Omniscient

Omniscient launched in 2014 with a clear mission: help online retailers keep customers engaged after acquisition. The founding team recognized that getting customers was only half the battle—retention through targeted communication (email, SMS, web push) was where the real opportunity lay. In the crowded marketing automation space competing against giants like Klaviyo and Meltchip, the team needed a differentiated growth strategy.

For the first few years, Omniscient relied heavily on app marketplaces. The Shopify App Store, Becommerce, WordPress app stores, and similar platforms became their primary customer acquisition channels. This approach worked well initially, providing a steady stream of early adopters without heavy marketing spend. However, as the company scaled, they recognized the limitations of depending solely on platform distribution.

Around 2018-2019, Rytus made a strategic decision to invest in SEO and content marketing. This became the company's second-largest growth driver for years. The SEO strategy was built on several key principles: focus on outcomes (revenue) rather than vanity metrics like article count, maintain a small in-house team rather than outsourcing to agencies, and view SEO as mathematics rather than creativity.

The team's first three years of content investment were brutally slow. Starting from near-zero domain authority, it took almost three years to reach 40,000 monthly website visitors. But the compound effect eventually kicked in. Today, the blog generates 180,000 monthly visitors. The breakthrough came from aggressively building domain authority through backlinks. Omniscient now has nearly 100,000 referring backlinks from 11,000 unique domains, including major publications like Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, and Forbes. Competitors like HubSpot and Mailchimp also refer to them.

Backlink strategy combined several tactics: high-quality guest posting on relevant sites (ghostwriting), conducting original research (like their viral study on why Americans buy from Temu), and persistent outreach to journalists. The research approach proved especially powerful—journalists at trusted outlets picked up their findings, generating high-authority backlinks organically.

The team also learned to be skeptical of cheap backlinks. As Rytus put it, "if there is something for cheap in the market, usually there is a trap." They invested in mid-range quality links from established sites, not low-authority spam sites that could trigger Google penalties.

Omniscient has reached $50M ARR, with agency partnerships now their fastest-growing channel, potentially surpassing SEO. However, the SEO foundation remains critical. The landscape shifted dramatically with the rise of AI search assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini. Rytus explained that visibility in AI-generated answers is now essential—if you're not recommended by AI when someone asks "what's the best email marketing platform?", you're invisible to a growing portion of searchers.

Google's integration of Gemini in search results means AI overviews now appear above traditional rankings. Omniscient adapted by ensuring they appear in top-10 Google positions first, which AI systems now use as their trusted source pool. They also shifted to building personal brands for company leaders as AI increasingly requires "authentic" author authority. Bernard, one of their employees, now appears on podcasts and is quoted in major publications to establish himself as a recognizable authority figure.

The team experimented with AI-generated content but found Google now penalizes full AI-written articles. They witnessed one experimental site drop to zero rankings after publishing purely AI-generated content. Their conclusion: use AI as an assistant, never as the sole author.

Rytus emphasized that even in a competitive market where PPC costs exceed $60 per click during peak season, bootstrap-focused founders can succeed by treating marketing as mathematics—measuring everything against revenue impact, maintaining small focused teams, and staying ahead of industry shifts like the AI revolution.