How Ahrefs got its first customers?

Dmytro Gerasymenko, the creator of Ahrefs, created his first modest online database of links while still in school. Unfortunately, a server crash made him lose all the data. He didn't have a backup copy. After a few years, he began the entire process from scratch. When Ahrefs launched, its only tool was Site Audit. Originally, it was to be merely an indexing system and a web crawler.

The Ahrefs team did very little marketing. They put ads on forums for SEO gurus and marketers. Soon, they had their first customers, who spread the word about the high-quality product of Ahrefs, as they liked it a lot. This was the beginning of the customer acquisition journey of Ahrefs.

Apart from the forums, Ahrefs didn't have any other advertisements or direct marketing techniques at the beginning. Instead, they polished their product, which helped them to improve the customer acquisition process.

Tim Soulo joined their team. He was promoted to the position of Head of Marketing. Ahrefs began as nothing more than just a good tool for analyzing backlinks (they dominated the market), but the guys needed more. Tim was a fantastic writer and the key element to the Ahrefs growth story. He redesigned Ahrefs' user interface and worked on their blog. Soon, he started hearing from people that they had begun their Ahrefs adventure mainly because of the blog.

In fact, it took a lot of Tim's time. He described how to utilize Ahrefs to help their SEO perform more efficiently. He was well aware of what people were looking for. He also launched some low-cost Facebook advertisements. His work on the blog and the Facebook advertisement was part of the customer acquisition strategy of Ahrefs. It greatly helped the tool to achieve significant growth.

[source]