Timeweb — the MyReviews startup for working with reviews

ClientTimeweb, the MyReviews startupNicheReview management serviceWhen I joined the project, it had already been on the market for over a year. There was already a product, a site, a few successful articles and a small base of paying users.

All of this needed a proper look. Put everything into numbers, measure it and build marketing channels to grow revenue. In the first 2 weeks I analysed the current results and turned them into a marketing strategy based on the SOSTAC model, split into stages and tools.

We set priorities, split the channels into short-term and long-term ones and broke the goals down into steps. Among the directions we picked a few of the most promising for a SaaS service: SEO and link building, YouTube production and short-form video, webinars with partners and conversion improvements.

That is what we got down to.

Market and competitor analysis

To build marketing on data, you need data. And not only on the product, but on the whole market. So alongside building lead generation, I launched an analysis of the market, its size and every competitor’s prices. Partly guerrilla-style: I booked meetings with all the competitors posing as a client and took apart their product, prices and offers — what they sell and for how much.

Along the way I found many ways to stand apart from the competitors: on price (it is already in fact tens of times more affordable), a stronger offer and a different audience segment. The big players in the review management market worked with enterprise and sold expensive packages with a ticket of 300–400 thousand roubles a month. We were moving with SMBs and decided to keep going that way, but not to pass up big business either. By the way, over the time we worked, a large telecom operator came to us asking to build our infrastructure for them. And later there was also a large fast-food chain, but that’s another story.

Alongside the analysis I launched custdev research to kill two birds with one stone: get material for client case studies and get inside the heads of those very clients. All of this took about a month, while we were already working with the lead generation channels. After the analysis, together with the CEO and the product manager, we drew many conclusions and applied them in the service: changed the positioning, the plan prices and the CJM logic.

SEO, GEO and link building

We started writing articles for several resources, including our own site: for every hot and secondary keyword, putting out 2–3 articles a week. Not AI slop, but real articles. Alongside, we published on the Timeweb blog, where many authors write.

Within the first month the articles were reaching the top 5 and top 10 in search. The reason: we picked keywords well and played with the formats that robots and LLMs love. For SEO and GEO at once.

We also put link building to use: we placed links to our site on other resources to strengthen the domain rating. The higher it is, the better the site shows in search and the more willingly others link to it, neural networks included.

I’ll say it straight: SEO brought the most tangible flow of clients within a few months. And the internet experts can keep saying it’s dead and doesn’t work.

YouTube and short-form video

We drew up a list of key topics and started shooting videos for YouTube. We also wanted to capture search queries from there: YouTube shows up in search too and responds well to SEO.

Honestly, this channel didn’t take off. One video, about the review widget, started showing up right in the search results and brought traffic and sign-ups. But overall there were few views.

Short-form video worked much better. We built a strategy for it and set up a mini content factory: the videos went out on Reels and Shorts, each one steadily gathered 1–3 thousand views and brought sign-ups to the service.

Webinars with partners

We launched webinars. We found several partners among agencies: especially those that manage companies’ online reputation and have plenty of clients of their own.

Together with the partners we ran webinars: how to boost marketing with reviews, how reviews affect sales, why customers read reviews before buying, how to work with them and how to manage reputation. Each live session drew 100–200 viewers and around 500 sign-ups. The traffic was mostly organic, with a little from Yandex Direct.

Product improvements

The product itself matters just as much, because marketing always works at the junction of product and sales, affecting the company’s profit. Here we rebuilt the welcome sequence and the whole push system: mapped out how a person goes through onboarding after sign-up and at which moment to offer which product. We reworked the product pages of the site and put all 4 functions of the service on the first screen, so it is clear at once which tasks we solve.

The updated pages raised the conversion to sign-up, and the welcome sequence and pushes raised the conversion to payment: it grew from 14 to 22%. And rebuilding the product and standing apart from the competitors raised the average ticket by 20%.

Results

+30%MRR and paying users of the service14 → 22%conversion to payment+20%average ticket after rebuilding the productIn the end we grew MRR and the number of paying users of the service by 30%, getting the bigger result through SEO/GEO, the affiliate programme, plus content marketing and a webinar funnel run in collaborations.

Reviews work.