SEMrush S-1

Believe in yourselves: If a scraper (SEMrush) of another scraper (Google Search) can IPO, the sky really is the limit.

&gt; We have incurred annual net losses since 2016 and expect to continue to incur net losses in the future. We incurred net losses of $10.2 million and $7.0 million for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively. As of December 31, 2020, we had an accumulated deficit of $35.8 million. We do not know if we will be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future. We plan to continue to invest in our research and development, and sales and marketing efforts, and we anticipate that our operating expenses will continue to increase as we scale our business and expand our operations. We also expect our general and administrative expenses to increase as a result of our growth and operating as a public company. Our ability to achieve and sustain profitability is based on numerous factors, many of which are beyond our control.<p>how unusual is it for companies to ipo without profit or even a clear path there?

Lol... I literally block semrushbot on all of my servers. They are a trash company.

Can people claiming success with this product provide just a little more context on how it helped your company? I always think there might be astroturfing with these kinds of submissions.

A very dishonest company whose scrapers are tough to block. They don&#x27;t honor robots.txt and tell you that you have to add in special verbiage to get them to stop. They hop IPs from different ranges so they are difficult to range-ban.

Wow. An SEO IPO. Is the real bubble indicator?

Meh, not impressed. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.investing.io&#x2F;c&#x2F;forum&#x2F;semrush-files-to-go-public-7ecb2c7a-a4ef-4643-9cfc-4228c9482afa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.investing.io&#x2F;c&#x2F;forum&#x2F;semrush-files-to-go-p...</a>

Very interesting! I have found their product a joy to use and I say this with all sincerity, credit it with getting our business out of a tough spot during COVID. Wishing them the best on the IPO!

The people that spam my referrer logs are going public?

Fuck these guys. They are a completely disrespectful and dishonest crawler. Fortunately I’ve moved most of my clientele over to Cloudflare and are able to block them at the perimeter.

CEO and co-founder still owns 45.7% of all shares!

Like many companies, we really enjoy paying SemRush a few hundred dollars a month and almost never opening it. It’s politically difficult to cancel, because it feels like a no confidence vote in “doing SEO.” But every year, we opt to spend most of our SEO budgets just writing stuff based on Google autocompletes and simple Google Ads data.

They did a small acquisition September 2020<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.semrush.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;semrush-acquires-fast-growing-saas-pr-tech-company-prowly&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.semrush.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;semrush-acquires-fast-growing-s...</a>

How are they at 144ARR and 76% gross margins losing money on an SEO SaaS?

This is great news! I know SEMRush from early days and i know their current growth.

There&#x27;s word out there that SEMRush is entangled with the Russian mafia. Literally everyone right now is getting in on this bubble.

Growing profits, shrinking losses and a product I&#x27;ve literally used to build my business. I don&#x27;t see how this isn&#x27;t a winner long-term.