[A conversation with] Rand Fishkin - About Seo, content marketing, influencer marketing (and so much more)

Karine Abbou: To start, I’d like to talk first about Moz (a very famous tool in France) and about SEO and I'm just going to read an excerpt from your book, which I don’t usually do, but this one was really a gem.

“That blog, MOZ blog became a bootloader for the business, exposing the brand to a vast array of serendipitous experiences that led us to our eventual path. Today, it might be called content marketing, but when I was writing, it was simply passion for sharing, a useful craving for attention, and a hatred of the secrets Google kept that drove those nightly posts”.

That was really my favorite because it summarizes what lies within (at least, should lie) content marketing and you got Moz to become that famous? The way you wrote this very first SEO guide with your unbelievable grandfather! So that was just amazing because this is the way so many folks are starting. We're all wondering what content marketing is and to what extent it can help us. But you are, especially in a niche like SEO was at the time, proof that it works. So can you just zoom a little bit on that and tell us more about this? 

Rand Fishkin: I think, you know, a few factors are at play, right? SEO, when I started MOZ, was viewed as this very, you know, black hat, spammy, manipulative, sort of problematic space. Most professional marketers, marketing teams, companies wouldn't invest in it at all. Marketing agencies didn't have anyone who did SEO. Huge Fortune 500 had nobody who did, so they thought it was beneath them, they thought it was a bad thing to do SEO. 

Karine Abbou: Even dangerous, maybe?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Dangerous or just sketchy and spammy and manipulative, and those people aren't real marketers, all that kind of stuff. Right? It really took until I would say, gosh, maybe 2012, 2013. When you start to see emerging as more of a mainstream tactic, it becomes more of a fundamental part of marketing; and now the last five years, it's really been a mainstay. It might even be one of the biggest practices in digital marketing overall, maybe the biggest practice. And that's so wild to me, right, that you kind of have this massive growth even as the opportunity is plateauing a little bit. So one of the other things that were definitely true is, not only did we not have a lot of competition because people weren't investing in it, we were at one of the few places that you could go on the web. You know, maybe there were 10 or 12 websites that offered decent information about how to really do SEO, and we were one of them. And so standing out from that crowd, not that difficult. Today, if you wanted to build, you know...

Karine Abbou: Forget about it. 

Rand Fishkin: ...Beating blog Inácio!! Oh, my gosh. There are thousands of websites you're competing against. Right. It was also the case that a lot of the industry, which was quite small at the time, but a lot of the industry practitioners believed that they had to be secretive in order to hold on to their competitive advantage. They believe that if they shared what they knew openly and transparently, everybody would just do it for themselves and they would never get any business. Obviously, the whole concept of content marketing emerged 2009/10/11, with the Content Marketing Institute and Joe Pulizzi and all these people who are developing that concept. But content marketing as a practice kind of started right around then, that you could basically be open and transparent and build in public with your ideas, and that would actually attract business rather than drive people to just do things themselves. And obviously, now, you know, for the last 10, 15 years, tons and tons of businesses have been practicing that. But MOZ was very early in that space, and so we benefited from that. 

Karine Abbou: Just for us to have a little bit of background in terms of, you know, the process, how you built up MOZ awareness online and in general? Did it start quickly while writing the content? I know in the book you really explain that it took you nights on the blogs, writing and writing and writing. When did it take off approximately?

Rand Fishkin:  I think the first you know, the first year or two it really did very, very little. I was lucky to get one hundred visits in a day. Very, very limited. Most of the promotion Google had this thing at the time, which they sort of denied for a long time and then sort of came around to the idea, but we had this thing called the sandbox, at least that's what SCOs called it. Where essentially for the first few years or few months, if it was a very fast-growing site, it just couldn't rank for anything, you know, wouldn't rank very well for any terms or phrases at all. And so MOZE was sort of in that world for its first couple of years. And then I remember one day, I think it was like in the fall of maybe 2005, all of a sudden our rankings just jumped up for every keyword. Google had taken us out of the sandbox and we like popped out and started ranking for things. So a lot of the promotion was done by posting to other forums, leaving comments on other people's blogs,s and engaging with them. There was not really any social media yet. So blogs and forums were sorts of the only way this was happening. And then we had a big, big success when I wrote “The Beginner's Guide to Seattle”. I wrote that because there was this, you know, old school magazine that was going to write an article about us, Newsweek magazine, back when it was still in print and you still get it at the newsstand. And because that article is coming out, I thought, oh, lots of people who don't know anything about SEO are going to come to visit our website. So I should write a beginner's guide so that they have something to read. Well, not a lot of people came from a Newsweek article about us, right. That was very, very tiny, but what did happen was that when we published that beginner's guide to SEO a lot of sites wrote about it, they saw it, they read it. They thought it was great. They published it. I think Slashdot was one of the big ones, which was kind of the Reddit of its time. It was like getting on the front page of Reddit. And so that drove a ton of traffic to the MOZ blogging. And after that, it started picking up some steam. People started to notice and recognize us. I got some invitations to speak at conferences and events. Of course, I was terrible at it from my first few events, awful on stage. But eventually, you know, it's like anything else. You start out, you're terrible. You do it again and again. You practice, you try and improve. You watch people who are great at it. You try to imitate them and learn from their style. And eventually, I became a reasonably good speaker. And so now I get invited to keynote events all over the world, which has also driven a lot of MOZ growth over those years. Because I would go to conferences and events, I'd make relationships with people, they'd ask me to contribute. We’d do a webinar together or we write a guest piece or contribute somehow. And then more links would come to MOZ and more people would come. And people saw me on stage and then they went to the website and subscribed to the email. So all of that sort of turned into this flywheel. 

Karine Abbou: At the time you were already writing for the amplifier and whiteboard Friday also gave you a push. Can you tell us a little bit because you're so famous in France with whiteboard Friday? This is the masterpiece. 

Rand Fishkin: I mean, I definitely need to start a new video series, that's for sure. 

Karine Abbou: That's another of my questions, but I’ll save it for later. But let's talk about this now. 

Rand Fishkin: So Whiteboard Friday started as just an experiment. We bought a camera for some reason at the office. There were five or six of us working there. We had a camera and one of the folks I worked with was like, well, as I was explaining some SEO concept, he was like, let me get the camera and we'll try and film it. We put it on the blog, and the thing that I loved about it was that it meant I didn't have to put up a blog post that day. 

Karine Abbou: So great. 

Rand Fishkin: It's just like, oh, what a huge time-saving. Like Thursday night I can take off. Great. This is awesome. And you know, the whiteboard Friday was the worst-performing blog post we put up every week. 

Karine Abbou: I read that. This is incredible. 

Rand Fishkin: You know, every week the lowest traffic, lowest number of links, lowest rankings for search phrases, all that stuff. It just did terribly. You know, it was not successful at all. And this was kind of before the era before YouTube was taking off and becoming a major thing. So even though the way I Whiteboard Fridays went on YouTube, we didn't really get subscribers to that. So I was just very poor traffic and visibility. But the people who did see Whiteboard Friday, especially those folks who started watching it religiously every week, watched them became super fans, right. Because video is just so much more engaging than text alone. You know, you can read text content on a website for years, dozens or hundreds of articles, and not really even remember or know who the writer is. All right, you just sort of oh, yeah, oh, yeah, but I don't know who wrote it. I have no association. But you watch one person's video even a couple of times, and you'll remember them because you see their face and you hear their voice and you see their actions, you start to connect with them. You build real empathy and memory. And so we started seeing that with Whiteboard Friday, and that's what made us decide to continue, even though it was underperforming. And eventually what happened was wild, right? It became like, you know, like anything else with episodic content. You do it over and over and over again and you get better at it and you get better at promoting it. And it builds a fan base and that fan base goes out and promotes it for you. And then this turns into the flywheel that cyclically brings more and more people to that platform. And that's exactly what happened with Whiteboard Friday, so by twenty 2012, 2013, which was year five or six, I think whiteboard Friday started in 2007, by year six or seven, it was the top-performing blog post every week, and after I left a couple of years later it was one of those things where they asked me to come back and do it for another year. And it was a very, very big part of how the marketing engine for MOZE worked. 

Karine Abbou: So just one last question about this, because it's so interesting. Five years of whiteboard Friday before it took off. But extremely good conversion or just that's something…?

Rand Fishkin: Extremely passionate fans. 

Karine Abbou: OK, so no conversion and subscription? 

Rand Fishkin: It didn't contribute well to conversions to the software in the early days later on it definitely did. But what it did was it built up, what I would say, is a powerful connection between the audience and the host. And that was the driving factor. That's what made me decide, let's keep continuing to invest in it. What's interesting is my suspicion is that if it started up today inside of MOZE, they'd shut it down very quickly, because as you know, the current leadership, the current mindset is much less serendipitous. It's much more metrics-driven. So you know, if you make an investment, you're the CEO. You see someone's making investments six months in, it's not proving it's worth, you're going to shut it down, you’re going to stop it. This is what's so beautiful about serendipitous kinds of marketing - you can decide instead of the leadership. You can be like, I think there's something here. I don't care about the metrics right now. I think long-term this is going to work. I'm willing to invest and see what happens. I like doing it. I'm passionate about it. I'm going to get better at it. This is something most metrics-driven organizations are not willing to invest in. I say that this is a very American way of thinking, right? The American way of thinking is very hyper-capitalist. I think in France, things are a little bit different. Right. There's a lot of there's a lot more of I'm passionate about this, I like it, I found an audience of people who care about it and are passionate about it. And I'm going to put my pride into it and we'll get something wonderful out. Turns out that works really well, even in hyper-capitalism, it's just that most Americans at least are not willing to invest for the long term. 

Karine Abbou: We're maybe less matrix-focused. It depends, less on the short-term focus, for sure. So thank you so much. We're going to come back to the whiteboard Friday version, probably related to Sparktoro but I just want to spend a few minutes on something that really is tightly attached to you. So I have three or four questions about this. The first one is now, with content marketing and changing of Google all the time, what role should SEO really still play in the growth of a company strategy, really? How could we manage that? And on a budget, as an example, of 1,500 bucks, how do I ventilate it and how much should I put in SEO immediately?

Rand Fishkin: So there is no one answer. I will tell you right now at my new company, I'm very well known for SEO. Obviously, I was pretty good at it. 

Karine Abbou: To say the least.

Rand Fishkin: I invest almost nothing in SEO today with Sparktoro. And that is despite the fact that we're, you know, trying to build a big business and doing it in a space that would seem to be conducive to search engine optimization. And the reason that we are not investing almost anything at all is that people don't search for what we do. And if people don't search for what you do, there's no point in ranking for a bunch of keywords and optimizing a bunch of content and creating that content. You instead need to go about your marketing in a different way. And so my sense is that SEO makes a lot of sense in two stages. One, where you know that tons of people are already searching for exactly what you have to offer and that if you ranked for those words and phrases and they saw you high in the results and clicked on you, they would be likely to become customers now or soon and that you would get a return on investment from that. That's one of the cases. And the second is if you're a very mature business, and you've built up, you know, a big brand, you almost certainly have a ton of uncaptured SEO opportunity if you haven't already invested, even if that's just for things like your brand name and the brand names of your products and the things you talk about. Because if you do just basic SEO types of things and basic content production and visibility and keyword research and those kinds of things, you'll find a lot of opportunities, low hanging fruit opportunities. So a good example of this is I think this company is well known even in France. Airbnb. Airbnb, when they started, they spent no effort at all for years. I think it was six or seven years. They didn't spend one iota of effort on SEO. They never tried to rank for vacation homes, vacation rentals, none of it. They focused exclusively on the brand. Building the marketplace, appealing to people who wanted to rent out their homes, appealing people. And then I think it was maybe they started in, ‘06, ‘07. I’m trying to remember. I met the founders a long time ago at one of the Y Combinator events, and we had a long car ride. They give me a lift to my hotel. And we were talking about SEO right there, explaining to me like, well, we're not sure if we want to invest yet. And of course, I was telling them, no, you have to invest in SEO, it's so important. They were right, I was wrong. What ended up being the right decision for them was to build the brand first, build the demand first, become influential through other sources, get covered by TV and radio and print media and every online publication and, you know, build up this sort of social following. All that type of stuff worked incredibly well for them. And then many years later, I think seven or eight years into the business, they started making destination pages, ranking for those destination pages. Now, if you search for, you know, whatever it is, vacation rental home, Tuscany, you'll find Airbnb. But they didn't even try for a long time. So when I say it depends, it really, really depends. If you are, you know, a local yoga studio, it probably makes sense to try and rank for yoga studio plus your town name. That is a very reasonable goal, should you create a page about every different kind of yoga, maybe, every kind that you offer, potentially that could be a reasonable way to go. If you are building up a new kind of exercise program that's never been searched for before, you've invented it. You created cross-fit, if you are the creator, should you focus on SEO or on the brand? I probably go with brand marketing. 

Karine Abbou: OK, so brand marketing “sort of” first. In order for a brand to go through this path, it would have to go out and look out for who, outside of the online world, would talk about its new niche, its products, build its community also through media coverage. Enter Sparktoro right?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I mean, so Spark Torro is very much in this world of “help me discover the sources of influence for my audience. Tell me what they read, what they watch, what they follow, what they pay attention to, what they listen to and subscribe to. what words and phrases they talk about, topics that are of interest to them”. It's that sort of marketing. And obviously, you know, Spark Torro is not the only way to do that. You can interview your audience, you can survey them, you can sort of manually follow them around the Internet and see what they do, but understanding where that audience pays attention already is oftentimes easier in a lot of sectors than going to Google and trying to outrank everybody. And the reason for that is Google has become so incredibly competitive. Google themselves often puts their own results at the top of the search results they're trying to answer and more and more searches with instant answers. They have that zero-click search problem that I talk about, that I've done some research about. And if you are attempting to get people to know you and like you and trust you and look for you in particular rather than search for. You know, I think the Airbnb example is really good here. Would I rather have 10 people every month searching for Airbnb or a hundred people every month searching for vacation rentals and clicking on my website? I would take the branded search traffic. I want them searching for me, not for the generic term. And so building up that, you know, through brand marketing, through sort of what I've called influence with no r, influence marketing. Right. That digital PR, those kinds of tactics can really win the day. 

Karine Abbou: When I was a lawyer, I remember my former “master” always used to tell me: “don’t focus on who says something, always focus on what he says”. It looks a little bit like what SparkToro enables us to do. It helps you focus on where people are talking about something, focusing on the content itself and maybe less on the superstar Instagramer who will, you know, as you say, often shares more about himself than the content of the products you have to sell. Does Sparktoro sort of “fix” this influence without “r” issue? This mix between the influence over a topic rather than the influence of the person who influences about this topic?  

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, so, I mean, the way that I think about influence in general, right, is that. There's a strong misconception. I think it started a few years ago with the rise of the influencer, the person on YouTube or Instagram with lots and lots of followers; and usually they have six-pack abs and they're very strong, they don't wear much clothing. But that kind of person may have influence over a large number of people, but the relevance of that influence and the composition of the audience does not fit with what most marketers' goals are. So if you're one of the top 50 consumer product goods CPG companies in the world, what you're really looking for is a substitute for television advertising; reach a broad demographic group, we want to reach everyone, we're trying to sell our candy bar. Fine. So Mars company or Nestlé or whoever it is, use the classic six-pack take off my shirt type of guy, fine, go spend money with them. But if I am trying to sell my local yoga studio, it doesn't make sense, right. What percent of that person's followers are even in my region? What percent of them could even become my customers? What percent of that person's followers care about yoga? Instead, the way I want to think about influence is these are people that I want to influence, right. This group, however big or small they are, who and what do they pay attention to? So it's starting from the audience, not the influencer. 

Karine Abbou: I like that so much. 

Rand Fishkin: You want to start from the audience, tell me what podcasts they listen to. Tell me what YouTube channels they subscribe to. Tell me what webinars they attend. Tell me which email newsletters they subscribe to. Tell me who they follow on social, what websites they visit. That's what I care about. I don't care about being in front of 10 million people, I care about being in front of nine thousand people who are my exact customer targets. And this is the way I think my co-founder and I kind of conceptualize influence marketing and the smart kinds of digital PR that you can do. And that's what we wanted to make Spark Torro do. Right. The whole idea behind Spark Torro, the big innovation. It's not that big of innovation, it's just percent of the audience, percent of the audience you describe that follows the source in the database.  

There's no fancy AI or machine learning or anything like that. It's division. It's just that you have these 9,000 people who care about yoga in Rennes, France. Great. Tada! This is what they follow. This is what they listen to. 

Karine Abbou: OK, I love that. What I like the most, to be honest, is that when I hear you talk about both SEO and Sparktoro your keyword always seems to be transparency, because what motivated you were being transparent, being fed up with Google secrets about SEO, Darksiders of SEO, etc. And now you’re really being transparent with telling people to stop spending random dollars on Facebook ads or Google ads and just trying to focus much more on, you know, a small targeted audience. 

Rand Fishkin: You know, I'm not sure I've ever thought about it that way, but I think you're absolutely right. Right. A big part of why I love this kind of marketing, why I love doing SEO back in the day, why I loved content marketing, is to make something that felt difficult to understand, difficult to invest in, poorly optimized, to make those things clear, to make them obvious. And uncovering that data, that information in this world that sort of has all these incentives to keep it secret. I mean, Google and Facebook, in particular, keep pulling back data, so that you can't get it so that advertisers and marketers can't get it. Sometimes it's under the guise of privacy protection. Sometimes it's under the guise of, you know, oh, well, we're doing this for our customers or our users when in fact, they're just doing it to protect their monopoly power. And my sense is that if we as small businesses, early-stage companies, startups, and scale-ups invest more intelligently in marketing channels and tactics of all kinds if we build up resilience, we don't have to have that exclusive reliance on these big tech giants. And I don't think they're a force for good in the world. I don't think many people do anymore. 

Karine Abbou: Especially not them. That's one thing. Another thing I wanted to discuss Spark Torro is the whole market research component that it enables a marketer to do. I'm just going to do a little bit of background in it. When I started with content marketing and partnering with the Content Marketing Institute to launch an academy online, because I love the concept, what I liked the most was the process they set up. I even wrote a book about it, to be honest, because I said anywhere you have a process, you have steps, clear steps, it helps you identify what you’re doing right or wrong, what to fix, at which pace, and it gives you sort of a guideline. And one of the main, of course, processes when doing content marketing is working on your audience, defining who is your audience, who you're talking to. And for that, they usually use personas, and I have to be honest, I had a terrible time with personas. I really did not like them so much and didn't find it efficient. Perhaps I was not doing it well, I'm not saying it's not good, but what I like in Spark Torro is that you really provide the market research component without going too deep into those personas, and focusing more on the content. Will you at some point launch some sort of a market research guide explaining and teaching some of the processes on how to do market research?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, I don't know if you've ever used it, but I took a spin of HubSpot persona builder. You know, they have an online tool, that kind of walks you through building your own persona. It's not terrible because it sort of lets you build your own custom system or what have you. But I kept thinking to myself, oh, my gosh, how amazing would it be if you could build a persona or build audience research through Sparktoro in the same way, you know, you build up the elements? I'm really interested in demographic data, so let me put some demographic data distributions into my market research model, my avatar persona, or whatever it is for this. So I like that idea a lot. The big challenge for us, as you know, we're only two people. So, yes, I would love to overhaul a little bit of people's thinking about market research broadly and provide some better ways of thinking about how to do this. My big challenge with personas is, I feel like they are stereotypes. I feel like they're just these simple models of a single fake human being, and when you as a product builder or a marketer or a CEO or an executive or a finance person, when you try and optimize toward a stereotype, you're going to encounter big problems. Right. You're going to build for a person who doesn't really exist and is not truly representative of your audience.

You know, I get so worried when I see, for example, someone says, oh, well, our audience, you know, it looks like from our market research, our audience is fifty-four percent, women and forty-six percent men. So we are going to make a persona who's a woman. Well, look, that's OK, that's fine, I'm glad you have those numbers, that's great, but that four percent difference, does that really mean that you want to over-optimize and over-indexed toward the fifty-four percent instead of the forty-six percent? I don't think that makes a lot of sense. And of course, this gets really problematic and really terrible when you start to do this in, you know, large groups with, you know, in countries and regions where, oh, well, only 10 percent of people in our audience are disabled. So we're not going to build anything for disabled folks. You are excluding this audience who doesn't deserve that, right? That's a terrible thing to do. Or you're stereotyping. You're saying, well, you know, most of our audience is whatever. There are black Americans. So we are going to over-index on that. That gets really problematic when you start to stereotype and try to pander.

And I don't like any of that type of marketing. I would much prefer to see market research be about the topics that people are interested in and the content that they care about in our sharing and what they're following and listening to and watching and reading and how they behave. Those kinds of things are far more interesting to me than sort of surface-level identity elements, which I think are just a holdover from the pre Internet era, you know, sort of the Mad Men era of, well, this magazine reaches mostly, I don't know, white Americans in the Midwest, so that's where we're going to advertise or not. 

Karine Abbou: That makes a lot of sense. I wish we could go even deeper into this point coz there would have so much to be added but, just before we move to the next topic, I have one last question about SEO, because, of course, even if you're not in the SEO space anymore, you're still very much aware of all those things and my audience really wants to hear your thoughts about this last one: In terms of the future for SEO, how do you see things? Because it seems that Google’s algorithm is definitely going from a technical to a very editorial way of working. Do you think we're still going to have to consider SEO into our marketing strategies? What about if we just give up on SEO?

Rand Fishkin: Let's see, so I think it is reasonable for some businesses to prioritize other marketing channels first and invest in SEO later. I don't think there will be many businesses for the very long term, especially businesses that build-up that can ignore SEO permanently or they'll lose out to competitors who do. And that's just because Google has built itself as the primary way that we navigate the Internet. So, you know, if you are Airbnb and you do absolutely no SEO whatsoever, you leave yourself open for competitors to come in and take your rankings, even for branded search types of traffic, if you are unwilling or unable to make those investments. And we've seen companies who struggled because they were unwilling to make those investments. So I would not ignore it entirely. I do think what's true is, it's going to keep getting more and more competitive and more difficult. There's going to be more and more practitioners, at least for the next four or five years. There's going to be more and more people practicing, which means more people who are doing the work that you're competing against for the jobs and attention and all those kinds of things. But I suspect it's going to keep growing because I don't think it's a saturated field yet. There are very few colleges and universities that teach SEO, almost none, and almost none done well. There are still way more jobs out there than there are people who have two to five years of experience in SEO, which is why so many people can get a job in search engine optimization, even right out of college or without even going to college. So it's a great growth field for that. What I do think is other areas of digital marketing are being ignored because SEO is so big and because Google is so big. So, you know, Facebook ads and Facebook marketing are probably doing pretty decently, Instagram as well. But there's a lot of kinds of marketing from PR to email marketing to frankly, the content strategy and non SEO focused side of content marketing, influence (without the “ER” marketing), all that type of stuff that is being under-invested in and I think will present more opportunities for people who are creative with their skills and use those sorts of things. So I think it's funny. SEO kind of started as the underdog. Now it's become, you know, the big player and I think it's going to keep growing for a while. But I suspect there's a lot of these other tactics and channels that are now becoming the underdog where they could produce pretty spectacular results if you're willing to invest. 

Karine: Yeah, I heard. I was listening to a podcast with Marc Schaefer last time, and he was saying that, according to him, influencer marketing or what we called influencer marketing really just started. We were at the very beginning of it in many, many different ways.

Now I would like to talk a little bit more about your book, the startup world and I’d like to link it to Sparktoro coz, here again, I see a common factor between the two. I'm going to try to link SparkToro and “Lost and Founders” with a little story very quickly.

I used to have, you know, a “startup” also. I did the first round of fundraising with love and business angels’ money and the initial plan was, at the second stage, to raise towards VCs. To make a long story short, they ended up saying no mostly because we were in the legal industry, so an extremely regulated market which they don't like too much - at least at the time coz we were among the very first ones using the internet on this industry in France so the risks of the first on those industries are carefully measured. But they also said: you have a good point, we think you're on the right path, so we're going to do something for you. We're going to recommend your start-up to be ranked in a very big media in France that used to published an annual startup ranking that was very famous at the time.

At first, I was super happy. I thought “even if it doesn’t bring me money, it will help me build brand awareness and it will no matter what be good for my business.

After reading your book, I sort of realized the same issue is happening everywhere, and with the same media “injustice” - if I may use such a word.

Today when you're raising money you're very happy for 2 reasons. The first one obviously is because the money raised will help you implement your growth plan. And the second is straightly related to the press coverage you’re gonna get thanks to this fundraising.

The fundraising provides the media and journalists with something to talk about and they're going to talk about your company, which will give you more visibility and eventually bring you more customers, or at least you’d think so at first. However, you're just part of a big package that you're not controlling anymore, but at first, you're very happy. And what sort of happened today, at least in France is that the media world, you know, the few media that are talking about startups, are really busy. They're receiving tons of emails to talk about different startups, so they're kind of making a selection of who they’re going to talk about, and it’s usually ended up being only the startup that has raised money.

But what about all the others?

Can Sparktoro be a good use of helping those startup founders be talked about and to do some partnerships and simply raise brand awareness about themselves, about their product, even in terms of personal branding? Could a startup use Sparktoro as a sort of online PR tool to build media coverage and sort of compensating what they cannot do with the regular media? 

Rand Fishkin:  I mean, certainly, yes, like that's one of the big goals of Sparktoro and there's a whole tab for press sources. But, you know, I think one of the problems that you bring up is this idea that a lot of startup founders have, that if media publications in the technology and startup and venture capital worlds write about you, talk about you, put you on stage, build up your brand, that this will somehow help you reach customers, and it's just not true.

It's even less true today than it was 10 or 15 years ago when there was a more consolidated media. So being in The New York Times technology section, being on the front page of TechCrunch will potentially bring you traffic, it might bring you a lot of people reaching out, some people saying, congratulations, people in your network, a lot of new LinkedIn requests. It will also bring you a lot of, hey, I want to write for you. Hey, I want to get a job with you. Like lots of interesting biz dev type of things. But customers?

Unless your customers are actually, you know, whatever tech industry, VC industry professionals, it will not bring you because no one who is interested in yoga is reading TechCrunch. So if you have some amazing new yoga invention, TechCrunch might cover you, but it will not have the impact that you think it will have. And this I think, you know, this is part of a sort of a complex web of incentives and structures that is hard, hard to get past. As a young entrepreneur, I felt I think a lot of young entrepreneurs feel this way. I wanted attention. I wanted people to pay attention to me. I wanted them to think that I was important and worthwhile and impressive. And like somebody worth following. And that is a pride thing, right? I want prestige, I want pride. I want to be put on stage. But that is a very different goal than I want my company to succeed and help its customers. I want to attract more people who need our product. I want to be profitable and grow and be able to sustain this business long-term. Those things are completely disconnected.

And so I think when you are facing this challenge, you just have to go in knowing that this ecosystem, the technology venture capital ecosystem, is designed to make you feel like you are not worthy and you are not good enough unless you get their blessing unless they give you money, you're not going to feel good enough. Right. And that that can leave a big hole in your chest that you're sort of always trying to fill until you get it. And then it's only after you get it that you realize, oh, shit, that that did do anything for making my business better or my customers better or my product better or bringing customers to me or all of the things that I now need to do successfully in order to raise the next round and get the next bit of coverage and avoid being seen. I mean, I think honestly, it is so much better, so much better to never raise venture capital or to be rejected than to raise it successfully one or two times, but not become a unicorn.

Those stuck in the middle companies, don't make money for their founders. They don't make money for their employees. Everybody's paid under the market with the hope that your stock options will someday produce big results. And they almost never do. Right. Ninety-nine out of one hundred VC investments doesn't return their expected rate of return for the capital invested. 

Karine Abbou: That’s your situation at MOZ?

Rand Fishkin: You know, MOZ might be a 50 million dollar a year company that's profitable and throwing off five million dollars in revenue a year. And it might be growing, but it's growing too slowly to be able to sort of getting to the IPO stage, and the metrics aren't quite IPO-worthy. And so it's stuck there and it's not getting acquired by anyone because there are very few other companies in the space who are very big who would want to acquire it. So it's just this asset that might someday be worth something, but likely might be worth nothing. And investors have put, what, 30 some odd million dollars into that business. So it's got to make a ton of money. Those investors really are not going to be happy with an outcome under three hundred million dollars. How's MOZ going to get there? You know, it's a real struggle.

Karine Abbou: And you never wanted to stay and try to find a way to help this growth because you still have 18 percent of the company. And it's a shame that it makes so much money and that you don't even see it. That is crazy. I mean, it's a beautiful testimony of what you did with your book.

Rand Fishkin: I absolutely wanted to do that, and I think that I realized that once I stepped down from the CEO role, I no longer had the ability to do that. And so the best thing I could do was move on. Just sort of accepting the fact that I can no longer influence that trajectory and leave it in the hands of other people, and that is that's their decision to make, right?

In a way, you know, it is a very frustrating thing from a sort of financial standpoint that it is where it is. But at the same time, I don't need to be, you know, a multimillionaire with a mansion and a pool and fancy cars. Like I don't need any of that stuff. What makes me very happy is thinking that my work might help a lot of other people, and I think the work I did at MOZ helped a lot of other people.

I'm hopeful that the work I can do at Sparktoro can help a lot of people in a different way. That would make me feel really good. I would love it if Sparktoro’s independent financing model caught on because our success sort of showed to other people, oh, I can invest this way and have a successful outcome. I think it's actually quite possible that the United States will implement some serious capital gains tax advancements and that those sorts of progressive taxation will make Spark Torro’s funding much more appealing in the future than the classic venture model for a lot of angel investors. That would be super exciting, too. Right. So I mean, venture capital only really exists because it's a tax dodge.