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Every year, millions of people flock to Carta’s website to learn about 409a valuations, cap tables, vesting basics, and other oh-so-fun (and oh-so-complex) equity-related topics.
Sound fun to read? Imagine writing it.
That’s the dirty, unsexy work Carta (formerly eShares) is proud to perform. And it’s been doing it for close to a decade now, earning itself a $7+ billion valuation in 2021.
Carta is a SaaS platform that helps companies manage their equity, but—unlike competitors— they opted to offer what nobody else wanted to do.
“We avoid things competitors and investors want to do. We LOVE doing the stuff nobody else wants to do. Messy cap tables, gritty 409A valuations, legal paperwork— when we see other people getting excited about a space or problem, that is a signal to us to stay away,” says Henry Ward, Carta CEO.
Seems unorthodox, but you can’t argue with the numbers. Carta boasts:
- 28,000 companies (including big names like Intercom and Axios)
- 1+ million investors, law firms, and employees on the platform
- 10 offices across 3 continents
And that’s led to impressive website performance.
Source: SEMRush
So, how did Carta go from nothing to millions of users in less than a decade? Let’s take a deep dive into the numbers and find out.
Win the Market, Win the Traffic
Carta has become synonymous with equity management, and would-be investors and companies know where to go when they start thinking about a solution.
Source: SimilarWeb
Direct traffic is Carta’s biggest driver, followed by search and email. That means that the majority of visitors to Carta’s website aren’t stumbling across the brand through click-bait BuzzFeed-like articles or clever social media campaigns—they’re going straight to the site by (a) typing in the URL, (b) copy/pasting the URL, or (c) using a pre-established bookmark.
Now, you could argue that a majority of that traffic is likely current customers visiting the site to access the platform and their account—and I wouldn’t argue with you. However, the same findings bleed over into the organic search side of things.
Source: SEMRush
Nearly two-thirds of Carta’s total organic traffic comes from branded keyword terms. Branded keywords are typically search phrases that include the name of the brand, such as “carta valuation,” “carta careers,” or “carta stock.”
The other one-third are discovering Carta through smart search engine optimization (SEO) designed content. For example, search for important (high-traffic) keywords like “409a,” “vesting,” and “QSBS,” and guess who you’ll see smack-dab at the top of Page 1.
Yep, it’s Carta.
But back to Carta’s branded keyword dominance. How did the company grow awareness enough to earn 66.5% of its traffic from brand keywords?
Well, it all started with Quora back in 2014.
Building Awareness By Bouncing Around
Now, bouncing around is probably not a strategy any CEO or CMO would recommend, but that’s exactly what Carta did in the early days. Maybe a better phrase would be throwing darts and seeing what sticks—same thing.
Instead of throwing all their eggs in one basket, Carta looked for novel new growth tactics to find customers. Quora started gaining steam in 2014, and Carta jumped on the bandwagon right from the get-go.
“Everyone in Silicon Valley was starting to use it,” Henry said. “We would answer all the questions about 409A and talk about how we do it.”
Meanwhile, Ward was also posting on Medium (before it was cool, mind you). He published a blog post titled “Broken cap tables,” which got widespread attention from influencers, investors, journalists, and even a popular lawyer named Jose Ancer.
Source: Medium Post
“Jose’s post got to page one on Hacker News, and it just gave us so much credibility,” said Ward. “Getting other people to validate us was so critical in our market.”
Email was a little less crowded a decade ago, and it was also a little less regulated (this was before GDPR). Carta’s marketing team purchased a handful of email lists (a practice we don’t recommend nowadays) to reach founders at the right time in their startup journey, and the tactic worked.
While these same tactics might not work today, the lesson is clear: high-growth tactics usually aren’t evergreen, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them. While you likely won’t see the same results using Quora, Medium, or purchased email lists, even with email validation (*gasp*), there are tactics today that are certainly worthwhile that might be worthless in a year or two.
TikTok might still be a thing in a decade, and it might not—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in it in the short term. However, a more reliable tactic has been driving the majority of customers to Carta’s website for the last three years, and that’s organic search traffic.
Nothing Is Free—Including Organic Traffic
Organic search traffic is always touted as free, especially when compared to pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements and traditional awareness-building campaigns. However, there’s a lot that goes into building a search-based presence.
It’s not easy, and it’s usually not cheap, either.
While Carta might be raking in most of its traffic now without spending a penny, it took years of upfront investment to get where it is. Somebody spent hours of salaried time day in and day out writing today’s traffic-driving content.
Source: SEMRush
Looking at the data, Carta didn’t start seeing significant traffic to its website until January 2020. Now, that’s also due to shifting economic trends—but Carta put in a lot of upfront work and didn’t start seeing the fruits of its labors for years.
That’s the life of a content marketer. You often don’t have the numbers to justify your existence until you’ve already up and left for another job.
Source: SEMRush
However, it’s not just about an increase in searches for trending terms. Carta also began ranking for these terms. Notice around the time of January 2020 a significant jump in Page 1 organic keywords—that’s directly correlated with the jump in traffic you begin seeing in the organic traffic graph above.
Carta went from ranking for 1,600 Page 1 keywords in November 2019 to 2,541 by January 2020.
They kept producing thought leadership content that their audience needed, and their content marketing efforts finally started to pay off.
Some of Carta’s biggest drivers today were actually published right before the big traffic boom in 2020—and they’re focused around a few very competitive keywords.
Quality Over Quantity Wins the Keywords That Matter
Below is a graphic showing Carta’s top 10 non-brand keyword traffic drivers to the website. They rank on Page 1 for all these terms.
Source: SEMRush
Notice how these keywords are the exact products and services that Carta offers. It’s not a coincidence.
However, these keywords aren’t leading back to Carta’s homepage or product pages—they lead to educational blog posts. Carta doesn’t need to rank for every equity management term under the sun, but they better rank for keywords relevant to their core business offerings.
Take a look at What is a 409A valuation? and What is vesting?, and you’ll understand why they rank #1 on Google. They’re damn good pieces of content.
It’s not sexy or earth-shattering content, and it’s not going to get featured in a top 10 post of 2022 curation or anything like that. But it gets the job done.
Regardless if you’re a content team of 1 or a team of 100, it’s all about quality over quantity. These 2 posts alone drive close to 10,000 in organic traffic to Carta’s website every month. That’s close to 16% of all non-branded keyword traffic, which is incredible considering Carta has published hundreds of blog posts.
It all comes back to the 80/20 Rule. In this case, 80% of your traffic will come from 20% of your content.
Focus on the Customer and the Money Will Follow
Mix up these priorities, and you’re doomed to fail. That’s why Carta has always taken a customer-first approach:
- Educate the public, whether they’re buying from you or not
- Respect your email list, and don’t just try to sell to them
- Do the right thing, and it will come back to you
These are the types of approaches Carta has taken to become a household name for equity management.
“We have our big flagship event, Carta Equity Summit, which used to be in-person, but we moved it online during the pandemic. I am incredibly adamant that our annual summit is not a lead gen event,” says Carta CMO Jane Alexander.
“It will be, of course. But…if we email registrants about our products right away, we’re just not adding value to the ecosystem. I think of events broadly about increasing value to the ecosystem and increasing consumer surplus. You have to trust that they will generate leads in the long-term, but that’s not the goal.”
Carta takes the same approach in smaller dinner meetings that they do with emerging fund managers. Instead of trying to sell them on Carta’s products, they listen and try to help. “This is not a sales dinner; this is, ‘how do we share information?’” says Alexander. “It feels counterintuitive, but you have to see through the fog and believe that if I do the right thing—if I add value for the customer—it will come back to me…it’s not always about generating demand.”
Talk Value Before You Talk Numbers
Pricing is a fundamental marketing component. Get your pricing wrong, and it doesn’t matter how many Instagram followers or organic traffic you have—you’re not going to make many sales.
Carta has dropped the price on their products since launch, and it’s resonated well with customers. However, you won’t find pricing on Carta’s website—you’ll need to talk to sales to find that information.
Source: Carta Pricing Page
While that might sound like an unnecessary obstacle for customers, it’s worked out well for Carta due to the complex nature of the product.
“Very few founders understood cap table management—setting it up and managing option flow,” says Ward. “We forced people to talk to us. We wouldn’t tell them the full pricing until they talked on the phone with us so that we could explain the process to them. You have to get this product set up right from the get-go; you can’t experiment with this.”
Ward was on to something. If you want to charge a premium for a premium product, you have to deliver value before you deliver pricing. Scare someone off with the price before they discover the value, and you might never get a second chance.
Patience Pays Off
Carta might have bounced around with different marketing strategies in its early days, but it’s learning what works and what doesn’t.
You can see a more concentrated content marketing effort on their blog in the past couple of years, and—looking at the data—it’s paying off.
However, you’ll also notice that they’re not afraid to continue experimenting and testing new ideas. Social media hasn’t been a huge traffic driver for them in the past (only about 2%, according to SimilarWeb), but that doesn’t mean they’re not investing heavily in the different channels.
I mean, they’ve interviewed the likes of Serena Williams, Kerry Washington, Tan France, and Steve Nash for their YouTube channel, for crying out loud.
Source: Carta YouTube Channel
But, knowing Carta’s history, if the strategy doesn’t start driving traffic, they’ll move on to the next thing. You never know unless you try, right? And it’s worked out well for them so far.
Whether you’re a brand-new startup looking to drive initial traffic or an established corporation needing to see a lift in numbers to the website, Carta can teach you a lot.
Try new things, scale what works, and ditch what doesn’t. Carta isn’t getting much traffic from Quora anymore (though, you could look at these stats), and nothing on Medium is really going viral—but they’ve experimented and found an organic search strategy that’s working for them. And once that stops working, they’ll move on to the next thing.
Do the same, and you’ll always be in control of your traffic’s fate.
Written by Jesse Sumrak
