What's up, everyone?

This is Cortland from Andy Hackers.com, and you're listening to the Andy Hackers podcast.

On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.

How do they get to where they are today?

How do they make decisions, both at their businesses and in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses. In this episode, I'll be chatting with Tim Solo, the CMO and product advisor for a company called HREFs. HREFs is an SEO company, or SEO stands for search and optimization. They provide a collection of tools that help you grow the traffic to your website that comes from the billions of people who are searching Google and Bing every day, as well as some tools that help you research your competitors, see why they're ranking high on Google, and find out what you need to do to outrank them.

So obviously, this is massively useful stuff if you were a founder trying to build and grow your

online business.

Tim, welcome to the Indyackers podcast and thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks so much for having me.

Let's talk about H.R.S.

You and I caught up a little bit last week and you told me some stats about your company HRFs and you guys are killing it. You're a 45 person company. You're bringing in over $40 million a year in revenue, which is pretty close to a million dollars in revenue per employee. Yeah. And yeah, it's pretty amazing. And despite being so huge, you're still growing 60% year over year. And so you're the CMO sitting on top of this rocket. You're in charge of marketing. You're in charge of growth. And you're also in many ways, I think, the face of H-Refs. I mean, literally when I open the website, a little window pops up in the bottom right, and it's your face telling me about new features and asking me if I need any help. So you're really front and center.

How did you get here? If I would share the short story, Dmitri, the founder and CEO of

H.R.S. comes from Ukraine. So he's a Ukrainian. And I'm a Ukrainian myself, as you can probably

hear from my accent. And Dmitri, because he's like a super technical guy, he was able to create a pretty

bad as product with pretty bad as data that was like one level better than what was

already there.

And he was able just with awesome product and like no good marketing.

He was able to get it to a certain level.

But then he realized that he won't be able to grow the company unless he does something

with marketing.

So he started looking for people who could potentially join the team and fill that gap.

At the time, there was a website called Inbound.org, where marketers were discussing, like, newly published articles or sharing their opinions, doing polls, etc., etc., etc.

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