I studied SEMRush's growth for a week - here's what I found

Hey team,

Just finished spending a week trying to understand how SEMRush managed to grow to $100m relatively bootstrapped in a VERY competitive space and thought I would share some of those insights here.

Full disclosure, I have the full 3k word case study on our site here, but all the important parts are in this post :)

1/ Founder Industry Focus

Forget product <> market <> fit.

Or even founder <> product <> market <> fit.

In this growth story, we’re talking founder <> industry <> focus.

SEMRush founders Oleg and Dmitri first discovered SEO in 2001 and haven't stopped since...

2/ Forget Everything Apart From Product

From SEMRush's release in 2007 through to 2012, Oleg and Dmitri worked on the project part did and did ZERO marketing (apart from the affiliate program we will discuss next ;)).

This growth came just through word of mouth.

3/ A Monster Affiliate Program

One thing the marketing SEMRush founders did do when they launched... was also launch arguably one of the most prolific SaaS affiliate programs of all time.

Fast forward to today and they have tens of thousands of affiliate promoting...

4/ Outsource Content Marketing To Influencers

SEMRush's blog is solid...

It looks like most other SaaS business blogs, apart from one small difference...

Most of the content is not written by people within their team.

5/ Horizontal Product Expansion

SEMRush have expanded across the typical SaaS axis:

• Data
• Users
• Features

And their feature expansion is insane. You can now replace most of your marketing stack with SEMRush.

6/ Expanding Past The English Language

SEMRush have translated their product and have separate content sites for:

• Brazilian
• Italian
• Spanish
• German
• French

They're getting 85k organic sessions to their Spanish site alone:

7/ An Expansion Focussed Sales Team

By 2018, SEMRush has a team of 50 inside sales reps.

Are these sales reps out prospecting for new, $99 per month accounts in the bloody red MarTech ocean?

No.

They focus almost exclusively on expanding existing customers:

8/ The Right Way To Raise Money

Between 2007 and 2016, SEMRush founders raised zero cash and focussed on building and selling product.

They raised $40m in 2016 but that was simply to increase their payback period from 1 to 6 months.

9/ Becoming Ubiquitous

And yes, I know it’s an obvious thing to say: get everyone to know you in your market and revenue will grow.

But it's worked for SEMRush.

#StayInTheGame