How to grow your startup by building a newsletter audience

Unacademy started out as a simple college hobby for a co-founder, Gaurav Munjal. In 5 years, it was built into the actual company with a free tier and a subscription model.

Being the 2nd largest ed-tech startup in India, Unacademy enjoys a lot of attention from VCs.

Its current valuation is $3.44B, after it raised a $440M funding round in 2021. Much like any other VC-funded startup with deep pockets, Unacademy naturally spends a huge amount on growing its user base.

Given the wild popularity of IPL in India and that most of their target audience tunes in to watch IPL, Unacademy spends a ton on IPL ads.

1) Overall, in 2022, Unacademy spent Rs 40 Cr on IPL ads in 2022.

2) Their target audience accounts for over 40% of IPL’s total 20 Cr viewership, which is 8 Cr target audience.

3) Unacademy's paying user conversion rate = paying users/net users = 350K/30M *100 = 1.1%.

4) Traditionally, the TV ad conversion rate is 0.7%. So, net net the paying users = 8 Cr x 0.7% x 1% = 5600 users.

5) We finally get the customer acquisition cost (cac) = Rs 40 Cr/5600 users = Rs 72K/user

6) If we say that on average the course fee is around 10K. Unacademy still is burning ~60K per user acquired.

Zapier is a simple workflow automation tool that allows you to move information between apps & connect them to create automated workflows. It gets ~2M monthly traffic & has 50k+ automated pages! It's vastly successful, thanks to its brilliant SEO strategy.

To drive traffic to their website, Zapier created two sets of pages. The blogs on "Best Apps" & the App Integration pages.

One of the top-performing Zapier subfolders is the /apps landing page. This set of pages accounts for ~15% of Zapier's total traffic with 235K monthly visitors! The idea behind creating these pages is simple. Zapier wants to target all users who are searching for ways to connect different apps.

This set of pages forms a 4 stage hierarchy, where each stage links to the next stage. The pages are, Main Page -> App Profile Page -> App-to-App Integration -> Zaps Page.

Next, the best app blogs are basically blogs that list down top apps in the market in a particular category. For example, the best URL shorteners, the best note-taking apps, the best to-do list apps, etc. These pages get 900K monthly organic traffic, ie. 60% of traffic to their site!

Zapier ranks for really difficult keywords with these pages. It does that by writing high-quality SEO optimized content, internally linking all pages to flow the authority & acquiring high-quality backlinks.

All these pages are internally linked & are created using an automated template to reduce effort while creating new pages!

BrowserStack is a cross-browser testing tool that can be used to test software on different browsers and applications.

Their target audience is primarily developers. They are highly technical and appreciate in-depth tech content.

Secondly, testing is frustrating. So, these devs would not go research multiple sources to find the best way to do anything in testing.

Given these 2 points, BrowserStack took a leap to create guides for its audience that are highly technical and in-depth in nature.

Their SEO strategy looks something like this:
1) Find relevant queries related to software testing and specifically their product
2) Create a detailed guide to wow tech folks, so they rave about the content and share it.
3) Optimize for SEO & hope Google ranks them.

BrowserStack uses this high technical, in-depth guides to wow their users, so they rave about them to other developers. When readers love this content and share it, eventually Google also recognized your effort!