EFP 180: Scaling ahrefs with Tim Soulo

We know that many of our customers are customers of ahrefs, particularly on the SEO side of things. In this episode, we talk with Tim Soulo from ahrefs about how he landed at the company and the details behind how they’ve scaled the business over the last few years.

We can relate to Tim’s challenges on the marketing side of things for a fast growing company and it was fascinating to hear his perspective on marketing a software product specifically.

If you operate a SaaS business or are just curious about what it is like to be responsible for scaling a 7, 8, or even 9 figure SaaS company, this is a great episode for you. Listen in as we cover some of ahrefs’ interesting thoughts and approaches to business we hope you find super valuable.

If you’re thinking of exiting your SaaS business, then downloads this SaaS checklist to see if your business is ready.

Check Out This Week’s Episode:

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Topics Discussed This Week:

• Starting With ahrefs
• Scaling ahrefs
• Long-Term Plans

Mentions:

• Tim Soulo @ ahrefs
• Listing # 45601 an Amazon Associates in the Technology Niche
• Blogger Jet
• Mixergy
• Upwork
• SEM Rush
• Inbound.org
• Moz
• AHRefs.com/tim
• Pat Flynn @ Smart Passive Income

Justin:

Welcome to the Empire Podcast episode 180. What’s it like to be responsible for scaling a seven, eight, or even nine figure SaaS company? Now that’s a question we still have to answer today with Tim Soulo from Ahrefs. We look at how he landed in the company and look at the details behind how they’ve scaled that business over the last few years. They’ve got some really interesting thoughts and approaches to business that I thought were super viable, and I hope you do, too. You’ll find the show notes for this one at empireflippers.com/ahrefs. Alright, let’s do this

Speaker 2:

Sick of listening to entrepreneurial advice from guys with day jobs? Want to hear about the real success and failures that come with building an online empire? You are not alone. From San Diego to Tokyo, New York to Bangkok, join thousands of entrepreneurs and investors who are prioritizing wealth and personal freedom over the oppression of an office cubicle. Check out the Empire Podcast. And now, your hosts, Justin and Joe.

Justin:

Alright Joe, which came first: the amazing marketing or the amazing product? I want to pose a question to you, buddy: if you had to choose, you get to build an amazing product with so-so marketing, or an amazing marketing team with so-so product, which is your preference?

Joe:

Probably amazing marketing, because it’s harder to fix.

Justin:

Amazing marketing. Yeah, yeah, amazing marketing is good.

Joe:

Because if I have amazing marketing, then I’m probably going to have the money to fix my product and make it more amazing.

Justin:

That’s funny. I’m not sure, man, I don’t know. I think you can have the money to hire marketers, I think not having a product is bad. If you don’t have a product market fit in particular, that’s bad. Anyway, it’s interesting, I get into that with Tim today on the call, and he makes the point that having an amazing product kind of is your marketing. And I think that’s just him downplaying himself a bit, and he’s a particularly good marketer, but there’s some truth to that. If you look at some of the amazing products and amazing SAS companies out there that have blown up, the marketing definitely helped, but it wasn’t the driver, it was more of them just looking for opportunities and trying to draw them out, right? But there was so much word of mouth in growing a business that was super helpful. It’s an interesting topic, though, that’s an interesting question, we actually talk about it on the podcast.

Justin:

One of the reasons I want to talk to Tim is, I think that his challenges on the marketing side of things for a fast-growing company kind of relates to ours, and so I want to dig into how he held the tiger by the tail, so to speak.

Joe:

Yeah, that is very interesting to hear. I’ve been a fan of theirs for a long time, on the list, getting all their messages, and I use their tool on a weekly basis at least to do research on sites, so, very interesting to hear this.

Justin:

Yeah, so is our team, right? We have an API, we’re Ahrefs fans, as are many of our customers. I’m also interested to hear his perspective on marketing of software products specifically. As we get closer and closer to launching what we’ve been working on for quite a while, we’re going to have some marketing challenges there, we’re going to have some marketing needs, and so hearing from him about their approach to marketing software I think was really helpful.

Joe:

Yeah. It’s curious you were reading that up, I was thinking about the same thing. I think in 2019, we’re going to see huge advances in the Empire for the first product and how we capture that, and what customers have to say about that.

Justin:

Yeah. So, before we get into this, I going to put this out there because it’s something we touched on in the interview, and I’ll ask you this, Joe. Do you think putting a cap on the number of your people in the company makes any sense? Like saying, “We’re going to 40 people, or 50 people, or 60 people, and no more.”

Joe:

Yeah, I don’t know if I would cap it that way. I think there are caps that should be in place, like revenue per person, a minimum revenue per person, something like that. Another stat that I like to look at, too, is gross profit per labor dollar spent, which is a very good service-based business statistic, and if you fall below a certain percentage, that’s usually considered to be about 30 percent, then you definitely need to look at either cutting people, increasing margins, or increasing profit. So if you put the cap just on people, you could make some of the wrong decisions there, so that’s the only thing I would disagree there.

Justin:

The metrics you mentioned I think are super important. So, obviously, the revenue per employee is super important, and then the gross profit per dollar hour worked, I totally agree with both of those, those are things that we look at really closely, super important for our business. I’m going to make his argument right now to you, though, is that there are some, we’re finding this, as you grow your team larger there’s some infrastructure stuff that’s forced on you, like, “Oh, well we just need HR support. We need some of these things that you don’t need with a smaller team.” I think their idea was, “Look, if we can keep it mean and lean, then we’re not going to require some of those infrastructure things that come with building a larger team.” But “mean and lean” is measurable. As you just said, gross per hour worked or gross profit per employee, that keeps you lean.

Joe:

Exactly.

Justin:

That’s a measure of your lean-ness, so to speak. Yeah, it’s interesting, but we definitely talk about that on the thing. The other thing I want to talk to him about is, many of our customers are Ahrefs’ customers, and I thought it’d be interesting to give him some background on their company, particularly of of our SEO-ers, all the people building our affiliate sites and the content-type sites, I thought that’d be great.

Justin:

Alright, man, before we get into the heart of this week’s episode, let’s do our featured listing of the week. What do you got for us, Joe?

Joe:

This week, we’re talking about listing #45601. It’s an Amazon Associates business in the technology niche, it’s making just over $14,000 net profit per month. We have it listed at 36x multiple, which brings it to a list price of $518,000. Now, this is a WordPress site with content guides related to computer parts and accessories, kind of one of those geeky sites that’s good for people to review different parts for their computer, gamers, that kind of thing, and see what’s the best out there. The owner’s not required to work many hours here, as he has VAs doing most of the work.

Justin:

One of the things I really like about this site is that it’s something I’d like to work on. It’d be a fun site to work on, it’s something where I kind of dig the products and the research would be fun, so if you’re looking for something that you can really sink your teeth into, I think there’s some value here. I’d also say that I know the seller on this one. I know that he builds quality sites, it’s nearly two years old, and the guy’s had some experience in building all different types of sites, so there’s some trust there, on my side anyway.

Joe:

Yeah. It’s had some great growth throughout 2018, but like you said, almost two years old right now, and it’s definitely hitting a great stride.

Justin:

Alright, man, let’s get into the heart of this week’s episode.

Speaker 2:

Now for the heart of this week’s episode.

Introducing Tim Soulo, Chief of Marketing at Ahrefs

Justin:

Hey Time, we’re really glad to have you on the Empire Flippers podcast, how are you doing, man?

Tim:

Hey, I’m doing great, and you should really leave the part where you messed up the beginning, it’s quite fun. Yeah. Thanks a lot for inviting me.

Justin:

[crosstalk 00:07:01] I will. People love that. They love that stuff. Really quick, you’re the chief marketing officer of Ahrefs.

Tim:

Yeah.

Justin:

For some of our audience that’s not as familiar, we’ve got plenty of people that do affiliate sites, and they’re kind of SEO peeps, for people that are more in the commerce side, or just not as into the SEO space, how would you describe what Ahrefs does?

What is Ahrefs?

Tim:

Yeah, so, basically, Ahrefs is a platform, is a set of online tools that is supposed to cover almost all if not all your SEO needs. So if someone is looking to get traffic from Google, traffic from search engines, we have a lot of great tools, a lot of great data to help you with that, so that’s kind of general view of what Ahrefs does.

Justin:

Yeah, and just to get a sense for our audience, too, we use Ahrefs for a couple of reasons. First reason, on the marketing side, we review any backlinks or mentions that we have, we look at our competitors, we look for opportunities of marketing for our content. And then we also use it in our vetting team. So when we’re reviewing backlinks for any business that’s going to be listed with us, or that we’re considering listing on the marketplace, we dig through the backlink profile using your tool as well. So it’s something that we find helpful both in vetting and in marketing.

Tim:

Awesome, you have a better page than I do. (laughs)

How Tim Got Started in Internet Marketing

Justin:

(laughs) Well, for our industry, for sure it’s helpful. It’s funny though, we talked about this a little bit before we got on, but I first found you back when you were at bloggerjet.com, I think it was a personal blog of yours, and you laid into this guy that came on the scene many years ago, he was calling himself “Copy Shaun” or “Shaun King” or something like that, and I was researching this guy at the same time because he was saying interesting things, but it just seemed like “copy/paste” stuff he’d heard on other blogs or podcasts, and it just wasn’t a real person, I couldn’t find a real person behind it. And you were just taking him to task, and I thought it was fantastic, and we connected about that. Do you remember that conversation we had, and us both up and coming back in the day.

Tim:

Yeah, for sure, I do remember this, and I do remember this “Copy Shaun” guy. Basically, my article made him delete his entire blog because I outed him so well for being a fake persona, and I think what caught my attention about him is artificial earning reports where he was saying he was making a ton of money, but I just couldn’t trace it and they even couldn’t trace his persona, so I wrote an entire article about it. And I do remember getting in touch with you guys, and at some point you even mentioned me on your podcast, which was I think six years ago, something, and you gave me props on this smart domain name bloggerjet.com that I’ve picked for my personal blog, and it was such a big deal for me at the time that I literally cut the part from your podcast and shared it around my social media for my friends to see.

Justin:

That’s so cool, man. It’s fun to come up, and now I’m seeing you at conferences, you’re speaking at conferences that we’re sponsoring, we get to hang out at the after-parties, so it’s kind of crazy how business turns. Let’s talk a bit about what your business looked like, your personal business when you had BloggerJet going. Now, you were working for other companies, but you were making some money on the side, just hustling, what were you doing back then to make money, and how were you getting along?

Tim:

Basically, for the majority of my career, I was working in marketing. I started as a junior marketing parson and then progressed into marketing manager and marketing director and whatever, and yeah. Usually I wasn’t super happy with the amount of responsibilities, the amount of flexibility that I had at my jobs, so I always wanted to work on my own ideas, on something that naturally exciting me. And that’s where BloggerJet, it actually started as a bet with my friend. So we had a bet, who can launch a brand new blog and generate more traffic in six months. So this is how I launched BloggerJet and started blogging, a personal blog about marketing, which is a way a lot of people start in our industry, they just started a personal blog about marketing. Even when they don’t have a lot of knowledge about marketing, they would launch a blog, and share their learnings along the way. Which I think is actually not too bad of a strategy, but it’s really hard to get traction, and I really struggled to generate traffic with a blog.

Tim:

So yeah, it was a nice testing platform. And later, when I was figuring out ways to make money on the site, I was doing some freelance work, some freelance writing, some consulting, and eventually I decided that I wanted to have some kind of product, and actually what motivated me to start building and selling my own workplace plugins is actually I was listening to a podcast, Mixergy, I don’t think it was even called “podcast” back then, it was just “Mixergy Interviews”.

Justin:

Yeah, yeah.

Creating Plugins to Solve a Problem

Tim:

Yeah. And some guy was sharing his story of how he built a business building plugins for WordPress, and I thought that I was just in a good position because I was an active blogger, I already had a few blogger friends, so I understood the needs, I understood the industry, and I had a couple of ideas of things that I didn’t see any existing solutions where doing, covering, so I found a developer at Upwork, kind of classic, like everyone does, and started building these plugins, started creating landing pages for them, try to generate some traffic, try to sell it. It was a super awesome learning experience, and the only thing I regret is that I didn’t start to do this earlier, didn’t start to create my own projects and make my own money on the side earlier, because it’s such an awesome learning experience.

Justin:

It’s interesting, one of the apprentices we hired, I’m going to go back to the first thing you said, which is, one of the apprentices we hired had a blog, and it was on person development, but that blog helped him reach out to a bunch of other people that were doing interesting things, and it was kind of his calling card on the Internet. And I think that’s how a bunch of us started out, was we had a blog that kind of established who we were, and we talked about our trials and tribulations, and failures and successes, and that was kind of the thing at the time and it resonated, but it did help him get a job with us. I’m sure that your blog helped open doors that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. So, just to paint the picture, you had your personal blog going, you were doing some contract work and some work for other people, but you said, “Well, that’s not really for me, I don’t love that, I want to make some money on the side.” So you started doing plugins, and you figured out, “I can hire from [inaudible 00:13:20], Upwork now”, but you started hiring people to do the development. You weren’t a developer yourself, right?

Tim:

Yeah, I have almost zero experience in web development. I know some basic HTML, but that’s about it.

Justin:

Were you able to use your blog to leverage the growth of the plugins? Meaning, would you talk about the plugins on the blog, say, “Hey I’ve got this going on, I’m testing it out, do you guys want to try it out, give me some feedback?”

Tim:

Yeah. They know that I would be using it in a “give me some feedback” way, but I was using, this also aligns with what I do at Ahrefs today, these days, but I guess we’ll get to it. But, basically I was scratching my own itch, as they say. I was creating plugins that I needed myself, because back then, Twitter was gaining traction, and everyone was talking about Twitter marketing and such, and so I thought that it was a smart idea to create tweetable quotes, and back then I didn’t know that someone somewhere launched clicktotweet.com website where you could create tweetable quotes, so I thought my idea was original. And I wanted badly to put tweetable quotes in my articles and motivate people to click these quotes so that they would share my articles in the process, because we are tweeting a quote, they would include a link to my article, and bring people back to my website.

Tim:

So I created this plugin and actually my blog was a testing ground in the first place. I tested the plugin myself and of course I rolled my case, that is how I was able to generate more tweets with my plugin and blah blah blah. And then the other plugin that I created was about content upgrades. This is when you write an article and then you want to have some extra value within that article, but you hide it behind the email forum, so people will have to give you their email address to get that extra content from your article. And this converts super well. I’ve seen cases where articles would convert 60 percent of visitors into email subscribers, which is crazy. So I launched, and back at…

Justin:

I hated that, though, Tim. I would notice, they call them “gates” or “content gates”, whatever, I absolutely hated them. I fell for it a few times when I just couldn’t help myself, but as a user, I was not a fan. They work, but I was not a user fan at all.

Tim:

Yeah, I agree, but at a certain point where it was brand new, when it wasn’t everywhere. Marketers of course ruin everything, but once a new strategy pops, it works incredibly well, so it makes sense to bank on it a little bit. But yeah, eventually I abandoned both ideas because they worked incredible well at the start, but then their effectiveness started to fade and I refocused my efforts on different things.

Justin:

We’re going to skip ahead. I want to get into how you got connected with Ahrefs, but before we do that, Greg, our content manager, was having a chat with you, and he was telling me how you sold a plugin because you wanted to invest in this really amazing investible asset, not really. You wanted to buy a watch, so you were selling a plugin to buy a watch. What’s the deal with that?

Tim:

Yeah, so, like many human beings, I like shiny things. But because I am a reasonable human being, I find it super hard to justify spending on these shiny things. So I wanted to have a nice watch, but I just couldn’t take my hard-earned money and buy this thing that I basically don’t really need. So then, as I was working at Ahrefs for two years already, and things were going fine, I didn’t have time to work, and, not even time, I didn’t even have motivation or willingness to work on any side projects. I was perfectly, and I am perfectly happy with Ahrefs.

Tim:

So these plugins, my projects, they were fading for all these two years that I didn’t put any time into them, and I had two choices. Either to wait until they fade to nothing so that I would just have to remove them at all, because WordPress updates and you have to update them as well so that they will be fresh and all these things. Or I would sell it, and I decided that, if I will be able to sell it for a nice sum of money, I think I sold them around five grand, I would invest all the money that I will get from those dying projects into a watch. So basically, I ended up selling those plugins to a guy, I don’t think he’s actually working on them actively, probably because we discussed the whole idea of tweetable quotes and content upgrades, it’s not as hot today as it used to be.

Tim:

But still, yeah, I sold it to the guy, and then, maybe even the next day, I don’t actually remember, but I went to a store and bought myself a Breitling.

Justin:

A Breitling, yeah, I was going to ask. I just recently got into watches myself, so I’m always looking for new watches. So Breitlings are nice, man. Good choice.

Tim:

(laughs) Thanks.

Getting Hired by Ahrefs

Justin:

So let’s back up a bit, because that while you were already with Ahrefs. How did your connection to Ahrefs happen? What was the spark there?

Tim:

So, I always thought that it happened one way, but actually, just recently, I found out that it happened differently. So, I always thought…

Justin:

It’s funny how our memory plays tricks on us like that, right? I’m absolutely certain that it was laid out this way and this is what happened, and then you repeat it on a few podcasts, and it becomes fact in your head. And then someone’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, it’s a little different than that.” It’s great.

Tim:

No, actually, I think I misunderstood it from the start, because I remember that when I was actively working on my personal blog, and on my plugins, and all that stuff, I was obviously doing a lot of outreach because I needed links, I needed to lend guest articles, to lend mentions and stuff, and so I reached out to Ahrefs. I was in the SEO industry for quite a while, so I knew all the big players, Moz, Ahrefs, SEM Rush, et cetera, et cetera, but I knew that Ahrefs was founded by a Ukrainian guy, and I am from Ukraine as you can probably hear by my accent. So I used that classic, sleazy trick, I reached out to Ahrefs and said, “Guys, I know you’re a Ukrainian company, or Ukrainian-founded company, and I’m also a Ukrainian guy, I’m doing marketing, I’m doing my own projects, blah blah blah.” And what I wanted is, I wanted to appear in their link roundup posts.

Tim:

So back then they were publishing weekly links roundups, and a listing, like, best articles from the internet marketing space, from SEO space. So I wanted to get into that roundup, and I always thought, and this is what I was telling on different podcasts, that I got a reply from Ahrefs’ CEO and founder, Dmitry, who asked me to write an article for them to promote their tool, their newly-released tool. So this is how I thought I landed a job at Ahrefs. But actually, Dmitry, after I shared this story another time on another podcast, Dmitry listened to it and said that this is not how he found me. He said that he actually saw a threat on inbound.org, that was a community site, I don’t think it is still live today, they rebranded it into something. So he actually saw a thread where I was communicating with someone he already knew, I think it was [inaudible 00:20:20], this is another person from Ukraine who is now quite famous person in the SEO space.

Tim:

So he was reading a thread, and he saw that I was talking to her and saying that classic sleazy thing, that I’m a Ukrainian, and she’s Ukrainian, and I’m so proud to see that Ukrainians are kind of trudging their way into the SEO and marketing space. And so he started researching me, he found my blog, he found my WordPress plugins, he found that I wrote a couple of posts for Moz blog and one of my posts actually became top article of 2010 in three nominations out of four, something like this. So yeah, I got a ton of traction with my Moz article. And then, he didn’t know that I reached out to them to appear in the link roundup, and then he reached out to me and asked if I’m interested to do some freelance writing for Ahrefs. So this is actually Dmitry found me, it wasn’t me who landed a job for myself.

Justin:

So he found you, you didn’t find him, you kind of remembered it wrong. That’s funny. I’ve gotta ask you because you mentioned it twice. You felt like it was a little sleazy to use the, “Hey, I’m Ukrainian, you’re Ukrainian, wink wink.” I hear that, though, and I’m like, that doesn’t sound sleazy at all. In fact, if you got a connection with someone, like I was in the military back in the day, and someone reached out to me and they’re like, “Hey, I was in the military,” or “I’m just getting out,” or whatever, and I’m fine with them using something like that. It’s like, “Oh, we have a connection,” I mean, not directly, but we have a shared history that I think is interesting. Why do you feel bad about that?

Tim:

I don’t know. Probably because I understand how it works, because just recently I was reading a book, I don’t remember the name, with a list of cognitive biases, and it was actually explaining how, like, if you live in New York, fellow New Yorkers don’t mean anything to you, but if you go to, I don’t know, San Francisco and you meet a person and the person is from New York, you suddenly feel that connection.

Justin:

Yeah.

Tim:

Which is clearly a cognitive bias, it doesn’t mean anything. So probably this is why I am mentioning that this is a sleazy tactic, because I kind of know how it works.

Justin:

So you’re careful with it. You’re just like, “Look, I know the deal, I know how that works.” Well, it’s funny you mention that, it’s definitely true as expats in foreign countries.

Tim:

Yeah.

Justin:

It’s absolutely true. You run into a Ukrainian, you’re in Singapore right now, you run into a Ukrainian there, which is a somewhat odd place to meet up with another Ukrainian, just on the bus or whatever, in a bar, and you immediately have shared history, similar background, and you have some kind of connection and that’s overplaying that connection, right?

Tim:

Yeah.

Setting Up Ahrefs in Singapore

Justin:

Yeah, interesting. So, you’re in Singapore now, Ahrefs has an office there, Dmitry’s there, and you’re there as well. Why Singapore? I mean, there are plenty of places you guys could be, where costs are lower, why Singapore? It’s not the cheapest place [inaudible 00:23:09] stationed at all.

Tim:

Well, this is actually a good question to Dmitry because he’s the founder and he’s the person who is making all these decisions, and I only joined Ahrefs when Ahrefs was already in Singapore. But as far as I remember, if my memory is not failing me again like with that story, I think Dmitry initially wanted to establish a business in the U.S., but I think he had some problems with the paperwork or whatever, so he then turned to Asia and he was picking between Hong Kong and Singapore because of the climate, because of the ease of registering business and running a business. And eventually he settled with Singapore because, generally, as far as I know, Dmitry is a fan of big cities, so he seems to like Singapore more than San Francisco just because it’s a big city that everything is close and stuff like that.

Justin:

Gotcha, so just preference, he likes big city, he was looking at Hong Kong or Singapore. I’ve gotta tell you, I think Hong Kong, I love Hong Kong, and I’m not such a fan of Singapore. Wasn’t my choice, but I get it. So it’s based on his preference and where he wanted to be. Let’s talk about the company structure a bit. Is it a Singapore company, is it an LLC, is it a corporation? I know that you guys don’t have any investors, Dmitry is the founder and owns the whole boat.

Tim:

Yeah.

Justin:

Was there a reason that you guys set up in Singapore, and if so, was it to eventually raise money? What was the plan there?

Tim:

As far as I know, Dmitry is not planning to raise money because we’re doing okay, we have only less than fifty people on our team, and so the expenses on the team are not that big. We also have big server expenses, but still I think we’re profitable with a nice margin, so Dmitry doesn’t see at all why would we need investment. Like, where would we spend all that money if someone would invest in us? And in terms of the company structure, I don’t really know because it was Dmitry who established it here. All I know is that, after Ahrefs, here in official documents we write, “Pte. Ltd.” So that’s it.

The Team at Ahrefs

Justin:

Gotcha. A bit about the company in terms of employees and the team you’ve brought on. They benefit, I don’t want to get into specifics and what you all make, what everything, that’s rude and not needed, but I know that their pay adjusts based on how successful the company is going, so that’s something you guys have had in place for a while, right?

Tim:

Yeah. Generally, I think Dmitry is pretty much eager to pay above the average to everyone because the company is doing well and he doesn’t see why not, especially if a person is doing a good job. And yeah, as the company grows, and as people grow with the company, which is really important because Dmitry also wants every person on our team to grow and to be able to produce better and smarter work. Yeah, he’s happy to raise salaries so it doesn’t feel bad at all to work at Ahrefs because I think everyone is happy with how they’re getting reimbursed for their work.

Justin:

Well let me ask you about working at Ahrefs. It’s pretty easy today to work at the company and go, “Yeah, I’d like to be in Tim’s spot, he’s the CMO at a growing company that’s profitable and has a bunch of customers, it’s well known in the industry, sure, give me that job.” But that wasn’t the case when you first came on. Back in 2015, you were going from, you did some contract work, you had jobs previously, and then you started doing your own plugins and were starting to figure it out. You were I think on a path to where you would have been an entrepreneur and had your own thing going, so why give that up, why get off the path to go work for someone else?

Tim:

Yeah, that’s a good question, and it brings us to the dilemma, super famous dilemma of, “Should I leave my nine-to-five job or start a business?” Well, my thinking is that nine-to-five job can actually be awesome. And why I stopped working on my projects and came to Ahrefs? Because, first of all, I felt that I have a kind of connection with the company, so I started working with Ahrefs remotely and it all started from simply writing some articles. But then I started to dig into the actual website and the actual tools and discussed with Dmitry things that I think could be improved, and in many cases he agreed with me.

Tim:

So what I eventually understood is that Dmitry is a great business person, he’s a great technical person, he’s a great visionary, but in terms of where his specific-use cases of how, like, SEO professionals and marketers are actually using Ahrefs, he’s not so good because you have so many hours in the day and you cannot know everything. And I was the kind of person, I was interested to talk to people, to figure out how they do their marketing, to figure out how they do their SEO, and figure out those little features, those little directions that we could take with Ahrefs, that we could build with Ahrefs and pitch them to Dmitry. And actually it felt to me super satisfying that I can go tap into the market, research it, understand what people are looking for, then pitch my idea to Dmitry, he will approve it and the team will create it. So I kind of feel that there’s part of me in Ahrefs because I suggest things and they’re being built.

Justin:

You’ve kind of become like a “Dmitry whisperer”, I’ll say, where he builds a really cool product, it’s really good technically, and good at running a company, but not so great understanding how the end users use or need the tool, and so you kind of translate that from him to them and from them to him in terms of helping to make the tool better, so you’ve kind of become a part of Ahrefs over time. That wasn’t the case earlier on, though, you’d mentioned this separately, that this was a side project he was working on, and he actually wanted to scale up some other business. What was the turning point that made this from being a side project Dmitry wasn’t that interested in to making it something he was devoting a lot of time to and really focusing on?

Tim:

No, I don’t think it was a side project for Dmitry as far as I remember, and I recently talked to him again about this situation. When it came to Singapore, Dmitry thought that Ahrefs was approaching its maximum, because, like I said, Dmitry is good with technology, but he doesn’t have a grip on what people are actually doing with it. And when I came and started digging into customer personas and all that stuff and discussing with Dmitry all the ways where Dmitry could actually offer some other things on top of my findings, so I cannot say that I’m the only person suggesting features here, especially now that our company is… back when I came there were only sixteen people, so it was easy for me to be almost the only source of inspiration for Dmitry, but these days we hired quite a few awesome people who also contribute.

Justin:

So he didn’t think it was a side project, but he did think he was kind of “maxed out” in terms of the number of customers that would use it. He felt like it had kind of reached it’s maximum. That’s actually, I think, really interesting to our listeners, too, because some people sell their businesses on our platform, and they think it’s kind of capped out as well, so it’s gotten as big as it can get, so they’re looking to sell the project. This is, I think, a great, interesting case where he could have done that and really missed quite an opportunity, because, from your perspective, you’re able to step in and work with him and, in not too long a period of time, he started realizing, acknowledging a customer base and a user base that was much wider than you guys originally thought, right?

Tim:

Yeah, well, the only thing is that I don’t actually think Dmitry was ever willing to sell Ahrefs at this point, at the point where I came.

Justin:

Sure, no, but lots of other people might have been willing to do that.

Tim:

Yeah.

Justin:

And they would have been, I think, selling themselves short. So what I’m trying to figure out is, how did you find that there was a larger user base that you could really continue to grow? What made you change your mind between being capped out and thinking, “That’s all the customers we’re going to get,” to saying, “Oh, there’s a whole new market of customers we can go after.”?

Developing Ahrefs Further

Tim:

Well I think it’s a better question to Dmitry, what was his thinking at that point? But what I remember is that Dmitry is a person who always wants this new challenge, and so he didn’t see a challenge for himself in Ahrefs at the state that it was back then, so he thought that he had created, like, he has fixed all the most challenging issues, and he was looking to build to the next big project. But then when I came and I started digging into all those smaller-use cases and better understanding how our customers and our niche and talking these things with Dmitry, he kind of understood many ways where Ahrefs can grow and how to find these next challenges for him.

Tim:

So I think, in terms of people who are thinking that their business is maxed out, it makes sense to bring another perspective because I am very different with Dmitry. He is like a super technical, super business-oriented guy, and I’m mostly doing podcasts and talking to people, and I cannot even say that I am super extroverted, I’m still introverted but much more extroverted than Dmitry, so we kind of have different personalities. And just by bringing different things to the table, Dmitry was able to figure out what to do next.

Justin:

That’s interesting. I think, at least I’ve seen or identified something interesting here, that solo founders probably have a harder time of knowing what they don’t know, or seeing something that’s outside of their perspective and their focus look at the business. And so, if you’re a solo founder, yes, bringing a second party in, maybe a consultant or whoever that is, makes sense. It’s easier, I think, if you’ve got another co-founder or two for you all to have different perspectives, and maybe easier to see that, where it’s harder as a solo founder of a business.

Tim:

I don’t think it’s actually about the co-founder. I think it’s mostly about respecting the people who you work with and listening to these people because, like I said, I was kind of the major source of Dmitry’s inspiration back when there were only like sixteen people in our company, but now, as we scale to 45, there are quite a few people in our support department, in our UX, UI department, in our development department, who actually bring different ideas to Dmitry, and all he has to do is listen and see how these ideas align with his vision.

Justin:

You mentioned one of the reasons you really like working for Ahrefs and the reason you feel it was a smart move and a good decision to work with him is that he actually listened to you, and you felt like some of your previous bosses didn’t feel that way. And I think a lot of our listeners may have been in that boat, where their previous employers didn’t listen to them on suggestions, and I know that you really appreciate that. So my question for you is, for the employees that have come on after you, what are you doing to give back? How do you make sure that your employees are heard from and that their ideas are heard, as you grow the company?

Tim:

Well, this is quite a challenging question, and again comes back to the human psychology, because, again, there’s another thing in our psychology that people want to be right all the time. So whenever you have an argument with someone, even when you kind of subconsciously understand that you’re wrong, you still cannot leave with the thought, and you will still push on your opinion. So I think the culture that we try to cultivate within our company is that we try to be as objective as possible, so whenever I go into an argument with someone, be it Dmitry or someone from our UX team, or someone from our support, I always try to put myself in their shoes and I’m always trying to imply that I could actually be wrong, so we try to stay open-minded.

Tim:

And this helps as well because a lot of the time, what I’ve seen in my experience working in different companies, if you’re a boss, you won’t really listen to anyone. So you only listen to yourself and you’re the only person who is correct. This is not the case in our company, at least, I don’t see this happening. Anyone can be right, and everyone can agree that someone else is right and they’re wrong, and I think this is super healthy, and this is what helps us create cool things.

Justin:

Yeah, it’s interesting. On a side note, Joe and I were just having a debate, an argument about something going on in our business. We were trying to find out where the issue was, and I was convinced that it’s his sacred cow, it was his area, his baby, and he’s convinced it’s mine. So I was like, well, that’s a difficult impasse, because I don’t know if we’re just protecting something because it’s our baby. So what I was thinking is, is I’m going to have him beat up my baby, and I’m going to beat up his, because there’s no ego in this. Ultimately, I don’t care. I want to objectively find issues, fix them, you know what I mean? So my thought was to have him dig into my baby, so to speak, and I’ll dig into his so that we can come at it even more objectively than we would on our own, does that make sense?

Tim:

Yeah, of course. Yeah. It’s good that you guys understand it because a lot of people just, I don’t know, act like basic animals and don’t think about those things.

The Competitors of Ahrefs

Justin:

(laughs) That’s probably true. Let’s talk about competitors a little bit. I heard you say some interesting things about your competitors, one of these being, one of the best ways you compete is by having a super-solid product, right? And of course, one of the best things you can do for marketing is having a solid product that people like and talk about and share. One of the things you mentioned, and we’ll talk about why this is fascinating to me, but that you kind of piggyback off of one of your competitors, like SEM Rush for example, because they’re spending a lot of money in expanding people’s knowledge and understanding of how SEO works and how their tool works, but that you’re getting benefit from that. Talk to me a little about that

Tim:

(laughs) Yeah, so, we usually have a ton of discussions on whole topics within our marketing department and with Dmitry, and in those three years that I’ve been with Ahrefs, I saw a trend that companies like SEM Rush and Moz, they invest a ton of money into marketing while, back when I came to Ahrefs, I was the only marketing person and I didn’t even have any budget, not because Dmitry wasn’t willing to give me budget for marketing but because I genuinely didn’t know where to spend that money, I needed to try some things.

Tim:

Yeah, so what I noticed is that, for example, if we take SEM Rush, they sponsor a ton of different conferences, they organize a ton of meetups, they create a ton of events, webinars, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. They do a ton of work and it costs them a lot. In our case, in the case of Ahrefs, we don’t cast the net that wide because we don’t want to hire that many people to help us organize and sponsor all these events, to host all these webinars, et cetera et cetera et cetera, and we don’t want to throw this much money into these kind of things, especially because we feel that these marketing activities, they are kind of, what do you call, top of the funnel, where you would educate people who are probably into digital marketing but they are not so much into SEO or, let’s say, technical SEO, or backlinks specifically.

Tim:

So they would cast this wide net, and they would bring people from all areas of digital marketing onto using the kind of tool they have and onto thinking about the kind of strategies, the kind of use cases that their tool can serve. And what we do, in our case, so our best strategy, if we don’t want to compete with them there, we just try to create the superior product, because in our days, everyone is super connected, and whenever you find something awesome, be it a beard trimmer or, I don’t know, diaper for your baby, you will naturally talk about it. So, yeah.

Justin:

It’s interesting to me because we’re kind of in your competitor’s position where we view growing the market as being a smart move, but that’s because we have enough of the market share to where it makes sense. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t, though. So if we felt like it was growing our competitors faster or more than it was growing our business, we would likely cut back on some of that top-of-funnel, focus on bottom-of-funnel stuff, so it’s interesting that you make that point. When you own a bigger slice of the pie, growing the entire market, growing the pie might make sense. When you own a smaller sliver, spending that money might not make as much sense. You have to judge that.

Justin:

And, from the other side, if you’re competing with a big player, try to draft off of their marketing spend, right? So find a way to kind of get in the wedge and ride it. While they’re spending a bunch of money and a bunch of effort, find a way to take advantage of that.

Tim:

Yeah, exactly, and I don’t think I said that they’re doing anything wrong. I just said that they’re doing it. This is the first point and the second point is that, I never said that even right with my assumption, so this is what I feel is happening. I feel that they’re actually growing the market, they’re educating it, they host so many events, so many webinars, bring so many people on board, do also cross-country marketing, they market in different cultures, in different languages which we don’t do.

Tim:

And we only focus on our product, and I’m advocating this thing called comparison test, because, like I said, everyone is interconnected, and whenever you are presented with options, it’s so easy to just try them and pick whichever you like best, so we focus on winning that comparison test and we know that if we will do, we will kind of, like you said, draft behind them. They will educate and enlarge the market, and we will get our share of that market just because being, let’s not even say superior because it might kind of sound arrogant. Let’s just say we have an awesome tool. So you might even be complimentary to them because we have so many unique things that they don’t have, and they have some unique things that we don’t have, so we can even be complimentary to them and still draft, and still leverage the marketing that they’re doing towards our own product.

How the Price of Ahrefs Has Changed

Justin:

Yeah, there’s some other advantages, too, where you can run a tighter ship and that you can likely have better margins because you don’t have to do the top-of-funnel things that they’re doing, which is, hey, that’s a smart move. I want to ask you about something. You guys did this, and I saw this and I was like, “Why did you do that?”, but you, I was reading a Reddit thread where you did an AMA and you were asking for feedback, and someone popped in and said, “Look, you should be charging me $49 a month and then you bumped it to $79 a month. Why did you go to old customers and charge them more? Why didn’t you just charge new customers more?”

Justin:

And I’ve got to tell you, I was a part of a service where I was paying a monthly fee, and they came back to me and started bumping it and changing what they, they offered me less value for more money, and they didn’t come and say, “Look, it’s not profitable for me,” they didn’t give me any reasoning, they just changed it to me. And I used to be a big proponent of what they were doing, and I would talk about it a lot, and I just stopped because I was like, “You know what, that’s kind of a crappy thing to do, and I don’t want that to be done to other customers.” So I’m wondering, did that hurt you guys at all, in terms of bumping your price to old customers that are already on the platform?

Tim:

Okay, so first of all, the key thing that you said there is that they were offering you less value for more money. So this is the key, and of course you can never do that to your customers. This is obvious as, I don’t know, as some… Yeah, so, I don’t remember that we would kind of explicitly raise prices to our old customers. Usually this happens when someone is on a grandfathered account, and then they would cancel and then, in a month or two, they will realize that they need Ahrefs back, and they will come to us and ask us for the same price that they were getting.

Justin:

[crosstalk 00:42:34] Oh, that’s different, yeah, no.

Tim:

Yeah, that’s usually the case.

Justin:

That’s fine, yeah.

Tim:

And probably we might have raised prices, but we always raise them for new customers. Yeah, we always try to grandfather old customers, but then again, in terms of less value for more money, Ahrefs is constantly developing. We’re adding more tools all the time. It’s not that we have the same old tool, the same old data, and we just want to charge more for it. No, we’re adding more and more features, and the price usually stays the same. I don’t think we’ve changed our pricing in the past two years.

Tim:

And if you read any articles and if you go to any conferences about SaaS pricing, one of the best advice they give in terms of growing your annual recurring revenue is to raise prices. I’ve seen articles that say that you should be revising your prices like once or twice per year, and we didn’t change our pricing in two years, so I think we’re actually missing out that we’re not doing this, because I see that in two years we’ve added so much amazing stuff. For example, we’re about to add into our keyword tool, YouTube data, so people will be able to research what people are searching for on YouTube. And I think there’s no other source for it but clickstream data, which we will buy for a lot of money and which we will provide to customers, and it will come at no extra cost.

Justin:

Yeah, that’s interesting, I heard you talk about that in Chiang Mai at the SEO Conference, I thought that was really interesting. So, yeah, people leave and come back and they don’t get that grandfather pricing, I totally get it. In fact, if you come out and you have the same tool and you’re offering new features, and you want to offer opportunity for people to pay more, they can keep what they currently have, or they get to pay more and they get this new feature tool, I’d be fine with that, that seems perfectly reasonable, as a consumer, it seems perfectly reasonable. Not cool to come back and say, “Oh I need more money from my old customers because whatever, we want to invest in this or whatever,” that just seems, yeah, it left a bad taste in my mouth. It wasn’t you guys, it was some other company, but I want to talk about something else. You, we talked about this privately, I want to make sure it’s okay to talk about, but you guys have set a goal or a limit, basically, on the company at only being 50 people.

Tim:

Yeah.

Maintaining the Team

Justin:

I know what Dmitry said, “Look, I want to keep it at 50 people,” and have you felt any pressure to go above 50? Do you think that will ever change, and what’s the reasoning behind that?

Tim:

I don’t know. This is Dmitry’s vision. He, as a leader, he likes to keep the team super small and super efficient because he likes to be in everything, so he participates in pretty much everything in the company, so sometimes, even when we publish an article on Ahrefs’ blog, Dmitry would ping us on Slack and say that he doesn’t quite agree with something we said there, so we have to fix the issue within our article. And I think that, again, this is a question to Dmitry, but my thinking is that Dmitry wants to work with a smaller company because, as the company gets bigger, each person can do less work and get away with it.

Tim:

So Dmitry wants to work with professionals who are good at their work, who love their work, and he wants to actually see if everyone in the company is aligned, if everyone is happy, if everyone is doing a great job. And again, when the ship is small, you can turn it in any direction super fast, but if your ship is super big, you start having all those meetings, all those endless confirmations of any little thing you want to change. This is not the case for us at all, so whenever we see some interesting feature that we could build, we discuss it within, I don’t know, fifteen minutes, and sometimes we can launch it pretty much the next day, just because the company is so small and the communication is so easy.

Justin:

Yeah, that’s the thing, as you get bigger, there’s more bureaucracy that kicks in, there’s people that are kind of just doing their job, right? And just, there’s more of that.

Tim:

Yeah, and I am so happy that Dmitry is not like that, I am so happy that Dmitry is not building that bureaucratic company that, it still feels like a startup here, it still feels like…

Justin:

Well those companies are boring. I don’t want to hear a word from one man, but they get kind of boring, right? It’s not as exciting.

Tim:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree.

Justin:

I want to be conscious of your time, and I know we’re coming up toward the end, but I want to talk a little bit about long-term plans. How do you guys do goal-setting? One of the things we do is we set a “long-term vision”, and I’m doing air quotes here, but “long-term vision” for us is, like, three to five years, and we say, “This is where we want to be.” We work backwards, we set an annual goal, and then we set quarterly goals to hit that annual goal. Do you guys do anything like that, do you have any kind of long-term strategy meetings or vision for the company that you guys try to stick to?

Tim:

To be honest, I don’t think that we have it explicitly written somewhere. The vision and the goals are mostly in Dmitry’s head, and he just talks… Because we’re so small, he doesn’t have to send company-wide emails, like, “Dear employees, this year our goal is blah blah blah.” He just, Dmitry is basically having lunch with pretty much everyone in the company at some point, so sometimes he has lunch with the developer team, sometimes he has lunch with marketers, sometimes he has lunch with support people, so he actually talks with everyone and he aligns everyone just by talking.

Tim:

So we don’t really have these kinds of goals, but what I can say is that Ahrefs is super technology-driven because, like I said, Dmitry has his background in technology, he’s a web developer himself, and he has a ton of understanding of all these servers, backend, and stuff. So I think a lot of his vision actually relies on technology and what technology can do, so he is super enthusiastic about using whatever the latest technology is available. So I think that influences our vision a lot.

Justin:

What metrics do you guys track, do you see as important as for the business, like lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, versus metrics that you maybe surprisingly think aren’t as important?

Tim:

Yeah, so the only metrics we think are important are the very, very, very bottom line metrics, which are MRR, ARR, number of customers, and that’s pretty much… And the trend, how it goes over time. So if we see that month-over-month growth is not as good as, like, in the past three months, then probably we did something wrong and we need to push a little bit more. Or when we see that, during some month, we had more growth than average, then it means we released some good thing or we were able to retain our customers better. So yeah, we are always looking at the money because, basically, people vote with their money for our software, and if we see that things are going well, people are staying with us, people are paying for our tools, then we’re doing things right. If we see that this is declining, then we’re doing something wrong.

What Metrics Do You Track?

Justin:

On a secondary note, on the marketing side, do you guys look at anything that’s away from the company metrics? Do you look at, like, conversion rates, or anything like that, or is it just strictly focused on the overall company goals?

Tim:

No, no, no, we just look at company goals metrics. Again, we’re small and pretty much everyone knows how many customers we have, how many new leads we’re onboarding per week, because we use intercom, and intercom basically sends everyone weekly emails how any new leads we have onboarded. So everyone knows more or less the general numbers, and we don’t try to… We tried setting up cohorts, striking our conversion funnel and all that stuff, but there was another funny story where we tried to set up the same conversion funnel from people visiting our homepage, clicking the trial button, registering, blah blah blah, and up to becoming a customer. We used three different tools to set up the same funnel and we fed the same data to all those three tools, that was Kissmetrics, Woopra, and I don’t remember which was the third one, but the fun thing is that funnels show different numbers, different percentages in those three tools. So if the percentages are already off by, I don’t know, two, three percent between the tools, why does it make sense to increase your conversion by three percent if that’s already the different between different tools?

Justin:

Yeah. That’s super interesting. And we’ve run into some problems with determining, like, what weights to give, where these customers came from, and it hurts our marketing efforts, and it comes back to a lot of marketing decisions in terms of where you should be and who we should be talking to on podcasts, and what you should be doing is kind of based on gut though, right? I mean, there’s a lot of it, Tim, where you’re like, “Look, I’ve gotta sense that they have a good show, and I want to be on their show because it’s a good, it’s a quality show.” You know what I mean, like that?

Tim:

Exactly. Yeah.

Justin:

There’s a lot of that.

Tim:

Yeah. I’m not going to drive the performance of this podcast.

Justin:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. You’re not going to see, “Oh, how many customers clicked over that?”

Tim:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, if it was an hour of my time, oh my god.

What’s the End Goal for Ahrefs?

Justin:

Any idea, as kind like of a wrap up, any kind of end goal for Ahrefs, is that kind of discussed in the company? Is it an exit, or would you guys eventually be looking to acquire competitors, any plan there? Any ideas?

Tim:

I actually cannot say because the ecosystem, the world changes so fast. New stuff is getting released, even our industry changes, so I don’t think Dmitry is looking sell his company and maybe IPO in a few years, I don’t know. I don’t even know. We don’t really discuss this because we mostly focus on growing the company and so far it’s going well.

Justin:

Gotcha. Alright Tim, well, thanks so much, man. I’m conscious of your time, I know you’ve got to go. Where can people find out where you’re at, hang out with you, check out Ahrefs?

Tim:

Yeah, just, if people want to learn a little bit more about me, read some of my articles, or see some of my upcoming conferences, they can just go to ahrefs.com/tim. This is a page where I collected some of my best work, some of my best articles, and also my social media channels, so if anyone wants to get in touch or, like, follow me on Twitter, see what I tweet there, they can use ahrefs.com/tim to see some information about me.

Justin:

Cool man, I will link those up. Thanks so much for coming on the show, man.Ahrefs

Tim:

Thanks a lot for inviting me.

Empire Flippers Round Up

Speaker 2:

You’ve been listening to the Empire Podcast. Now some news and updates.

Justin:

Alright Joe, time for some news and updates. First up, Q4 was looking a bit rough, man. We were in November, and it wasn’t shaping out so well, but our team really pulled it out with some catch-up in December, and caught us up to where we have a reasonable Q4, do you think?

Joe:

Yeah, no, I was looking at the numbers before this, I think we’ve done quite well for ourselves considering where we were at in October and even into December, so very happy where the team ended up.

Justin:

One of the things I want to mention is that we’re changing our approach in 2019. For every previous year, we were goal-setting to be double what we were the previous year, and it was kind of a “grow at all costs” scenario, and so a lot of costs with that, too, expenses kept rising and rising. And we’re changing a little bit for 2019. We’ll let you know how it goes, but it’s less about scaling at all costs this year, and more about improving our margins. So the idea is to add to our spend a bit from 2018, so we still have to go up a little bit and that’s mostly legacy costs, people we’ve hired in 2018, but we want to grow by 40%, 45% or so this year, so significantly less than previous years.

Justin:

It does a couple of things. Obviously, we want improvement to margins, so we want to profit more this year. But also, it gives our team a chance to gel together, lets them get to know each other a bit more. We went through a crazy hiring spree in 2018, and letting them settle in and learn their jobs very well, and improve processes and efficiency, I think it’ll be a good year for that.

Joe:

Yeah, I think we had to have this kind of year, make sure that the money that we spent in 2018 is getting a return on our investment, and that’s just something we need to do. Any big company that makes these sort of investments that we have has to see what type of return they get.

Justin:

So funny you mention “big company”, too, that’s so relative. So someone that’s listening to this and they’re like, “Empire, they’re just this big company!” And then you’ve got other people listening to this, they’re like, “What? You guys are tiny, you’re not even mid-size yet.” I get what you’re saying, but it’s just funny to me that it’s all, how relative that is.

Justin:

Alright man, last thing I want to mention in the news and updates: we’re locked into our next company meetup. Finally we went back and forth, we were talking all kinds of different places, we’re going to be in Mexico City starting April 8, and we’re going to be there for at least two weeks. We’ve got a good portion of our team heading down to Mexico City. I just bought my ticket there, Joe, I know you’ve bought your ticket there, and we’re going to have some fun.

Joe:

Yeah. I’ve never been to Mexico City, I’m looking forward to some authentic Mexican food, it’s been a while, and I hear that it’s a great place to be.

Justin:

Tacos, enchiladas, burritos, I’m fired up, man. I’m fired up.

Justin:

Alright man, let’s do our listener shout section, also known as the indulgent, ego-boosting, social prude segment. First up, we’ve got a message from Jason. Jason says, “Do you guys sell Facebook groups and/or Instagram pages? If not, do you know a reputable place that does?” Let me tell you, Jason, in terms of selling Facebook groups straight up, or Instagram pages straight up, we do not do that. And the reason for that is, they don’t allow the sale of those directly, so what we do actually do is, we’ll sell those as a part of a business sometimes, but there has to be some underlying fundamental business that goes along with the sale. So Facebook page that’s attached to groups or some Instagram pages that are attached to a business, we’ll sell those, but in terms of selling the pages, groups, or anything directly, we don’t do that.

Joe:

Yeah, and that’s because it has to be monetized, right? So we have some minimum profit requirements for any asset that we sell at Empire, and so if it’s just a group, that’s not good enough for us. And it has to be monetized in some way, it has to meet our minimum requirements.

Justin:

And then we’ve got Matt Thomas who said, “Buying an online business can be easier and less risky than starting from scratch. If you’re looking for a reputable broker, I recommend talking to Justin at Empire Flippers. You always need to do your homework, but they’re a great place to start.” Matt, I really appreciate the recommendation, man.

Joe:

Yeah, thanks a lot, Matt.

Justin:

Last thing that I want to mention, we were mentioned over at Smart Passive Income, on the podcast there, on how to buy and sell websites with Empire Flippers. I’m going to link to that in the show notes if you’re interested, really fun interview with Pat Flynn, we’ve followed him for a number of years, it was great to actually be on his show.

Justin:

That’s it for episode 180 of the Empire Flippers podcast. Thanks for sticking with us, we’ll be back soon with another show. You can find the show notes for this episode and more at empireflippers.com/ahrefs, and make sure to follow us on Twitter @EmpireFlippers. See you next time.

Joe:

Bye-bye everybody.

Speaker 2:

Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Empire Podcast with Justin and Joe. Hit up empireflippers.com for more. That’s empireflippers.com. Thanks for listening.