In this episode, Raman Sehgal sits down with Dmitry Dragilev. Dmitry is a 4x acquired SaaS founder and growth expert on a mission to build businesses that serve life, not the other way around.
He has spent the last 15 years developing a model for high-margin, self-managing companies designed to deliver both time freedom and meaningful impact—a model validated by a decade of successful exits.
Dmitry’s track record of building autonomous, high-value platforms includes:
- TopicRanker (Acquired by Semrush, 2025): Originally launched as the top-performing app in the Semrush App Center, this SEO tool identified ranking weaknesses to help users dominate search results.
- SmallBiz.Tools
(Acquired by Semrush, 2023): A trusted affiliate and software review platform built to help entrepreneurs navigate the complex world of business tools.
- JustReachOut (Acquired by SEOJet, 2020): An AI-powered PR platform that empowered 5,000+ small businesses to pitch journalists and podcasters without an agency; later re-acquired by early Slack employees in 2024.
- Polar Polls (Acquired by Google, 2014): As the sole marketer on a five-person team, Dmitry used aggressive PR to scale this polling startup to 40 million monthly pageviews, leading to Google’s 166th acquisition.