this sort of idea that they're going to put up a landing page. People are going
to come read like one or two lines and immediately decide, I'm going to buy, you know, I'm showing
out a hundred dollars for this. I'm sold. And it's really hard to underestimate, easy to underestimate
how much work can really go into education before that point. Yeah. So if marketing was a one out
of five when you joined Ahrefs, where would you say it is today? I won't answer that question
because like, it's I have two choices either to be humble or to be arrogant. So I'd rather have
people who saw like what we're doing in terms of well, actually, it's interesting. If there are any
like Ahrefs customers among our listeners, let's have them tweet mentioning you and me, what they
think like from one to five where our marketing is right now. I'll be super interested to get
feedback from people. Okay. I want your Twitter is at Tim Solos. So at T-I-M-S-O-U-L-O. Yeah,
or they can actually mention Ahrefs. Okay. We'll still see those tweets. It will be super
interesting. It'll be an interesting experiment. I've never asked people to tweet while they're
listening to a podcast. But where do you think Ahrefs marketing is at? Tweet Tim, tweet Ahrefs,
and let us know. Let's switch over into talking a little bit about SEO in particular. You said
elsewhere online that SEO is the best distribution channel for a small bootstrap startup to get
started on. Have you said that? Is that true? I said many things. But yeah, I believe this is
true. Okay, so that's a pretty ambitious claim. And you mentioned earlier that there are other
ways of course that customers can find your startup. But you think SEO is the best. Why do
you believe so much in this approach? Well, like I said, because this is permission marketing,
because people are actually looking for a solution to their problem. And you have that solution.
So if we talk about paid traffic, you can still kind of bid for keywords in Google,
but still you're getting your product in front of people who are actually looking for it.
So this is why I think that getting yourself in front of people who are searching for something
relevant, whether we are ranking organically or paying for ads, this is the best way to get
customers. On the other hand, SEO is kind of free. So once you write an article and make it
rank high in Google, it will consistently bring you traffic every single month. So you don't have
to pay for it. Like if you if you're paying for pay pay per click advertising, you have to pay
for every single click. But once you get your article to the top of Google, it might stay there
for years. So then you can write a second article. So now you will have two articles that generate
your traffic. And then you will write a third one and you have three articles. And it's like
kind of it's compounding, it's adding up and like you're investing work that actually adds up and
not like investing dollars that once you stop it, you're out of customers. So yeah, this is why I
think that SEO is like amazing channel. Of course, people might argue with me that SEO takes time to
build up. So if you have a new website, you have to like build authority, you have to build links,
you have to like invest your time into creating like all those great articles and integrate your
tools there, etc, etc, etc. Well, yeah, you have to work. That's that's how you make money. That's
how you build a business. You have to work. Like, of course, like if you have like tons of investing,
it's easier for you to simply just burn that money into like all sorts of ads rather than like
hire a team, train them how to create content, train them how to build links, how to get exposure,
etc, etc. But yeah, those people who will have their content, they're organically will eventually
win over the people who are like burning their money on ads, because the first ones they they
are not spending any money. And like every next article they write, it adds up to their total
traffic and total number of prospects that they get to their website. And their competitors are
paying for each customer. So already their customer acquisition cost is high. And like,
it's harder for them to make profits. I like that you went a little bit into some
of the objections that people have around SEO, because that it turns out is exactly where I want
it to go. SEO, obviously, one of the most popular channels online, billions of people searching
Google every month. And yet, a lot of founders are starting companies and completely neglecting SEO
for a number of reasons. One of the first objections that people have is that the market's
too crowded. Any amount of success you are going to find via SEO pretty much died years and years
ago. And at this point, it's impossible to succeed. And I think an interesting data point
is to just look at the people I've had on my podcast. I've had Rand Fishkin of Moz on here,
I've had John Docherty of Credo, I've had Nat Eliason, he runs an SEO content marketing agency,
I've had Ryan Bednar of Rank Science, had plenty of other people, I think, in the SEO space. And I
think it's just a reflection, not of me liking SEO and interviewing SEO guests, but of SEO just being
a crowded place with tons of people. What do you say to founders who are considering, you know,
trying to get the word out about their startup, but are afraid to enter the search engine
optimization game because they think it's too crowded? Well, I think I have a super fun answer.
Those people that you mentioned, like Rand Fishkin, who's like the biggest person in SEO,
probably Nat, John Docherty, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When I joined Ahrefs, I was up against
them. I was up against like best SEO people in the world. I was up against Moz, I was up against
SEMrush. Like, I actually had to do SEO against people who are the best in the world in SEO.
And our blog went from like 15,000 visitors per month to over 200,000 visitors per month.
And so like, well, I was able to compete with the best SEOs of this world. I'm sure that if you
enter some other niche, there would be still a room for you. Like it's fun that I think there's
room for everyone. And I actually think that not all the businesses are good in SEO. For example,
if I take a look at Moz blog or SEMrush blog, they are not targeting many, many juicy keywords
that we are targeting. So if people are interested, they can use Ahrefs and go to our tools, go to our
site explorer tool, enter the URL of Ahrefs blog, enter the URL of Moz blog, enter the URL of SEMrush
blog, and go to a report called Top Pages, which will show them the pages that generate the most
traffic from search to each blog. And you'll instantly see like which topics each blog is
targeting, which topics are bringing the most traffic. And Ahrefs is ranking and getting traffic
for a ton of topics that are not really covered on those other blogs. So there's a ton of opportunity
and they think like many businesses are simply missing out. They're not doing proper keyword
research. They're not doing proper content marketing. I think like it is quite easy to get
traffic with SEO. Like if I was able to wrestle with like all those biggest guys in the world
and still be successful, then you should be able to. And one other thing, one other objection about
SEO is many people think that SEO is too technical, probably doesn't apply to the audience of
developers, of course, because like the technical SEO is actually web development, the other word
for it. But recently here in Singapore, I was giving a short kind of talk to MBA students of
National University of Singapore. They were doing some online project, launching their startup,
etc, etc. So I asked them how many of them are going to use SEO to bring traffic to the websites
of their project. None of them raised their hands. So I asked like, why don't you guys are not,
why are you not using SEO? And they said like, SEO is too technical. And I said, guys, like,
I barely know any HTML and I was able to like ramp up the traffic to our blog, like 10x.
You don't have to be technical to know SEO. All you need to do is do keyword research. You need to
like find the phrases, the topics that people are searching for online related to your product.
And then you need to write articles on your like blog or on your like create pages on your website
that would target those searches that would target these problems that people are having.
And then the last thing is that you need to get some links from other websites. So probably you
have like, I don't know, partners, probably you have friends with websites or like you can go
and just post for other blogs. There are many ways to get backlinks to your website. And that's it,
like only three steps. First, you need to know what people are searching for. Second, you need
to create some content or pages on your website to target these searches. And third, you need to
get links from other websites as a validation that that your website is important. And so that
Google would breaking high. That's all you need to do like on the surface level. Of course,
if you're doing SEO for like big sites or e-commerce sites, there are a lot of bells
and whistles there. And yeah, you have to be technical, you have to understand many different
concepts, you have to be good at web development. But like on the surface level, SEO is super
simple and straightforward. You got into a little bit about the difficulties of SEO and the
technicality. And this was my second objection that I wanted to bring up that a lot of founders
have trouble with. When they look at SEO, it just looks like it's too hard. There are people like
you, there are people like Rand Fishkin, who have been doing this for 10-15 years. And the amount
of expertise and experience that you built up by this point of time just looks exhausting.
And so they turn to SEO experts and consultants who can help them. And that's kind of a crapshoot.
Because if you don't know anything about SEO, you don't really know how to hire somebody to help you
with SEO. And of course, you can turn to, you know, various WordPress plugins that promise to
optimize your website's SEO. But, you know, you press the button on WordPress and nothing really
seems to happen. You're not ranking on Google, you think, this is impossible. And a lot of people
don't even bother trying because it seems like it's too much to learn. There's too much work to do.
And whatever they try doesn't really help. Yeah. And they're missing out like big time. So it's
really that simple. You know what people are searching for. You create pages to target the
searches. And you try to get links from other websites. That's all you need to know. And yeah,
you said there are a lot of scammy SEO experts. Let me defend them. There are also a lot of
legit SEO experts because when you have like a huge website with like thousands and thousands
of pages, probably you're doing a ton of mistakes on this website. Probably you have a lot of dead
weight pages, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the guys who have a lot of experience with SEO,
they can kind of access your website and show you like all the mistakes that you're doing
and remove like duplicate pages, remove like seen pages, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
and ramp up your traffic. But specifically for people who are building websites from scratch,
you don't really have any pages at all right now. So you don't have any mistakes at this point. So
you don't need to hire SEO expert. You just need to start creating those pages to target what people
are searching for. It's that simple. The last objection I was going to go into,
you've also already touched on briefly, which is that SEO is too slow. So you're a startup founder.
You're trying to get your company off the ground. You maybe only have six months of runway and the
bank. You're still building your product. Can you really invest three to six months into writing
dozens or even hundreds of articles before you start seeing any results? Great question. First
of all, yes, SEO is slow and probably won't be able to get SEO traffic in the first month,
in the second month, and you'll probably be lucky if you'll get your first traffic in half a year.
But why is that objection not to start doing SEO? Because time will pass anyway. So where do you
want to be in six months? Do you want to have passive traffic that you don't have to pay for
and customers coming to your website consistently every single month? Or you want to be looking
like half a year from now, you want to be looking for that next growth hack that will magically
take your business to new heights, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Another thing is that you
don't need to publish that many pages. Like I said, if you do keyword research, you can see
the search demand for different topics and some topics are like super popular. So if you take the
search query like dog food, there's a huge search demand for the search query, but can you really
sell with that search query? It's hard because it's kind of general. So people are not looking
to buy anything. But if you look at the search query, like buy some specific dog food in Texas
or whatever, that is something you should be targeting because people are actually looking
to buy something at your location. So you don't have to build ton of pages. You just have to
figure out what, what kind of topics, what kind of pages would be the most effective for your
business to make a sale. But still you'll have to then hustle and build links from other websites
so that Google would start, start crawl, crawling your website. And so that Google would understand
that your website is worth ranking at the top of the search results. But there's another kind of
quick quote unquote hack that you can do. So once you do that keyword research, and once you
find all the kind of relevant search queries, all the relevant phrases that people are using
to kind of find solutions to relevant problems, there are already like 10 pages for each of these
search queries that are already ranking on the front page of Google. And quite often, many of
these pages are not your direct competitors. So for example, if you Google for, I don't know,
best wifi headphones, these will be all review sites. So if you happen to sell like super new
wifi headphones, let's say you just recently launched a Kickstarter campaign, and you want to
promote them, just go to these pages, just go to these websites that already get traffic for your
desired search term and pitch them your product. If they already listing like 10 different headphones,
why wouldn't they list like 11? Of course, like these people are looking to make money via affiliates,
but if you have an affiliate program, just pitch them your product, just tell them that you also
have a affiliate program, and they can include your product on their page and start making like
a little money from promoting you. So yeah, to start getting SEO traffic early, you need to focus
on what I called second hand SEO traffic, which you get from pages that already rank for your
desired search terms, unless they're of course your direct competitors. In that case, they of
course will not be interested to include you on your pages. But yeah, like while you're not getting
the SEO traffic of your own, while you don't have all these pages to target relevant search queries,
go and see all the ranks there. And if you can pitch them your product to service, and if you
can have them included on their pages, and you'll instantly start getting some relevant traffic.
That's good stuff, Tim. We're approaching the end of the episode. I want to close out by asking you
to maybe just give some general purpose advice to entrepreneurs who aren't located in a tech hub,
you yourself come from Ukraine, a very different environment there than it is in places like San
Francisco. And I think most people listening to the podcast don't live in tech hubs like San Francisco
or London or anything like that. How can you sort of strike it on your own and start a successful
business? And what kinds of problems have you ever come in doing that being from Ukraine? Like I said,
the best way to learn something is to start doing this. So be an action taker. Don't just like
learn the internet indefinitely looking for the next best idea, or the next like most awesome
growth hack. Actually, go build that website, go like create MVP of your product, put it out there,
start getting feedback. And the second best thing you can do after you like do all these things,
connect with people who are either at your stage or like just one or two steps above you in the
hackers is like amazing community for that. So like you can easily like engage, discuss your problems
and connect with like minded people. And you're going to get friends. Like I said, I launched my
own blog because it was a bet with my friend and I met that friend online. So I was reading his
blog. I was leaving him comments. I wanted to connect with him because he was quite a few steps
above me. He was where I wanted to be. So eventually I was able to connect with him and
we're friends till this date. So yeah, like start doing things, start connecting with people who
are a few levels above you. And eventually you'll figure it out. There's just no other way for you.
There's no way to consistently fail for years and years if you're trying things and if you're
connecting with people who are above you. Well, thank you so much, Tim, for coming on to the
India Actors podcast and sharing your story and sharing your knowledge so passionately.
Can you tell listeners where they can go to find out more about what you guys are up to at Ahrefs
and about what you're up to personally, if you share that kind of thing online as well?
Yeah, I have my own personal page at Ahrefs. So it's Ahrefs.com. A-H-R-E-F-S.com slash team,
T-I-M. And on that page, I'm basically listing all my social profiles. I'm listing all the best
articles that I have written for Ahrefs blog. And I'm also listing my podcast interviews.
So once this one is published, it will appear on that page as well. So if people want to connect
with me, they can find all the information there. And other than that, like I cannot even like tell
people to, I don't know, to go to Ahrefs blog or to go to Ahrefs or to go to our YouTube channel
because like, if you're not looking for help with SEO, then you don't really need to explore those
resources. But if you are looking to start an SEO, if you are looking to get some knowledge to learn
how to do things, just go to Google, start typing like whatever problems you're having,
just go to YouTube, start typing whatever like things you don't understand. And I'm sure that
eventually you will land on Ahrefs blog, eventually you will land on our videos,
and you learn how to use our product and you become our customer.
That's good stuff. Thank you so much, Tim, for coming on the show. It was great having you.
Thanks a lot for having me.
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