Scaling A Marketing Tool To $400K ARR [Update]
This is a follow up story for Attributer . If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 2 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
My name is Aaron Beashel, and I am the founder of a marketing attribution tool called Attributer.io.
Most businesses have tools like Google Analytics installed on their website, which tells them where their visitors are coming from (E.g. They got 100 visitors from organic search, 200 from paid search, 150 from paid social, etc.).
But when it comes to tracking how many actual leads & customers they get from these different sources, most businesses don’t have a solution.
Attributer is that solution.
You install it on your website, and each time a person completes a lead form on your site (like your ‘Request a quote' or ‘Contact us’ form), Attributer passes through information on where that lead came from (i.e. Organic search, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.) with the form submission.
Businesses can then send that data into their CRM (or even just a Google Sheet) and start to track things like how many leads they got from their Google Ads, how many customers they got from their SEO efforts, how much revenue they generated from their Facebook Ads, etc.
We’re about 1.5 years in (launched end of 2021) and are currently at $400k ARR. It’s completely bootstrapped, and I’m the only full-time person in the company.
Here’s the link to my original Starter Story interview!
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
When Attribute was first featured on StarterStory (which was about a year ago), we were at $50k ARR and it was still a part-time side project for me. Now we’re at $400k ARR and it’s my full-time job, so that’s been a nice change.
My wife has also been helping out a little bit (she used to be the Head of PR at companies like Xero and Zoho) and it’s been nice to work on growing something together.
Looking at bigger picture numbers helps me to see that even though there are peaks and troughs in the short-term numbers, we’re still growing pretty nicely.
In terms of where the growth has come from, it’s all been through SEO and word of mouth.
We’re lucky in that we have a big opportunity in SEO. There are a lot of channels people want to track (i.e. Facebook Ads, Google Ads, YouTube Ads, SEO, affiliates, etc) and there are a lot of different tools people want to be able to track those channels in (Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Pipedrive, Microsoft Dynamics, Stripe, etc), so we essentially just create blog posts for each of those matchups (i.e. How to track Facebook Ads in Salesforce, How to track Google Ads in Zoho CRM).
I’ve been doing a blog post per day for the last year, and people finding those blogs in search results is where the vast majority of our customers have come from to date.
To help drive these posts up the rankings, I’ve also been actively working on building links with high-authority sites. To date, we’ve managed to land guest posts (and links) on sites like Zapier, Zoho, Search Engine Journal, Wix, and more (all of which are 80+ DA sites). This has helped us go from a Domain Authority of the high 20s to a DA of 43 in the last few months.
On top of that, I’ve started to do YouTube videos as well. YouTube is the second biggest search engine behind Google, and the videos also rank in Google Search Results, so it makes sense to extend our strategy there as well.
This has been steadily growing which is nice. We started about 6 months ago and are now doing about 1,500 views per month. I know this seems small, but that’s 1,500 people watching a 2-minute video every month that explains how our product can solve the problem they are having.
Finally, now that we are 1.5 years into the business and have several hundred customers, we’re starting to see ‘word of mouth’ kick in as well. This is particularly true with marketing agencies who start to use us for one of their clients, like what they see, and then tell their other clients about it.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
The slowing economic climate. We’re fortunate that we’re still growing pretty well (we’re probably growing 3-4x faster than the benchmarks show other companies like us are growing) but it’s slowed down a bit, particularly in the last 2 months or so.
We’ve considered a few changes we could make, but we ultimately feel that we’re on the right path with our product, our go-to-market model, pricing, etc and so we’re generally just aiming to continue doing what we’re doing for the time being.
Fortunately, we’re bootstrapped and profitable so we don’t have to worry about where our next round of financing is going to come from, if it’s going to be a down round (I.e. a decrease to our valuation), etc.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
Probably just how much of an impact macro factors can have on your business. I wasn’t running my own business during other economic downturns so I didn’t feel it as much, but it’s so hard to just have all these visions and dreams of what you’re going to achieve this year and then essentially have to tear them all up because things outside of your control changed.
I remember the week Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in the US we probably had one of our worst weeks ever in terms of new customer acquisition (and we’d just come off a few great weeks), and I just remember being so down about the fact that something that happened so far away from me (and by people, I don’t know) can have so much of an impact on my business.
This probably leads to another learning/struggle I’ve had this year, which is just learning how to deal with the emotional rollercoaster that startups are. We’ll have a great week or month and I’ll be so happy and optimistic about the future, and then we’ll have some bad ones and I’ll be so down.
Managing that has been difficult, and I’m still learning. One little trick that has helped is just looking at bigger picture numbers (I.e. how many customers we got in X month last year versus this year). It helps me to see that even though there are peaks and troughs in the short-term numbers, we’re still growing pretty nicely. A bit of perspective always helps.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
Just continue to do what we’re doing really. There’s still so much upside in SEO for us, so it’s just continuing to produce more content, record more videos, increase our domain authority, etc.
I also want to start adding some more agency features to help expand that word-of-mouth motion we have within agencies. At the moment, our product isn’t geared for agencies to use it on multiple client websites and there’s a lot we could do here.
We could allow them to manage multiple client websites in one account, allow them to white-label it, set their pricing and pay them out on the difference between our price and theirs, etc. I think that could be an interesting growth lever for us.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
Given that SEO is such a big driver of growth for us, I’ve been getting super deep on that and trying to understand what the future of SEO looks like, particularly given the rise of AI-generated content and even Google and Bing now starting to show AI generated answers in search results.
Lily Ray has some great articles on EEAT (which is Google’s acronym for Experience, Expertise, Authority & Trust) which, for me, have been informative in terms of where the search is going, what kind of content Google likes now, and in the future, and ultimately what we need to be doing to ensure we’re still ranking and getting traffic from SEO in the future.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
My favorite saying at the moment is ‘If you show up every day and stack a brick, eventually you’ll have a wall’
For me, this saying has two meanings: The first is just a reminder that if you show up every day and make your business 1% better, you’ll eventually get to where you want to go.
But the other, probably more important meaning, is the power of doing things that compound. Our SEO efforts are a great example of this, if every day we just show up and publish a new blog post, create a new video, etc then eventually we’re going to have thousands of blogs and videos out on the internet that are going to be driving customers for us even though we haven’t touched them for years (the blog post that gets us the most customers every month is one I wrote over a year ago and haven’t touched since).
This means that right now our growth is probably a bit slower than it would be if we were just pouring all of our resources into ads, but it will compound over time and ultimately mean that we get further in the long run.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
No, my wife and I are determined to keep it to just us. Not only does it means we get to keep all the profits for our family, but it gives us the ultimate flexibility in terms of when we work, how we work, where we work, etc.
And we’re fortunate to have built a great network of freelancers that help us out with things that are beyond our skill sets.
Where can we go to learn more?
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