SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1750 With $12m in ARR Yoast CEO Says Wordpress Couldn't Afford to Acquire
09 May 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
launched his SEO tool on WordPress back in 2013. Now over 200,000 customers paying $7 a month, doing about $12 million in terms of run rate today. That's up 60% year over year, so that's healthy. 25% EBITDA margin, so that's about $3 million a year in free cash flow that he reinvests in real estate for the company or other things. 100 people in the Netherlands, totally bootstrapped, which I love.
15% logo churn per year on their subscription cohort. They're moving more of their users into that subscription cohort as they look to scale. and grow. Again, it doesn't track CAC or payback period just because a lot of his growth comes from the WordPress.org plugin repository, and it's working nicely today. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Joost de Valk.
He is the web developer, SEO, and open source fanatic from the Netherlands. He's the founder and CEO of Yoast, which provides software and training for website optimization. SEO Yoast's main software product currently runs on over 10 million WordPress websites. Yoast, you ready to take us to the top?
I always am.
Good. All right. So tell us about the company. What's it do? Obviously, SEO is obvious, but what's it do specifically on WordPress? And then how do you make money? Is it pure play SaaS?
No, not really. So we build a software plugin for WordPress that is basically an extension that allows you to optimize your site better. And there's a free version of that plugin and a premium version of that plugin. So it's mostly a freemium model. And Some of it is SaaS now because it connects to a service called My Yoast, which has some added features.
But most of it right now is a pure freemium software play.
Okay, so let me quickly touch on the freemium. Then I want to go towards how you introduced the SaaS model. So the freemium kind of plugin, when did you launch the tool right from scratch?
So the first version of Yoast SEO was released in 2014. Early 2014. No, 2013. And then the first premium version of Yoast was somewhere around 2014.
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Chapter 2: How did Yoast SEO start and what is its business model?
And we were one of the better SEO plugins and that word spread rather quickly. So mostly through word of mouth.
How did you get on the speaking circuit before you had the tool?
I was an SEO consultant and have been an SEO consultant for the last decade.
Don't take offense to this, but there are a bunch of really stupid SEO consultants, right? So how did you have credibility before you had the tool? I know you were an SEO consultant, but what credibility did you have?
I was working for some of the biggest brands on the planet. I've done SEO for eBay, The Guardian, Facebook. So I led the migration from Guardian Co. UK to TheGuardian.com. So there was projects I was also allowed to talk about, which helps a lot at conferences because a lot of SEO work is always hard because you're not allowed to talk about it.
And, well, I had a lot of friends in that circuit, was thrown into it by a friend of mine. When I attended a conference, I started asking questions that were too hard for the speakers. So they basically invited me on stage.
Interesting. So you got on stage because you were doing work for these big brands that you were allowed to talk about. How many then in 2013, how many conferences did you speak at?
In 2014, not as much anymore because I was focused on building this business. Okay.
Well, you said that so you got most of your new users.
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Chapter 3: What strategies contributed to Yoast's rapid user growth?
And then there's also a lot of sites that are single blogs by single people. And even some affiliates that have 100 sites and use our plugin on all of them. but it's only one person. So it's probably about 2x what we have in sites, but that's still a guesstimation.
And then capital-wise, I mean, have you bootstrapped the company or did you decide to raise...
No, we've bootstrapped.
Bootstrapped. I love that. That's great.
We're now at, last year we did about 10 million euros, so about $12 million in revenue. There's about 100 people here. So yeah, we're doing well.
Yep. 100 people. And then look, you told me earlier you had about 200,000 customers. 89 a year would be seven bucks a month. That would put you at about 1.4 million a month today. Is that a little high?
No, it's just somewhere around there.
Yeah. Okay. And what would you say? You said you finished last year at a 10 million run rate?
Yeah. So yeah, we, our total revenue was about 10 million euros. So that's real money as we call it.
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Chapter 4: How does Yoast plan to evolve its freemium and premium offerings?
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your company? My brain. Besides your brain. Obviously, besides WordPress or your own tool.
Um... So a lot of it, I mean, I'm an SEO guy. So I'm going to say google.com and actually searching for stuff and looking at what's there and what's missing and what people are searching for and are missing.
You said just google.com? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Sorry, again?
How many hours of sleep?
Seven.
And you said married. Any kids? Four. Four. Holy mackerel. Okay. How old are you? I'm 36. 36. Last question. What do you wish your 20 year old self knew?
Um, my 20 year old self should probably start a company sooner.
When did you launch? How old are you when you launched your first company?
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