Prowly & Semrush—a short history of a new chapter

When Sebastian and I started on this adventure almost seven years ago, neither of us was 100% sure what we were doing. However, we were totally confident that we were doing the right thing by taking the opportunity that Maciek Hazubski from IQ Partners fund gave us and not to spend EU money on company cars which was quite common practice at that time in Poland 😉. We invested most of the money on creating a MVP version of the product and over the next months we watched our account balance slowly make its way downward.

The early years of our activity were a real bootstrapping period and a time of slow growth, because we did not even have a budget to support sales, and our results did not attract new investors. So we did what we knew best—Sebastian developed the product, and I dealt with communication. Personally, I am very proud of the fact that over time it was thanks to our focus on these two areas that more and more brands decided to use Prowly, because we are a great example of how PR works as long as it has a good product to sell.

With an increase in our profile in Poland and a growing portfolio of clients, we have come a long way financially from where we were in the beginning. As a result of investments by Bluerank and MCI Capital, our corporate account has grown by quite a bit, making us feel as if we had won the lottery. The beginning of this chapter looked like the typical story of a man who achieved great success right before a change in fortunes. We dreamed about a presence in the United States and knew that we had to be there if we wanted to make a difference in our market segment. The numbers looked good on paper, plus there was no similar experience on the Polish market, so we started with the setup of a team in the US, a team that was supposed to sell even though we didn’t even have such an operation in our own country of Poland. After four months of disappointing results, we decided on a tactical retreat.

This is how the following months and years passed, with expansion done by trial and error, experimenting and learning along the way. It is actually our entire being as an organization. There were moments of doubt, but looking back it’s clear that we benefited enormously from that time.

When our successes started to build on each other, we knew where to “push” to accelerate the process while gaining a better understanding of what kind of organization we wanted to be, our values and the kind of team we wanted to build. I am proud of the product and our success in the US, where our brand, despite a lack of extensive communication activities, has been recognized in the industry for some time. But first of all, I’m proud of what kind of culture we’ve created in our little company. We even described it in our guide book that we focus on [super] people by helping them to become the best experts in their fields. And this is where the new chapter begins.

We have known SEMrush for a long time, and we are their client ourselves. We met the team responsible for business development a year ago and we immediately believed in a product synergy between us. The possibility of further development of Prowly under the umbrella of one of the largest Martech SaaS tools in the world is not only an amazing opportunity to benefit from the experience of someone who has already been here, where we are, but also a chance to develop Prowly as a stand-alone brand and product in a direction that has always seemed natural to us. Cooperation with SEMrush is the missing piece of the puzzle for us—we will have access to ready-made technologies that we can use to enrich Prowly with functions focused on measuring the effectiveness of PR activities. Just thinking about how we can translate the data we have access to into the ability to measure PR campaigns is enough to get everyone on both sides super excited. This is exactly the kind of mutual feeling that confirms that Prowly and SEMrush are also a cultural and emotional fit.

We are stepping into a new era. Our entire team believes that we are in for another solid leap in development and that our clients will get much more from this merger than in the case of the previous acquisitions in the PR software segment. We will do everything to make it happen. We have proved more than once that we have this [super] power.

Thank you very much to the entire crew—not just the current one, but also to everyone we have had the opportunity to work with in the past. Thank you to the investors, especially those who stood back and let us do what we do 😉. Thank you to our customers, without whom all development plans would still be on a piece of paper. Thanks to all of you, this new chapter in our story has become possible. Keep your fingers crossed for us!