Kind of ironic. A link building platform that doesn’t itself use link building to grow. I know. Still built it anyway.
Links as a Service is a self-serve marketplace for SEOs buying editorial backlinks. Pick a publisher, set your URL, choose your anchor text, decide on a publishing date, and either write content yourself, or we can write it for you. Everything is up to you. It’s ridiculously simple: we charge a flat 25% of whatever the publisher’s commission is. Publisher’s ask for $100; you pay us $125. No extra, dynamic charges, no surprises.
After two months we’ve got over 300 active users across three continents and a million dollar run rate. Average order is around $650. And we’ve spent precisely zero on paid ads.
So, what did we do instead?
Link building is a niche within a niche. The buyers are SEO specialists, agency owners, in-house digital marketing teams. These people know exactly how online marketing works, and they’re extremely wary of sales pitches because they’ve seen it all. Trying to sell an SEO specialist a Google Ad for a link building tool is like trying to sell a sunglasses store prescription eyeglasses.
This audience doesn’t read ads, but instead relies on word-of-mouth referrals and social proof and proof of a claim. Additionally they are already using Slack, Reddit, and niche professional forums to talk about new products. Information is traveling quickly between these close-knit professional circles, the same is true of both good and bad information.
Spending money on Paid Acquisition at this time would have resulted in buying traffic from people who don’t know what they need, and customers who aren’t ready to trust us-neither of which we would have found worthwhile.
What actually moved the needle
This is not a gimmick-we decided our 25% markup would be made public as part of a product decision, believing our customers deserved to know the price they were being charged, as few platforms provide transparency and a simple price is displayed.
As an afterthought this created the marketing opportunity. When you do something structural different, to a traditionally non-transparent industry, it travels. This product was referenced organically by SEO’s who immediately saw its merit over what they had previously assumed regarding their own platform’s markup, and word-of-mouth began organically traveling on its own. Transparency, in an industry starved of trust, travels well.
Meet your buyers where they live.
We partnered with Fatgrid, Linkpricer, G2 and Capterra. These are not just directories, these are actively comparison shopping tools built for people that have high-intent and comparison focused needs. We could have bought advertising in relevant professional magazines or published sponsored articles but getting our offering in front of users that are actively shopping and trying to make a purchasing decision with all of their information readily available was crucial.
It is on comparison sites that our flat, publicly disclosed markup really shone. We make the exact amount of the agency’s 25% margin on the publishers commission readily visible, whereas no other comparable tool does. Buyers didn’t need convincing to pick us.
Targeted and Personal outreach, NOT Spray and Pray
We didn’t avoid cold outreach-we just focused it on a handful of relevant parties. Agencies running link building campaigns, freelance SEO’s who offer link building as a service, and in-house clients that we knew were buying links in bulk. Using direct messages we explained the platform, clarified the pricing model, and offered walkthroughs to demonstrate the product. Our emails converted because we weren’t spamming the masses, instead we focused on providing people who had already indicated an interest in a link building platform, with our product as a more trustworthy solution. Our pitch wasn’t “we’re better,” but “here is how we work, and this is what it means for your bottom line.”
Existing customers felt compelled to share.
The earliest LaaS customers are our biggest marketers. A long-time owner of an agency who was frustrated with paying hidden markups discovered our product and told everyone they know. An in-house SEO who wanted to demonstrate the benefits of using our product, shared it with their team in a Slack channel. We have no referral program; our product simply gives people a reason to recommend us organically. This is how word of mouth marketing works-you can’t force it, you have to earn it.
The Number 1 thing B2B founders get wrong about marketing.
Too many founders consider marketing to be something that happens post-product build. You launch, then you go out and acquire customers. In specialized, professionalized markets this separation just is not practical. The decisions you make about the product you are building-whether it is your pricing structure, your publicly stated mission or your level of transparency-are marketing decisions. These are the foundations of the narrative around your product when you are no longer the person telling the story.
LaaS made a decision on pricing, which ultimately ended up being a positioning decision as well. The flat disclosed markup requires direct relationships with publishers, trades potential higher profits for lower operational complexity and thus a greater investment and commitment to our customers. These decisions have already paid off in a way that our larger profits never could have. In the long run, the one structural change that helped us stand out from the crowd in an otherwise virtually indistinguishable market was our greatest marketing tool.
We could have reached more people using paid ads. Just not the right ones.
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