How Ahrefs Grew to $40m+ ARR by Ditching Conventional Marketing Wisdom with Tim Soulo

What do all 3 of these have in common?

“Always be split testing.”

“The money is in the email list.”

“Track every metric in your funnel.”

If you guessed that they’re best practices that every marketer has been told to follow, go ahead and pat yourself on the back.

Second question: do you have to do all these things to be successful with your marketing.

The answer to that one is a little less obvious.

While plenty of companies follow the conventional rules of marketing, some marketers are ditching what we’ve always been told to do in favor of forging their own paths.

One such example is my guest today on Demand Gen Chat: Tim Soulo.

Tim is the CMO and Product Advisor at Ahrefs, makers of tools to help you grow search traffic. I’ve been using Ahrefs for years and it’s basically the only tool I use for SEO.

Not only has Tim helped grow Ahrefs to over $40m ARR, they’ve done it with a 10 person marketing team and a total company headcount of less than 50 people. Nuts.

• Why Tim attributes a lot of his success at Ahrefs to handling customer service in the early days, and why if you want to join Ahref’s marketing team you first have to go through customer support before being promoted to marketing
• Why Ahrefs threw most conventional marketing metrics and best practices out the window, and the one metric they choose to focus on instead
• How Ahrefs took on well established brands in the SEO space like Moz and SEMRush and became one of the industry leaders

Sit back and take a listen here:

Connect with Tim here

Mentions from the episode:

• BloggerJet
• Dmitry Gerasimenko
• Whiteboard Friday
• Lost and Founder
• The Ahrefs Blog
• Podcast Advertising: $51,975 Spent. Here’s What We Learned.