Dan Sharp is the Director of Screaming Frog, a search engine marketing agency that, in addition to providing SEO & PPC services, has built software that has been used by 100,000’s of companies including Apple, Google, Amazon and Disney. In this episode, we talk about the pros and cons of having a hybrid software and service based agency, and how software can be used to generate agency leads.

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Transcription

You’re listening to the 10X Your Agency Podcast Your Agency podcast where every Wednesday for the next 12 weeks you’ll be learning strategies on how

to scale up your agency and grow your client base from successful agency owners who’ve been there, done it and built a highly successful agency.

You’ll learn how they attract clients, what their biggest causes of client churn were and what their challenges were at different stages of building their agency.

My name is Marcus Taylor and I’ll be your host.

Marcus: Hey guys welcome to Episode 7 of the 10x Your Agency Podcast. Today I’m joined by a good friend of mine called Dan Sharp who’s the founder of Screaming Frog.

Screaming Frog are perhaps best known for their software-the Screaming Frog SEO spider- which is used by hundreds of thousands of companies like Disney, Apple,

Google and many many more. So we are going to be talking to Dan about how he’s grown the agency as well as the software and how he balances the team between the

two different sides of business, some of the benefits of having the relationship of having both software and an agency as well as also some of the drawbacks.

So Dan it’s a huge pleasure having you here on the show, how’s it going?

Dan: Hey, Marcus. Yeah not too bad. Thanks, thanks for inviting me on.

Marcus: Before we jump in, I was just wondering can you maybe share with us a little bit about what is Screaming Frog and perhaps what is it that makes you different to other agencies out there?

Dan: Yes, absolutely. First of all, Screaming Frog is an agency which I don’t necessarily think a lot of people realise because obviously they call our software Screaming Frog and you know our software is the SEO spider. So I think there’s probably a little bit of confusion there just because our software has been popular over the years. But we are based in Henley in the U.K. I think there’s 32 of us now. We’ve been going for about six years. I guess what makes us different is that we do have the software side as well as the agency. When I say software, we have the SEO spider, which everybody calls Screaming Frog and then more recently we’ve developed a log file analyser as well and came out middle of this year.

Marcus: Got it and what kind of services do you specialise in with Screaming Frog?

Dan: Very much search, so SEO predominantly. We do a little bit of PPC, CRO and analytics consultancy stuff like that.

Marcus: So the software that you’ve developed, the Screaming Frog SEO spider it’s been used by hundreds of thousands of companies. We use it; we’ve been using it for a couple of years now. Companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Disney all use it. It’s been a huge success. I was wondering what impact has having the software side of the business had on the agency side of the business?

Dan: That’s an interesting question because I think it’s been positive but also kind of negative in a way as well. I definitely think that it’s helped build brand awareness, everybody’s heard of us. And it’s definitely helped us win some SEO consulting business of the back of having the software there’s in-house SEOs who’ve used our tool, found it useful and then realised that we also offer some consulting and come to us for general SEO projects. However, on the other side, I think conversely, the tool has been so popular that a lot of people just don’t realise that we are an agency as well and just think that we build software. You could say that we’ve probably been overlooked sometimes as well so it’s a difficult one. In reality we’re an agency and we built the software for ourselves to use in our own consultancy and then we it just transpired that we ended up releasing it publicly.

Marcus: And is there anything that you do to drive–any sort of active things that you are doing to drive people from the software to the agency or vice-versa?

Dan: Not specifically. I mean it’s all on the same website so if you visit the website, you’ll see our software and you’ll also see our services but we don’t

necessarily do anything special. We’ll probably come onto this a little bit later but we are not overly promotional or anything along those lines we don’t say, Oh

we also offer consulting or anything like that. We haven’t built anything into the app. We don’t even go as far as, and lots of companies do this; we don’t collect

user’s details, email addresses. You can just download the software for free to call up to 500 URLs and we don’t require anything from you whatsoever. You know a lot

of people would take an email address and then spam usually afterwards. We don’t do that [laughs].

Marcus: Got that. So a lot of agencies obviously strive to build tools on the side and software to generate passive recurring income to supplement the sometimes volatile nature of having consulting clients yet from what I’ve seen most agency typically fail with this because when you have these two options, you have billable hours that you can assign to client projects or you could work on a project that may or may not end up in generating results. Most agency owners typically focus on the billable hours side.

Dan: Yes.

Marcus: So I was wondering in the early days, how did you justify putting team members onto the software project before it even had any success. What was the thinking

around that?

Dan: To be honest there wasn’t really any thinking and it was actually a lot easier in the early days just because the software itself was being built when I was an SEO consultant going under the name Screaming Frog and it was being built in the evenings and weekends. So it wasn’t being built during billable or work hours. Historically I used to have a lot of fun with my previous agency when I was working as an SEO; used to work late in to the evenings doing affiliate stuff.

So I was quite used to working in the evenings and things like that anyway. My brother who’s a developer on the tool spent his own personal time building the

software which we never knew would work and it was only built for us anyway so there was not necessarily anything to lose or any personal time so it made it quite

easy really. And arguably it’s gotten harder as we’ve become a proper business in that the challenge has been sometimes taking ourselves away from developing the

SEO spider. For example, more recently we released a log file analyser. We had to take some of our developers of off the SEO spider from developing features for a

large user base to kind of develop this new tool. There’s a certain risk to that and it was quite hard to do but in the end it was well worth doing it and it’s helped

us develop more technical learnings that are going to be integrated into the spider at a later date but early stages it was easy.

Marcus: So you mentioned that Screaming Frog is currently around 32 people, I think?

Dan: Yes

Marcus: What’s the breakdown in terms of team size as to people that work on the software versus number of people that are predominantly focussed on the agency side?

Dan: Yes so we’ve got a fairly small in-house development team. So I would say there are around four or five people who work on the SEO spider fulltime. That doesn’t really include support just because we’ve got a fairly large user base to support user queries things like that. So the rest of the SEO team which probably is around about 25 people is kind of split out between the more technical SEO to deal with support.

Marcus: And they are also the ones doing the agency services as well.

Dan: Exactly that yes. So we’ve got a fairly small PPC team of a couple of people. Between 20 and 25 people who work on SEO projects, technical SEO consultancy. Of those 20 to 25 people we’ve got four designers and a front-end dev who work on creating content for clients who create a lot of visual content, so working on content, content marketing and link building campaigns too.

Marcus: And in terms of the revenue coming into the company what’s the approximate split of the percentage of revenue coming from the agency services versus directly from the software projects?

Dan: It’s pretty even actually except a lot of people probably don’t realise or haven’t realised that we are an agency weren’t necessarily expecting that but the agency side of the busi