After two exits, Dmitry Dragilev built his latest product to $12k MRR pre-launch. Here's how.

Dmitry Dragilev worked at a startup that got acquired by Google — and instead of taking the payout, he walked. He wanted to start his own thing, and that's exactly what he did.

Since then, he has built and exited two businesses. And now, he's working on his third, which is making $12k MRR less than a year after monetizing it.

Here’s how he did it. 👇

Why did you become an entrepreneur?

I was born in the Soviet Union under communist rule. I didn’t have the things we take for granted here in the United States. No diapers. No Fruit Loops.

I dreamed of freedom. The ability to make choices. The chance to start a business one day.

Then, a relative convinced my risk-averse family to immigrate. And this idea of taking risks really stuck with me.

I worked my way up at these big behemoths of corporations until I got a pretty cushy job at a startup called Polar Polls. I helped them scale from 0 to 40M+ pageviews per month, until it was acquired by Google in September, 2014.

I was not a founder, but the founders hinted that I should join full-time in case they sold. They wanted me to have a stake.

I decided to walk away instead and forgo the payout. I didn't want to work for Google or any other huge company for years until my shares vested.

I wanted the American dream, but looking around the office, I knew that was not it.

How did you conquer your fears?

I feared leaving my job and starting my own business. I was settling down, about to have a kid, and I would have no income.

There was a lot to fear! And coming from a risk-averse family, fear and worry were instilled in me from a young age. But I could either let it hold me back or embrace it and move forward. I chose the latter.

I had this practice of writing down what I was afraid of, then writing down how to overcome it, or why it’s something I shouldn’t fear in the first place.

So when I was scared to go out on my own, I came back to this practice.

• Afraid of losing the payout? Being in control of my own destiny could lead to an even bigger payout.

• Afraid to lose work-life balance? I would commit to balance and put my kids first.

• Afraid to fail? I could fail big and learn a lot from it.

I faced my fears and I dismantled them, one by one. I can trace my biggest success to this type of fear assessment.

Did taking the leap pay off?

Everyone else moved to Mountain View and worked for Google for years with a nice package. I got to work on JustReachOut, a PR outreach tool to find and pitch relevant journalists.

The product wasn’t even validated at that point. But I had been working in the space for a while and I had launched a course that did really well, so I knew people were looking for a solution.

I built it to $30k MRR and it was acquired in 2020 by SEOJet for an undisclosed amount. It was later acquired from SEOJet by Jon Katzur — one of the early Slack employees — in early 2024.

Then, in 2021, I founded SmallBizTools, an affiliate blog site featuring the best business software tools. I built it to $10k-$12k and it was acquired by SemRush in September 2023. Per the contract, I can't comment on specific numbers, but it was a part cash, part stock deal.

Now, I’m working on TopicRanker, a software tool that helps you find long tail keywords based on weaknesses and problems in the SERP. It’s built on Vercel, Postgres, and DigitalOcean.

We’ve grown from 0 to 1600+ customers since launching in July 2023. We’re at $12k MRR and we’re launching on ProductHunt today!

How did your businesses get acquired by such big names?

I’ve worked in SEO for the last 12 years. I’ve consulted 60+ companies, including companies like DowJones, Barrons, MarketWatch, Realtor.com, Nextiva, Aura, Pipedrive, Wistia, CultureAmp, Backlinko, Helpscout, and SwanBitcoin, helping them to rank #1 organically on Google for their most competitive terms.

Through my consulting, I've met people and companies with money and a need for something in PR or SEO — but they could not seem to build it themselves or it doesn't make sense for them to build it. So I befriended them early on when I started building my own product. And I built a relationship with them over time.

I usually try to start a project/startup knowing a specific company might want to acquire it in the future.

Each time, I had a clear vision of what I wanted. And I went for it. I defined my goals. I committed to them. And I made it happen.

How are you growing TopicRanker?

We started with a free tier only. We did it to get feedback, but starting this way brought in 1600+ users.

When we launched the MVP in July of 2023, we switched to paid only — no free tier. And now we’re growing rapidly. We’re at 220 or so active paying customers.

There are two ways we do marketing.

One is posting on LinkedIn and Indie Hackers with case studies that showcase the real need and use case of what we do. These drive a good number of customers. Here are some examples: 1, 2, 3.

We also have an affiliate relationship with SemRush that drives a lot of new customer growth.

How does your affiliate relationship with SemRush work?

SemRush has an app center where their customers can buy add-on apps and use them right in the SemRush UI.

So we went through an approval process and built an app. And it's doing REALLY well!

SemRush does all the promotion (in-app and email blasts). They also take care of the customer service. I can't comment on the fee/percentage structure but it's similar to Apple's app store.

I can't share the number of customers who have come from SemRush either, but trust me — they're a great partner to have!

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What’s your SEO playbook?

TopicRanker's blog traffic is still tiny since we just launched less than a year ago. We get maybe 1,000 uniques per month right now. But the relevancy is super high, so we’re ranking #1 for keywords like "keywordtoo.io alternative", "SEO target keywords", and "longtail pro alternative".

Here's are the steps that I always use:

Step 1: Find a good topic

Focus on target keywords that have a problem or a weak spot on the SERP.

Ever Google something and the results stink? That's your cue for ranking potential. Really — if the results suck, you can rank for that term easily.

Here are some key indicators a SERP is easy to rank:

• Low authority and backlinks for sites ranking.

• The search query Googled does not match the title.

• The content is outdated.

• Content is less than 800 words in length.

• The page has a poor load score on mobile (loading more than 3 sec).

• Readability is poor.

• The domain has a high spam score.

All keyword research tools and strategies focus on keyword difficulty metrics. But none of them emphasize actual problems and weaknesses on the search results page. That’s a real problem!

Most indie hackers choose a keyword based solely on the keyword difficulty metric. They don’t analyze whether there is a specific problem in the search results for the keyword they want to go after.

That’s crazy because every Google core ranking update in 2023 and 2024 has focused on quality of content search results.

When doing keyword research, your job is to focus on SERPs that have an actual problem. This is precisely why I founded TopicRanker.

Beyond that, You’ll want two things from a target keyword:

1. Significant keyword volume. If you’re going to spend months trying to rank for a single keyword, you need to pick something big enough to justify the effort.

2. Make sure it’s strategically relevant. The topic needs to be relevant to your conversion goals.

Step 2: Write a badass piece of content

Here’s the process we followed to create our content:

1. Do extremely thorough research.

2. Write the content. You don’t need to be a subject matter expert to create an excellent piece of content. What you do need is good writing skills... and the discipline to actually finish an article.

3. Add lots of visuals and make content more readable with headers, etc.

Step 3: Optimize on-page SEO and engagement metrics

Optimize your on-page SEO:

1. Add keywords to your H1 header tag.

2. Use actual questions the reader might ask for your H2s.

3. Use a short URL. According to research, shorter URLs tend to rank better than longer ones.

4. Improve keyword density. Make sure Google knows what the article is about.

Step 4: Build internal links to article

Building internal links to your new content can be surprisingly effective. Link from:

1. Pages that had high traffic and page authority

2. Pages where the keyword already existed unlinked

Step 5: Find link targets

Find targets for your outreach campaign.

There are multiple ways to approach this process, but the easiest is to simply find sites that link to your top competitors.

Here’s what you need from the links:

• You need a link from a page that ranks organically on Google for a search term with more than 100 searches per month that is actually relevant to your topics.

• The DR of the domain you're getting the link from needs to be higher than yours.

• The organic traffic according to SemRush or Ahrefs for the blog portion of the domain you're getting a link from needs to be 10K+ and increasing, not decreasing.

• The domain needs to rank for keywords similar to our topics.

Then, find email addresses of the author or webmaster. Try Hunter.io and tools like it.

Step 6: Outreach like crazy

If a site is lower quality, use an email template. For up-and-coming or authoritative sites, personalize the emails and try to build a relationship, even if it doesn’t yield a link.

You can use a number of tools to make outreach easier:

1. JustReachOut

2. MixMax

3. LeadIQ

4. Toutapp

5. Prospectify

When you reach out, do the following:

1. Use a curiosity-evoking headline. Keeping everything lower case in the subject line makes the email look authentic. And say that “something is missing” from their article to make them curious.

2. Name drop familiar brands that you have a relationship with.

3. It’s also a good idea to include a link to their article to jog their memory.

4. Let them know what’s missing. The meat of the email. Make sure that you’re specific here.

5. Tell them why this is advantageous for them.

6. Never demand a link. Asking for feedback first is a good way to show that you want a genuine conversation, not just a link.

I teach entrepreneurs more about link building in my course.

Step 7: Be prepared to guest post

Consider guest posting to improve traffic and authority.

Step 8: Fine-tune the content

Continue to optimize and update the content.

How do you maintain work-life balance?

My business supports the life I want for myself and my family. It will cover my kids’ education and my house, but is not part of a billion-dollar unicorn.

My path to success is to work 20 hours per week and build a business that lets me enjoy life with my family. I want to spend a good part of my day working out, picking up my kids from school, doing homework with them, hanging out with them, and cooking dinner.

That's what I committed to in the beginning. And I stuck with it.

You just have to be very conscious about your time. You can't let other people influence what you do each day.

That's why I am not an "inbox zero" person. You need to have your own agenda and focus. You know what you need to get done for your business.

Check out Rand Fishkin's “The Big Cheat Code”.

What else should indie hackers know?

80% of everything I do fails. That's 8 out of 10 initiatives we run at TopicRanker or my consultancy fail. Keep that in mind.

Dmitry is launching on ProductHunt  as we speak. And you can check out TopicRanker or find him on X.

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