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I am a SaaS founder and content marketer who founded, built and grown four businesses which were acquired by Google in 2014, SEOJet in 2020, SemRush in 2023, Mangools in 2024. Below are the stories behind each one and a bit about myself along the way.
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2022-2024: I founded TopicRanker — a platform which uses AI powered bulk SERP analysis to recommend easy-to-rank keywords based on weak spots in SERP which your competitors are struggling with. TopicRanker was acquired by itrinity the folks behind Mangools SEO suite in September 2024.
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2021-2023: I founded SmallBizTools – an affiliate review blog site featuring the best business software tool reviews. SmallBiz.tools was acquired by SemRush in 2023. Watch or listen to case study here.
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2014-2020: I founded JustReachOut — a PR outreach software tool to find and pitch relevant journalists. JustReachOut was acquired by SEOJet in 2020 and acquired again in January of 2024 by early employees of Slack. Read more here.
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2012-2014: As the only marketer on a startup team of five people, I used PR to grow Polar Polls from 0 to 40M+ pageviews per month. Polar Polls was acquired by Google in 2014. Google’s acquisition #166 dated September 11, 2014 see on Wikipedia. Read the case study here from start to acquisition.
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Since 2009 I’ve helped companies such as DowJones, Realtor.com, Nextiva, Aura, Pipedrive, Wistia, CultureAmp, Backlinko, Helpscout rank #1 organically on Google for their key terms. Check out the case studies.
I am a contributor for Intuit, Forbes, Entrepreneur, TheNextWeb, TechCrunch, Moz, AListApart, SEMRush, Mashable, Huffington Post, WIRED and many others. My latest articles are here.
I started a speaking series called ZURBsoapbox and interviewed Tim Ferris, Neil Patel, Dan Martell, Winklevoss Twins, founders of Dribble, Eventbrite, WordPress, LinkedIn, Twitter, 99Designs, Overstock, StackOverflow, Pandora, and many more.