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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

1203 SEMRush to hit $80m ARR This Year, Here's How

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

Ceo, Entrepreneurs, Founders, Software, Business, Entrepreneurship, Saas, Startups

4.6683 Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2018

⏱️ 24 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As Chief Strategy Officer Eugene helped SEMrush to more than triple it’s revenue in less than 2 years and raised over $40m from Tier 1 VC firms.
Before joining SEMrush Eugene was a partner at Target Global, pan-european growth stage venture fund that invests in consumer Internet space. There Eugene was in charge of US pipeline and invested in number of notable companies including Blue Apron(IPO), Lyft and Juno(acquired by Gett)
Eugene started his VC career as Senior Associate and then Partner at Foresight Ventures. Foresight Ventures was focused on early stage US technology companies. Fund generated number of profitable exits over three years and was ranked top 10 Russian VC firm by Forbes in 2013.

Transcript

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0:00.0

He was on the, I'm calling it the dark side because I think it's the dark side.

0:02.8

It's hard to make a lot of money.

0:03.8

But anyways, very successful doing VC related things, especially with this Russian firm,

0:07.6

sourced a lot of the U.S. deals for them, including Lyft and some other very well-known

0:10.8

companies, saw the data from SEM Rush.

0:13.2

And when he put it in the VC format, said, I've never seen anything like this, right? growing at, you know, 60% year-over-year growth without working really hard. 40% EBITDA margins,

0:21.1

one-month payback period. Today, they're growing rapidly, adding 1,000 to 5,000 new customers

0:25.6

per month. They currently have north of 30,000 customers paying 180 bucks a month, so well north

0:30.1

of, call it 60, 65 million bucks in ARR, 105% net revenue retention annually, $40 million raised

0:37.1

with the team of 500 people based

0:38.5

between Philadelphia, Europe, and Russia. Payback period, six months, KAC, 600 bucks, super healthy

0:44.3

economics again as they help the world understand how to do search engine marketing.

0:48.2

Now expanding product lines and other marketing products as well.

0:52.0

This is the top entrepreneurs podcast where founders share how they started their companies

0:57.9

and got filthy rich or crash and burn.

1:03.1

Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that

1:09.6

creates business news headlines.

1:12.6

We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.

1:15.6

I had no money when I started the company.

1:17.6

It was $160 million, which is the size of any IPOs.

1:20.6

We're a bit strapped.

1:21.6

We have like 22,000 customers.

...

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