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SEMrush S-1
- enahs-sf 6y agoGrowing profits, shrinking losses and a product I've literally used to build my business. I don't see how this isn't a winner long-term.
- bostonsre 6y agoThe risk section of the s1 is pretty large. At least for the SEO portion, I would guess the biggest risk is that google gets wise and figures out how to block search result scraping better. It is a constant battle to react to changes made to prevent scraping by coming up with new work arounds to get around those changes.
- ErikAugust 6y agoAt what price would you buy it though? 1000 P/E? No thanks. Besides you need to account for all the risks.
- dmurray 6y agoGood news is that this company is aiming quite a lot lower than 1000!
- BillSaysThis 6y agoWhat? They have no earnings (profits), the PE is infinity.
- edoceo 6y agoWow. An SEO IPO. Is the real bubble indicator?
- notyourday 6y agoI'm more shocked to see JPM and GSCO taking this on.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dna_polymerase 6y agoWhy? People will buy this, just because it's another Tech-Stock. People bought Nikola and Wirecard just because they have to do something with compute/tech. As for JPM and GSCO it's good business.
- notyourday 6y agoWhen you sell shit to public you become known as the shit seller at which point you become toxic for non-shit.
- john_moscow 6y agoThe bubble has been around for a while. It's just each time it gets anywhere near popping, Fed prints more money [0]. So the market-cap/dollar ratio hasn't hit a historically expected correction, but the purchasing power of a median salary has been declining and will continue declining as long as this policy is in place. But don't worry, the media is working around the clock to convince the general public that owning a detached house, starting a family, eating meat and going on a vacation is evil, so we must welcome the declining affordability of these things and be grateful for a unique chance to put custom pronouns in our bio. /s [0] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m0 https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m0
- dclaw 6y agoLol... I literally block semrushbot on all of my servers. They are a trash company.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago> They are a trash company. How so?
- ratww 6y agoDon't know if this is the reason OP hates it, but for me SEMRush and similar companies are the reason the web is littered with blogspam for pretty much every topic. Content Marketing companies and Content Farms use SEMRush to figure out which topics are covered by competition of their clients and which topics would attract visitors, and then pay pennies to a non-expert freelancer to produce a very shallow text with content probably copied from the same competitor, and littered with keywords recommended by SEMRush. Then, this text rises to the top of Google while non-SEO optimized quality content lingers in obscurity. How Google doesn't go after those shady practices is beyond me. They're probably just afraid of killing a whole industry and having an antitrust target on their backs.
- Xevi 6y agoImo the problem mainly lies in Google's square. All SEO tools exist for the reason of it being possible to game search results in the first place. It's inevitable that companies will offer tools and services to do so when there's such a huge market for it. Google has gotten better at discerning between crap and quality content, but they still have a long way to go, and I'm unsure if it can be fully fixed the way search engines currently work.
- kilroy123 6y agoPersonally, I've given up hope Google will be the one to do this. They have serious talent and no one can deny this but IMHO Google lacks vision and leadership. They've simply lost their way. Even their search results have gotten worse and worse.
- bladegash 6y agoVery interesting! I have found their product a joy to use and I say this with all sincerity, credit it with getting our business out of a tough spot during COVID. Wishing them the best on the IPO!
- mprev 6y agoWhat specifically did it do for you?
- bladegash 6y agoAllowed for us to understand where we were doing well in terms of page rankings, where we were not, what keywords we needed to begin targeting to get the most traffic volume, and recommendations on what that content should consist of. We were also able to gain insights into competitors, what keywords they were targeting, where there were opportunities to hit keywords they were not, etc. It also gives estimates as to how much they are spending on advertising, which can be useful. While I’m sure other factors have contributed, our sales of IT services has tripled and verticals we were receiving no leads in are getting a significant amount. All organically. I will also say we were able to reduce our advertising spend from $1,500 to $0.00 per month. I can’t recommend using SEMRush highly enough, especially for small businesses.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- melomal 6y agoThere's word out there that SEMRush is entangled with the Russian mafia. Literally everyone right now is getting in on this bubble.
- mobilio 6y agoThis is great news! I know SEMRush from early days and i know their current growth.
- jedc 6y agoCEO and co-founder still owns 45.7% of all shares!
- tmpz22 6y agoCan people claiming success with this product provide just a little more context on how it helped your company? I always think there might be astroturfing with these kinds of submissions.
- nickff 6y agoIt's useful for figuring out how to optimize your site for 'organic reach', as well as for analyzing the relative popularity of your competitors. SEMRush can tell you how many people search a variety of terms, and what websites they're visiting after those searches. You can then use this to change the language (key phrases and the like) on your website, and write content (blog posts or landing pages) that fits with existing search user preferences. You can also pop a competitor, client, or supplier's website into SEMRush, and see how much they spend on ads, as well as how many people are finding their website via search. This can help you figure out what they're doing well, and where they do poorly. You might be able to rank for similar keywords, or go for keywords they aren't targeting.
- dcist 6y agoA lot of SEO and digital marketing agencies use SEMrush because it's an easy way to track keyword rankings for your clients and their competitors. SEMrush also generates reports for keyword rankings that are helpful to provide clients. I haven't used it in a few years but I found SEMrush to be a good tool and worth the cost if you have clients.
- hayksaakian 6y agoLike the other commenters said, ahrefs, moz and other competitors provide similar information too. It's useful for people doing SEO, not much else.
- ErikAugust 6y agoBelieve in yourselves: If a scraper (SEMrush) of another scraper (Google Search) can IPO, the sky really is the limit.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- twiddling 6y agoScrapers all the way down
- moat 6y agoMeh, not impressed. https://community.investing.io/c/forum/semrush-files-to-go-public-7ecb2c7a-a4ef-4643-9cfc-4228c9482afa https://community.investing.io/c/forum/semrush-files-to-go-p...
- fumar 6y agohow do you like investing.io?
- sixhobbits 6y ago> We have incurred annual net losses since 2016 and expect to continue to incur net losses in the future. We incurred net losses of $10.2 million and $7.0 million for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively. As of December 31, 2020, we had an accumulated deficit of $35.8 million. We do not know if we will be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future. We plan to continue to invest in our research and development, and sales and marketing efforts, and we anticipate that our operating expenses will continue to increase as we scale our business and expand our operations. We also expect our general and administrative expenses to increase as a result of our growth and operating as a public company. Our ability to achieve and sustain profitability is based on numerous factors, many of which are beyond our control. how unusual is it for companies to ipo without profit or even a clear path there?
- jxramos 6y agoAmazon reached its first reported profit like 10 years after founding. It's hard risk all the way through with funding needed to pay wages and other fixed expenses. Pretty amazing that people stick to it as long as it takes to become profitable. I'm not so sure my nerves could take all the suspense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Amazon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Amazon
- a13n 6y agoA lot of companies, and particularly Amazon, always have an easy path to profitability in their back pocket. They simply choose not to be profitable because it means they'll pay less taxes and grow faster. It's a lot easier to "stick with it" with this in mind.
- jxramos 6y agothat's an interesting idea, could you comment on some of those deferred profitability strategies? How does that work precisely?
- weird-eye-issue 6y ago
- boynamedsue 6y agoThe people that spam my referrer logs are going public?
- shrubble 6y agoA very dishonest company whose scrapers are tough to block. They don't honor robots.txt and tell you that you have to add in special verbiage to get them to stop. They hop IPs from different ranges so they are difficult to range-ban.
- judge2020 6y agoYep - they get blocked a lot by CF (probably for not honoring robots and crawling random websites for marketing purposes) yet a lot of people use it and wonder why it’s blocked: https://community.cloudflare.com/search?q=Semrush https://community.cloudflare.com/search?q=Semrush
- digitalbase 6y agoThey did a small acquisition September 2020 https://www.semrush.com/news/semrush-acquires-fast-growing-saas-pr-tech-company-prowly/ https://www.semrush.com/news/semrush-acquires-fast-growing-s...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- eaenki 6y agoHow are they at 144ARR and 76% gross margins losing money on an SEO SaaS?
- alvah 6y agoThis is the question I have too. Looks like they have far too many employees (IIRC around 10-20x their biggest rival Ahrefs, who incidentally aren't losing money). The headcount can't be all of it though.
- whalesalad 6y agoFuck these guys. They are a completely disrespectful and dishonest crawler. Fortunately I’ve moved most of my clientele over to Cloudflare and are able to block them at the perimeter.
- 1123581321 6y agoLike many companies, we really enjoy paying SemRush a few hundred dollars a month and almost never opening it. It’s politically difficult to cancel, because it feels like a no confidence vote in “doing SEO.” But every year, we opt to spend most of our SEO budgets just writing stuff based on Google autocompletes and simple Google Ads data.