📈 How Ahrefs reached $149.1M ARR

+ New trend to catch

Author

Ayush Chaturvedi
May 03, 2025

Ahrefs is a wild successful bootstrapped company doing $149.1 M ARR

  • Started as a side hustle (back in 2010)

  • Primary growth via inbound content marketing

  • No free plans 🤭

This is there revenue graph -

What does Ahrefs do?

Ahrefs is the industry leading SaaS tool for SEO data.

It helps companies with -

  • Keyword research

  • Competitor research

  • Site audits

  • Backlink management

And more..

This is from there landing page.

Learn how to make AI work for you

AI won’t take your job, but a person using AI might. That’s why 1,000,000+ professionals read The Rundown AI – the free newsletter that keeps you updated on the latest AI news and teaches you how to use it in just 5 minutes a day.

Ahrefs Top 5 Content Strategies -

  • Lost of educational content - teach don’t sell. Check out their blog and youtube channel

  • Data driven insights - They do a lot of research backed content that attracts inbound traffic

  • Visual content + engaging video tutorials

  • Regularly updated content pieces according to changing times and trends

  • Community engagement, building in public and taking lots of feedback via social media, forums and user surveys

Further Reading -

  • How did Ahrefs start?

  • How it grew initially?

  • What are its top marketing strategies?

Couple of resources to learn more about Ahrefs -

How ahrefs Bootstrapped its Way to $100M SaaS Engine

This case study shares how ahrefs founder grew his SaaS business to $100 million ARR without taking money from investors, and what you can learn from it.

startupgeek.com/blog/case-study-ahrefs-dmitry-gerasimenko

In Case You Missed It -

I send 1 new business idea every week on Wednesday

1 idea, 1 screenshot, 1 line insight - in <100 words.

(only to highly engaged readers)

This week’s post -

To receive next week’s idea, make sure to click through or reply to this email.

🤗 How can I help?

Whenever you’re ready, consider joining the Indie Masterminds community. The goal of this newsletter is to inspire you, but the goal of the community is to help you take action and go to the next level in your journey.

So if you’re at that stage where you don’t need more inspiration, but you do need to take the right action, then come join us!

We’re here to help 🫂

PS: Do you think AI is making us dumber? See what 125 people said