HOW SURFER BOOTSTRAPPED TO €15M ARR | Tomasz Niezgoda, Co-Founder & CMO @ Surfer

Tomasz Niezgoda (Co-Founder & CMO @ Surfer) let me pick his brain for 60 min on how they bootstrapped to €15M ARR, get ~20% of paying customers from AI Search, and talked to 50+ customers per week in the early days.

If you care about SaaS, bootstrapping, SEO, AI Search, or marketing in general, this conversation is packed with insights.

Mit dem Laden des Videos akzeptieren Sie die Datenschutzerklärung von YouTube.
Mehr erfahren

Video laden

YouTube immer entsperren

Here are 5 things that stood out

1) They didn’t touch SEO for 4 years

While building an SEO tool, they focused on community, webinars, and education first. SEO came later when they had the domain authority to compete with Ahrefs and Semrush.

2) 50+ customer conversations per week in year 1

Not async support tickets. Real customer calls. Tomasz and the team split them. The knowledge they gathered became their unfair advantage over competitors.

3) AI search isn’t magic, it’s discipline

Monitor your prompts weekly. When competitors get cited, create similar content. Track visibility like a hawk. Act fast. Repeat every single week without missing.

4) They killed top-of-funnel content completely

Traffic dropped as a KPI. Now they focus purely on middle and bottom-of-funnel content. “Best alternatives” and “vs” pages feed LLMs with the exact narrative they want.

5) They doubled down on YouTube and it paid off 10x

They started with just 2 videos per month, and it took 3 months to see first signs it worked. Now they have 24K subscribers, published 180 videos, and it’s one of their top channels.

“Talk to your customers” is the most ignored advice in SaaS marketing

“Talk to your customers” is the most ignored advice in SaaS marketing. It’s also what Surfer used as their unfair advantage. Here’s how they did it (and at which scale) and how you can get started with small steps too.

Most marketing teams build content strategies based on keyword research tools and competitor analysis. Surfer did something different. Their founders did 50 calls per week, 30-60 minutes each.

That’s already a full work week, just listening to prospects or customers talk about their problems, needs, and how they imagine a solution.

The result? Content that actually resonates because it uses customer language. SEO strategies that target real pain points, not just high-volume keywords. Product positioning that connects immediately because it came directly from user conversations.

This depth of customer understanding became impossible for competitors to replicate.

Here are 3 simple steps to build customer understanding into your content process

1. Join at least 2 sales calls every month silently, just listening. Pay attention to how prospects describe their problems and what language they use
2. Schedule at least 2 user interviews every month. Ask about their challenges, and how they are actually using your product. Learn what they were doing before, what changed, and how the solution manifests in their daily life.
3. Set up a regular sync between marketing, sales, and product (if you haven’t already). Share insights, roadmaps, narratives, and customer language across teams.

The magic isn’t in the number of calls. It’s in the discipline to do it consistently and actually use what you learn in your content.

How we do customer research at Radyant

When we onboard new clients at Radyant, the first thing we do is dive deep into understanding their users. We join sales calls, analyze support tickets, review customer feedback, everything available. You can’t create content that converts without truly understanding who you’re speaking to.