3 Growth Tactics we Used to grow SEMRush to $330m ARR and Why Shares dropped 20% on IPO day

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

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

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2024

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Eugene Levin joined SEMRush at $3m ARR after the founders wouldn't let him invest. As president, he's grown the business to 100,000 paying customers 850k free users, $2,500 ACV and 25% YoY revenue growth. Will they break $350m ARR this year?

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom.
0:13.5	If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com. We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, cac, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to gitlatka.com and use our filtering tool.
0:29.6	It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com.
0:41.3	What was it like ringing that bell in the middle of COVID? Our CEO, he was extremely upset.
0:43.3	This whole chart is kind of my pride to enjoy it.
0:50.3	Eugene, thanks for being here, man.
0:52.3	All right? I'm not lying, right?
0:54.3	You'll share more data since we've got a more curated audience.
0:57.0	Yeah, we're public.
0:58.3	So if I share something I'm not supposed to share, you can not trade our stock.
1:03.7	Fair enough, fair enough.
1:05.0	So I want to first start and just jump right into the revenue graph, right?
1:09.4	So you guys see the company really got going.
1:11.6	What was actually first year? Was it 2013? When I've met founders, 14.
1:16.5	2014 is when you met the founders. And what was the size of the angel check you put into the company?
1:21.2	So actually they didn't take my money. They just offered me a job. Okay. I pursued them for two
1:27.2	years, but they were so profitable.
1:29.5	The margin was like 40%.
1:31.1	They didn't know what to do with money.
1:32.9	So I said, why don't we do it this way?
1:35.5	I figure out how to speed up business and use more capital, and you give me shares.
1:43.0	Okay, got it.
	...

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