How FatGrid.com Was Born: A Backlink Battle Story

A friend of mine asked me to help him with SEO for his small business website. Given my past success with SEO back when I worked at Semrush, I figured it would be easy.

We created brilliant content, significantly better than what his competitors were doing. But the pages were stuck in positions between 10 and 20. Never higher.

That was strange. I was sure we did our best, but it didn’t rank.

So I hired a guy on Upwork to do an SEO audit. He had way more experience with small businesses. He looked at the site and said, “Listen, you don’t have enough backlinks. That’s it.”

We spent $500 on backlinks. The total budget was small. But it helped. We moved into the top 10 for the main keywords. Not top 3, but traffic started to come in.

What surprised me: most of the backlinks we bought were garbage. It was a local service business, and the agency got us backlinks from a web hosting forum. Totally irrelevant.

Still, we started ranking better. It was clear that backlinks helped.

But then the agency started blackmailing me. They said if we didn’t continue buying more, we would lose rankings. I asked for a list of publishers and some quality criteria. They refused.

So I started shopping around and found other link building agencies. That’s when I noticed something strange. Same websites were showing up in different offers with completely different prices and SEO metrics.

Then I found backlink marketplaces. Huge step forward. At least I could see the websites in advance and decide for myself what’s relevant or not.

Eventually, we pulled together hundreds of thousands of offers from about 15 marketplaces into one database. That’s when I discovered the same backlink could cost $50 or $500 depending on where you buy it.

That’s how FatGrid.com started.

We built it for ourselves at first. We didn’t trust the SEO metrics shown by marketplaces, so we enriched everything with fresh Semrush data. That way, we knew it was real.

Once we had the product, I thought maybe we don’t need that many backlinks ourselves. Let’s make it public.

Now, FatGrid.com helps users find the most relevant publishers and make sure they are buying at fair market prices.

Most of our users are SEO agencies and link builders. For them, the cost savings are obvious. The subscription is $29. Average savings is over 30 percent. With an average backlink price of $250, savings from a single backlink can be three times the subscription cost.

We also have business users, mostly from larger companies with in-house SEO teams.

This is how FatGrid.com was created. We built it for our own needs, and now a few hundred users rely on it every month.

Max