Do-it-yourself PR firm JustReachOut sold an 80% stake of the company to Adam White, the founder of SEOJet, in a high six-figure deal, founder Dmitry Dragilev said in an interview with Mixergy.
Founded in 2014, JustReachOut is a public relations platform that helps companies build a PR strategy to get exposure and build valuable backlinks that enhance a site’s SEO ranking. The platform provides businesses access to pre-populated pitch templates, PR training to maximize their efforts, and a search engine to find relevant journalists and press opportunities.
The company was averaging about $250,000 in annual revenue at the time of its sale in late 2020 and sold for “between $700,000 and $900,000,” Dragilev told Mixergy. He added that the PR software platform helped more than 5,000 businesses with their press outreach and backlink-building strategy.
The backlinks JustReachOut helps companies build are valuable because they signal to Google that other websites find your content useful enough to link to within their content. Generally speaking, the more quality backlinks a website has on other authoritative websites — for example, The New York Times or Forbes — the higher their content will rank on search engines.
Founder Dragilev sold JustReachOut to spend more time with family
Dragilev, who is a software engineer by training, arrived in the United States in 1993 after emigrating from the former Soviet Union to seek a better life, he said on The App Guy Podcast. He sold JustReachOut to spend more time with his family and children, who he’s teaching to speak Russian, Dragilev said in his Mixergy interview.
“Patrick Burns said to me once — he’s the founder of Overstock.com — ‘You have to live six months at a time,’” Dragilev told Mixergy. “Like if you knew you were going to die in six months, what would you be doing today? I was stuck in that mentality. I want to spend time with family, friends and be doing that. Who cares if this thing isn’t going to scale.”
Dragilev, who still owns 20% of JustReachOut, said he maintained some ownership in the firm because his personality is a core component of the brand. He indicated in his interview with Mixergy that he sold the business to have more time with his family.
SEOJet founder White said he purchased JustReachOut for its tools that can help small companies grow their online presence.
“Having worked in the SEO space for almost 20 years, the one constant has been the need to be able to get good, relevant, authority backlinks. This is the greatest struggle for all small businesses,” White told They Got Acquired. “I saw JustReachOut as the perfect set of tools for business owners to be able to do their own link building and PR outreach.”
Dragilev did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
JustReachOut sold to the Adam White, the founder of SEOJet, rather than to SEOJet. The company sold in late 2020. A previous version of this story misstated the buyer and the sale date. We share more about our reporting process here.
