The Ahrefs playbook: Scale to $100M ARR with product-led content

This is the playbook Ahrefs and Tim Soulo used to scale to $100M ARR with product-led content and zero sales reps. Copy these steps to grow your SaaS through content like Ahrefs, and generate $1M ARR per employee.

Ahrefs is a popular SEO tool built to help marketers and website owners get more traffic to their websites. It helps in finding the best keywords, track how well a website is doing, analyze competition, and fix issues that might hurt visibility on search engines like Google.

Competitive landscape: They compete with other SaaS products like Semrush and Moz, in a fairly red ocean type of market.

Business model: Ahrefs is sold as a B2B SaaS on monthly or annual basis. No freemium or free trial is offered.

Growth model: Product-led content.

Also, Ahrefs is a bootstrapped company with no VC funding - scaling to over $100M ARR with just 125 employees. For context, that's almost $1M ARR per employee, where the average "good performing" SaaS has around $200K ARR per employee.

Ahrefs grew to over $100M ARR without using traditional marketing tactics like a sales team or free trials. Instead, they focused on (A) making their product better and (B) creating content to show what their product can do.

Ahrefs' growth has been driven by a product-led content strategy. Meaning they teach users how to solve specific problems. And the solution often involves using the Ahrefs product.

This approach provides value without being overly salesy.

Ahrefs is not just obsessed with their product. They also obsess about data, and making decisions based on the data.

They collect feedback from users, their team, and various platforms. This feedback is then used to continuously improve the product. Both from communities like X, Reddit, the Ahrefs user base, etc. And they use a voting system to rank the requests.

Their data also drives content creation - leading to high quality content that drives referrals, engagement - and not surprisingly, high conversion rates.

Ahrefs has successfully used formats other than the "plain old blog" to attract traffic and organic search, for example:

• programmatic content - generate content through code and/or use product data.

• comparison content - ranking on "vs searches": Ahrefs vs. alternatives

• glossary - use short-form content to build topical authority and reap low-hanging fruit

• industry-specific guides - put together in-depth guides with unique insights people are likely to share

Also, translating content for international markets resulted in a significant traffic uplift for them.

While not offering a free trial or freemium, Ahrefs builds alot of free tools near their main product. And they get massive traction. 50% of Ahrefs' website traffic comes from free tools they offer.

These tools show off the capabilities of Ahrefs' product, and serve as strong hooks for lead generation.

9 years ago, Ahrefs' CMO Tim Soulo started out recording how-to videos on Youtube by himself. Just him, a camera and screen sharing.

Today, Ahrefs' YouTube channel has over 550,000 subscribers. With an entire team of content creators running the show. And it plays a key role in their content strategy.

Just like their blogs, the videos feature the product natively. Providing the viewer value, while showing off what the Ahrefs’ product can do.

The Youtube videos are integrated to blog posts, meaning they (A) get views and traction from the website. But, the Youtube videos also (B) rank on their own on Google and Youtube, meaning the website traffic and awareness for Ahrefs increases.

Bootstrapping to $100M ARR without a sales team and reaching nearly $1M ARR per employee makes the Ahrefs playbook very special. It shows that you can scale without traditional sales teams or marketing tactics - and instead take an engineer driven approach.

Ahrefs has been obsessed about product and data. But what is special is that they have been able to leverage this smoothly into their content, through a product-led content play. Allowing them to rank and have people discover them inbound. This is an important distinction to the, broken 'build and they will come' approach that way too many technical founders unfortunately take.

Also, I think an important key to remember is that these guys have been dogfooding all the way - using their own product to grow.