Chanty’s Playbook for Reaching Millions in ARR Amidst Billion Dollar Competitors
Ask any bootstrapped founder.
Is competing with brands that have an Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of $1B, $4B, and $130M a tall order?
Their response? Likely “Yes.”
For Dmytro Okunyev, it’s no.
I wasn’t very certain that my idea would work, but step by step, small win by small win, I gained that confidence.
— Dmytro Okunyev (@dmytrookunyev) February 12, 2021
Now we are in the ivy league of communication platforms.#chanty #software #marketing
In 2017, Dmytro built Chanty, a team chat and collaboration tool that’ll go head-to-head with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and many more.
Together, the above team chat heavyweights had an ARR worth billions of dollars when Chanty hadn’t attained product-market fit.
Amidst this fierce competition that can make a new SaaS brand to cave in, Chanty acquired:
- Over 2.2 million annual organic visitors
- 10000+ users
- $1.5M in ARR
The best part?
They achieved these without spending a cent on Facebook and Google ads.
So how did Dmytro and his team pull this off?
👉🏾 They created a lot of comparison articles.
Like comparison pages, comparison articles are content that help prospects with commercial and transactional search intent to make informed buying decisions.
These articles can have titles like:
- Your Product vs Competitor Product: Which is Best for {niche}
- {number} Best “Your Competitor Alternative” for {niche}
- Your Product vs Competitor Product vs Another Competitor Product: An Unbiased Comparison
This title list can go on and on and it’s one that’s not new to Chanty.
In this case study, we’ll explore Chanty’s method for creating and driving results with comparison articles.
You’ll uncover:
- How Chanty piggybacked on its dominant competitor
- The breakdown of Chanty’s comparison article worth $119,400
- How much Chanty saves by adopting the comparison article tactic
- The overlooked SEO tactic that Chanty uses to retain top SERP positions
- The estimated returns from Chanty’s blog content
Plus, we’ll explore a content format that Chanty is yet to milk to make its comparison articles even more effective at generating high-intent prospects.
Let’s get started.
Piggybacking on the Dominant Competitor
There are tons of team chat or instant messaging software out there.
G2 has 290 on their platform alone.
Many of these software aren’t new because they’ve existed for several years.
- Proofhub: Found in 2011
- Gitter: Found in 2014
- Workstorm: Found in 2015
- Microsoft Teams: Found in 2016
Now you may or may not know these software. However, chances are you know Slack, the most dominant player in the team chat industry.
Slack was launched to the public in August 2013. Over 10 million people use it, it was acquired by Salesforce for a staggering $27.7B, and while several users raved about it, others weren’t so pleased with it.
Dmytro Okunyev was one of such unsatisfied users.
Chanty is born out of a problem. We faced a lot of problems while using different team communication and collaboration tools. We just couldn’t find the right fit for us.
Before creating Chanty, Dmytro managed a few design agencies that experienced communication challenges.
To solve this problem, Dmytro tried Slack and several other communication software.
Did they work? Nah.
These software weren’t worth their salt for Dmytro.
The result?
Dmytro built his own internal communication app, saw potential in it, released it to early adopters, and iterated on it based on user feedback. This was how Chanty started out.
However, there was a tough but surmountable challenge. And that was ‘attracting more people to use Chanty.’
Straight off the bat, one way to solve this challenge is to adopt the marketing funnel by creating content that makes Chanty’s audience:
- Aware of their problem
- Interested in solving their problem
- Consider options for solving their problem
- Purchase Chanty’s product.
But Chanty didn’t follow this route.
Why?
They wanted to reduce the length of their sales cycle and quickly close interested prospects.
This made them flip the marketing funnel on its head by creating content for buyers in the consideration and evaluation stages.
They executed this by first targeting people who intended to switch from Slack, the biggest player in the game.
These people are:
- Dissatisfied Slack users who want to switch to another product for one reason or the other
- First-time team chat buyers who want to evaluate the best communication and collaboration apps before purchasing one.
According to SEMrush, up to 4400 people around the globe search for ‘Slack alternatives’ every single month.
Creating content that’d rank for this keyword and immediately convert some readers will be a gamechanger for a new SaaS brand like Chanty.
It was game on and Chanty published its first comparison article on May 31, 2017.
Today, this post brings about 7950 annual organic visitors to the Chanty website.
If it has a conversion rate of just 5%, Chanty could have up to 398 new users from this post—and at an estimated customer lifetime value of just $300, this post will drive $119,400 in annual revenue.
The estimated revenue stats get more interesting when we look at Chanty’s entire traffic.
SEMrush data suggests the Chanty website gets 211.6k visits per month or around 2.5 million visitors yearly.
At a 0.5% conversion rate and an estimated customer lifetime value of $300, the estimated revenue is a whopping $3.75M.
We aren’t done.
Besides these interesting estimated revenue stats, Chanty saves $62,300 every month or $747,600 every year that they’d have spent on ranking their 15.8k keywords with Google ads.
Now you’ve heard the sweet part.
TRUTH BOMB: The data wasn’t always as interesting as this.
Consider Chanty’s first Slack alternatives post. In June 2017, a month after this post went live, it didn’t get any traffic according to SEMrush. Not even one visitor.
July wasn’t so bad because 85 people landed on the post.
So What Was the Problem at the Time?
Numerous.
First off, the keyword difficulty for ‘Slack alternatives’ is 64% and this was super-high for Chanty, a relatively new website with low Domain Authority (DA).
This keyword has a high difficulty score because several high domain authority websites published content that targeted it.
Here they are:
Also, the web pages targeting this keyword had a decent page authority because of the number of backlinks they had, among other factors.
To get a chance at ranking for ‘Slack alternatives,’ Chanty had to tick all the boxes that’ll make their post one of the best resources targeting the term.
Here are the steps they took to make it happen.
They:
- Gained authority and trust in the eyes of search engines by generating backlinks
- Built lots of domain expertise by publishing more comparison articles
- Created more in-depth content targeting this keyword
Link Building: Chanty’s Silver Bullet for Retaining Top SERP Positions
Building lots of backlinks is an underrated strategy that gives content better organic search visibility. Asides from helping search engine bots to discover your web pages, backlinks are like a thumbs-up or vote of confidence from one website to another.
You can also think of backlinks like the thousands of ‘retweets’ of a Tweet, hundreds of ‘likes’ on a Facebook post, and tens of ‘comments’ on a LinkedIn post.
The more people engage with content, the more social media and search algorithms believe that content is useful. This prompts the algorithms to give such content more visibility. The Chanty team knew this: So they went all-in on generating backlinks to their comparison articles.
Again, their money-post on Slack alternatives shines here. This post has 1.7k Backlinks from 276 Referring Domains.
These backlinks are a lot more than those of the competing content on page 1 of the SERP, except for HubSpot.
| SERP Position | Website and DA | Referring Domain | Backlinks |
| 1 | Kinsta -71 | 170 | 518 |
| 2 | HubSpot -83 | 277 | 2.3k |
| 3 | Chanty -55 | 260 | 1.7k |
| 4 | Proofhub -60 | 47 | 120 |
| 5 | M.io -53 | 60 | 358 |
| 6 | Alternativeto.net -69 | 38 | 56 |
| 7 | Itsfoss -67 | 81 | 218 |
| 8 | MarketSplash -52 | 49 | 124 |
| 9 | Startupstash -57 | 33 | 62 |
| 10 | CRM.org -53 | 91 | 224 |
“Impressive work,” you say.
But the big question is, how did the Chanty team get this much backlinks?
👉🏾 Guest posting
Guest posting or guest blogging is the act of writing content for other websites that are mostly within your industry.
SaaS companies write guest posts to:
- Attract referral traffic
- Build authoritative backlinks
- Improve their brand awareness
- Gain recognition as experts in their industry
- Grow co-marketing partnership opportunities
- Increase their social following or website subscribers
- Get more prospects who could become customers
AND more.
For Chanty, the primary goal was to build authoritative backlinks from high domain authority websites.
This strategy allowed them to get several backlinks to their ‘Slack alternatives’ post—with links from websites like HubSpot, GoDaddy, Invisionapp, Process Street, Bplans, Marketo, Blogging Wizard, etc.
The icing on the cake?
Chanty can still drive user signups from the traffic generated by their guest posts.
Take their post on Invisionapp.com, for instance. It attracts 650 organic visitors every month.
And on HubSpot, 1866 organic visitors monthly.
Want to know what made Chanty’s ‘Slack alternatives’ post so appealing that other websites gladly linked to it?
👉🏾 The Chanty team were mostly telling a story: A story of how they piggybacked on their major competitor to drive user signups and paying customers.
Now you may not have a similar story, but you can still adopt the guest posting strategy to grow your domain authority, gain relevance in the search engines, build more brand awareness, and attract user signups.
Here’s how your guest posting strategy can look like:
1. Set attainable goals
Your goals should be simple and it’s best you adopt the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) approach.
Example: We want to publish 15 guest posts in Q3 and get quality backlinks from DA 50+ websites.
2. Pitch industry websites
Every guest post you put out there should be on websites covering topics related to your product.
For instance, Chanty’s guest posts were suitable for marketing, SaaS, productivity, team communication, blogging websites, etc.
As you scale up your content marketing program, your domain authority will increase.
So it makes sense to pitch majorly blogs with similar domain authority as yours or higher.
4. Be wary of spam websites
Spam websites usually build bad backlinks and you should avoid them like a plague.
Why? They can cause Google penalties, badly affect SEO, and ruin every positive impact from your content marketing efforts.
So, be sure to always check a website’s spam score.
According to Moz, a score of 1%-30% is low, 31%-60% is medium, and 61%-100% is high.
5. Publish evergreen guest posts
It makes little sense to publish guest posts just to get links.
Like Chanty, you should deliberately go after evergreen topics that people search for daily.
Doing this will make you get user signups for many years.
Content Update: Chanty’s Signature Move For Constant Value Delivery
You may build loads of backlinks and tick every other element that’ll make your content rank.
But here’s the thing: Consistent content update is one of the crucial levers for retaining your page one spot on Google search results.
Generally, your content will lose its value over time.
Why?
- A new SaaS product may enter the market
- An older SaaS product may get acquired or go under
- Your post’s content may be inaccurate due to price or feature changes in the products you compared
AND so on.
These necessitate an update to your old content because search engine algorithms always look for the most accurate, helpful, and relevant content for users.
This means that fresh content with the above elements gets prioritized over older content that doesn’t fit the bill.
The good news for Chanty? They take content updates seriously and this has helped them to keep the top spots for their high-value posts.
For instance, their ‘Slack alternatives’ post has undergone lots of updates since they first published it in 2017.
| Date | Slack Alternatives Discussed | Content Word Count |
| October 20, 2017 | 5 | 2955 |
| June 14, 2018 | 7 | 4516 |
| March 9, 2019 | 7 | 4552 |
| August 17, 2019 | 7 | 4641 |
| April 24, 2020 | 7 | 4350 |
| March 31, 2022 | 8 | 4813 |
Besides making Chanty’s old content appealing to search engines, constant content update allows them to retain a top SERP position, which increases their chances of driving more user sign-ups, and eventually, more customers.
Using Videos to Unlock More Top SERP Results
Chanty has perfectly executed the comparison articles tactics to gain thousands of customers. However, they can gain more customers by adding videos to their comparison articles.
Let’s go to YouTube for a moment and enter ‘Slack alternatives’ in the search bar.
The returned result shows Chanty’s video on Position 1.
That’s pretty good.
What’s better?
This one video has 28,348 views since it went live.
What’s even more impressive is that Chanty brilliantly adds a link to their slack alternatives blog post in the YouTube description.
This allows viewers seeking more information to dive into their blog post, read it, and likely convert.
But is Slack Chanty’s only competitor?
Of course not.
Chanty has written comparison articles on brands like Discord, WhatsApp, Zoom, and more.
The sad part?
They are yet to create videos for several of these comparisons and attract viewers to their website who could become users.
This is a missed opportunity that can help Chanty to get hundreds of thousands of views from YouTube.
Don’t believe me?
Look up these queries on YouTube.
Discord alternatives. Potential? 100,000 views.
Google chat vs Slack. Potential? 17,000 views.
Jira alternatives. Potential? 10,000 views.
Basecamp alternatives. Potential? 7500 views.
If we go on and on, we’ll see that there are plenty of video opportunities to attract prospects and turn them into customers.
The beauty of these videos is that they can also help Chanty’s comparison articles rank better on search engines.
How?
By uploading them to YouTube and embedding them in the comparison articles.
This gives the article a better chance of ranking in the video SERP results and driving more clicks. We see all video results on page 1 of the SERPs doing this exact thing for Chanty’s money keyword—Slack alternatives.
A bonus is the increase in dwell time that comes with including videos in comparison articles.
When dwell time increases, search engines believe the comparison article satisfies search intent and they rank your post on the top of the SERP.
Will the Comparison Articles Tactic Work for Your SaaS?
It depends.
Like Chanty, you need to examine the data before going all-in.
First off, you’d want to be sure you’re in this for the long haul.
Publishing 5 or 10 comparison articles won’t cut it. You need to put in the work by publishing lots of comparison articles.
Done right, this helps search engines to know that your brand has domain expertise. This way, you get a better chance of ranking towards the top of the SERP.
Once the first step is out of the way, you’d need to have a clear-cut marketing budget that’s sufficient for the end-to-end creation and execution of a sizable number of comparison articles.
After that, dive into review platforms like G2, Capterra, SourceForge, and so on to unlock the pain points of your competitors’ customers.
The next step is to write your comparison articles, publish them, consider building backlinks, double-down on your wins, find out why some comparison articles didn’t take off, refine your strategy, and then you rinse and repeat.
Doing all these will help you build a solid content marketing engine that addresses not only your prospects’ challenges but also converts several of them into loyal users who will stick with you for years to come.
Precious Oboidhe is a B2B SaaS content strategist and writer for hire. If you need help with strategizing and creating assets for the different stages of your content marketing funnel, get in touch.
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