> We have incurred annual net losses since 2016 and expect to continue to incur net losses in the future. We incurred net losses of $10.2 million and $7.0 million for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively. As of December 31, 2020, we had an accumulated deficit of $35.8 million. We do not know if we will be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future. We plan to continue to invest in our research and development, and sales and marketing efforts, and we anticipate that our operating expenses will continue to increase as we scale our business and expand our operations. We also expect our general and administrative expenses to increase as a result of our growth and operating as a public company. Our ability to achieve and sustain profitability is based on numerous factors, many of which are beyond our control.
how unusual is it for companies to ipo without profit or even a clear path there?
It's been standard operating procedure in several high tech industries like biotech for decades. The FDA doesn't allow anyone to charge for anything related to medicine or medical devices until a premarketing application is approved so many biotech companies (if not most, since anything profitable pre-IPO is generally gobbled up by pharma) IPO with zero revenue and their success or failure is entirely dependent on a few binary decisions made by government agencies which ostensibly depend on the strength of the science.
It depends heavily on industry dynamics; in biotech it's not a problem since "product-market fit" is essentially predetermined and there are very few "customers", which are limited to private/public insurers representing patients and pharma companies looking to grow their stock value. In software there is a lot of capital sloshing around because the vast majority of it goes towards payroll which can be scaled up or down on a whim and many times the return on an investment depends not on dividends from profits but acquisitions by other companies looking to move their own stock price (the public version of an acquihire). There's the additional factor that many tech companies have network effects that form semi-monopolies which can be an order or two of magnitude more profitable than competitive industries.
You won't find the same level of unprofitable IPOs in resource extraction, for example, which is subject to the whims of governments, fluctuating prices, and requires massive up front investments. Most of the excess capital goes towards hedging the aforementioned risks so dividends from profit is how money makes its way back to investors. Unprofitable IPOs only really happens when some company signs a big deal for mineral/resource rights with a government and spins off a separate company to raise money to exploit that deal without diluting the main company. If the government is considered reliable to investors, its perfectly normal to throw money in.
Common but it's one of those things that should come with a label on every single ticker or such. As it stands, without any plan or goal to become profitable, investors should acknowlege that they are incurring extreme risk and are investing on concepts outside of any actual plan to eventually turn a profit. To top it all off, they are just crawling Google. Google could potentially shut their entire game down any day. In a different era's market I would expect the SEC to shut it down and ask 'Why are you IPOing?' and 'Is this an attempt to exit from a failing business by misleading investors?'.
That last one is really the kicker here. It's hard to interpret this any other way outside of the current tech boom than "We're failing, have been for years, and are looking for a lifeline here to float us a little further down the river."
I sometimes can't tell if this is just the bright spot right before total collapse, or if we've just entered a completely new business paradigm.
What numbers are you guys looking at? They lost $7M on $125M of revenue. Compared to losing $10M on $92M the year prior. It's not insanely far away from being profitable.
> Google could potentially shut their entire game down any day
SemRush CEO said that Google would rather sponsor them than shut down.
That kind of analytics increases Google's sales, but Google cannot run such a product without conflicts of interest (providing one ad-buyers information on what doing their competitors).
Semrush, Moz, Ahrefs, and others have been scraping Google for more than a decade. I suspect whatever system they have for scraping Google is pretty robust and spreads risk out over lots of different types of proxies.
Amazon reached its first reported profit like 10 years after founding. It's hard risk all the way through with funding needed to pay wages and other fixed expenses. Pretty amazing that people stick to it as long as it takes to become profitable. I'm not so sure my nerves could take all the suspense.
A lot of companies, and particularly Amazon, always have an easy path to profitability in their back pocket. They simply choose not to be profitable because it means they'll pay less taxes and grow faster. It's a lot easier to "stick with it" with this in mind.
If you make $100k in profit, you pay 21% in taxes, so it turns into $79k.
If you instead invest that $100k into growth (eg. ads, sales people, marketers, engineers), you pay $0 of taxes, and can ideally generate an additional $200-300k revenue next year because of the investment.
Would you rather have $79k now, or $200-300k next year?
If you always invest, you'll grow faster and never pay taxes. With this in mind, why would these companies want to be profitable?
The major assumption here is that you have a way to invest $x now into $x+ in the future. A lot of SaaS companies have this down to a science via metrics like CAC, payback period, etc.
The risk section of an S-1, should be taken with a grain of salt. Half the items there are simply cookie cutter templates that simply provide protection if their stock goes to 0 and they get sued. Here's is the exact same line from coinbase's S1
> Due to our limited operating history, it may be difficult to evaluate our business and future prospects, and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in any given period. [1]
You spend more money than you make to grow revenue and capture market share. Then you try to slowly become profitable over time. It's how nearly every growth company operates, whether it is a startup or public company.
is it safe to say reinvesting is counted as a loss for tax purposes then? How does the tax angle come into play, taxes are only on profit income not revenues?
Yes, taxes are only on profits. You don’t need a loss per se, you just need to reinvest everything.
The results would be crazy otherwise. Tech makes near 100% margins, grocery about 2%. But both industries would pay the same level of tax on 100% of revenue if it wasn’t profit based.
Same. Their bots index content that they have no possibility of being able to parse or use (binaries?!) and at a rate far above anything that could be useful or reasonable.
Don't know if this is the reason OP hates it, but for me SEMRush and similar companies are the reason the web is littered with blogspam for pretty much every topic.
Content Marketing companies and Content Farms use SEMRush to figure out which topics are covered by competition of their clients and which topics would attract visitors, and then pay pennies to a non-expert freelancer to produce a very shallow text with content probably copied from the same competitor, and littered with keywords recommended by SEMRush. Then, this text rises to the top of Google while non-SEO optimized quality content lingers in obscurity.
How Google doesn't go after those shady practices is beyond me. They're probably just afraid of killing a whole industry and having an antitrust target on their backs.
Imo the problem mainly lies in Google's square. All SEO tools exist for the reason of it being possible to game search results in the first place. It's inevitable that companies will offer tools and services to do so when there's such a huge market for it.
Google has gotten better at discerning between crap and quality content, but they still have a long way to go, and I'm unsure if it can be fully fixed the way search engines currently work.
Personally, I've given up hope Google will be the one to do this. They have serious talent and no one can deny this but IMHO Google lacks vision and leadership. They've simply lost their way.
Even their search results have gotten worse and worse.
Google's fix for spammy results seems to be favoring large corporations, governments, and putting results on their own page (so-called "rich results" fka "rich snippets).
Can people claiming success with this product provide just a little more context on how it helped your company? I always think there might be astroturfing with these kinds of submissions.
It's useful for figuring out how to optimize your site for 'organic reach', as well as for analyzing the relative popularity of your competitors.
SEMRush can tell you how many people search a variety of terms, and what websites they're visiting after those searches. You can then use this to change the language (key phrases and the like) on your website, and write content (blog posts or landing pages) that fits with existing search user preferences.
You can also pop a competitor, client, or supplier's website into SEMRush, and see how much they spend on ads, as well as how many people are finding their website via search. This can help you figure out what they're doing well, and where they do poorly. You might be able to rank for similar keywords, or go for keywords they aren't targeting.
A lot of SEO and digital marketing agencies use SEMrush because it's an easy way to track keyword rankings for your clients and their competitors. SEMrush also generates reports for keyword rankings that are helpful to provide clients. I haven't used it in a few years but I found SEMrush to be a good tool and worth the cost if you have clients.
A very dishonest company whose scrapers are tough to block. They don't honor robots.txt and tell you that you have to add in special verbiage to get them to stop. They hop IPs from different ranges so they are difficult to range-ban.
Yep - they get blocked a lot by CF (probably for not honoring robots and crawling random websites for marketing purposes) yet a lot of people use it and wonder why it’s blocked: https://community.cloudflare.com/search?q=Semrush
The bubble has been around for a while. It's just each time it gets anywhere near popping, Fed prints more money [0]. So the market-cap/dollar ratio hasn't hit a historically expected correction, but the purchasing power of a median salary has been declining and will continue declining as long as this policy is in place.
But don't worry, the media is working around the clock to convince the general public that owning a detached house, starting a family, eating meat and going on a vacation is evil, so we must welcome the declining affordability of these things and be grateful for a unique chance to put custom pronouns in our bio. /s
Why? People will buy this, just because it's another Tech-Stock. People bought Nikola and Wirecard just because they have to do something with compute/tech.
Very interesting! I have found their product a joy to use and I say this with all sincerity, credit it with getting our business out of a tough spot during COVID. Wishing them the best on the IPO!
Allowed for us to understand where we were doing well in terms of page rankings, where we were not, what keywords we needed to begin targeting to get the most traffic volume, and recommendations on what that content should consist of.
We were also able to gain insights into competitors, what keywords they were targeting, where there were opportunities to hit keywords they were not, etc. It also gives estimates as to how much they are spending on advertising, which can be useful.
While I’m sure other factors have contributed, our sales of IT services has tripled and verticals we were receiving no leads in are getting a significant amount. All organically.
I will also say we were able to reduce our advertising spend from $1,500 to $0.00 per month.
I can’t recommend using SEMRush highly enough, especially for small businesses.
Fuck these guys. They are a completely disrespectful and dishonest crawler. Fortunately I’ve moved most of my clientele over to Cloudflare and are able to block them at the perimeter.
Like many companies, we really enjoy paying SemRush a few hundred dollars a month and almost never opening it. It’s politically difficult to cancel, because it feels like a no confidence vote in “doing SEO.” But every year, we opt to spend most of our SEO budgets just writing stuff based on Google autocompletes and simple Google Ads data.
This is the question I have too. Looks like they have far too many employees (IIRC around 10-20x their biggest rival Ahrefs, who incidentally aren't losing money). The headcount can't be all of it though.
The risk section of the s1 is pretty large. At least for the SEO portion, I would guess the biggest risk is that google gets wise and figures out how to block search result scraping better. It is a constant battle to react to changes made to prevent scraping by coming up with new work arounds to get around those changes.
