The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 13

Tim Soulo, Ahrefs

How Ahrefs Used SaaS SEO to Grow from 15K to 250K Monthly Visitors

Tim Soulo is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Ahrefs, a SaaS startup that provides SEO tools to help grow your search traffic, research your competitors, and monitor your market niche. In 2015, Tim joined Ahrefs as head of marketing. The company had spent several years building their blog, but it still was not generating much traffic or leads. Tim decided that publishing higher-quality content regularly on their blog was going to be one of his top priorities. But after a year, he still had little to show in terms of traffic and leads. Eventually, Tim figured out the problem. They were creating high-quality content, but they were not optimizing it for SaaS SEO. They were not doing keyword research or doing on-page optimization. That is not uncommon. A lot of companies make that mistake. But the startup that Tim worked for was in the business of SEO and their product helped their customers to grow search traffic. So it was pretty crazy that they were not thinking about SEO on their own blog. Once he figured out the problem, Tim made a simple change - he started by doing keyword research to find out what people were searching for and then focused on creating the best content around those keywords. And in a couple of years, their blog traffic grew from 15,000 to over 250,000 monthly visitors and has become one of the biggest drivers of new customers and revenue growth. But the real story here is about a SaaS startup that is incredibly product-focused and breaks a lot of rules and conventional wisdom about marketing and growth. They do not have a target customer or persona. They do not do growth hacks. They do not use analytics software or track conversion rates. They do not even do traditional SaaS SEO optimization. They focus on building a great product and educating people on how to use that product through their blog. And that approach is working - they are bootstrapped and doing over $40M ARR with just 45 people.

Christian Owens, Paddle

Founder-Led Sales: From Failed Launch to 7 Figures

Christian Owens is the founder and CEO of Paddle. Paddle is a SaaS product that helps other software companies sell their products. It provides checkout, subscriptions, taxes, licensing, and insights in one unified platform. Christian learned to build websites when he was 12 years old. He started walking into local businesses and asking them if they wanted a website. Some business owners just laughed at him, but others hired him to do the job. At the age of 15, Christian built an invoicing application for Mac. But he had no idea how to sell software and no money to spend on marketing. So he started contacting other people with Mac products and persuaded them to do a special 2-week promotion where they would combine all their products into a heavily discounted bundle and promote that to all their existing customers. The promotion was a huge success and they made over $400,000 in sales in 2 weeks. At the age of 16, Christian dropped out of school and focused 100% on this business and kept running these bundle promotions. By the time he was 18, he had already made his first million dollars. In 2012, Christian founded Paddle with his co-founder Harrison. They wanted to make it easier for software companies to sell their products. But they quickly realized that they had a big problem - nobody wanted their marketplace product. The first two months generated just $800 in total sales. Then something surprising happened. Customers started hacking around the marketplace to use just the checkout page directly. Christian realized they did not want the marketplace skin - they wanted the guts: checkout, billing, taxes, and licensing. So the founders threw away 90% of the product and focused on that one thing. From there, founder-led sales drove almost all of Paddle's growth. Christian and Harrison built internal tools to find leads, manually wrote personalized cold emails, and grew the business to over $10 million in annual recurring revenue with 140 employees. The journey from failed launch to $10M ARR shows the power of founder-led sales combined with the willingness to listen when customers tell you what they actually want.