I decided to start a separate column on my Telegram channel about bootstrapping projects that are launched and grow independently! Such startups inspire me a lot.

Ahrefs – is a SaaS service that helps SEOs from all over the world to increase traffic from search engines. To be more precise, it is a large set of tools for search optimization: analysis of links to your site, to competitors’ sites, selection of keywords and much more. I used this service, it turns out, almost from the moment of its foundation, just in those days I was also actively engaged in SEO.

It was founded in 2011 by Ukrainian Dmytro Gerasimenko together with his groupmate Igor Pikovets. The idea of a service was not new for Dmytro, he was interested in searching and indexing since his school days and even launched a small search engine for documents, which received good traffic. He used this traffic to make money selling books for a while. But it didn’t last long, and due to some error, the server crashed and all the data was lost, and there were no backups.

For some time Dmytro worked as a C# and PHP programmer for Ukrainian and American companies. With the money he earned, he had enough money to lead a modest lifestyle and hire freelancers to implement his ideas and projects. So he gradually recruited his team and moved towards the realization of his plans.

Since 2007, without graduating from university, he immersed himself in search engine optimization. The niche in the world was new and great prospects opened up there, which the boys took advantage of. According to Dmitry, he invested only his own funds in the launch of the project and most of the money went to rent servers.

After launching Ahrefs, they moved to Singapore from Kyiv in 2012, and by this time they had 7 employees and revenues approaching $1 million. This despite the fact that they did not spend anything on marketing. As Dmytro said in his interviews: they simply posted information about their service on several specialized forums, and then everything spread by word of mouth. They still don’t have a sales team.

From day one, they have been completely focused on the quality of their product and the data provided. Their main competitive advantage was that they updated their data every 15 minutes, while their closest competitors did it once a month. The right product, good quality – all this helped them grow at a crazy pace.

They started with tariffs from $20 per month, now they have a minimum tariff of $99, and most users pay $179. Among their clients are Rozetka, Depositphotos, Netflix, Uber, Tripadvisor and many other well-known companies, but the main revenue is still received from small businesses.

In 2019, their revenue was $51 million, and by the end of 2021 they plan to reach $100 million in ARR (recurring revenue).

Competitor for Google

But what is still very interesting and inspiring is that the guys decided to challenge Google itself, namely their search engine. Now their team is actively working on the creation of their anonymous search engine, which will not collect information about users, but will issue search results and advertisements based only on search queries, and not on user profile data.

And also in their plans to give 90% of the profit from advertising in the new search engine to the owners of the sites, i.e. content creators. The search engine Google brings in about 100 billion dollars a year. Can you imagine what kind of world we would have if 90 billion of this money was distributed among ordinary people: journalists and website owners?

Given that now their service Ahrefs, in fact, already indexes almost the entire Internet no worse than Google, they already have a good base to start with!

In general, the task is mega ambitious and difficult, we wish them only luck!

“It’s easier to solve big problems than small ones,” one of Google’s founders, Sergey Brin, once said.