The 50 Best Bootstrapped Backlink Builders in 2024

We analyzed the organic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies to discover the SEO strategies that work best in 2024.

In this article, we’re looking at bootstrapped SaaS companies that gained the greatest amount of referring domains in the past year.

Bootstrapped businesses generally don’t have huge budgets to spend on marketing, so any strategy these small-but-mighty companies use to improve their organic growth is something that you can take inspiration from, too.

We used the Ahrefs API to pull a list of live referring domains for each company in September 2023 and September 2024.
Companies were ranked by referring domain growth as a percentage of their initial referring domains. We’ve set a minimum starting threshold of 1,000 referring domains.
We’ve reported on referring domains instead of backlinks, because 1,000 referring domains are much, much harder to get than 1,000 backlinks.

Elfsight 7,657 33,610 25,953 339% $8.0M 2 Short.io 5,709 18,573 12,864 225% $0.5M 3 Gymdesk 1,325 3,052 1,727 130% $5.5M 4 Helpjuice 4,015 8,672 4,657 116% $6.0M 5 AlsoAsked 1,602 3,343 1,741 109% $0.5M 6 Stripo 2,304 4,420 2,116 92% $5.5M 7 Clearscope 1,883 3,580 1,697 90% $5.5M 8 Surfer 5,815 10,899 5,084 87% $37.5M 9 Wordtune 2,877 5,347 2,470 86% $1.0M 10 Crowdin 4,818 8,919 4,101 85% $17.5M 11 Socialinsider 3,264 6,007 2,743 84% $0.8M 12 SpyFu 8,101 14,821 6,720 83% $2.0M 13 Pentest-Tools.com 1,543 2,779 1,236 80% $5.5M 14 Canny 4,411 7,675 3,264 74% $5.5M 15 Surfshark 13,898 24,056 10,158 73% $20.0M 16 Sitebulb 1,232 2,093 861 70% $0.5M 17 Seobility 3,496 5,900 2,404 69% $5.0M 18 SpyCloud 1,192 1,987 795 67% $14.0M 19 MxToolbox 10,718 17,736 7,018 65% $9.0M 20 Shiftbase 1,077 1,780 703 65% $17.5M 21 Signaturely 1,113 1,839 726 65% $0.5M 22 Lemlist 1,613 2,654 1,041 65% $6.0M 23 Sitechecker 5,938 9,732 3,794 64% $6.1M 24 SavvyCal 1,272 2,070 798 63% $5.5M 25 Statusbrew 2,750 4,470 1,720 63% $14.0M 26 Wisepops 1,291 2,086 795 62% $3.0M 27 Glassnode 5,041 8,123 3,082 61% $5.5M 28 DeviceAtlas 2,765 4,442 1,677 61% $19.0M 29 Float.com 1,021 1,638 617 60% $5.5M 30 RTINGS.com 8,601 13,779 5,178 60% $6.3M 31 Smallpdf 13,953 22,264 8,311 60% $17.5M 32 Clockify 6,109 9,733 3,624 59% $5.5M 33 Mailtrap 3,162 4,991 1,829 58% $5.5M 34 BambooHR 8,511 13,410 4,899 58% $237.8M 35 Setapp 13,178 20,696 7,518 57% $15.0M 36 WebCEO 2,495 3,891 1,396 56% $25.0M 37 Visme 10,354 16,135 5,781 56% $1.0M 38 UpLead 1,823 2,833 1,010 55% $17.5M 39 Slickplan 1,345 2,086 741 55% $1.0M 40 Jotform 45,485 69,553 24,068 53% $21.0M 41 Wiza 2,013 3,070 1,057 53% $5.5M 42 Ahrefs 52,536 80,036 27,500 52% $100.0M 43 Plausible Analytics 6,084 9,251 3,167 52% $5.5M 44 Creately 7,816 11,844 4,028 52% $12.0M 45 Homerun 2,040 3,068 1,028 50% $38.4M 46 Yardi 1,928 2,880 952 49% $5500.0M 47 Infinite Campus 1,029 1,534 505 49% $56.0M 48 Filemail 3,829 5,694 1,865 49% $1.0M 49 LiveAgent 4,740 7,034 2,294 48% $5.0M 50 Semaphore 2,727 4,025 1,298 48% $4.0M