Michał Suski is a man of many talents. Apart from his extensive digital marketing and SEO knowledge, he’s also a seasoned carpenter, DIY enthusiast, and an avid skier. Having majored in forestry and worked as QA for three years, he decided to rebrand himself to SEO after his friend Sławek Czajkowski hired him as a Junior Specialist at KS SEO agency. Going in with zero experience, Michał managed to quickly learn what it’s all about, and after only a year working as an SEO, he co-founded a highly-successful tool called Surfer. He trained hundreds of SEOs, copywriters, and marketers on on-page SEO, content, and technical optimization.
What is Surfer all about?
Surfer is a content intelligence tool that helps with maximizing the potential of your writing in terms of SEO. Surfer is entirely data-driven, and its main mechanism consists of reverse-engineering Google algorithms. We base our calculations and suggestions on the top pages that rank for a specific keyword. Surfer analyses more than 500 ranking factors so that you know exactly what works and what doesn’t.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
My history with SEO is not very long. I have about four years of experience. Before that, I majored in forestry and worked in Quality Assurance after graduating from the university. I entered the whole SEO ordeal back in 2016 with the help of my friend, Sławek Czajkowski (with whom I co-founded Surfer). Sławek was the owner of an SEO agency in a small Polish village in the south-eastern part of the country. Now, scaling up became almost impossible, as hiring talent in-house was extremely difficult due to the agency’s location. Sławek decided to hire his close friends who wanted to learn SEO, and I was lucky to be one of them. I began with simple copywriting for PBN websites, then went on to optimization based on the data gathered from the SERPs.
At first, we had to gather the data manually. Seeing that it was immensely tedious and prone to human error, Sławek decided to improve the system by developing a small internal tool. Soon after, in late 2017, we decided to share it with the rest of the world. With the help of my brother, Lucjan Suski, who’s a phenomenal developer, we managed to launch our application. At first for the Polish market, and not long after released to a worldwide audience, Surfer was acclaimed by many SEO influencers such as Matthew Woodward, Matt Diggity, and Steve Toth.
We decided to bootstrap Surfer, as we didn’t want to make any commitments with outside investors and maintain our complete freedom. Now, after three and a half years, Surfer has grown to $2.8 million ARR and 31 employees.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business, and how did you overcome it?
The biggest problem not only for myself but also for the whole team was crossing the chasm. Crossing the chasm is a term that illustrates the issue of transitioning from early adopters to acquiring the majority of the market as customers. We devised our strategy based on a book of the same title. The principles that I believe were the most important were maintaining momentum to create a snowball effect and improve word of mouth marketing and changing our primary target to content marketers from SEO specialists.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from it?
Definitely, the mistake that had and is still having a huge impact was basing our pricing on gut feeling. We should have analyzed the customers’ willingness to pay. Currently, it’s one of our biggest concerns, as we’re trying to rebuild the pricing system to reflect our features adequately and allow customers to upgrade conveniently. Now our pricing system doesn’t work well, and we’re struggling to find a way out of that. Instead of going for intuition, we should have conducted an extensive analysis of both our competition and potential customers. Now that we didn’t do that, we’re at a tough spot. The main takeaway from it is to make sure that ALL of your decisions, especially ones as vital as the pricing model, are based on data.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
I read a lot of self-development books from authors like Cal Newport and Jim Collins, listen to podcasts, and keep myself updated in terms of SEO knowledge. My favorites include Authority Hacker, Craig Campbell, SEO Video Show, and Lion Zeal – Daryl Rosser podcasts. I do my best to stay on top of any new trends in my industry, emerging startups, competition, partnership possibilities, and I’m constantly building both product and personal brands.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
I just have to go for four things, it’s really hard for me to pick just three since the amazing value each of these has:
- Monetizing Innovation by Madhavan Ramanujam and Georg Tacke
- Great By Choice by Jim Collins,
- Matt Diggity’s The Affiliate Lab course
- The One Thing by Gary Keller
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
I wish that I could do everything myself. Now I know that it’s impossible, and I’m glad that I met people who can take responsibility and do a great job, often better than me. I used to think that taking up more and more work would make our company and myself grow faster. In reality, it’s the opposite. You need to find a balance between your business responsibilities and delegating tasks to others. You can’t clone yourself, and relying on other people to a certain degree helps solidify and reinforce that equilibrium.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
We managed to put out a product that spread like a fire. We didn’t do any link building; our website is not really optimised properly, too. See, dedicating a significant part of your efforts to provide the best product possible is more than essential, especially at the beginning. That way, you don’t need to splash out that much of your budget on marketing efforts since the product can market itself via word of mouth. And that’s what we did. Now we do affiliate marketing as well, which is not half bad, although a great product or service has ways of promoting itself by just that — being great.
If you only had $1000 to start a new startup, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
I’d spend the majority of my budget on validating ideas with potential customers. I’d simply reach out to people from certain industries and environments (depending on what my business idea would be) and ask them if that would be something useful to them. Business is all about meeting your customers’ requirements and expectations, and what better way to find what they are than to ask directly? Remember, you don’t need a working prototype; a mockup is more than enough!
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
We managed to bootstrap straight from the launch of Surfer until now. We’re entirely independent, which lets us grow and expand at rates that a funded company never could. Bootstrapping your business means freedom, and I believe that startups should do their best to remain so. It’s only your team and you who decide what you want to do next, and what direction you want to go in. You don’t feel any external pressure from stakeholders, who might have different ideas concerning further development. This requires a lot of patience, though, as breaking even takes some time and dedication. Still, I think that it’s entirely worth it seeing the benefits it brings.
What is your favorite quote?
If you have more than three priorities, then you don’t have any.
– Jim Collins
Besides the obvious social media tools available, what are the top 3 most useful tools or resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
- Calendly to book meetings easier with people that can make the difference.
- Firstpromoter for affiliate campaign tracking.
- Shape Up, which is a method concerning product development and teamwork.
How is running a tech company different than what you thought it would be?
Tech company has a lot of aspects that I have no clue about. I thought I could be involved in everything, but I couldn’t be more wrong. While I learned SEO fairly quickly with the help of my mentor and the community, learning things like programming was not an option for me. There was just so much work that was outside the scope of my knowledge that I was dumbfounded at the beginning. While I quickly got used to it and remained focused on the things that were within my expertise, it still surprises me how much work there is.
Upkeep of a tech company is a true group effort, and you simply can’t oversee everything. I’m the type of person who would prefer to do things by myself and be sure that they’re done the right way. Now I’m just glad that we found the right people to fill our openings, so I have peace of mind at all times when it comes to responsibilities I delegate to my teammates.
How can readers get in touch with you?
If you want more information about our tool, please visit Surfer. You can reach out personally, too — find me on LinkedIn and let’s have a conversation there.
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