In this article, we’re looking at bootstrapped SaaS companies that gained the greatest amount of referring domains in the past year.
Bootstrapped businesses generally don’t have huge budgets to spend on marketing, so any strategy these small-but-mighty companies use to improve their organic growth is something that you can take inspiration from, too.
- We used the Ahrefs API to pull a list of live referring domains for each company in September 2023 and September 2024.
- Companies were ranked by referring domain growth as a percentage of their initial referring domains. We’ve set a minimum starting threshold of 1,000 referring domains.
- We’ve reported on referring domains instead of backlinks, because 1,000 referring domains are much, much harder to get than 1,000 backlinks.
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| Rank | Company | Referring Domains 2023 | Referring Domains 2024 | Referring Domain Growth | Change | Estimated Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Elfsight | 7,657 | 33,610 | 25,953 | 339% | $8.0M |
| 2 | Short.io | 5,709 | 18,573 | 12,864 | 225% | $0.5M |
| 3 | Gymdesk | 1,325 | 3,052 | 1,727 | 130% | $5.5M |
| 4 | Helpjuice | 4,015 | 8,672 | 4,657 | 116% | $6.0M |
| 5 | AlsoAsked | 1,602 | 3,343 | 1,741 | 109% | $0.5M |
| 6 | Stripo | 2,304 | 4,420 | 2,116 | 92% | $5.5M |
| 7 | Clearscope | 1,883 | 3,580 | 1,697 | 90% | $5.5M |
| 8 | Surfer | 5,815 | 10,899 | 5,084 | 87% | $37.5M |
| 9 | Wordtune | 2,877 | 5,347 | 2,470 | 86% | $1.0M |
| 10 | Crowdin | 4,818 | 8,919 | 4,101 | 85% | $17.5M |
| 11 | Socialinsider | 3,264 | 6,007 | 2,743 | 84% | $0.8M |
| 12 | SpyFu | 8,101 | 14,821 | 6,720 | 83% | $2.0M |
| 13 | Pentest-Tools.com | 1,543 | 2,779 | 1,236 | 80% | $5.5M |
| 14 | Canny | 4,411 | 7,675 | 3,264 | 74% | $5.5M |
| 15 | Surfshark | 13,898 | 24,056 | 10,158 | 73% | $20.0M |
| 16 | Sitebulb | 1,232 | 2,093 | 861 | 70% | $0.5M |
| 17 | Seobility | 3,496 | 5,900 | 2,404 | 69% | $5.0M |
| 18 | SpyCloud | 1,192 | 1,987 | 795 | 67% | $14.0M |
| 19 | MxToolbox | 10,718 | 17,736 | 7,018 | 65% | $9.0M |
| 20 | Shiftbase | 1,077 | 1,780 | 703 | 65% | $17.5M |
| 21 | Signaturely | 1,113 | 1,839 | 726 | 65% | $0.5M |
| 22 | Lemlist | 1,613 | 2,654 | 1,041 | 65% | $6.0M |
| 23 | Sitechecker | 5,938 | 9,732 | 3,794 | 64% | $6.1M |
| 24 | SavvyCal | 1,272 | 2,070 | 798 | 63% | $5.5M |
| 25 | Statusbrew | 2,750 | 4,470 | 1,720 | 63% | $14.0M |
| 26 | Wisepops | 1,291 | 2,086 | 795 | 62% | $3.0M |
| 27 | Glassnode | 5,041 | 8,123 | 3,082 | 61% | $5.5M |
| 28 | DeviceAtlas | 2,765 | 4,442 | 1,677 | 61% | $19.0M |
| 29 | Float.com | 1,021 | 1,638 | 617 | 60% | $5.5M |
| 30 | RTINGS.com | 8,601 | 13,779 | 5,178 | 60% | $6.3M |
| 31 | Smallpdf | 13,953 | 22,264 | 8,311 | 60% | $17.5M |
| 32 | Clockify | 6,109 | 9,733 | 3,624 | 59% | $5.5M |
| 33 | Mailtrap | 3,162 | 4,991 | 1,829 | 58% | $5.5M |
| 34 | BambooHR | 8,511 | 13,410 | 4,899 | 58% | $237.8M |
| 35 | Setapp | 13,178 | 20,696 | 7,518 | 57% | $15.0M |
| 36 | WebCEO | 2,495 | 3,891 | 1,396 | 56% | $25.0M |
| 37 | Visme | 10,354 | 16,135 | 5,781 | 56% | $1.0M |
| 38 | UpLead | 1,823 | 2,833 | 1,010 | 55% | $17.5M |
| 39 | Slickplan | 1,345 | 2,086 | 741 | 55% | $1.0M |
| 40 | Jotform | 45,485 | 69,553 | 24,068 | 53% | $21.0M |
| 41 | Wiza | 2,013 | 3,070 | 1,057 | 53% | $5.5M |
| 42 | Ahrefs | 52,536 | 80,036 | 27,500 | 52% | $100.0M |
| 43 | Plausible Analytics | 6,084 | 9,251 | 3,167 | 52% | $5.5M |
| 44 | Creately | 7,816 | 11,844 | 4,028 | 52% | $12.0M |
| 45 | Homerun | 2,040 | 3,068 | 1,028 | 50% | $38.4M |
| 46 | Yardi | 1,928 | 2,880 | 952 | 49% | $5500.0M |
| 47 | Infinite Campus | 1,029 | 1,534 | 505 | 49% | $56.0M |
| 48 | Filemail | 3,829 | 5,694 | 1,865 | 49% | $1.0M |
| 49 | LiveAgent | 4,740 | 7,034 | 2,294 | 48% | $5.0M |
| 50 | Semaphore | 2,727 | 4,025 | 1,298 | 48% | $4.0M |
Want to work out how virtually any company builds its best backlinks? Here’s how I do it in Ahrefs.
I usually start with the Overview report in Site Explorer to get a quick overview of the website’s referring domain growth. Here’s the chart for our #1 company, Elfsight:
Impressive! Next, I use the Anchors report to quickly understand the types of links being built: are they all brand mentions, or links to blog content, or free tools?
In Elfsight’s case, the vast majority of their referring domains (well over 60%) have anchor text containing the word widget:
Looking at some of these links, it’s clear that the company offers free website widgets that also include a link back to Elfsight:
For some websites, anchor text won’t be so revealing. Here’s the Referring Domains report for a SaaS company I excluded from this article. At first glance, they seem to be doing well, with over 100,000 new backlinks acquired in the past year:
But digging into the most common anchor text, it becomes apparent that these are almost all spammy links (advertising Korean business massages).
You can exclude spammy links like these using our Best links filter. By default, the “Best links” filter will only show links that are:
- Dofollow,
- In the page content,
- On a referring domain with a DR of at least 30,
- With estimated organic traffic to the page of at least 500/m.
If you have different criteria for defining a “best” link, you can customize the filter yourself:
With the filter applied, if we run the Anchors report again, we can filter out all of those spam links, and get a clearer picture of the good quality links this website has acquired. Far, far fewer:
Lastly, I like to visit the Best by links report to see the individual pages that have acquired the best links.
Here’s an example from another one of our top 50 websites, Clearscope. Aside from common “utility” pages like their homepage, pricing page, and sign-in page, their most linked-to pages are all thought leadership blog posts—opinions, predictions, and research studies:
Not every company can build links by offering tons of free tools or widgets, but thought leadership content is a link-building strategy that’s much easier for other companies to emulate.
Final thoughts
We’ll share more of these data analyses in the coming weeks. Want us to include your company in the next analysis? Fill out this short Google Form.
