Roy Morejon:
Welcome to Art of the Kickstart, your source for crowdfunding campaign success. I’m your host Roy Morejon, president of Enventys Partners, the top full-service turnkey product development and crowdfunding marketing agency in the world. We have helped startups raise over $100 million for our clients since 2010. Each week, I’ll interview a crowdfunding success story, an inspirational entrepreneur, or a business expert in order to help you take your startup to the next level with crowdfunding.
Art of the Kickstart is honored to be sponsored by BackerKit and the Gadget Flow. BackerKit makes software that crowdfunding project creators use to survey backers, organize data and manage orders for fulfillment by automating your operations and helping you print and ship faster. The Gadget Flow is a product discovery platform that helps you discover, save and buy awesome products. It is the ultimate buyer’s guide for luxury gadgets and creative gifts. Now, let’s get on with the show.
I’m here with Rand Fishkin, the Wizard of Moz.
Rand Fishkin:
Great to be here.
Roy Morejon:
It is an honor to be with you, man, for real. You are the face of SEO, I want to say.
Rand Fishkin:
I’m not sure about that, but all right.
Roy Morejon:
You stay consistent, and I think consistency is the key in SEO. There are all these new trends and everything else that comes out, but staying true to the core of what used to work 10, 15 years ago when we were first starting doing it. When you first started SEOmoz back in 2004, right, it was a heyday where you could still stuff keywords and do all of these things to manipulate rankings, right?
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah, that’s right.
Roy Morejon:
Nowadays, it’s totally changed on its end in terms of everybody now is a media company, and they have to be thinking about SEO, at least at its foundation, when they launch their company.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah.
Roy Morejon:
Take us back 13 years ago when you first started Moz, or SEOmoz, back then. Talk about the transformation of what you’ve seen in the industry.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I think that’s actually been driven by really three forces. One of the obviously major forces is Google advancing, and then dominating. You remember 2004. It was the search engine wars, right?
Roy Morejon:
Yeah.
Rand Fishkin:
Bing, Google, and Yahoo were all fighting each other. At the time, Bing was called MSN Search. You know, it was a 20, 30% market share for each, and then Google just kind of ran away. Probably by 2007, Google had already basically won.
Roy Morejon:
It was like 60% of the [crosstalk 00:02:42] was gone.
Rand Fishkin:
Now they’re 90% lost, right?
Roy Morejon:
Yeah.
Rand Fishkin:
That’s one. Then Google just evolved massively, right? They evolved their sophistication, they evolved the way they show results, they evolved desktop and mobile, they evolved their ranking algorithm. Just incredible progress on that front. That’s one. The second one is how searchers interact with search engines, and that’s transformed a ton, too, right?
Roy Morejon:
Right.
Rand Fishkin:
We’ve become less literal and more conversational. We have incredibly higher expectations. I mean, I don’t know if you remember, but 2004, if your site took seven, eight seconds to load that was …
Roy Morejon:
Good.
Rand Fishkin:
That was pretty fast, right?
Roy Morejon:
We didn’t have to worry about mobile, right?
Rand Fishkin:
Right, we had to worry about dial-up. Dial-up was the challenge.
Roy Morejon:
I know, that’s it. 54.4, probably at that point-
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah, exactly.
Roy Morejon:
… was the hot shit.
Rand Fishkin:
Totally, right? The way users interact, the way that a few hundred microsecond delay can hurt your conversion rates, can hurt your engagement rates, that’s just nuts. I think searcher behavior, what they click on, what they choose, what they trust and don’t trust, how they trust it, all of that is the second course. Then the third one is the marketing industry itself, right?
Roy Morejon:
Yeah.
Rand Fishkin:
I think we grew up a little bit. We sort of went through this middling adolescence and now search, to your point, right, every big company, every media company, every startup is thinking about search. They’re thinking about SEO, they’re thinking about paid search. You get this world where there’s a lot more democratization of the information, and the skillsets, and there’s also a massive amount more people and players, which means a much more competitive space.
Roy Morejon:
Yeah, especially when people are launching products out there. Usually, they’re rarely the first one, ever. If they are, the search volume just isn’t there, right?
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah.
Roy Morejon:
You got to think about that user behavior of how am I going to turn them in to use my product and save, maybe, one step now to utilize it. Let’s take a jump back. Is this your first time in Portugal?
Rand Fishkin:
It is, yeah.
Roy Morejon:
How’s your experience been so far?
Rand Fishkin:
I mean, Lisbon is a gorgeous city, it’s stunning. I can see why it’s on all these top tourism lists, must visit, that kind of thing. Web Summit itself is, to be honest, a little overwhelming. I like small companies, I like small products, I like small gatherings. This is, what did you say, 80,000 people?
Roy Morejon:
Will come through the doors, yeah.
Rand Fishkin:
Right. We’re in this room right now, one of my childhood heroes, one of Russia’s heroes Garry Kasparov is in the other room next to us. I don’t know how he and I are in the same building.
Roy Morejon:
It’s happening.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah, it’s crazy. [crosstalk 00:05:17]
Roy Morejon:
They’re going to start tracking him now, I think he’s done.
Rand Fishkin:
That’s right. Hopefully Putin’s not here.
Roy Morejon:
I think he’s everywhere, isn’t he?
Rand Fishkin:
You’re probably right.
Roy Morejon:
He’s watching us now. Yeah, Web Summit has been absolutely epic. I’ve been here since opening night. It is very overwhelming. I’ve been to tech conferences like the Consumer Electronics Show, that’s 250,000 people over all of Vegas.
Rand Fishkin:
Right.
Roy Morejon:
It’s at least nice the way they’ve contained all of this into one big area. It’s just nuts how many people are here. The beauty, though, is just they’re from all over the world. I don’t think you get that from a lot of different marketing or even tech conferences, or just globally, they said there’s 170 different countries here represented.
Rand Fishkin:
That’s totally amazing.
Roy Morejon:
Right?
Rand Fishkin:
Donald Trump didn’t even know there was that many countries.
Roy Morejon:
Or could spell half of them, right?
Rand Fishkin:
I think he and Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan were having a conversation yesterday. One of the aides was Trump telling him, “Did you know there’s so many countries?”
Roy Morejon:
The aha moment for us [crosstalk 00:06:20]. Let’s talk about scaling companies. You were in the CEO role. I think you started SEOmoz in the early 2000s, right, like 2001?
Rand Fishkin:
2001 I dropped out of school and started working in web design with my mom, and then basically built this blog for her called SEOmoz. In 2007, turned that into a software company, raised some venture capital, and now Moz is, what, 180 people, 37,000-ish customers, and I think it’s going to do probably around 45, 46 million in revenue this year.
Roy Morejon:
That’s awesome. Props.
Rand Fishkin:
Thanks, dude, yeah.
Roy Morejon:
Props. Now your role is a contributor?
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah, that’s right.
Roy Morejon:
Like a individual contributor?
Rand Fishkin:
Right. I like using the title that my wife came up with, which was Wizard of Moz.
Roy Morejon:
Yeah.
Rand Fishkin:
Basically, yeah, I do a lot of speaking, writing, blogging, [inaudible 00:07:13] for Friday. I’m the chairperson of our board of directors as well, so contribute at sort of the highest strategy level, and then right down in the tactics working on the product with the engineers and designers, and trying to make software that works for as many people as possible.
Roy Morejon:
Yeah. Can you talk to our audience a little bit about tips for scaling? From you in the workshop to 180 employees, talk about some of those pain points along the way, and now to you being moved out of that CEO role for the last two or three years.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. I think that one of the biggest challenges around scale is just human interaction, and the behavior that people have, especially what I think has been called by a lot of folks who talk about scale, this problem of tribalism. For example, you and I are working in a 40 or 50-person company. We probably know every other person on our team. We have some relationship with them. Maybe we don’t like what one person did, or how they did it, but scale that to 100 people, and suddenly it’s the marketing team, the engineering team.
Roy Morejon:
It’s siloed.
Rand Fishkin:
The product team, right, the design team, the finance team, customer service team. Teams start to have tribal cohesion, but also the natural results of tribalism is also antagonism against other tribes, right?
Roy Morejon:
Yeah.
Rand Fishkin:
Marketing always blames engineering for this, engineering always blames product for that, product blames design for this, right?
Roy Morejon:
Sales and marketing.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. Oh God, sales and engineering. That’s why I never built a sales team. I think that that is one of the fundamental biggest challenges that companies face as they scale, is how do you keep people cohesive? How do you keep them believing in assuming good intent from one another? I found that psychologically, emotionally overwhelming. Overwhelming. When I was, I think I stepped down as CEO, Moz about 130, 140 people. A little smaller than it is now. That really got to me. I didn’t like being CEO in those circumstances where people didn’t have love, and trust, and care for each other. I like people, man. I want people to get along.
Roy Morejon:
No, you’re a people person. Yeah, don’t we all.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah.
Roy Morejon:
It gets to a point, right? It’s like with company culture, and how do you maintain that from what your core beliefs were when you first started it, and then instilling that into every new employee from there on out. Was that something you missed?
Rand Fishkin:
That was something that was hugely important to me, and for some reason, once you get to a certain scale, it feels, it’s not impossible, it’s just different, right?
Roy Morejon:
Yeah.
Rand Fishkin:
It’s just a different kind of, it’s more formal, it’s more process-oriented, it’s more rigid. Those aren’t really things that I love. I’m a craft beer, not a Budweiser guy, right?
Roy Morejon:
Sure.
Rand Fishkin:
I’m a local coffee shop that no one’s heard of, not a Starbucks guy. For me, that tension wasn’t quite a match.
Roy Morejon:
Yeah. I think a lot of companies get to it. Let’s fast forward now, we’re at Web Summit. You just gave a killer presentation on top tips and SEO for 2018.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah.
Roy Morejon:
Give us the down low.
Rand Fishkin:
Sure, okay. Basically, I think Google has moved from being expressively keyword-driven to intent-driven. They are able to use an incredible amount of information that they know about you, contextual information, everything from location to past behavior to behavior of people like you in your location to temporal elements to personalization based on your device, all this type of stuff. As a result, what’s getting weird is that SEO is sort of, I want to say it’s shifting where it can sit competitively in the marketing spectrum.
You think about SEO in 2004, for example. You could basically just rely on tons of people performing the exact same search, getting the exact same results consistently all over. Now it’s, you visited these sites a lot before, and you’ve exhibited these behaviors before, so your results are going to be a little bit different. It’s kind of that same thing that we talk about in social media, the filter bubble.
The filter of your past, and your device, and your geography, and all these other elements sort of make Google different for you, personalized for you in a way that they’re not for everyone else. As a result, marketers kind of have to think about this intent-driven world and where they want to play in the spectrum. If you want to play in a competitive sector at the top, when someone’s thinking about making a purchase, you better have been somewhere in their journey before. If you haven’t been, someone else has, and Google’s going to bias to them.
That sort of fundamentally changes how people think about SEO. SEO used to be great, we’ll get in front of everyone right when they purchase, and now it’s a, shit, we never talked to them when they were just barely experiencing the problem, or just researching it. That’s a new world. A lot of SEO players now have to invest in content as a result. They have to invest in branding. They got to invest in social.
Roy Morejon:
Yeah, that holistic marketing approach is so critical for a lot of these companies now, especially startups when they’re getting out there. Nobody knows their name, right? I saw your deck on SlideShare why startups suck at marketing, right?
Rand Fishkin:
Yes, exactly.
Roy Morejon:
It was killer, and the first thing was naming your company, right?
Rand Fishkin:
Did you see, so this was two days ago, eShares, which we use. I think pretty much every venture capital firm and almost every startup on the west coast uses eShares, has for years. They’re wonderful, they’re great. They sent out an email and they said, eShares is now Carta. In the explanation, they said, “We can’t afford our own domain name. We registered eShares Inc way back in the day. We can’t get eshares.com. The person who owns it won’t sell it to us.”
Roy Morejon:
So what? Bid on it.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. They changed their name. It was one of those, oh my God, get your .com, people. You’ve got to get your .com.
Roy Morejon:
How could they not afford it? What do they want? Who knows.
Rand Fishkin:
I think they must have wanted tens of millions.
Roy Morejon:
Hundred million?
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah.
Roy Morejon:
That’s insane.
Rand Fishkin:
I think they wanted their last round of venture financing.
Roy Morejon:
I guess [crosstalk 00:13:37]. They pay my domain name. That’s so weird. I wonder how many companies, startups, have actually done that, though. Probably most of them.
Rand Fishkin:
Buffer, right? They were tweeting about it. They were like, “Yeah, we had Buffer App originally, and then we had to spend a lot of money to get Buffer.com because once the ball got rolling.” Moz was the same way. People were starting to call us. When I bought moz.com, that was a six-figure investment. Today, it probably would have been a seven figure investment.
Roy Morejon:
Yeah, you said it was a half-million dollar branding exercise.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah, exactly.
Roy Morejon:
Well worth it now?
Rand Fishkin:
I think so, probably. I mean, three letter domain name, pronounceable. That’s a brand.
Roy Morejon:
Definitely brandable, for sure. I’ve got my Moz shirts at home, and I rock that out.
Rand Fishkin:
To be fair, thankfully, moz.com was owned by someone who’s actually a moz fan and a friend in our community.
Roy Morejon:
It was a chill transaction?
Rand Fishkin:
It was a chill transaction, yeah.
Roy Morejon:
Those are nice, those are nice. Let’s say I’m a startup, and I’ve got $100 budget, or $1,000 budget. What are some of the things that I should really focus my marketing efforts on to begin with?
Rand Fishkin:
I would tell you to put most of your marketing effort at the intersection of three things, so you think of it like a Venn diagram, right?
Roy Morejon:
Yeah.
Rand Fishkin:
Circle number one is an area where you have passion and interest. I find that people cannot do truly great marketing that stands out in their field if they don’t care about, right?.
Roy Morejon:
Yeah.
Rand Fishkin:
You hate video, don’t do video. You hate Twitter, don’t do Twitter. You hate blogging, fine. Do you love interviewing people, do you love audio? Maybe podcasting is a great content channel for you, right, and that’s where you should invest your energy. Or maybe you’re great at visual design. Great, let’s get into visuals, and let’s make that our content play for SEO. I would urge folks to focus on your passion.
Second, an area where you can provide unique value that no one else in your field currently is doing. If you’re targeting interior decorators with a new product, and you think, wait a minute, you know what? There’s very few, or no one who can provide this particular type of experience for content, or app, or data that my customers, my audience is going to care about. Great, awesome. Look for that uniqueness. Then the third one is, find a place where your audience actually is, or at least a place where their influencers are. I think, yeah, you combine those three, you find something at the intersection of all three of those points, that’s where you should put your time.
Roy Morejon:
Why should a startup focus on their SEO at the foundation of their launch?
Rand Fishkin:
Because retrofitting is a pain in the ass, and your competitors are already doing it.
Roy Morejon:
Yeah.
Rand Fishkin:
I think it’s pretty crazy to say, hey, eventually we want to run in that race. We know all those people are way ahead of us, but you know what, I don’t think I’m going to buy shoes just yet. Buy the shoes, put them on, lace them up, let’s go.
Roy Morejon:
Yeah. Switch gears, have you ever backed a crowdfunding campaign?
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. You know, I backed the board game Robot Turtles because it helped kids learn how to program. I got a bunch of Robot Turtles boardgames, and then gave them out to my friends with kids, family members.
Roy Morejon:
Nice.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah.
Roy Morejon:
Is that the only campaign?
Rand Fishkin:
No, I know I’ve done some others. I’m not recalling them off the top of my head. I’ve done at least a couple on Indiegogo, because I get their email updates and alerts. I think I’ve backed some video games, actually, that I never actually downloaded and played. But you know, time.
Roy Morejon:
You supported the community, though, right?
Rand Fishkin:
I wanted to see it made, right? That’s what matters.
Roy Morejon:
Nice. All right, so quick questions. Who’s your favorite entrepreneur throughout all of history?
Rand Fishkin:
All of history?
Roy Morejon:
Dead or alive.
Rand Fishkin:
Wow, gosh. I am not going to be able to get this right, but how about I’ll just do someone that I, personally know. That’ll limit it nicely. I am really inspired by a woman named Jessica Mah, who founded inDinero down in Silicon Valley. She sort of led through Y Combinator, and then took a hard left pivot and was like, “No, you know what? I don’t want to be in this VC-backed craziness, I want to build my own thing. I want it to be profitable, I want to grow it myself.” Yeah, I love her. Really impressive.
Roy Morejon:
I thought you would’ve given props to Will.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. I mean, I love Will.
Roy Morejon:
You guys are boys.
Rand Fishkin:
He’s built a hell of a company, for sure, in our space, in particular.
Roy Morejon:
Absolutely.
Rand Fishkin:
I love, I don’t know if you saw it.
Roy Morejon:
I did.
Rand Fishkin:
He recently turned down …
Roy Morejon:
A lot of money.
Rand Fishkin:
A crazy amount, a life-changing, retirement, his kids can retire amount of money, right?
Roy Morejon:
Yeah.
Rand Fishkin:
I was really proud of him, I was so proud of him.
Roy Morejon:
I love how transparent he is with everything. Just being an agency owner and founder, and just being able to just tell your story, and be that open about it. It’s inspirational, it really is.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. Also, Will’s adopted a few kids. He talks about how he asks the acquirer, “What’s your policy on parental leave?” It was pretty small, he wasn’t thrilled with it. Then he asked, “What about for adoptive parents?” They said, “We don’t give time for that.” He was like, “Keep your money,” and walked away. That is principles, right?
Roy Morejon:
Yeah.
Rand Fishkin:
That’s something.
Roy Morejon:
Wow.
Rand Fishkin:
You don’t find that.
Roy Morejon:
All right, what’s your favorite book?
Rand Fishkin:
Favorite book. In the business world, there’s a book called The Billionaire Who Wasn’t. It’s about the guy who founded duty-free shops, and then basically gave away billions of dollars from that. He was essentially behind a significant portion of all the anonymous donations in the United States, and Ireland, and a bunch of other places over the ’80s and ’90s. Inspired Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet to sign the Giving Pledge. Really impressive book.
In fiction, that’s a tough one. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. That’s right on the top of the list. My wife wrote a book, so that is clearly one of my favorites.
Roy Morejon:
It should be clearly your favorite in the entire universe.
Rand Fishkin:
Especially because it’s about a lot of our travels, called All Over the Place.
Roy Morejon:
Nice.
Rand Fishkin:
If you need to laugh, that’s a great one.
Roy Morejon:
Nice. What’s the favorite travel spot? If you had to pick one.
Rand Fishkin:
Favorite travel spot.
Roy Morejon:
A warm one and a cold one?
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. There’s a place in southern Oregon called Ashland that is really special for us. I love it down there. They run a Shakespeare festival and produce a bunch of plays that are Broadway quality. It’s this tiny little town, I don’t know, can’t be 20,000 people, right? It’s amazing to see, I think as Geraldine put it, you know, “There’s Ophelia drinking coffee after being killed the night before in the coffee shop.” That’s a pretty special place.
I love Cape Town in South Africa. That was an incredible spot. In cold weather, Edinburgh in Scotland. Oh my God, that place is gorgeous. It’s stunning. You’ll never get a sunny day there, but on a sunny day it competes with every other city for the prettiest in the world.
Roy Morejon:
Nice. What does Rand Fishkin fear?
Rand Fishkin:
I think my biggest fear is that I will not be able to do again what I did with Moz. I’m going to start a new company next year and try and build something special out of that. I’m nervous, I’m scared. I’m hopeful. I’m going to try my hardest. I feel I have something to prove to myself and to a lot of other people, that I can do this again.
Roy Morejon:
Awesome. Rand, it’s been my pleasure having you on. Thanks for tuning into another episode of Art of the Kickstart, the show about building a business, world, and life with crowdfunding. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, awesome. Make sure to visit artofthekickstart.com and tell us all about it. There, you’ll find additional information about past episodes, our Kickstarter guide to crushing it, and of course if you loved this episode a lot, leave us a review at artofthekickstart.com/itunes.
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