Surfer's journey to $2.8M ARR from marketing perspective.

Hey Marketers,

I know that getting a look into other companies' playbooks can be really inspiring...

This is why I crafted a summary of Surfer's journey to $2.8M ARR. Specifically, the last year of it 🥳

A little background: we're a SaaS tool for content creators and SEOs. With Surfer, you can accelerate every stage of content strategy and creation. We have no funding and we're Poland-based.

This is what worked for us in 2020:

1. Release of the Keyword Surfer free Chrome extension – I think free (and useful!) tools are one of the best ways to build brand awareness. Right now, there are 235k people who installed the extension.

2. Affiliate program – this one worked well for us since the beginning. It’s great growth leverage for different businesses, but SEO and content SaaS can really build their growth on affiliates.

3. Webinar series – I love all sorts of cycles and series instead of one-shots! This helped us build visibility and build connections with influencers from our industry.

4. Adding urgency to trial onboarding sequence – offering more credits in users’ accounts helped us increase trial -> paid conversion by 33%!

5. 637 net new clients during BFCM – you don’t have to discount your product to get new clients! EVERY SaaS should take advantage of Black Friday weekend. It was a game-changer for our growth.

6. Customer support as growth leverage – thing that many companies take for granted, for us is one of the core value propositions. Any business can do the same.

7. Community growth – I believe content and community being two top elements of successful marketing. We have over 3k people in our Insiders group and they are creating content for us.

There are a few other insights that I shared in the full-blown article. If you’re interested, I’ll link it below.

Thank you for reading this! I wish you all the best in the year and all the growth your team can handle!

I’d be happy to talk about any of those points as well 💜

Full article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/part-ii-our-journey-28m-arr-surfer-marketing-karolina-gawron