Today, the internet has become more accessible than ever. This has led to the formation of a whole new kind of marketing, i.e. digital marketing. Digital marketing has become an essential part of every business’s strategy and accounts for the highest conversion rates among the different types of marketing. Whether it be in the form of long blogs, short posts, drip email marketing or Social Media Marketing, having the right online presence makes a whole lot of difference in today’s world.
With so much content available for consumption online, businesses are finding it challenging to stay relevant. That is where SEO, the Search Engine Optimisation, plays an essential role, as it helps in raising your website’s visibility. Tools like Ahrefs allows you to leave your SEO woes behind, and in turn, raise your website’s visibility. Having grown their ARR by over 65% within just two years, it goes without saying that Ahrefs is one of the most preferred SEO tools in the industry.
About the Founders
Dmitry Gerasimenko is a Ukrainian by birth, having been born in Nizhyn, but now lives in Singapore to manage Ahrefs. Dmitry’s father handed him a computer when he was six, and ever since, he has been fascinated by computing ad programming. After school, he went on to pursue a degree in computing from the Kyiv Polytechnic University. He relocated to Singapore in 2012 to grow and expand Ahrefs, after having fallen in love with the place when he visited Singapore during one of his visits to Asia.
He began his career as a C# and PHP developer for a website design studio in Kyiv. Following this, he freelanced for an American company before turning entrepreneur. Dmitry’s love for the search engine’s started in school wherein he built a documentation search engine and even started making money selling books until he lost the project due to server issues. This love led to launch a web crawler almost ten years after graduating from University.
Founding Ahrefs
When starting Ahrefs, Dmitry had no partners, and hence bore all the risks alone. He invested his savings in the company and hired freelancers when he could afford to do so. The first $400,000 went into product development and was the amount he had saved while working as a freelancer. As the company grew, he went from handling simple projects to more advanced ones and built a team along the way.
In 2010, he recruited Igor Pikovets, who was a friend from university. A year later, the duo launched a link-index paid service. The tool started as a small fish in an ocean of other such tools, and slowly built their way up to becoming one of the most used SEO building tools available on the market now. That company grew into Ahrefs, which now has over 300 billion pages in the index, and updates over 8 billion every day, averaging at 100,000 every second.
Ahrefs acquired its first customers via ads on SEO forums and focused on building a quality product. One of the primary reasons that led to this exponential growth is that they provide a product that triumphs all comparison tests. The SEO growth market is one that is overcrowded with a lot of players; hence, standing out isn’t always an easy task. This is precisely where the company has been able to do so well because they provide a superior offering that consumers find to be the best in the market.
The company markets its product as its most important marketing tool and uses its existing customers as their company’s vocal advocates. When Ahrefs was just developing, Dmitry spent all his time, improving the quality of the application and accumulating data. That was what he focused on because he felt he could do that better than anyone else and that later became the company’s backbone. All that data which was built up, grew as the company grew, and soon, Ahrefs started gaining a reputation for having the best SEO related data.
The downside of this concentrated effort was that the tool’s design and usability weren’t that great because they weren’t areas Dmitry focused on. With the customers they had gained because of their extensive data, Dmitry built a team of web developers who over the years bettered the UI of the engine, and fixed user issues, making Ahrefs an all-in-one package.
A Resounding Success
As the business grew, Dmitry took in more employees. Hence, a team that had less than six members grew to become a close-knit family of over 30 employees. Ahrefs has always had stringent hiring policies, and they hired only when it was absolutely necessary. This is one of the main reasons why Ahrefs does with 30, what most companies do with over a hundred employees!
For instance, most employees at Ahrefs wear more hat than one, with the CMO also being in charge of the blog. Having let go of the freelance bloggers who handled the Ahrefs blog, Tim Soulo took over the blog and in doing so gained more control over the marketing strategy of the company.
Another interesting point is that Ahrefs does not have a dedicated HR team for hiring new recruits. Everything from looking for new employees to finalising the paperwork is done by the core team itself, with the person in the driver’s seat change according to the position being filled. As Dmitry has a background in programming, handles the technical hiring side and was the one who recruited Ahrefs’ present CTO, Igor.
Such a dedicated team of employees who are well-versed in their respective fields has helped the company achieve a YoY growth rate of over 65% and an 8-figure revenue. Ahrefs current has over $50M ARR and employs more than 45 people, with the team having kept 50 people limit for the company. They are still growing over 60% a year with predictions putting them at $64 million by November 2019 and $102 million by September 2020.
When Soulo joined Ahrefs, their blog attracted 15,000 visitors a month, and now over 250,000 go through their website every month. They have 8 to 10 employees handling marketing, and market-related research, around 7 taking care of customer support and the rest of the employees working on web development.
Ahrefs now has plans to create a search engine of its own. Dmitry has announced that the engine will work on principles similar to that used by DuckDuckGo. This means that it will not engage in the collection and sharing of personal user data. The fact that DuckDuckGo recently hit over 1 billion monthly searches goes to show that there is potential in this market, and Ahrefs is trying to be one of the first few to harness that potential. Ahrefs search engine strategy will also enable it to share profits with publishers, helping to foster more innovation.
Being a cinephile with a love for all things outdoorsy, Athulya never misses a chance to chase inspiring stories or poke fun at things, even when the subject is herself. Currently pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering, she is someone innately interested in technical and scientific research. Music reviews and op-eds define her as they allow her to explore different perspectives. Though sometimes she thinks she makes more sense playing the guitar than she does while writing.