From Failed Affiliate to $1.5M ARR with SaaS SEO

Omer (00:10.000)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talked to Jeff Atkinson, the founder and CEO of Huckabye, a SaaS platform that takes SEO to the next level by automating the creation of structured data to help search engines better understand your website.
In 2015, Jeff started an affiliate website.
It was a simple business model.
Promote other companies products and get commissions from the sales.
So his priority was to do a great job with search engine optimization and drive plenty of traffic to his website.
And in order to do that, he needed to create lots of content.
So he built a software tool to help him generate a lot of that content.
He struggled with that business for the next two years and got nowhere.
And eventually he knew that he had to either shut down the business or pivot pretty quickly.
And he had two interesting insights at that point.
Firstly, even though his affiliate business was a failure, he had several people asking him if they could license the software tool that he had built for himself.
And secondly, after doing so much SEO, he realized how important structured data was becoming for Google and wondered if he could get ahead of the curve.
So based on those two factors, Jeff decided to pivot into a SaaS business.
And this was something that he knew nothing about.
And it became even more challenging when he had to try and sell his new product.
Initially, there was no user interface, so he was going into sales meetings and trying to explain to prospects what his product would do for them.
But he had nothing to show them.
It was too much of a leap of faith for many prospects, but a few decided to give him a shot.
And finally, after three and a half years of working on his business, he started to get sales.
Today, the business is doing almost $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue.
So in this interview, you're going to hear Jeff's story and how he went through three and a half years of lean times for his business.
How he pivoted into a SaaS business, what he learned about sales and the importance of structured data and how it could help you with SEO.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Jeff, welcome to the show.

Geoff Atkinson (02:42.290)
Thank you so much for having me.

Omer (02:44.290)
So what gets you out of bed?
What inspires or motivates you to work on your business every day?

Geoff Atkinson (02:48.290)
Yeah, I'd say it comes from.
I have an athletic background.
I was a ski racer and runner, and Soccer player.
And you know, I like to win and I like to compete, and that's really my motivation.
I kind of look at this similar to a sporting event.
And I'm competitive, so that's what gets me going.

Omer (03:06.680)
So Hakabuy is the company, but it's made up right now of two different products.
So can you tell us, number one, what do the products do?
Who are your target customers and what problems are you helping to solve?

Geoff Atkinson (03:24.440)
Yeah, absolutely.
So our products essentially help translate a website for Google.
So I always say websites are built for human beings, but I argue that in any given day, the most important visitor is actually this little Google bot, because they kind of end up dictating how much traffic you get.
We take a site and essentially translate it using structured data in SEO cloud so that Google has this wonderful user experience as a bot.
Our target customer is really anybody that's interested in increases in organic search traffic.

Omer (04:02.650)
So.

Geoff Atkinson (04:02.920)
So it ranges from SaaS to E commerce, travel insurance.
We really span across the board, nonprofits and what we solve for them.
Essentially, their sites aren't fully optimized today for a search engine to come and understand.
And we help that communication between a website and a search engine.

Omer (04:28.930)
Now, most people, when they think of SEO, will think of the traditional stuff like, are my pages optimized for being crawled and do I have high quality backlinks to my site?
And all the other stuff which is really focused on can I get ranked on the first page of Google for whatever keywords I want with those 10 blue links on the page.
But with structured data, there's more to it than just that.
So for people who aren't familiar with the concept, can you explain what structured data means in the world of SEO?

Geoff Atkinson (05:06.380)
Yeah, absolutely.
So structured data is essentially a language that is Google's search engine's sort of preferred language to communicate with a website.
You can have, it's called structured data markup.
And you can have markup for almost anything.
So a human being, a location, an event, a product, on and on.
Almost anything can be represented through structured data.
It's authoritative.
So as opposed to metadata, which is stuff like title tags and meta descriptions, those are really suggestive.
With structured data, it's authoritative.
So if you say this Sports score is 3 to 0 and it's the bottom of the seventh, it has to be 3 to 0 at the bottom of the seventh.
And if they find that you're not giving them accurate information, you actually get dinged.
So needs to be very accurate.
It's authoritative.
And then you'll see Google use it in lots of interesting ways.
So anytime they're called rich cards, anytime that you see sort of a unique feature in search results that aren't, as you said, just a blue link, if you search for a recipe and the recipe just shows up, or you see star ratings on products, or you see search for a movie time and the movie times just show up and you can book right there, that's all being powered by structured data.
They are leveraging it more and more.
It's very important from an SEO perspective to have world class structured data.
They keep encompassing it into their search results and also they use it for voice search.
Voice search is essentially if you search for something using a voice search, it's essentially reading to you the rich cards that are available on the page.
And so as voice search becomes more prevalent in every industry, structured data is the way to sort of capture those interactions.

Omer (06:56.460)
So I just watched Spider Man Far From Home last week with my kids.
And so if you search for that on Google, you see a few things.
First of all, you'll see the 10 blue links, links to websites, but you'll also see the sort of the module on the right hand side, depending on which kind of variation of the search results page you're looking at, where I can see the movie and it shows me the IMDb rating, it gives me an overview of the synopsis of the movie, etc.
Stuff like that.
And then above the the 10 blue links I've got the movie show times which is showing me like local movie theaters where the movie is playing and at what time.
Most of that in the two things I talked about, excluding the 10 blue links, that's the structured data and that might be coming directly from somebody's website or it might be something that Google is putting together themselves, right?

Geoff Atkinson (07:47.870)
Correct.
So just to be specific, so the show times are being driven by what's called event markup, which is telling Google, hey, this is happening here.
And when on the right hand side, that is what Google calls their knowledge panel.
That's being powered by what Google calls their knowledge graph, which is highly influenced by structured data.
So pretty much everything I just did the search as well.
Pretty much everything above the fold on this page is going to be powered by structured data.

Omer (08:16.960)
So tell me about how you came up with the idea for this business.
What were you doing before you started this company?

Geoff Atkinson (08:22.720)
Yeah, so I was the SVP of marketing at Overstock and we had a great SEO story.
We took it from a very little channel to a very big Channel hundreds of millions.
And, you know, I really got into SEO.
That wasn't the only thing we did there, but I was just sort of fascinated by it.
And it ended up transforming the business and, you know, helping us become profitable.
And it's just such a interesting and special channel versus your typical paid media channels.
It drives the best new customers.
It always has the highest roi.
I could go on and on and why it's so important, but yeah, I just really got into it and especially around the technical conversation between a website and a search engine turned out to be particularly important.
I think it was really cool just to be on the front lines of SEO for so long and really recognizing what moved the needle and what didn't.
I think the industry of SEO is sort of broken.
Where there's a lot of agencies, there's a lot of consultants that are sort of telling you what to do, but a lot of these folks don't have sort of the track record of really actually driving something through the roof.
And so I just saw something kind of missing in the market where people were kind of being sold a lot of snake oil and not getting what they wanted from the industry.
And so we're here to try to fix that.

Omer (09:47.850)
So tell me about, like, how did you come up with the idea for the product?
Which product came first and how did you get started?

Geoff Atkinson (09:56.200)
Yeah, it's kind of a funny story actually.
So we started as a B2C site.
It was an affiliate site.
It was basically a comparison shopping engine plus coupons type site.
It was a total SEO play.
And at the time, Google really started to not like affiliate sites.
And so we were really swimming upstream.
We had built a product, a software product that we used to generate content on pages.
It's a product that we just a few of our customers use still today.
And it's really not what we sell at all.
It's a product called Huck News.
And you basically grab.
The idea was like, let's grab an Instagram post or whatever and write a short comment on it.
And you could add content and change the page in a meaningful way in a really short amount of time, as opposed to someone having to write an entire blog post or whatever.
It actually ended up being a very effective product, and it worked well on that site.
And people that knew Huckabye wanted to start licensing it.
And we were getting nowhere in terms of revenue with that model.
And so we pivoted into a SaaS company and that was really our first product.
The other piece that I knew was just really important from my overstock days and just by monitoring Google was just how important structured data was.
And we figured if we got ahead of that curve and could really learn structured data and what it does and how to optimize it correctly and all those things, that we'd really have something pretty significant on our hands.
And so that was sort of our go to market.
It wasn't out of any sort of clear thinking or strategy.
It was really over.
Like, how do we get to revenue?
And these affiliate commissions aren't happening.
Let's pivot and start licensing this thing.
And now I've come to realize how wonderful the SaaS world is.

Omer (11:44.880)
So you've been in business for about two and a half years, and at what point did you pivot into a SaaS product or business?

Geoff Atkinson (11:53.920)
We've been in business, I think a little longer than that for four and a half years.
And we pivoted two and a half years ago.
And then we've kind of, once we built the product, we've sort of really been honestly selling it for about a year and a half.

Omer (12:06.960)
And what are you doing in terms of revenue?

Geoff Atkinson (12:08.520)
At the moment, we're approximately 1.4 million in ARR.

Omer (12:12.680)
And so I want to kind of dig into where that growth has come from, because if you've really been just sort of selling for the last year or so, in the first year of when you pivoted to a SaaS business, roughly, like, what sort of revenue were you doing then?

Geoff Atkinson (12:30.520)
Oh, zero.
I mean, I think our largest affiliate commission check was like $5 or something.

Omer (12:37.240)
That's coffee money.

Geoff Atkinson (12:40.120)
So.

Omer (12:41.240)
So really the growth to Getting to over 100k in MRR has happened in just over the last year.

Geoff Atkinson (12:54.760)
Yeah, a year and a half.
Call it year and a half.

Omer (12:58.520)
So what have you done?
What's driven that growth so quickly?

Geoff Atkinson (13:02.440)
We haven't done anything special in terms of marketing or sales, I don't think.
I think we were very product driven.
We had a product that was exciting to a lot of people because it was really unique.
It made sense.
It was like, okay, this software is going to move the needle.
It has a track record of moving the needle.
It just really resonated with smart Internet marketing folks and smart SEO folks, a lot of which I already knew.
I reached out to my network, really, and said, hey, I've built something kind of cool and it's working and I'd love for you to try it.
And so that's really how we got started was within my network, my network's network, people that worked at Huckabye.
And that's really how it got started.
We would take any business that we could get our hands on and we had a pretty high, relatively high conversion rate.
People were interested and very sort of product driven and then network driven at first.
And then we got some lucky breaks like we were introduced to SAP for example, when we were quite small.
And we learned that, boy, this thing really works for SaaS companies.
And I can kind of get into why it does a little bit later.
And that was a big deal for us to get SAP as a customer.
And then we got Salesforce and so we started getting some really big logos early on.
And I think that that really verified the product.
It made people feel comfortable that we had these enterprise contracts.
And yeah, then it really has happened more organically than it probably should have.
Looking back on it, I wish we had pushed harder on the sort of sales and marketing side earlier, but I think being product focused, we did build a great product and that ended up moving the needle significantly for these companies.
And once you have a bit of a track record in SEO, people are willing to give you a shot.

Omer (14:57.080)
So tell me a little bit about what the sales process looked like.
So you were getting most of these leads, as you said, through your network.
And so when you say to people, I'd love for you to try this out, what did that entail?
Could you just send them a link and get them up and running?
Or did you have to initially get in front of people and do some demos and then be pretty involved in helping them to get onboarded?
Just what did that look like?

Geoff Atkinson (15:24.180)
Yeah, so this has been until recently a very myself driven sales process.
And what's interesting about Huggaby so far, and we're starting to get past this, where we're going to have a dashboard and a ui, what's unique about us is that there's really nothing to see other than the numbers grow.
So structured data, you can show what we're doing, but there's no login, there's no real thing.
Something to demo, which has honestly hurt us.
We're getting past that where we have actual, we're working on an actual UI that people can see.
Exactly.
Sort of like the Google Analytics.
Instead of looking at users, looking at what Google's doing on your site and how well they're interacting with the site.
So there wasn't really much of a demo.
It was me talking and whiteboarding and it's incredible to think that.
So relieved to just have a phone conversation and, and people just sort of got it.
But that was, you know, that's not normal.
We do have kind of a demo, but it's really sort of conceptually describing what we're doing, showing the numbers to back it up.
And it is a little bit of a leap of faith.
But if, as I've mentioned before, you know, smart Internet marketing people just got it really quickly and they're like, yes, this is important, and this is the way that Google's heading and we need to be doing this, I think it didn't hurt.
Having the track record that I did at Overstock made a lot of people trust what we were doing.
And it was totally different.
It was a totally different pitch than any other SEO pitch from an agency or whoever.
It really resonated with people, and they were like, I've never even heard SEO talked about this way.
And it's really refreshing.
I think people have been pretty drawn to it, drawn to the product, and made it a lot more easier to sell.

Omer (17:12.219)
Okay, so now the story is getting more intriguing because it's like you're going out, you're getting front of prospects, and you're selling them a product that they can't see or touch or use, but it will help them if they take that leap of faith.
But you've also got the challenge of how do you present it in a way and how do you pitch it in a way that people can understand the value and are willing to pay?
Because on the one hand, like, I can also.
I don't know whether this happened, but I could kind of easily see this going in terms of you're having a conversation with somebody and you're kind of explaining how structured data works.
Were there some people who said, well, yeah, that sounds great, thanks.
And we can probably create some of that ourselves.

Geoff Atkinson (18:05.860)
Absolutely, yeah.
You know, as we get more mature, I think it's getting easier to convince people that this is real and something's visible and we have this track record of results.
But most SEO successful SEO teams almost do everything internally.
That's how we did it at Overstock.
You're really good.
SEO teams do almost everything internally.
So there's a very.
Especially with SEO cloud, we talk a lot.
We sell as much into technology as we do into marketing.
There's a lot of that attitude.
What we have to do to overcome that is prove that we know what we're doing and that this is a complicated thing to accomplish in house, and you're better off outsourcing it to us, which hasn't always been easy.
We have had plenty of companies turn us down saying they're going to do it internally.
We've also had plenty of companies turn us down and come Back to us 612 months later and say, we just can't.
We're not getting this done.
We're not seeing the results that we want.
SEO wise, we're interested.
And that's really reassuring to feel that.
But yeah, it hasn't been easy.
I'd say that we're getting a lot better at sort of making the product much more tangible so that people know what they're getting, they know what the results to be expected are, and, you know, they sort of rest assured that they've got this terrific SEO software platform that's going to make a big difference for them.

Omer (19:31.040)
Right.
Because when people can't see a product, I guess that that potentially leads to some confusion about are you selling a product or are you selling a service?

Geoff Atkinson (19:42.800)
For sure.

Omer (19:43.840)
So it would be good to kind of understand, like maybe you can give an example of maybe a real life SaaS company or we can kind of talk about just general approach that you take.
But if you're working with a SaaS company and they say, okay, Jeff, we're going to give this a shot and we're going to try this out.
What's involved?
Like what are the main steps that you need to go through or they need to go through to get them onboarded and start seeing results.

Geoff Atkinson (20:10.720)
Yeah.
So I would say maybe the first thing when we talk about SaaS companies, which is really our bread and butter, is sort of why it works for SaaS.
And even before that, I'll say we do have situations or we did have situations where we have SEO analysts on our team that help our customers and the software will go live.
And at the beginning we'd be, at some point the customer would start thinking of us as a service because the only interaction that they're having is with this SEO analyst that's giving them advice and they'd forget that the software was up and live.
We've done a lot to prove to companies that the software is live.
It's what's really driving your results.
And here's what it's doing.
The reason that it works so well for SaaS is if you think about an overstock or an E commerce site, that's a site that's relatively easy for a search engine to understand.
They come in, there's these really well described categories like men's watches or patio furniture.
Those are all the same format.
And so it's easy for a Bot to understand.
Then they get to a product page and those are all the same formats.
Got a product name and a price and a description and reviews.
And in fact, your Amazon or Overstock is going to have a huge API that points back to Google with all their product information in a live feed.
So they understand e commerce sites really clearly.
When you think of SaaS, all that structure just goes away.
So you have much more complicated products, you have integrations and all sorts of things happening on a SaaS site that just doesn't happen on an e commerce site.
And so when Google wants to know everything they can about Salesforce, they know there's tons of backlinks, very high domain authority, but they're left sort of scratching their head as to like, what exactly is this?
And so structured data ends up being this fabulous mechanism to educate a search engine on a SaaS product.
And so implementation is really relatively easy.
We send them line of JavaScript to get our code live.
We then insert this little packet of, it's called a JSON LD packet of structured data that contains all the structured data.
We put it up as high as we can on the page.
Google comes in and recognizes it as structured data and just understands each and every page throughout the site way more clearly than they did before.
And the more they understand, the more search results they end up giving them.
So that's why it works so well in SaaS.
It's a light implementation and the search engines are struggling to understand these businesses.
If a CEO pitches the product to a potential buyer, the buyer is going to learn so much more about that product than what Google understands by going and crawling a SaaS site.
And so our software really helps that communication.

Omer (23:03.570)
So can you give an example of a SaaS company that's kind of used the product?
I mean, I'm just trying to get a sense of maybe one page on some SaaS site and what was that?
Structured data and how did it help them?

Geoff Atkinson (23:21.570)
Yeah, for sure.
So an interesting one for us is a Salesforce app exchange.
So the app exchange is.
It's almost like the e commerce world of software.
And Google was pretty confused as to when they'd come in, like, what is this?
There's actual software application markup that we provided throughout that site.
And once Google recognized exactly what these apps were doing, who were building them, who they integrated with, they're just like, oh, thank you.
We finally understand what's going on on this website.
And the results came similar.
Concur is a really sharp, very smart SEO company.
What's also interesting is SaaS companies come to SEO much later in the stage than your E commerce.
In E commerce you can't survive without SEO.
In software, you can survive for a long time without SEO.
But really smart CMOs and marketing people I've found in the SaaS space, they invest in SEO early because it's the real scalable channel.
If you're just completely reliant on PPC or these other paid media channels, you know, at some point they sort of tap out and so concur is a great example.
Like they have a huge more than 50% of their sales pipeline comes out of organic search.
And Google was similar to Salesforce, just sort of confused as to what exactly the site did and what the product did.
And they have a great Internet, they have like 20 something international sites and we have markup all over them.
And boy did they just take off once we layered our software on top.
And if you think about a huge portion of their sales pipeline coming out of organic search, if you double that or whatever, 50% or 100%, that has a real meaningful impact on their business.
Those are a couple examples.
We also have some relatively smaller SaaS companies that, that still are trying to have this conversation with Google and have them fully understand what they do.
And it really helps.
It really moves the needle.
There's other things you still have to do like backlinks and such, but this really helps facilitate that conversation.
And rest assured that Google's going to understand what you're doing and what your product does.

Omer (25:42.580)
So I'm curious how that structured data is generated like you talked about.
Okay, there's some JavaScript snippet that needs to get installed on the site, but in terms of the actual structured data for each page, how does that get created?
Is that something that's done programmatically through your product?
Does it initially involve some human having to look at the page and figure stuff out?
Like, how does that happen?

Geoff Atkinson (26:08.050)
Yeah, great question.
It is done as much as we can programmatically.
It's really done based on what we call page type.
So most websites will have five to ten different page types.
A landing page, a product page Q and a page.
And we then once we've sort of divided up the page types, we know what to look for on each page.
We know to look for a software application or look for a review or look for a Q and A.
And the software is automating this as much as possible.
So it recognizes what page type any given page is and then what content is important and useful on that page type, and then it adds the structured data accordingly.

Omer (26:51.500)
Got it.
Okay.
So I think it's really interesting that you're a former office VP of marketing at Overstock.
The products you have are really about helping companies grow with SEO, but you've done very little marketing, and you've done pretty much very little on SEO as well, to grow this business.
So how did that happen?

Geoff Atkinson (27:14.070)
Yeah, I'm a little embarrassed about that.
It's getting better.
The main reason for that was I really wanted Huckabye to fly under the radar for a while.
I didn't want to shout from the rooftops what we were doing, mainly because it was so unique and the product at first was pretty light.
And now with SEO, cloud, and other things, it's gotten way stronger, way more defensible.
But I was nervous that someone would just steal it.
Now I feel comfortable that it's really hard to steal what we do, and so it's much easier to talk about it and to market about it.
I do regret that, though.
I wish we had sort of spent more money, especially around SEO, because you're not really shouting it from the rooftops, you're just growing organically.
But we are investing pretty heavily right now in our own SEO.
We always try our products on our site before we try them anywhere else.
So we have the benefit of these brilliant developers building SEO products for Huckabye.com and seeing how that influences our traffic and what we do.
But, yeah, it was backwards.
You'd think being a marketing driven CEO, I would have played to my strength and just gone crazy on digital marketing, but we really haven't done any until the last couple months.

Omer (28:32.850)
Yeah.
And I think it's also interesting that this started off as an affiliate site.

Geoff Atkinson (28:36.740)
Yeah.
I mean, what's wild about that is that now I see all these VCs that'll only invest in SaaS companies.
And your podcast is about SaaS and how big a deal SaaS was.
When we pivoted into a SaaS company, I probably didn't even know the term.
I didn't even know the term SaaS.
I didn't know the value of recurring revenue.
I didn't know the value of SaaS companies were so much higher.
So it really was sort of dumb luck that we ended up this way.
And I've had to learn a lot about how to market a SaaS company and how to.
I know I've never done sales before, never managed a sales team.
You know, at Overstock, it was just a lot of numbers and a Lot of traffic.
It's a totally different game that I'm still learning to this day.
But, yeah, very, very fortunate for that to happen.
And I really didn't appreciate what I was doing when we did it.

Omer (29:31.660)
Yeah.
And I think you've really.
You did really well.
Whether it was luck or not to land some of these customers like SAP and Salesforce and concur.
And I'm sure that's helped to open the door and kind of get conversations with more prospects beyond the sort of working your network.
Like, how are you finding new customers today?

Geoff Atkinson (29:55.680)
Yeah, so we still do a pretty significant amount of outbound email.
We're pretty clever about it.
For example, I was a Dartmouth College alum, and it's a fiercely loyal alumni network for some reason, like unreasonably loyal.
And so we email Dartmouth alums that are executives and such at various companies, and they almost always take a conversation, which is really nice.
And sometimes it leads to something and sometimes it doesn't.
But that's sort of a clever marketing move.
The other one is there's a lot of SaaS companies in Utah.
And so we will.
We're in Park City, but a lot of SAS companies are in Lehigh and Orem and Provo.
And so we'll set appointments and we'll take people to lunch and we'll drive down there and spend the day in Lehigh and just go sort of.
It's not door to door, but there are literally so many that they're all in the same office park.
You know, you can hit go to five SaaS companies in a day in Lehigh and not leave the office park.
So that's where a lot of it's coming.
We are just cranking up the marketing engine.
This is the second podcast I've done, really sort of the first public conversations I've had about Huckabye.
And so it's early days.
We are not getting a ton of inbound right now, but I think that's going to change pretty quickly.
We're starting to get our first trickle of inbound leads, and lo and behold, they convert like crazy because they have interest already.
So we're just learning on that front.
Obviously, I have a marketing background, but it's B2C, so I'm learning as I go.
Fortunately, we have a board member who is the CMO of Pure Storage, and he was the CMO of New Relic before that and the CMO of Concur before that.
Before, you know, well, before we actually worked with Concur.
So he's teaching me a lot on how to market as a SaaS, as a SaaS company.
And what's crazy about it is his obsession over SEO, because it's like.
It's just.
That's.
That really is a channel that scales and works.
So we're still learning, but it's been scrappy, and we're looking to, you know, it'll be exciting when we have sort of the steady influx of inbound leads that we can really rely on.

Omer (32:15.990)
So you have a team of 14 people right now?

Geoff Atkinson (32:18.950)
Yes.

Omer (32:19.910)
And how many of those are focused on sales and marketing other than you?

Geoff Atkinson (32:26.310)
Five of them.
Five of the 14 are, and most are in sales.
We really have one person focused on marketing and the rest, I'm sorry, four.
Four total.
Beyond me, not five.
And three in sales and one in marketing.

Omer (32:43.160)
And so all these team members have been doing the same thing in terms of.
It's all outbound sales, very little marketing, and you're just working your network.
You've been using things like outbound email, and then just getting in front of anybody locally that will listen.

Geoff Atkinson (33:03.720)
Yeah, it's been pretty scrappy.
I'd say that the.
The marketing piece is definitely picking up.
So hopefully your listeners find this engaging and might want to give Huckabye a try, especially if they're in the SaaS space, which I'm guessing they are.
So we are having more and more conversations where people are reaching out to us, which is great.
But it has been pretty scrappy so far to date.

Omer (33:26.130)
Yeah, no, that's great.
By the time a SaaS company gets to over 100k mrr, typically it's.
They've got one sort of growth channel working well.
And most of the times what I see is it's either some kind of inbound channel, whether it's content marketing or, you know, whatever.
What you've done with a very kind of scrappy approach is pretty impressive because it's like, hey, you know, we've got to over, you know, 1.4 million ARR, and we're still getting our marketing machines sort of up and running.
So that's.
That's pretty impressive.

Geoff Atkinson (34:06.600)
Yeah, thank you.
I appreciate you saying that.

Omer (34:08.840)
Now, one thing I want to just kind of answer before we kind of wrap up here is like, I didn't ask you.
Was like, how do you price the product?

Geoff Atkinson (34:16.599)
Yeah, so typically it's about 2,000 to $4,000 a month, depending on how big your website is and what products you're going with.
That's sort of the range.
I think we have some smaller customers that are down in sort of the 1500 area, but typically it's 2000 to 4000amonth annual contracts.
We do a discount for prepays.
Yeah, that's what it looks like contract wise.
Got it.

Omer (34:44.570)
Okay.
And you know, you don't have to mention names if you don't want to, but can you maybe give me an example of like the type of results a customer has seen by implementing these products?

Geoff Atkinson (34:56.610)
Yeah, no, I'll give you a number for sure.
So our average customer, you take all of our customers and you look at their growth rates.
After 12 months of having this software installed, your average customer grows 62% in terms of organic search traffic.
And we're really proud of that.
I mean that moves the needle.
And those are some big companies in there.
It's not like we're taking a startup from zero to 500 visitors a month.
These are off of relatively big numbers.
We work with companies of all size, but yeah, your average customer will grow 62% in terms of organic search traffic in 12 months.

Omer (35:36.240)
And these are mostly companies who already have at least one person sort of dedicated to SEO, if not a team of people.

Geoff Atkinson (35:44.960)
Yeah, it really varies.
Right.
What's wild about SaaS is just how under invested they are in SEO.
You know, you'll have massive companies, public companies that'll have one or two people working on SEO.
You know, overstock, we have like 40.
Wow.
So it is somewhat of a neglected channel.
I think it's sort of like the oxygen of the Internet and the SaaS world really isn't breathing any oxygen.
And so it's under invested in.
And some companies won't even have someone working on SEO or they'll just say, well, SEO is something that we need to be doing.
And so they'll start looking and they'll find us as opposed to an agency or whoever it is.
And they like what they hear and so they sort of.
We say we take a really technology first approach.
You know, I look at SEO as really a technology driven problem and yet the industry is almost entirely services driven.
And so we take a technology first approach.
Very science versus art focused.
We believe in the science and that tends to resonate.
But even if they are small companies that don't have someone specifically working on SEO, they can start with Huckabye.
They get not only the software which is going to help Google really understand their site, but they're also going to get the advice of a company that works with a lot of big SEO driven software companies.
And that experience definitely helps.

Omer (37:08.050)
Great.
That's a really good number.
I'm glad you shared that.
All right, we should wrap up.
So we're going to get into the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
Just kind of answer them as quickly as you can.
You ready?

Geoff Atkinson (37:21.570)
Yeah, absolutely.

Omer (37:22.930)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?

Geoff Atkinson (37:28.370)
So it'd probably be.
My mentor was Patrick Byrne, who is the CEO of Overstock.
Very fortunate to have him as my mentor.
One thing he taught me is that you got to move quick.
There's no reason to sort of wait around to make decisions.
A day that goes by without a revenue growing opportunity is revenue lost.
And so move quickly, take risks, but you also have to learn really quickly.
So if something isn't working, you got to be able to respond to that as quickly as you do if something is working.
So, yeah, I'd say move quickly, take risks, and also learn quickly is the best business advice that comes to mind.

Omer (38:07.240)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Geoff Atkinson (38:09.720)
I love Warren Buffett's Investing in Life Lessons.
Patrick actually has a connection to Warren Buffet.
His dad was the CEO of geico, which is really Buffett's, really one of his first big investments.
And it's just, I don't know, it really kind of encapsulates what's a good business, what sort of makes the markets work, how that odd fellow ticks and what he thinks about, which is totally rational and smart.
But I got a lot out of.
I've learned a lot around Warren Buffett, and every time I sort of dig in, I feel like I get a lot brighter.
On the business world, what's one attribute

Omer (38:50.580)
or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?

Geoff Atkinson (38:53.970)
This is going to sound strange, but I'd say endurance.
It's not easy.
It's not easy, and you do have to hang in there.
And even when things aren't going well, I think a SaaS CEO has to absorb a lot of difficulties and problems.
And so that requires endurance.

Omer (39:13.090)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Geoff Atkinson (39:16.930)
I'd say Slack.
We live and die by Slack.
I know that's probably not the.
The most creative answer, but we live and die by Slack.
It's incredible.
I mean, it's an incredible platform and we get a lot done there.
And it's, you know, always on my computer and on my phone and we leverage Slack as much as we can.

Omer (39:34.590)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Geoff Atkinson (39:38.990)
Yeah, this is A great question that I actually have a funny answer for.
So one of my best friends has a house on Nantucket.
I'm actually from the Boston area and we were there like a year and a half ago.
Everybody there is obsessed with these vintage SUVs that you can drive on the beach and stuff.
Ford Broncos, old Land Rovers and so I bought the domain nantucketsuv.com and want to start a business that takes old broken down Ford Broncos and trucks from around the country that aren't valued at all and fix them up and boat them over to Nantucket and sell them.
I think it would be a lot of fun and it also I think do pretty well.

Omer (40:23.370)
I'm going to keep an eye on that domain.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Geoff Atkinson (40:31.370)
Yeah, so this is a funny one.
Well, I have two.
One is I was actually on the US Ski team as a cross country ski racer a long time ago.
Wow.
And the second is I have a very handsome 6 year old chocolate lab that actually served as a dog model for Carhartt.
So if you've seen in advertisements a handsome Labrador, that's my dog, James.

Omer (40:58.390)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
I love to golf.

Geoff Atkinson (41:02.950)
I play a lot of golf.
It's summer here in Park City, so it's golf season.
Playing in a member guest with my friend Bart this weekend at Victory Ranch and really looking forward to it.
Actually heading out there shortly after this podcast.

Omer (41:16.920)
Awesome.
Well, I wish you all the best.
Well, thank you for joining me.
First of all, it's been, it's been great to sort of dig in and kind of hear your story and how you've kind of discovered this business.
It wasn't a sort of a straight journey.
It's been an interesting way that you've got to discovering and building a SaaS business.
But once you did pivot there, it's pretty impressive how quickly you've been able to get traction and build a sizable business.
And so thank you for sharing that story and telling us a little bit more about the world of SEO, specifically from the perspective of structured data.
And it's probably an area that many of us probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about.
And it could be an untapped opportunity that more people could take advantage of.
Now if people want to find out more about either of the products, they can go to hakaby.com which is hu c k a b u y dot com and we'll include a link in the show notes to that as well.
And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Geoff Atkinson (42:24.270)
They can Find me on LinkedIn is a great way.
And they also can just email me at jeff g e o f fuckaby.com awesome.

Omer (42:33.280)
Thank you Jeff, and I wish you all the best.

Geoff Atkinson (42:36.560)
Thanks you Omer.
It was a real pleasure.
Thanks so much for having me.

Omer (42:40.160)
Cheers.