#to be transparent I am 100% biased and I do believe that the books could sway peoples opinions... just not sure which way

[dragonsasastronauts]

Side note, if you have read only one of the books, just select the "has read" option. It's honestly not a big deal, though. I just included reading/not reading the books because I thought it would be interesting to see if that impacts anything at all.

Also also, for those of you who have Alistair marry Anora, but also have your Warden become his mistress, please just pick the mistress Warden choice. I only get to put 12 answers here, I am so sorry 😞

[teshknowledgenotes]

PRINCIPLES - RAY DALIO

PRINCIPLES LIST

1) EMBRACE REALITY AND DEAL WITH IT

Learning how reality works, visualizing the things I want to create, and then building them out is incredibly exciting to me. Stretching for big goals puts me in the position of failing and needing to learn and come up with new inventions in order to move forward. I find it exhilerating being caught up in the feedback loop of rapid learning – just as a surfer loves riding a wave, even though it sometimes leads to crashes. Don't get me wrong, I'm still scared of the crashes and I still find them painful. But I keep that pain in perspective, knowing that I will get through these setbacks.

Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life

What does a successful life look like? We all have our own deepseated needs, so we have to decide for ourselves what success is. I don't care whether you want to be a master of the universe, a couch potato or anything else – I really don't. Some people want to change the world and others want to operate in simple harmony with it and savor life. Neither is better. Each of us needs to decide what we value most and choose the paths we take to achieve it.

Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change. Learning is the product of a continuous real-time feedback loop in which we make decisions, see their outcomes, and improve our understanding of reality as a result. Being radically open-minded enchances the efficiency of those feedback loops, because it makes what you are doing, and why, so clear to yourself and others that there can't be any misunderstandings. The more open-minded you are, the less likely you are to decieve yourself – and the more likely it is that others will give you honest feedback. If they are “believable” people (and it's very important to know who is “believable”), you will learn a lot from them.

Being radically transparent adn radically open-minded accelerates this learning process it can also be difficult because being radically transparent rather than more guarded exposes one to criticism. It's naturaly to fear that. Yet if you don't put yourself out there with your radical transparency you won't learn

Don't let fears of what others think of you stand in your way. You must be willing to do things in the unique ways you think are best – and to open-mindedly reflect on the feedback that comed inevitable as a result of being that way.

Learning to be radically transparent is like learning to speak in public: While it's intially awkward, the more you do it, the more comfortable you will be with it. This has been true for me. For example, I still instinctively find being as radically transparent in the ways that I am in this book uncomfortable because I am exposing personal material to the public that will attract attention and criticism. Yet I am doing it because I've learned that it's best and I wouldn't feel good about myself if I let my fears stand in the way. In other words, I have experienced the positive effects of radical transparency for so long that it's now uncomfortable for me to not be that way.

Look to nature to learn how reality works. All the laws of reality were given to us by nature. Man didn't create these laws, but by understanding them we can use them to foster our own evolution and achieve our goals. For example, our ability to fly or to send cell phone signals around the world came from understanding and applying the existing rules of reality – the physical laws or principles that govern the natural world

While I spend most of my time studying the realities that affect me most directly – those that drive economies, the markets, and the people I deal with – I also spend time in nature and can't help reflecting on how it works by observing, reading and speaking with some of the greatest specialists on the subject. I've found it both interesting and valuable to observe which laws we humans have in common with the rest of nature and which differentiate us. Doing that has had a big impact on my approach to life.

First of all, I see how cool it is that the brain's evolution gave us the ability to reflect on how reality works in this way. Man's most distinctive quality is our singular ability to look down on reality from a higher perspective and synthesize an understanding of it. While other species operate by following their instincts, man alone can go above himself and look at himself within his circumstances and within time (including before and after his existence). For example, we can ponder the ways that nature's flying machines, swimming machines, and billions of other machines from the microscopic the the cosmic, interact with one another to make up a working whole that evolves through time. This is because the evolution of the brain gave man a much more developed neocortex, which gives us the power to think abstractly and logically.

While our high-level thinking makes us unique among species, it can also make us uniquely confused. Other species have much simpler and more straightforward lives, without any of man's wrestling with what's good and what's bad. In contrast with animals, most people struggle to reconcile their emotions and their instincts (which come from the animal parts of their brains) with their reasoning (which comes from parts of the brain more developed in humans). This struggle causes people to confuse what they want to be true with what actually is true. Let's look at this dilemma to try to understand how reality works.

To try to figure out the universal  laws of reality and principles for dealing with it, I've found it helpful to try to look at things from nature's perspective. While mankind is very intelligent in relation to other species, we have the intelligence of moss growing on a rock compared to nature as a whole. We are incapable of designing and building a mosquito, let alone all the species and most of the other things in the universe. So I start from the premise that nature is smarter than I am and try to let nature teach me how reality works.

When I went to Africa a number of years ago, I saw a pack of hyenas take down a young wildebeest. My reaction was visceral. I felt empathy for the wildebeest and thought that what I had witnesssed was biased to believe it's horrible when it is actually wonderful? That got me thinking. Would the world be a better or worse place if what I'd seen hadn't occurred? That perspective drove me to consider the second and third-order consequences so that I could see that the world would be worse. I now realize that nature optimizes for the whole, not for the individual, but most people judge good and bad based only on how it affects them. What I had seen was the process of nature at work, which is much more effective at furthering the improvement of the whole than any process man has ever invented.

Perfection doesn't exist, it is a goal that fuels a never-ending process of adaptation. If nature, or anything, were perfect it wouldn't be evolving. Organisms, organizations, and individual people are always highly imperfect but capable of improving. So rather than getting stuck hiding our mistakes and pretending we're perfect, it makes sense to find our imperfections and deal with them. You will either learn valuable lessons from your mistakes and press on, better equipped to succeed – or you won't and you will fail.  

Adaptation through rapid trial and error is invaluable. Natural selections's trial and error process allows improvement without anyone understanding or guiding it. The same can apply to how we learn . There are at least three kinds of learning that foster evolution: memory-based learning (storing the information that comes in through one's conscious minds, though it affects our decision making) and “learning” that occurs without thinking at all, such as the changes in DNA that encode a species' adaptations. I used to think that memory-based, conscious learning was the most powerful, but I've since come to understand that it produces less rapid progress than experimentation and adaptation.

Realize that you are simultaneously everything and nothing – and decide what you want to be. It is a great paradox that individually we are simultaneously everything and nothing. Through our own eyes, we are everything – e.g., when we die, the whole world dissapears. So to most people (and to other species) dying is the worst thing possible, and it is of paramount importance that we have the best life possible. However, when we look down on ourselves through the eyes of nature we are absolutely no significance. It is a reality that each one of us is only one of about seven billion of our species alive today and that our species is only one of about ten million species on our planet. Earth is just one of about 100 billion planets in our galaxy, which is just one of about two trillion galaxies in the universe. In other words, we are unbelievable tiny and short-lived and no matter what we accomplish our impact will be insignificant. At the same time, we instinctually want to matter and to evolve and we can matter a tiny bit – and it's all those tiny bits that add up to drive the evolution of the universe.

I find it thrilling to embrace reality, to look down on myself through nature's perspective and to be an infinitesimally small part of the whole. My instinctual and intellectual goal is simply to evolve and contribute to evolution in some tiny way while I'm here and while I am what I am. At the same time, the things I love most – my work and my relationships – are what motivate me. So, I find how reality and nature work, including how I and everything will decompose and recompose, beautiful – though emotionally I find the separation from those I care about difficult to appreciate.

Understand nature's practical lessons. I have found understanding how nature and evolution work helpful in a number of ways. Most importantly, it has helped me deal with my realities more effectively and make difficult choices. When I began to look at reality through the perspective of figuring out how it really works, instead of thinking things should be different, I realized that most everything at at first seemed “bad” to me – like rainy days, weaknesses and even death – was because I held preconceived notions of what I personally wanted. With time, I learned that my initial reaction was because I hadn't put whatever I was reacting to in the context of the fact that reality is built to optimize for the whole rather than for me.

The constant drive toward learning and improvement makes getting better innately enjoyable and getting better fast exhilarating. Though most people think that they are striving to get the things (toys, bigger houses, money, status, etc.) that will make them happy, for most people those things don't supply anywhere near the long-term satisfaction that getting better at something does. Once we get the things we are striving for we rarely remain satisfied with them. The things are just the bait. Chasing after them forces us to evolve, and it is the evolution and not the rewards themselves that maters to us and to those around us. This means that for most people success is struggling and evolving as effectively as possible i.e., learning rapidly about oneself and one's environment and then changing to improve.

It is natural that it should be this way because of the law of diminishing returns. Consider what acquiring money is like. People who earn so much that they derive little or no marginal gains from it will experience negative consequences, as with other form of excess, like gluttony. If they are intellectually healthy, they will begin seeking something new or seeking new depths in something old – and they will get stronger in the process. As Freud put it, “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”

The work doesn't necessarily have to be a job, though I believe it's generally better if it is a job. It can be any kind of long-term challenge that leads to personal improvement. As you might have guessed, I believe that the need to have meanignful work is connected to man's innate desire to improve. And relationships are the natural connections to others that make us relevant to each other and to society more broadly.

It is a fundamental law of nature that in order to gain strength one has to push one's limts, which is painful. As Carl Jung put it, “Man needs difficulties. They are necessary for health.” Yet most people instinctually avoid pain. This is true wheter we are talking about building the body (e.g. Weight lifting) or the mind (e.g. Frustration, mental struggle, embarrassment, shame) – and especially true when people confront the harsh reality of their own imperfections.

Go to the pain rather than avoid it. If you don't let up on yourself and instad become comfortable always operating with some level of pain, you will evolve at a fast pace. That's just the way it is. Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your life – you have to opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion. The irony is that if you choose the healthy route, the pain will soon turn into pleasure. The pain is the signal! Like switching from not exercising to exercising, developing the habit of embracing the pain and learning from it will “get you to the other side.” By “getting to the other side” I mean that you will become hooked on:

Identifying, accepting, and learning how to deal with your weaknesses,

Preferring that the people around you be honest with you rather than keep their negative thoughts about to themselves and

Being yourself rather than having to pretend to be strong where you are weak.

Distinguish between you as the designer of your machine and you as a worker with your machine. One of the hardest things for people to do is to objectively look down on themselves within their circumstances (i.e. Their machine) so that they can act as the machine's designer and manager. Most people remain stuck in the perspective of being a worker within the machine. If you can recognize the differences between those roles and that it is much more important that you are a good designer/manager of your life than a good worker in it, you will be on the right path. To be successful, the “designer/manager you” has to be objective about what the “worker you” is really like, not believing in him more than he deserves, or putting him in jobs he shouldn't be in. Instead of having this strategic perspective, most people operate emotionaly and in the moment; their lives are a series of undirected emotional experiences, going from one thing to the next. If you want to look back on your life and feel you've achieved what you wanted to, you can't operate that way.

If you are disappointed because you can't be the best person to do everything yourself, you are terribly naive. Nobody an do everything well. Would you want to have Einstein on your basketball team? When he fails to dribble and shoot well, would you think badly of him? Shouldhe feel humiliated? Imagine all the areas in which Einstein was incompetent and imagine how hard he struggled to excel even in the areas in which he was the best in the world.

Watching people struggle and having others watch you struggle can elicit all kinds of ego-driven emotions such as sympathy, pty, embarrassment, anger, or defensiveness. You need to get over all and stop seeing struggling as something negative. Most of life's greatest opportunities come out of moments of struggle, it's up to you to make the most of these tests of creativity and character.

When encountering your weaknesses you have four choices:

1) You can deny them (which is what most people do)

2) You can accept them and work at them in order to try to convert them into strengths (which might or might not work depending on your ability to change).

3) You can accept your weaknesses and find ways around them

4) Or, you can change what you are going after.

If you are open-minded enough and determined, you can get virtually anything you want. So I certainly don't want to dissuade you from going after whatever you want. At the same time, I urge you to reflect on whether what you are going after is consistent with your nature. Whatever your nature is, there are many paths that will suit you, so don't fixate on just one. Should a particular path close, all you ahve to do is find another good one consistent with what you're like.

Most people lack the courage to confront their own weaknesses and make the ahrd choices that the process requires. Ultimately it comes down to the following five decisions:

1) Don't confuse what you wish were true with what is really true

2) Don't worry about looking good – worry instead about achieving your goals

3) Don't overweight first-order consquences relative to second- and third-order ones

4) Don't let pain stand in the way of progress

5) Don't blame bad outcomes on ayone but yourself

[theconservativebrief]

Who can be against empathy? If our moral intuitions align on anything, is it not on the idea that empathy for other human beings is a good thing? What harm could come from identifying with the thoughts and feelings of our fellow creatures?

According to Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, most of us are completely wrong about empathy. The author of a new book titled Against Empathy, Bloom uses clinical studies and simple logic to argue that empathy, however well-intentioned, is a poor guide for moral reasoning. Worse, to the extent that individuals and societies make ethical judgments on the basis of empathy, they become less sensitive to the suffering of greater and greater numbers of people.

“I want to make a case for the value of conscious, deliberative reasoning in everyday life, arguing that we should strive to use our heads rather than our hearts.” Such is the plea that Bloom makes in the opening pages of the book. What follows is a lucidly argued tract about the hazards of good intentions.

I sat down with Bloom to talk about his case against empathy. To be perfectly transparent, I read Bloom’s book — and entered into this conversation — with a fair degree of skepticism. I’ve long believed empathy to be the basis for human solidarity (for reasons I explain below). So if he’s right, then I’ve been wrong for virtually all of my life.

After reading his book and engaging him in this conversation, I think he’s (mostly) right.

Sean Illing

How do you define empathy? And how is it distinct from, say, compassion or sympathy?

Paul Bloom

It’s a great question because a lot of people freak out when they see my title. I’ve come to realize that people mean different things by empathy. Some people take empathy to mean everything good or moral, or to be kind in some general sense. I’m not against that. There’s another sense of empathy which is narrower and which has to do with understanding other people. And that’s not exactly what I’m talking about. I think that understanding people is important, but it’s not necessarily a force for good. It can be a force for evil as well.

By empathy I mean feeling the feelings of other people. So if you’re in pain and I feel your pain — I am feeling empathy toward you. If you’re being anxious, I pick up your anxiety. If you’re sad and I pick up your sadness, I’m being empathetic. And that’s different from compassion. Compassion means I give your concern weight, I value it. I care about you, but I don’t necessarily pick up your feelings.

A lot of people think this is merely a verbal distinction, that it doesn’t matter that much. But actually there’s a lot of evidence in my book that empathy and compassion activate different parts of the brain. But more importantly, they have different consequences. If I have empathy toward you, it will be painful if you’re suffering. It will be exhausting. It will lead me to avoid you and avoid helping. But if I feel compassion for you, I’ll be invigorated. I’ll be happy and I’ll try to make your life better.

Sean Illing

I take all the points you just made, but empathy still strikes me as a largely positive — or useful — emotion. One could argue that having empathy actually opens the door to more compassion.

Paul Bloom

My beef is with empathy in particular, with its role in decision making. Empathy has certain design features that do make it positive in certain restricted circumstances. If you and I are the only people on earth and you’re in pain and I can help you and make your pain go away, and I feel empathy toward you and so I make your life better, empathy has done something good. But the real world is nowhere near as simple. Empathy’s design failings have to do with the fact that it acts like a spotlight. It zooms you in. But spotlights only illuminate where you point them at, and for that reason empathy is biased.

I’m likely to feel empathy toward you, a handsome white guy, but somebody who is repulsive or frightening I don’t feel empathy for. I actually feel a lot less empathy for people who aren’t in my culture, who don’t share my skin color, who don’t share my language. This is a terrible fact of human nature, and it operates at a subconscious level, but we know that it happens. There’s dozens, probably hundreds, of laboratory experiments looking at empathy and they find that empathy is as biased as can be.

The second problem is the innumeracy. Empathy zooms me in on one but it doesn’t attend to the difference between one and 100 or one and 1,000. It’s because of empathy we often care more about a single person than 100 people or 1,000 people, or we care more about an attractive white girl who went missing than we do a 1,000 starving children who don’t look we do or live where we don’t live.

So it might feel good but empathy often leads us to make stupid and unethical decisions.

Sean Illing

Is empathy necessarily a spotlight? Does it have to be focused on one or two people at a time? Is that part of the structure of empathy or is that just the most common manifestation?

Paul Bloom

I think it’s part of what empathy is. Empathy as we’re talking about it is, “I put myself in your shoes.” So how many people can you do that with? Well maybe I could do that with you and some other guy at the same time. You’re feeling different things and I kind of got them both in my head. Can I do it for 10 or 12 or a 100 people? No. Maybe an almighty god could do that, could empathize with every living being. But typically, we zoom in on one.

And so it’s different from morality more generally. When I make a moral judgment, I can take into account, if I do this, 10 people will suffer but a thousand people will benefit. And with health care, gun control, or something like that, you deal with numbers.

But empathy, by its very nature, is like a spotlight.

Sean Illing

So it’s your view that empathy is not only a poor guide for moral reasoning; it actually makes people — and the world — worse?

Paul Bloom

I think empathy is a great for all sorts of things. It’s a wonderful source of pleasure, for instance. The joy of fiction would disappear if we couldn’t, on some level, empathize with the characters. A lot of our intimacy would fade. I think empathy is central to sex. It’s great for all sorts of things.

In the moral domain, however, empathy leads us astray. We are much better off if we give up on empathy and become rational deliberators motivating by compassion and care for others.

Sean Illing

Can you give an example of empathy gone wrong in everyday life?

Paul Bloom

I’ll give a controversial one and then a less controversial one. The controversial one has to do with the role of empathy in our criminal justice system, specifically victim statements. In many states, not all, there are victim statements, and these victim statements allow people talk about what happened to them and what it was like when their family member died or when they were assaulted; these often determine sentencing.

I could not imagine a better recipe for bias and unfair sentencing decisions than this. If the victim is an articulate, attractive, white woman, it’s going to be so much more powerful than if the victim is a sullen, African-American man who doesn’t like to talk about his feelings. You suddenly turn the deep questions of how to punish criminals into a question of how much do I feel for this person in front of me? So the bias would be incredibly powerful. So that’s case one.

Case two is about Donald Trump. Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants and Muslims was often framed, particularly early in his campaign, in terms of the suffering of people. He would actually tell these stories. In his rallies, he would tell stories of victims of rape and victims of shooting. He would tell stories of people who lost their jobs. And he was appealing to the empathy of supporters, whose concerns extended mostly to their own tribe.

Three hundred years ago, Adam Smith noted that when you feel empathy for someone who’s been abused or assaulted, it translates into anger and hatred toward those who’ve done the abuse. And I think we see that in the real world all the time. Whenever somebody wants you to kick a bunch of people out of your country or go to war, they’ll tell you a really sad story of some poor person who looks like you and got victimized in some way. Sometimes the story is false, sometimes it’s true, but it is a case in which empathy really goes wrong.

Sean Illing

I find your broad arguments about empathy persuasive, but I think your critique doesn’t hold as well for interpersonal relationships or parent-child dynamics. On some level, aren’t we obliged to care more about the people that we love or the people we call friends? And if that’s true, doesn’t that require something like empathy?

Paul Bloom

This is a great question. I have a whole chapter where I struggle with this. A lot of my book is like, “this is the way it is, man.” But I have a chapter on intimate relationships where I struggle exactly with these questions. It goes off in two directions. So one direction is, “empathy is biased, it plays favorites,” but there are some biases that don’t seem bad. I love my kids a lot more than I love you and I’m not ashamed of that. I don’t think I’m making a moral mistake. And I don’t think it’s a mistake to care more about my friends and my family than about strangers.

I think I’m making a mistake if I care about white people more than dark-skinned people. But friends and family? That seems right. In that sense, the bias of empathy isn’t such a problem. But I think the bias that that reflects is just a more general bias. If you took away empathy from my brain, I’d still love my kids. Because every other emotion is going to go in that direction. In that case, I think empathy’s bias per se isn’t a problem.

The other strand of your question is, the examples we’ve been giving so far have been about policy issues — going to war and victim statements. What about dealing with your kids, with your wife, with your friends? Don’t you want to be empathic to them? And I think the answer to that is mixed. I think the answer is often no.

Suppose you come to me and you’re freaked out, you’re anxious. Do you really want me to get anxious too? Do you want me to empathize with your anxiety, not just understand but feel it too? Presumably not. You want me to be calm. If you’re depressed, you don’t want me to sink into depression. Then you’ve got two problems instead of just one. You want me to sort of be uplifting, cheer you up, put things in perspective.

I think there’s a case for empathy, particularly with positive emotions. If we’re friends and something great has happened to you, you may want me to share your joy, not just be happy that things are well with you but actually share your positive feelings. I see nothing wrong with that.

Sean Illing

You made an interesting distinction there between feeling and understanding, and you alluded to this earlier as well. I wonder if you could unpack that just a bit. Are you saying that to be empathetic is to feel what someone is feeling, and not merely to understand it or relate to it in some way?

Paul Bloom

It’s actually critical to my argument that those are two separate things. Everybody agrees that to be a good person you have to understand other people. You can’t buy someone a birthday present unless you understand them on some level. And you can’t make a kid happy if you don’t understand her. Now as we said in the beginning, understanding is also necessary if you want to ruin somebody’s life, if you want to seduce them or con them or torture them. But understanding still seems to be a necessary condition for doing good. So if it turns out understanding and feeling are essentially entangled, then I can’t argue against empathy. But they aren’t entangled. You can easily find dissociations.

One such disassociation is the competent psychopath. So some psychopaths are not as impressive as you might think. They’re just kind of screwed up people. But some psychopaths are really good with other people. They’re really good with other people because they understand them. They know what you want. They know what you like. They know you better than you know yourself, but they don’t give a shit. They could cause you a lot of pain and not blink.

Sean Illing

Do you see any social utility at all to empathy?

Paul Bloom

I think it leads us to poor moral decisions, but it’s often what people want. There are a lot of cases where people want another person to feel what they feel. Some cases are cases of moral persuasion where I want you to persuade you to help me and to get you to do that I need to get you to feel what I feel. My kid’s in the hospital. I need money for an operation. How would you feel? I try to motivate that as part of persuasion.

Sean Illing

I take your point that empathy is often tribalistic, but must it be it that way or is that what it is for most people most of the time? Consider a Buddhist monk or someone who meditates regularly on compassion. Empathy in these cases is not directed at particular people. I’d argue that empathy, exercised in this way, is an orientation, not an emotion directed at someone or something.

Paul Bloom

Those are two different questions. The monk stuff is interesting. I talk about monks and meditation and Buddhism in my book. They really caution you about empathy. They say to get what you’re talking about, to get where you are, you have to jettison empathy and feel love and compassion, loving kindness. But don’t try to crawl into people’s heads. That will exhaust you. That will cause all sorts of problems.

There’s some evidence that meditative practice and mindfulness meditation makes you into a sweeter person. There’s no definitive evidence of this, but the argument is that mediation makes you more compassionate by diminishing your empathy, so you can help without feeling suffering.

Here’s an analogy I give: Isn’t it unfortunate that people overwhelmingly like delicious and fatty foods? Why can’t they enjoy eating protein powder or spinach day and night? Can you say that it’s impossible to have a person who hates hot fudge sundaes and steaks and enjoys chewing protein powder? Is it impossible to have somebody who isn’t sexually aroused by attractive young people but is instead sexually aroused by virtuous people? Is it impossible there are people who are only angry at global warming but if you chopped off their arm, they wouldn’t mind at all? I don’t know. I don’t think we’re such creatures.

I got into a discussion with a British academic over the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. He says the problem is not enough empathy. I said the problem is too much empathy. He says, but can’t you imagine a person, an Israeli, who feels as much empathy for the Palestinians as he does for his own family? I could imagine it. It’s just not how we typically tend to work.

Sean Illing

I’ve always felt that identification with another’s suffering was the key impetus for human solidarity, and that empathy is a gateway to recognizing the commonality of experience. If we want to make the critical shift from solipsism to collective consciousness, don’t we need something like empathy?

Paul Bloom

I wouldn’t say with confidence that that’s wrong. In some ways, to the extent that empathy can do it, it’s the effect, not the cause. That is, if you put yourself in somebody’s shoes — a person in Africa, a trans individual, a nonhuman, someone who you otherwise wouldn’t relate to, you already have to acknowledge them as a person. It’s not like empathy is this magical thing.

Empathy is a psychological process of imagination. Basically you’re choosing to make that imaginative leap. But that’s the moral choice. Empathy is just the one way you enact it. But then the question is, do you need to enact it? I think about rights revolutions in our times. The dramatic change in attitudes toward gay people and, more recently, the dramatic change in attitudes towards trans people.

I’m not convinced that everybody’s who’s changed or everybody’s who acknowledges these rights, these groups who are otherwise included, does so because they imagine what it’s like. I imagine what it’s like to be a man who wants to have sex with another man and can’t marry. I imagine what it’s like to be somebody with a penis who identifies herself as a woman. Maybe I do that. Maybe I don’t. Maybe I just say, I hear your argument about human rights, and there’s no reason to deprive them.

Sean Illing

Perhaps it’s better to think of empathy as an instrument, not a virtue. It can be used for good or ill, depending on the person in whom it’s exercised. Con men, as you say, are exceedingly empathic, which is why they’re so effective. Someone like the Dalai Lama is similarly empathic, only his empathy is put to much better ends.

Paul Bloom

I think when it comes to moral reasoning, empathy is just a bad idea. It just throws in bias and innumeracy and confusion. But yes, when it comes to moral motivation, empathy can be used as a tool. If I want to get you to help the baby, I can say, look at the baby’s family, I could do that. If I want you to lynch African Americans in the South, I can say, look at these white women who’ve been raped, feel their pain, let’s go! It is a tool.

My point is that there are better and more reliable tools.

Sean Illing

I’ve argued elsewhere that privilege has a way of blinding the privileged, and that that is a big reason why people fail to notice the role of luck in their own life and, more importantly, the role of misfortune in the lives of others. Obviously the political implications of this are terrible. I’ve always understood this to be an argument in defense of empathy.

Am I mistaken?

Paul Bloom

I’ve never thought of it that way. I actually think attempts at empathy might actually make things worse. A friend of mine, another white guy born into privilege, once said very honestly, “I don’t really understand why poor people would do this or do that. If I were in their shoes, I would do this and that and so on.”

You could argue that he’s just not empathizing strong enough; if he fully appreciated what it’s like to lack the right education and so on, perhaps then he’d understand. I wonder if an appreciation of contingency, of blind luck, isn’t something you get through empathy but through a broader understanding.

I’m not entirely sure, but it’s a great question.

Sean Illing

I don’t share this view, but there some who think that you place too much faith in pure reason as a guide to morality. At some point, don’t you have to smuggle value or emotion into this? You can easily reason your way into eugenics or some other repugnant worldview, after all.

Paul Bloom

I make a distinction. I think reason is how we come to conclusions and, more specifically, how we achieve certain ends. What ends you seek can be derived from reason based on some other goals, but they’re ultimately not determined by reason. I could say, I want to make the world a better place and here’s how we should do it. And you could challenge me and say, why do you want to make the world a better place. I’m just going to say, I just do. So reason has to end somewhere.

I’m most interested in cases where rational people share the same goals and then the question is roughly how to get there. And there I think reason is better than emotions.

Original Source -> The case against empathy

via The Conservative Brief

[luciousbailey]

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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John Jantsch: If you’re a founder of a startup, maybe you need some brutally honest advice from somebody who’s been there. For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I visit with Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz, and he’s written a book that you’re going to want to get into because it’s got some really practical and heartfelt advice of what he learned along the way.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help the support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz. I think people used to call him the Wizard of Moz. He actually has a new venture called SparkToro, which we’ll touch on today. But we’re going to talk a lot about his new book called, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.” Rand, thanks for joining me.

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I said off air but I’ll say it on air as well, I’ve been doing this podcast forever as a lot of my listeners know, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve had you on. It’s a treat for me. We are going to talk about your book, but I got to ask one SEO question. It’s a really broad one. Where does SEO sit today?

Rand Fishkin: Where does SEO sit today? Well, it’s at an interesting point in its history in that, in a lot of ways, search has become a mature industry and SEO has, too. That means that it’s more competitive than it’s ever been, and for the first time I think, thanks to the growth of voice search and how Google is displaying answers, there’s actually not the same acceleration rate of increasing opportunity in SEO. It’s sort of everyone is warring for more competition but with less potential new opportunity. So interesting timeframe.

John Jantsch: I’ve been coaching a lot of business owners that I think there’s a element of SEO that needs to be much more strategic. As we plan the website, they’re messaging their content, even SEO has to be a part of that, even how we structure their entire business to some degree before we even start talking about, as you said, the technical aspects. I think that’s a message that’s starting to make sense to people maybe because it’s gotten so competitive.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

John Jantsch: I’ve been doing this a long time. I can’t tell you how many small business owners would get a website built, put some form of content on it, and then come to me and say, “Would you SEO this?” You used to be able to do that.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

John Jantsch: You used the word ‘startup’ in the title, or at least the subtitle of the book. That’s such a term anymore that gets bantered around. I’d love to know what you consider … if you have a definition of a startup.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

Rand Fishkin: Well, I would hope that most mature businesses are seeking to maintain their growth rate or maybe grow it a little, and most of them have already found a scalable, repeatable business model, so startups are unique from both those aspects.

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. In many cases, a mature business, the founders are not involved anymore. In many long-standing businesses, the founders are retired or passed away. In many other businesses that are mature, founders have left and they’re off doing other things. But typically in startups, founders are still heavily involved and so that changes culture and a whole bunch of other things, yeah.

John Jantsch: This book is certainly a guide for somebody who’s starting a business, so in that way it’s kind of a how-to book, but it’s also very much a memoir. I’m curious if there was something that really compelled you to include the painfully honest part.

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s something that I’ve always been passionate about, and part of that is the catharsis that comes from the release of writing about something. A big part of it, also, is that when we share something that is not often shared, that the painful parts of journey or the hard issues, we help people to feel like they’re not alone in their journey. That is a really, really important aspect of all the work that I did at Moz and that I think I’ll ever do is trying to hopefully forge a path for other people to follow in and to be able to feel less [inaudible 00:05:49].

John Jantsch: Of course, while that is obviously an awesome contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, I suspect that it also in a lot of ways … you’ve got a new venture going, in a lot of ways I guess the question is what do you learn from it.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, sure, absolutely. I think “Lost and Founder” is really exactly that. It’s kind of a, “Hey, what are all the lessons that you’re taking away that you wish you could have known before you started Moz?” and trying to pass that on to a next generation of entrepreneurs but also to myself. When you sit down and collect your accumulated knowledge and put it into a written form, I think you process it in a way that you would not otherwise be able to do. So this is a very positive learning experience for me as well. I hope it’ll have a good impact on SparkToro.

John Jantsch: I’ve written five books now, and they are me postulating ideas, I suppose, which hopefully brings some value to the world. The idea that I would also share things that were painful that showed that I was actually vulnerable, that I didn’t have all the answers maybe at some point, was that scary at all for you?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I think it’s always scary. I mean the difference between transparency and marketing or honest marketing at least is that when you’re doing honest marketing, you are not telling any lies and you are showing off the good things that you’ve done and things that you’ve learned. When you’re being transparent, you are both being honest and embracing, wholeheartedly embracing the hardest, toughest, nastiest, ugliest parts of yourself and your journey and exposing things that other people would normally want to hide, things that could embarrass you and make you look bad. I think there’s actually more power in that one, certainly from a representation and a helping people feel not alone part of it. The, “Oh, I’m going to tell you the Facebook story of how I became the third richest person in the world,” neh, it’s not that interesting to me.

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

Rand Fishkin: I would say people who have known me and followed me for a long time, this book probably was a very good match. I think the one frustration, which Andrew Warner from Mixergy noted when I talked to him, was that there’s maybe two or three chapters that touch on SEO and web marketing kinds of things, but this is not an SEO-centric book. Of course, most of the people who’ve followed me historically over the last 17 years have done so because I’m in the SEO world and I help people learn more about that topic. So I think it’s a departure on that front and I think for folks who have read it, which is a few … I don’t know. Something between two and 7,000 people, I think, have bought the book so far. For those folks, it seems to be doing well. I get a lot of nice comments online so far.

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Again, the world of what … maybe it’s a misperception about what startup life is really like. Do you feel like a lot of people who are starting businesses look at the Silicon Valley common advice and common model and really fall prey to that in a not so positive way?

Rand Fishkin: I think one of the challenges is that Silicon Valley startups are built for a very specific asset class, venture capital, which is an asset class that’s designed to invest in 100 companies and three or four of them will return the entire fund and another 10 will be doing okay. The rest will hopefully die because the partners don’t even have time to engage with 100 companies. You don’t want to be putting money toward an investment that’s not return 5X, 10X. The advice that the Silicon Valley startup world gives to companies is very good if you fit that model, and it’s pretty bad if you don’t fit that model. I think the challenge is that popular media and culture and all of the focus of entrepreneurship especially over the last two decades has been so heavily centered, so heavily biased toward that model that the vast majority of businesses, which are not in that vein and shouldn’t follow that advice, can’t helped but be seduced by it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a big challenge. It’s a challenge in all sorts of things. If all the toys are geared towards, “Well, if you’re a boy, you have to play with Army toys. If you’re a girl, you have to play with princesses.” Well, no wonder kids want to dress up as certain things for Halloween and act certain ways when they grow up.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

John Jantsch: Years ago I’d take my kids to McDonald’s … Okay, I’m just going to admit it. We got the odd Happy Meal every now and then. They would always say, “Do you want a boy toy or a girl toy?” I was like, “What does that mean?” It drove me crazy.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

Rand Fishkin: I’m one of those people who absolutely fell prey to the classic Silicon Valley startup, taking venture. That’s the ultimate challenge, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what every entrepreneur … If you’re a great entrepreneur, you seek to do that. Of course, now that I’ve been through that experience, I have the wisdom to say, “Hang on a minute. That’s a totally biased perspective.” There’s no one class of entrepreneur that’s so much better than another. If you start a bakery, you are no less an entrepreneur than someone who starts a tech company. If you raise venture capital versus getting a bank loan, you are no less or more of an entrepreneur. So I think removing some of that external input is certainly a big thing.

The other big one I’d say, for me at least, is having a lot more self-knowledge, so some of that’s being able to push exterior forces away and recognize what I want, but also some of it is being able to say, “Okay, I know that I often fall prey to these problems or these mistakes. I know that I’m good at this and not good at that. I know that I need to shore up these weaknesses, and I know that I have challenges with hiring,” whatever it is. I think that’s why so many more entrepreneurs who start businesses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s tend to, on average, have higher success rates than those who start them earlier in life. No surprise.

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Oo, that’s an interesting one. Let’s see. I would say in my life personally and broadly, I’m a very mission-driven person, but as far as the business goes, SparkToro for me is not, “Oh, I want to solve this bordering on philanthropic problem.” It’s very much a, “Hey, this particular marketing problem that I kept seeing people have and that I encountered a lot when I worked with newer companies or companies for whom SEO wasn’t a good match.” That problem feels like there’s a great technological solution that could help with it. No, I think I’m still very innovation-driven when it comes to product market.

John Jantsch: Do you get, I’m assuming, a lot of startups or wannabe startups writing you and saying, “What should I do first? Where do I start?” What’s your one piece of advice that everybody always likes to … the one thing?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: Not necessarily how do you manage that, but do you have sage advice for the person that you decide, “I’m going to sit down and write a long, thorough fulfilling email back to them”?

Rand Fishkin: “Lost and Founder” has been great on that front because for a lot of the, “Hey, what should I do? What should I not do? How should I think about this?” there’s a chapter for a lot of those items in the book. That being said, I think probably one of the most common ones I get, no surprise because of my background in web marketing, is, “Where should I start my web marketing efforts, and how should I attract my first customers?” For me, the answer to that is always the intersection of three things. One, an area where you have personal passion and interest. I have never found, literally never found anyone who said, “You know what? I hate Instagram. Hate the whole platform. Ugh, it’s terrible. But I do get most of my business that way.” It doesn’t happen. People who are not interested in or passionate about or have some value they can just [inaudible 00:17:28] that they’re just not great at it. So I tell people to pick a marketing channel that they personally like. If you hate SEO, you hate content marketing, fine. Go for ads or PR or something else.

The second thing is somewhere where you can add unique value, and the important word in that statement is unique. Many people can add value. Many people can copycat other people who are adding value. It’s very difficult for a lot of organizations to recognize how they can add unique value. Why is this thing that you’re doing more uniquely valuable to the audience? If you have a great answer to that question and the first one, the third thing is you need to pick channels where your audience actually pays attention. So you find something at the intersection of those three.

John Jantsch: A lot of people really struggle with that uniquely valuable thing because they just say, “Hey, what I created, surely it’s valuable.” I find the best way to find those is find problems. What are people complaining about? What are they not getting? Like when they leave reviews with competitors and they talk about, “They didn’t show up on time,” or just whatever goofy things they’re saying, those are the problems that you need to figure out.

Rand Fishkin: Or problems where people are only solving them in one way. For example, lots of people are having this problem, and no one is helping those who prefer video content or those who like podcasts, or no one’s doing visual-centric content, or no one’s solving this in a way that’s accessible for whatever, an older demographic or that kind of thing.

John Jantsch: I’m certain because of your front of the leading edge, I suppose, SEO online stuff, you occasionally have people who say, “Okay, on this stuff that’s coming, what’s coming next?” Maybe just riff for a minute on voice search and assistance and AI and bots. That seems to be kind of the thing that’s got a lot of people’s attention but they’re not sure if they should pay attention yet.

Rand Fishkin: First off, my broad advice on this is that when you are investing in marketing, you do not need to and should not be leading your market. You should be following. That sounds weird because we have this culture that’s so innovation-centric, like what’s the next big thing? How do I make sure I don’t get left behind?

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

Rand Fishkin: Right, right. There’s a first mover advantage. In marketing, there’s a first mover advantage but not until the market moves. For example, I know a bunch of companies that invested very heavily in chatbots over the last few years. They were sure three, four years ago that chatbots were going to be the next big thing, and they built a bunch of tech around this. Those have not paid dividends for very many companies at all. In fact, I would say the majority of folks I’ve talked to who’ve invested there regret investing deeply. They still think maybe in the next few years it will be something that consumers really want but so far, meh, not so much. My broad advice is follow the market. Don’t try and adopt something before it’s popular. Don’t be on, whatever, [Kick 00:20:49] who went out of business or-

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a product for a lot of different marketers who encounter a consistent problem that we saw which was basically folks who’d try and figure out, “I have this audience I want to reach. Maybe it’s a new audience because I have a new company, or I’m trying to expand my audience and grow. But I’m trying to reach this audience, and I don’t know where I should I go to reach them. Because of that, I spend all my money with Google and Facebook and the rest is sort of, eh, I don’t know what do to.” As a result, those behemoths become even more giant.

When in fact, if you dig into any audience, there’s almost certainly podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they subscribe to and people they follow on social networks. There’s publications that they read and news media and blogs that they consume and online forums that they hang out in and events that they go to offline, places they actually go to and participate in. Discovery of those different people and publications and sources is an incredibly manual, challenging, often weeks or month-long process for a marketer to discover and uncover. If you have to do it every six months or every year, it’s even more painful. That’s what we’re trying to solve with SparkToro through technology.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The idea is that you could plug in something very broad like, “I’m interested in reaching travelers to Southeast Asia,” or you could go for something more niche like, “I want interior decorators on the West Coast,” or you could go for something hyper-niche like, “I’m looking for mechanical engineers who work in clean water facilities.”

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

Rand Fishkin: Well, since we just started, it’s going to be nine months maybe a little more away before we have any kind of product. You can go check it out certainly and read a little more about the problem. If you want, you can sign up and get an email when we launch, but there’s nothing there yet. The eventual idea, though, is that I want to do something very much like I did with Moz. I don’t want to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to use this product. I want this to be something that anyone can subscribe to and use, sort of a search engine for marketers to learn more about their audiences’ affinities and where they pay attention.

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

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John Jantsch: If you’re a founder of a startup, maybe you need some brutally honest advice from somebody who’s been there. For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I visit with Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz, and he’s written a book that you’re going to want to get into because it’s got some really practical and heartfelt advice of what he learned along the way.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help the support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz. I think people used to call him the Wizard of Moz. He actually has a new venture called SparkToro, which we’ll touch on today. But we’re going to talk a lot about his new book called, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.” Rand, thanks for joining me.

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I said off air but I’ll say it on air as well, I’ve been doing this podcast forever as a lot of my listeners know, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve had you on. It’s a treat for me. We are going to talk about your book, but I got to ask one SEO question. It’s a really broad one. Where does SEO sit today?

Rand Fishkin: Where does SEO sit today? Well, it’s at an interesting point in its history in that, in a lot of ways, search has become a mature industry and SEO has, too. That means that it’s more competitive than it’s ever been, and for the first time I think, thanks to the growth of voice search and how Google is displaying answers, there’s actually not the same acceleration rate of increasing opportunity in SEO. It’s sort of everyone is warring for more competition but with less potential new opportunity. So interesting timeframe.

John Jantsch: I’ve been coaching a lot of business owners that I think there’s a element of SEO that needs to be much more strategic. As we plan the website, they’re messaging their content, even SEO has to be a part of that, even how we structure their entire business to some degree before we even start talking about, as you said, the technical aspects. I think that’s a message that’s starting to make sense to people maybe because it’s gotten so competitive.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

John Jantsch: I’ve been doing this a long time. I can’t tell you how many small business owners would get a website built, put some form of content on it, and then come to me and say, “Would you SEO this?” You used to be able to do that.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

John Jantsch: You used the word ‘startup’ in the title, or at least the subtitle of the book. That’s such a term anymore that gets bantered around. I’d love to know what you consider … if you have a definition of a startup.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

Rand Fishkin: Well, I would hope that most mature businesses are seeking to maintain their growth rate or maybe grow it a little, and most of them have already found a scalable, repeatable business model, so startups are unique from both those aspects.

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. In many cases, a mature business, the founders are not involved anymore. In many long-standing businesses, the founders are retired or passed away. In many other businesses that are mature, founders have left and they’re off doing other things. But typically in startups, founders are still heavily involved and so that changes culture and a whole bunch of other things, yeah.

John Jantsch: This book is certainly a guide for somebody who’s starting a business, so in that way it’s kind of a how-to book, but it’s also very much a memoir. I’m curious if there was something that really compelled you to include the painfully honest part.

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s something that I’ve always been passionate about, and part of that is the catharsis that comes from the release of writing about something. A big part of it, also, is that when we share something that is not often shared, that the painful parts of journey or the hard issues, we help people to feel like they’re not alone in their journey. That is a really, really important aspect of all the work that I did at Moz and that I think I’ll ever do is trying to hopefully forge a path for other people to follow in and to be able to feel less [inaudible 00:05:49].

John Jantsch: Of course, while that is obviously an awesome contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, I suspect that it also in a lot of ways … you’ve got a new venture going, in a lot of ways I guess the question is what do you learn from it.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, sure, absolutely. I think “Lost and Founder” is really exactly that. It’s kind of a, “Hey, what are all the lessons that you’re taking away that you wish you could have known before you started Moz?” and trying to pass that on to a next generation of entrepreneurs but also to myself. When you sit down and collect your accumulated knowledge and put it into a written form, I think you process it in a way that you would not otherwise be able to do. So this is a very positive learning experience for me as well. I hope it’ll have a good impact on SparkToro.

John Jantsch: I’ve written five books now, and they are me postulating ideas, I suppose, which hopefully brings some value to the world. The idea that I would also share things that were painful that showed that I was actually vulnerable, that I didn’t have all the answers maybe at some point, was that scary at all for you?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I think it’s always scary. I mean the difference between transparency and marketing or honest marketing at least is that when you’re doing honest marketing, you are not telling any lies and you are showing off the good things that you’ve done and things that you’ve learned. When you’re being transparent, you are both being honest and embracing, wholeheartedly embracing the hardest, toughest, nastiest, ugliest parts of yourself and your journey and exposing things that other people would normally want to hide, things that could embarrass you and make you look bad. I think there’s actually more power in that one, certainly from a representation and a helping people feel not alone part of it. The, “Oh, I’m going to tell you the Facebook story of how I became the third richest person in the world,” neh, it’s not that interesting to me.

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

Rand Fishkin: I would say people who have known me and followed me for a long time, this book probably was a very good match. I think the one frustration, which Andrew Warner from Mixergy noted when I talked to him, was that there’s maybe two or three chapters that touch on SEO and web marketing kinds of things, but this is not an SEO-centric book. Of course, most of the people who’ve followed me historically over the last 17 years have done so because I’m in the SEO world and I help people learn more about that topic. So I think it’s a departure on that front and I think for folks who have read it, which is a few … I don’t know. Something between two and 7,000 people, I think, have bought the book so far. For those folks, it seems to be doing well. I get a lot of nice comments online so far.

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Again, the world of what … maybe it’s a misperception about what startup life is really like. Do you feel like a lot of people who are starting businesses look at the Silicon Valley common advice and common model and really fall prey to that in a not so positive way?

Rand Fishkin: I think one of the challenges is that Silicon Valley startups are built for a very specific asset class, venture capital, which is an asset class that’s designed to invest in 100 companies and three or four of them will return the entire fund and another 10 will be doing okay. The rest will hopefully die because the partners don’t even have time to engage with 100 companies. You don’t want to be putting money toward an investment that’s not return 5X, 10X. The advice that the Silicon Valley startup world gives to companies is very good if you fit that model, and it’s pretty bad if you don’t fit that model. I think the challenge is that popular media and culture and all of the focus of entrepreneurship especially over the last two decades has been so heavily centered, so heavily biased toward that model that the vast majority of businesses, which are not in that vein and shouldn’t follow that advice, can’t helped but be seduced by it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a big challenge. It’s a challenge in all sorts of things. If all the toys are geared towards, “Well, if you’re a boy, you have to play with Army toys. If you’re a girl, you have to play with princesses.” Well, no wonder kids want to dress up as certain things for Halloween and act certain ways when they grow up.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

John Jantsch: Years ago I’d take my kids to McDonald’s … Okay, I’m just going to admit it. We got the odd Happy Meal every now and then. They would always say, “Do you want a boy toy or a girl toy?” I was like, “What does that mean?” It drove me crazy.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

Rand Fishkin: I’m one of those people who absolutely fell prey to the classic Silicon Valley startup, taking venture. That’s the ultimate challenge, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what every entrepreneur … If you’re a great entrepreneur, you seek to do that. Of course, now that I’ve been through that experience, I have the wisdom to say, “Hang on a minute. That’s a totally biased perspective.” There’s no one class of entrepreneur that’s so much better than another. If you start a bakery, you are no less an entrepreneur than someone who starts a tech company. If you raise venture capital versus getting a bank loan, you are no less or more of an entrepreneur. So I think removing some of that external input is certainly a big thing.

The other big one I’d say, for me at least, is having a lot more self-knowledge, so some of that’s being able to push exterior forces away and recognize what I want, but also some of it is being able to say, “Okay, I know that I often fall prey to these problems or these mistakes. I know that I’m good at this and not good at that. I know that I need to shore up these weaknesses, and I know that I have challenges with hiring,” whatever it is. I think that’s why so many more entrepreneurs who start businesses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s tend to, on average, have higher success rates than those who start them earlier in life. No surprise.

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Oo, that’s an interesting one. Let’s see. I would say in my life personally and broadly, I’m a very mission-driven person, but as far as the business goes, SparkToro for me is not, “Oh, I want to solve this bordering on philanthropic problem.” It’s very much a, “Hey, this particular marketing problem that I kept seeing people have and that I encountered a lot when I worked with newer companies or companies for whom SEO wasn’t a good match.” That problem feels like there’s a great technological solution that could help with it. No, I think I’m still very innovation-driven when it comes to product market.

John Jantsch: Do you get, I’m assuming, a lot of startups or wannabe startups writing you and saying, “What should I do first? Where do I start?” What’s your one piece of advice that everybody always likes to … the one thing?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: Not necessarily how do you manage that, but do you have sage advice for the person that you decide, “I’m going to sit down and write a long, thorough fulfilling email back to them”?

Rand Fishkin: “Lost and Founder” has been great on that front because for a lot of the, “Hey, what should I do? What should I not do? How should I think about this?” there’s a chapter for a lot of those items in the book. That being said, I think probably one of the most common ones I get, no surprise because of my background in web marketing, is, “Where should I start my web marketing efforts, and how should I attract my first customers?” For me, the answer to that is always the intersection of three things. One, an area where you have personal passion and interest. I have never found, literally never found anyone who said, “You know what? I hate Instagram. Hate the whole platform. Ugh, it’s terrible. But I do get most of my business that way.” It doesn’t happen. People who are not interested in or passionate about or have some value they can just [inaudible 00:17:28] that they’re just not great at it. So I tell people to pick a marketing channel that they personally like. If you hate SEO, you hate content marketing, fine. Go for ads or PR or something else.

The second thing is somewhere where you can add unique value, and the important word in that statement is unique. Many people can add value. Many people can copycat other people who are adding value. It’s very difficult for a lot of organizations to recognize how they can add unique value. Why is this thing that you’re doing more uniquely valuable to the audience? If you have a great answer to that question and the first one, the third thing is you need to pick channels where your audience actually pays attention. So you find something at the intersection of those three.

John Jantsch: A lot of people really struggle with that uniquely valuable thing because they just say, “Hey, what I created, surely it’s valuable.” I find the best way to find those is find problems. What are people complaining about? What are they not getting? Like when they leave reviews with competitors and they talk about, “They didn’t show up on time,” or just whatever goofy things they’re saying, those are the problems that you need to figure out.

Rand Fishkin: Or problems where people are only solving them in one way. For example, lots of people are having this problem, and no one is helping those who prefer video content or those who like podcasts, or no one’s doing visual-centric content, or no one’s solving this in a way that’s accessible for whatever, an older demographic or that kind of thing.

John Jantsch: I’m certain because of your front of the leading edge, I suppose, SEO online stuff, you occasionally have people who say, “Okay, on this stuff that’s coming, what’s coming next?” Maybe just riff for a minute on voice search and assistance and AI and bots. That seems to be kind of the thing that’s got a lot of people’s attention but they’re not sure if they should pay attention yet.

Rand Fishkin: First off, my broad advice on this is that when you are investing in marketing, you do not need to and should not be leading your market. You should be following. That sounds weird because we have this culture that’s so innovation-centric, like what’s the next big thing? How do I make sure I don’t get left behind?

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

Rand Fishkin: Right, right. There’s a first mover advantage. In marketing, there’s a first mover advantage but not until the market moves. For example, I know a bunch of companies that invested very heavily in chatbots over the last few years. They were sure three, four years ago that chatbots were going to be the next big thing, and they built a bunch of tech around this. Those have not paid dividends for very many companies at all. In fact, I would say the majority of folks I’ve talked to who’ve invested there regret investing deeply. They still think maybe in the next few years it will be something that consumers really want but so far, meh, not so much. My broad advice is follow the market. Don’t try and adopt something before it’s popular. Don’t be on, whatever, [Kick 00:20:49] who went out of business or-

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a product for a lot of different marketers who encounter a consistent problem that we saw which was basically folks who’d try and figure out, “I have this audience I want to reach. Maybe it’s a new audience because I have a new company, or I’m trying to expand my audience and grow. But I’m trying to reach this audience, and I don’t know where I should I go to reach them. Because of that, I spend all my money with Google and Facebook and the rest is sort of, eh, I don’t know what do to.” As a result, those behemoths become even more giant.

When in fact, if you dig into any audience, there’s almost certainly podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they subscribe to and people they follow on social networks. There’s publications that they read and news media and blogs that they consume and online forums that they hang out in and events that they go to offline, places they actually go to and participate in. Discovery of those different people and publications and sources is an incredibly manual, challenging, often weeks or month-long process for a marketer to discover and uncover. If you have to do it every six months or every year, it’s even more painful. That’s what we’re trying to solve with SparkToro through technology.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The idea is that you could plug in something very broad like, “I’m interested in reaching travelers to Southeast Asia,” or you could go for something more niche like, “I want interior decorators on the West Coast,” or you could go for something hyper-niche like, “I’m looking for mechanical engineers who work in clean water facilities.”

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

Rand Fishkin: Well, since we just started, it’s going to be nine months maybe a little more away before we have any kind of product. You can go check it out certainly and read a little more about the problem. If you want, you can sign up and get an email when we launch, but there’s nothing there yet. The eventual idea, though, is that I want to do something very much like I did with Moz. I don’t want to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to use this product. I want this to be something that anyone can subscribe to and use, sort of a search engine for marketers to learn more about their audiences’ affinities and where they pay attention.

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

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Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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John Jantsch: If you’re a founder of a startup, maybe you need some brutally honest advice from somebody who’s been there. For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I visit with Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz, and he’s written a book that you’re going to want to get into because it’s got some really practical and heartfelt advice of what he learned along the way.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help the support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz. I think people used to call him the Wizard of Moz. He actually has a new venture called SparkToro, which we’ll touch on today. But we’re going to talk a lot about his new book called, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.” Rand, thanks for joining me.

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I said off air but I’ll say it on air as well, I’ve been doing this podcast forever as a lot of my listeners know, and I can’t believe this is the first time I��ve had you on. It’s a treat for me. We are going to talk about your book, but I got to ask one SEO question. It’s a really broad one. Where does SEO sit today?

Rand Fishkin: Where does SEO sit today? Well, it’s at an interesting point in its history in that, in a lot of ways, search has become a mature industry and SEO has, too. That means that it’s more competitive than it’s ever been, and for the first time I think, thanks to the growth of voice search and how Google is displaying answers, there’s actually not the same acceleration rate of increasing opportunity in SEO. It’s sort of everyone is warring for more competition but with less potential new opportunity. So interesting timeframe.

John Jantsch: I’ve been coaching a lot of business owners that I think there’s a element of SEO that needs to be much more strategic. As we plan the website, they’re messaging their content, even SEO has to be a part of that, even how we structure their entire business to some degree before we even start talking about, as you said, the technical aspects. I think that’s a message that’s starting to make sense to people maybe because it’s gotten so competitive.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

John Jantsch: I’ve been doing this a long time. I can’t tell you how many small business owners would get a website built, put some form of content on it, and then come to me and say, “Would you SEO this?” You used to be able to do that.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

John Jantsch: You used the word ‘startup’ in the title, or at least the subtitle of the book. That’s such a term anymore that gets bantered around. I’d love to know what you consider … if you have a definition of a startup.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

Rand Fishkin: Well, I would hope that most mature businesses are seeking to maintain their growth rate or maybe grow it a little, and most of them have already found a scalable, repeatable business model, so startups are unique from both those aspects.

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. In many cases, a mature business, the founders are not involved anymore. In many long-standing businesses, the founders are retired or passed away. In many other businesses that are mature, founders have left and they’re off doing other things. But typically in startups, founders are still heavily involved and so that changes culture and a whole bunch of other things, yeah.

John Jantsch: This book is certainly a guide for somebody who’s starting a business, so in that way it’s kind of a how-to book, but it’s also very much a memoir. I’m curious if there was something that really compelled you to include the painfully honest part.

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s something that I’ve always been passionate about, and part of that is the catharsis that comes from the release of writing about something. A big part of it, also, is that when we share something that is not often shared, that the painful parts of journey or the hard issues, we help people to feel like they’re not alone in their journey. That is a really, really important aspect of all the work that I did at Moz and that I think I’ll ever do is trying to hopefully forge a path for other people to follow in and to be able to feel less [inaudible 00:05:49].

John Jantsch: Of course, while that is obviously an awesome contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, I suspect that it also in a lot of ways … you’ve got a new venture going, in a lot of ways I guess the question is what do you learn from it.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, sure, absolutely. I think “Lost and Founder” is really exactly that. It’s kind of a, “Hey, what are all the lessons that you’re taking away that you wish you could have known before you started Moz?” and trying to pass that on to a next generation of entrepreneurs but also to myself. When you sit down and collect your accumulated knowledge and put it into a written form, I think you process it in a way that you would not otherwise be able to do. So this is a very positive learning experience for me as well. I hope it’ll have a good impact on SparkToro.

John Jantsch: I’ve written five books now, and they are me postulating ideas, I suppose, which hopefully brings some value to the world. The idea that I would also share things that were painful that showed that I was actually vulnerable, that I didn’t have all the answers maybe at some point, was that scary at all for you?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I think it’s always scary. I mean the difference between transparency and marketing or honest marketing at least is that when you’re doing honest marketing, you are not telling any lies and you are showing off the good things that you’ve done and things that you’ve learned. When you’re being transparent, you are both being honest and embracing, wholeheartedly embracing the hardest, toughest, nastiest, ugliest parts of yourself and your journey and exposing things that other people would normally want to hide, things that could embarrass you and make you look bad. I think there’s actually more power in that one, certainly from a representation and a helping people feel not alone part of it. The, “Oh, I’m going to tell you the Facebook story of how I became the third richest person in the world,” neh, it’s not that interesting to me.

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

Rand Fishkin: I would say people who have known me and followed me for a long time, this book probably was a very good match. I think the one frustration, which Andrew Warner from Mixergy noted when I talked to him, was that there’s maybe two or three chapters that touch on SEO and web marketing kinds of things, but this is not an SEO-centric book. Of course, most of the people who’ve followed me historically over the last 17 years have done so because I’m in the SEO world and I help people learn more about that topic. So I think it’s a departure on that front and I think for folks who have read it, which is a few … I don’t know. Something between two and 7,000 people, I think, have bought the book so far. For those folks, it seems to be doing well. I get a lot of nice comments online so far.

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Again, the world of what … maybe it’s a misperception about what startup life is really like. Do you feel like a lot of people who are starting businesses look at the Silicon Valley common advice and common model and really fall prey to that in a not so positive way?

Rand Fishkin: I think one of the challenges is that Silicon Valley startups are built for a very specific asset class, venture capital, which is an asset class that’s designed to invest in 100 companies and three or four of them will return the entire fund and another 10 will be doing okay. The rest will hopefully die because the partners don’t even have time to engage with 100 companies. You don’t want to be putting money toward an investment that’s not return 5X, 10X. The advice that the Silicon Valley startup world gives to companies is very good if you fit that model, and it’s pretty bad if you don’t fit that model. I think the challenge is that popular media and culture and all of the focus of entrepreneurship especially over the last two decades has been so heavily centered, so heavily biased toward that model that the vast majority of businesses, which are not in that vein and shouldn’t follow that advice, can’t helped but be seduced by it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a big challenge. It’s a challenge in all sorts of things. If all the toys are geared towards, “Well, if you’re a boy, you have to play with Army toys. If you’re a girl, you have to play with princesses.” Well, no wonder kids want to dress up as certain things for Halloween and act certain ways when they grow up.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

John Jantsch: Years ago I’d take my kids to McDonald’s … Okay, I’m just going to admit it. We got the odd Happy Meal every now and then. They would always say, “Do you want a boy toy or a girl toy?” I was like, “What does that mean?” It drove me crazy.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

Rand Fishkin: I’m one of those people who absolutely fell prey to the classic Silicon Valley startup, taking venture. That’s the ultimate challenge, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what every entrepreneur … If you’re a great entrepreneur, you seek to do that. Of course, now that I’ve been through that experience, I have the wisdom to say, “Hang on a minute. That’s a totally biased perspective.” There’s no one class of entrepreneur that’s so much better than another. If you start a bakery, you are no less an entrepreneur than someone who starts a tech company. If you raise venture capital versus getting a bank loan, you are no less or more of an entrepreneur. So I think removing some of that external input is certainly a big thing.

The other big one I’d say, for me at least, is having a lot more self-knowledge, so some of that’s being able to push exterior forces away and recognize what I want, but also some of it is being able to say, “Okay, I know that I often fall prey to these problems or these mistakes. I know that I’m good at this and not good at that. I know that I need to shore up these weaknesses, and I know that I have challenges with hiring,” whatever it is. I think that’s why so many more entrepreneurs who start businesses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s tend to, on average, have higher success rates than those who start them earlier in life. No surprise.

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Oo, that’s an interesting one. Let’s see. I would say in my life personally and broadly, I’m a very mission-driven person, but as far as the business goes, SparkToro for me is not, “Oh, I want to solve this bordering on philanthropic problem.” It’s very much a, “Hey, this particular marketing problem that I kept seeing people have and that I encountered a lot when I worked with newer companies or companies for whom SEO wasn’t a good match.” That problem feels like there’s a great technological solution that could help with it. No, I think I’m still very innovation-driven when it comes to product market.

John Jantsch: Do you get, I’m assuming, a lot of startups or wannabe startups writing you and saying, “What should I do first? Where do I start?” What’s your one piece of advice that everybody always likes to … the one thing?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: Not necessarily how do you manage that, but do you have sage advice for the person that you decide, “I’m going to sit down and write a long, thorough fulfilling email back to them”?

Rand Fishkin: “Lost and Founder” has been great on that front because for a lot of the, “Hey, what should I do? What should I not do? How should I think about this?” there’s a chapter for a lot of those items in the book. That being said, I think probably one of the most common ones I get, no surprise because of my background in web marketing, is, “Where should I start my web marketing efforts, and how should I attract my first customers?” For me, the answer to that is always the intersection of three things. One, an area where you have personal passion and interest. I have never found, literally never found anyone who said, “You know what? I hate Instagram. Hate the whole platform. Ugh, it’s terrible. But I do get most of my business that way.” It doesn’t happen. People who are not interested in or passionate about or have some value they can just [inaudible 00:17:28] that they’re just not great at it. So I tell people to pick a marketing channel that they personally like. If you hate SEO, you hate content marketing, fine. Go for ads or PR or something else.

The second thing is somewhere where you can add unique value, and the important word in that statement is unique. Many people can add value. Many people can copycat other people who are adding value. It’s very difficult for a lot of organizations to recognize how they can add unique value. Why is this thing that you’re doing more uniquely valuable to the audience? If you have a great answer to that question and the first one, the third thing is you need to pick channels where your audience actually pays attention. So you find something at the intersection of those three.

John Jantsch: A lot of people really struggle with that uniquely valuable thing because they just say, “Hey, what I created, surely it’s valuable.” I find the best way to find those is find problems. What are people complaining about? What are they not getting? Like when they leave reviews with competitors and they talk about, “They didn’t show up on time,” or just whatever goofy things they’re saying, those are the problems that you need to figure out.

Rand Fishkin: Or problems where people are only solving them in one way. For example, lots of people are having this problem, and no one is helping those who prefer video content or those who like podcasts, or no one’s doing visual-centric content, or no one’s solving this in a way that’s accessible for whatever, an older demographic or that kind of thing.

John Jantsch: I’m certain because of your front of the leading edge, I suppose, SEO online stuff, you occasionally have people who say, “Okay, on this stuff that’s coming, what’s coming next?” Maybe just riff for a minute on voice search and assistance and AI and bots. That seems to be kind of the thing that’s got a lot of people’s attention but they’re not sure if they should pay attention yet.

Rand Fishkin: First off, my broad advice on this is that when you are investing in marketing, you do not need to and should not be leading your market. You should be following. That sounds weird because we have this culture that’s so innovation-centric, like what’s the next big thing? How do I make sure I don’t get left behind?

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

Rand Fishkin: Right, right. There’s a first mover advantage. In marketing, there’s a first mover advantage but not until the market moves. For example, I know a bunch of companies that invested very heavily in chatbots over the last few years. They were sure three, four years ago that chatbots were going to be the next big thing, and they built a bunch of tech around this. Those have not paid dividends for very many companies at all. In fact, I would say the majority of folks I’ve talked to who’ve invested there regret investing deeply. They still think maybe in the next few years it will be something that consumers really want but so far, meh, not so much. My broad advice is follow the market. Don’t try and adopt something before it’s popular. Don’t be on, whatever, [Kick 00:20:49] who went out of business or-

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a product for a lot of different marketers who encounter a consistent problem that we saw which was basically folks who’d try and figure out, “I have this audience I want to reach. Maybe it’s a new audience because I have a new company, or I’m trying to expand my audience and grow. But I’m trying to reach this audience, and I don’t know where I should I go to reach them. Because of that, I spend all my money with Google and Facebook and the rest is sort of, eh, I don’t know what do to.” As a result, those behemoths become even more giant.

When in fact, if you dig into any audience, there’s almost certainly podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they subscribe to and people they follow on social networks. There’s publications that they read and news media and blogs that they consume and online forums that they hang out in and events that they go to offline, places they actually go to and participate in. Discovery of those different people and publications and sources is an incredibly manual, challenging, often weeks or month-long process for a marketer to discover and uncover. If you have to do it every six months or every year, it’s even more painful. That’s what we’re trying to solve with SparkToro through technology.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The idea is that you could plug in something very broad like, “I’m interested in reaching travelers to Southeast Asia,” or you could go for something more niche like, “I want interior decorators on the West Coast,” or you could go for something hyper-niche like, “I’m looking for mechanical engineers who work in clean water facilities.”

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

Rand Fishkin: Well, since we just started, it’s going to be nine months maybe a little more away before we have any kind of product. You can go check it out certainly and read a little more about the problem. If you want, you can sign up and get an email when we launch, but there’s nothing there yet. The eventual idea, though, is that I want to do something very much like I did with Moz. I don’t want to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to use this product. I want this to be something that anyone can subscribe to and use, sort of a search engine for marketers to learn more about their audiences’ affinities and where they pay attention.

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

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Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: If you’re a founder of a startup, maybe you need some brutally honest advice from somebody who’s been there. For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I visit with Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz, and he’s written a book that you’re going to want to get into because it’s got some really practical and heartfelt advice of what he learned along the way.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help the support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz. I think people used to call him the Wizard of Moz. He actually has a new venture called SparkToro, which we’ll touch on today. But we’re going to talk a lot about his new book called, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.” Rand, thanks for joining me.

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I said off air but I’ll say it on air as well, I’ve been doing this podcast forever as a lot of my listeners know, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve had you on. It’s a treat for me. We are going to talk about your book, but I got to ask one SEO question. It’s a really broad one. Where does SEO sit today?

Rand Fishkin: Where does SEO sit today? Well, it’s at an interesting point in its history in that, in a lot of ways, search has become a mature industry and SEO has, too. That means that it’s more competitive than it’s ever been, and for the first time I think, thanks to the growth of voice search and how Google is displaying answers, there’s actually not the same acceleration rate of increasing opportunity in SEO. It’s sort of everyone is warring for more competition but with less potential new opportunity. So interesting timeframe.

John Jantsch: I’ve been coaching a lot of business owners that I think there’s a element of SEO that needs to be much more strategic. As we plan the website, they’re messaging their content, even SEO has to be a part of that, even how we structure their entire business to some degree before we even start talking about, as you said, the technical aspects. I think that’s a message that’s starting to make sense to people maybe because it’s gotten so competitive.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

John Jantsch: I’ve been doing this a long time. I can’t tell you how many small business owners would get a website built, put some form of content on it, and then come to me and say, “Would you SEO this?” You used to be able to do that.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

John Jantsch: You used the word ‘startup’ in the title, or at least the subtitle of the book. That’s such a term anymore that gets bantered around. I’d love to know what you consider … if you have a definition of a startup.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

Rand Fishkin: Well, I would hope that most mature businesses are seeking to maintain their growth rate or maybe grow it a little, and most of them have already found a scalable, repeatable business model, so startups are unique from both those aspects.

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. In many cases, a mature business, the founders are not involved anymore. In many long-standing businesses, the founders are retired or passed away. In many other businesses that are mature, founders have left and they’re off doing other things. But typically in startups, founders are still heavily involved and so that changes culture and a whole bunch of other things, yeah.

John Jantsch: This book is certainly a guide for somebody who’s starting a business, so in that way it’s kind of a how-to book, but it’s also very much a memoir. I’m curious if there was something that really compelled you to include the painfully honest part.

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s something that I’ve always been passionate about, and part of that is the catharsis that comes from the release of writing about something. A big part of it, also, is that when we share something that is not often shared, that the painful parts of journey or the hard issues, we help people to feel like they’re not alone in their journey. That is a really, really important aspect of all the work that I did at Moz and that I think I’ll ever do is trying to hopefully forge a path for other people to follow in and to be able to feel less [inaudible 00:05:49].

John Jantsch: Of course, while that is obviously an awesome contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, I suspect that it also in a lot of ways … you’ve got a new venture going, in a lot of ways I guess the question is what do you learn from it.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, sure, absolutely. I think “Lost and Founder” is really exactly that. It’s kind of a, “Hey, what are all the lessons that you’re taking away that you wish you could have known before you started Moz?” and trying to pass that on to a next generation of entrepreneurs but also to myself. When you sit down and collect your accumulated knowledge and put it into a written form, I think you process it in a way that you would not otherwise be able to do. So this is a very positive learning experience for me as well. I hope it’ll have a good impact on SparkToro.

John Jantsch: I’ve written five books now, and they are me postulating ideas, I suppose, which hopefully brings some value to the world. The idea that I would also share things that were painful that showed that I was actually vulnerable, that I didn’t have all the answers maybe at some point, was that scary at all for you?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I think it’s always scary. I mean the difference between transparency and marketing or honest marketing at least is that when you’re doing honest marketing, you are not telling any lies and you are showing off the good things that you’ve done and things that you’ve learned. When you’re being transparent, you are both being honest and embracing, wholeheartedly embracing the hardest, toughest, nastiest, ugliest parts of yourself and your journey and exposing things that other people would normally want to hide, things that could embarrass you and make you look bad. I think there’s actually more power in that one, certainly from a representation and a helping people feel not alone part of it. The, “Oh, I’m going to tell you the Facebook story of how I became the third richest person in the world,” neh, it’s not that interesting to me.

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

Rand Fishkin: I would say people who have known me and followed me for a long time, this book probably was a very good match. I think the one frustration, which Andrew Warner from Mixergy noted when I talked to him, was that there’s maybe two or three chapters that touch on SEO and web marketing kinds of things, but this is not an SEO-centric book. Of course, most of the people who’ve followed me historically over the last 17 years have done so because I’m in the SEO world and I help people learn more about that topic. So I think it’s a departure on that front and I think for folks who have read it, which is a few … I don’t know. Something between two and 7,000 people, I think, have bought the book so far. For those folks, it seems to be doing well. I get a lot of nice comments online so far.

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Again, the world of what … maybe it’s a misperception about what startup life is really like. Do you feel like a lot of people who are starting businesses look at the Silicon Valley common advice and common model and really fall prey to that in a not so positive way?

Rand Fishkin: I think one of the challenges is that Silicon Valley startups are built for a very specific asset class, venture capital, which is an asset class that’s designed to invest in 100 companies and three or four of them will return the entire fund and another 10 will be doing okay. The rest will hopefully die because the partners don’t even have time to engage with 100 companies. You don’t want to be putting money toward an investment that’s not return 5X, 10X. The advice that the Silicon Valley startup world gives to companies is very good if you fit that model, and it’s pretty bad if you don’t fit that model. I think the challenge is that popular media and culture and all of the focus of entrepreneurship especially over the last two decades has been so heavily centered, so heavily biased toward that model that the vast majority of businesses, which are not in that vein and shouldn’t follow that advice, can’t helped but be seduced by it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a big challenge. It’s a challenge in all sorts of things. If all the toys are geared towards, “Well, if you’re a boy, you have to play with Army toys. If you’re a girl, you have to play with princesses.” Well, no wonder kids want to dress up as certain things for Halloween and act certain ways when they grow up.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

John Jantsch: Years ago I’d take my kids to McDonald’s … Okay, I’m just going to admit it. We got the odd Happy Meal every now and then. They would always say, “Do you want a boy toy or a girl toy?” I was like, “What does that mean?” It drove me crazy.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

Rand Fishkin: I’m one of those people who absolutely fell prey to the classic Silicon Valley startup, taking venture. That’s the ultimate challenge, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what every entrepreneur … If you’re a great entrepreneur, you seek to do that. Of course, now that I’ve been through that experience, I have the wisdom to say, “Hang on a minute. That’s a totally biased perspective.” There’s no one class of entrepreneur that’s so much better than another. If you start a bakery, you are no less an entrepreneur than someone who starts a tech company. If you raise venture capital versus getting a bank loan, you are no less or more of an entrepreneur. So I think removing some of that external input is certainly a big thing.

The other big one I’d say, for me at least, is having a lot more self-knowledge, so some of that’s being able to push exterior forces away and recognize what I want, but also some of it is being able to say, “Okay, I know that I often fall prey to these problems or these mistakes. I know that I’m good at this and not good at that. I know that I need to shore up these weaknesses, and I know that I have challenges with hiring,” whatever it is. I think that’s why so many more entrepreneurs who start businesses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s tend to, on average, have higher success rates than those who start them earlier in life. No surprise.

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Oo, that’s an interesting one. Let’s see. I would say in my life personally and broadly, I’m a very mission-driven person, but as far as the business goes, SparkToro for me is not, “Oh, I want to solve this bordering on philanthropic problem.” It’s very much a, “Hey, this particular marketing problem that I kept seeing people have and that I encountered a lot when I worked with newer companies or companies for whom SEO wasn’t a good match.” That problem feels like there’s a great technological solution that could help with it. No, I think I’m still very innovation-driven when it comes to product market.

John Jantsch: Do you get, I’m assuming, a lot of startups or wannabe startups writing you and saying, “What should I do first? Where do I start?” What’s your one piece of advice that everybody always likes to … the one thing?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: Not necessarily how do you manage that, but do you have sage advice for the person that you decide, “I’m going to sit down and write a long, thorough fulfilling email back to them”?

Rand Fishkin: “Lost and Founder” has been great on that front because for a lot of the, “Hey, what should I do? What should I not do? How should I think about this?” there’s a chapter for a lot of those items in the book. That being said, I think probably one of the most common ones I get, no surprise because of my background in web marketing, is, “Where should I start my web marketing efforts, and how should I attract my first customers?” For me, the answer to that is always the intersection of three things. One, an area where you have personal passion and interest. I have never found, literally never found anyone who said, “You know what? I hate Instagram. Hate the whole platform. Ugh, it’s terrible. But I do get most of my business that way.” It doesn’t happen. People who are not interested in or passionate about or have some value they can just [inaudible 00:17:28] that they’re just not great at it. So I tell people to pick a marketing channel that they personally like. If you hate SEO, you hate content marketing, fine. Go for ads or PR or something else.

The second thing is somewhere where you can add unique value, and the important word in that statement is unique. Many people can add value. Many people can copycat other people who are adding value. It’s very difficult for a lot of organizations to recognize how they can add unique value. Why is this thing that you’re doing more uniquely valuable to the audience? If you have a great answer to that question and the first one, the third thing is you need to pick channels where your audience actually pays attention. So you find something at the intersection of those three.

John Jantsch: A lot of people really struggle with that uniquely valuable thing because they just say, “Hey, what I created, surely it’s valuable.” I find the best way to find those is find problems. What are people complaining about? What are they not getting? Like when they leave reviews with competitors and they talk about, “They didn’t show up on time,” or just whatever goofy things they’re saying, those are the problems that you need to figure out.

Rand Fishkin: Or problems where people are only solving them in one way. For example, lots of people are having this problem, and no one is helping those who prefer video content or those who like podcasts, or no one’s doing visual-centric content, or no one’s solving this in a way that’s accessible for whatever, an older demographic or that kind of thing.

John Jantsch: I’m certain because of your front of the leading edge, I suppose, SEO online stuff, you occasionally have people who say, “Okay, on this stuff that’s coming, what’s coming next?” Maybe just riff for a minute on voice search and assistance and AI and bots. That seems to be kind of the thing that’s got a lot of people’s attention but they’re not sure if they should pay attention yet.

Rand Fishkin: First off, my broad advice on this is that when you are investing in marketing, you do not need to and should not be leading your market. You should be following. That sounds weird because we have this culture that’s so innovation-centric, like what’s the next big thing? How do I make sure I don’t get left behind?

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

Rand Fishkin: Right, right. There’s a first mover advantage. In marketing, there’s a first mover advantage but not until the market moves. For example, I know a bunch of companies that invested very heavily in chatbots over the last few years. They were sure three, four years ago that chatbots were going to be the next big thing, and they built a bunch of tech around this. Those have not paid dividends for very many companies at all. In fact, I would say the majority of folks I’ve talked to who’ve invested there regret investing deeply. They still think maybe in the next few years it will be something that consumers really want but so far, meh, not so much. My broad advice is follow the market. Don’t try and adopt something before it’s popular. Don’t be on, whatever, [Kick 00:20:49] who went out of business or-

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a product for a lot of different marketers who encounter a consistent problem that we saw which was basically folks who’d try and figure out, “I have this audience I want to reach. Maybe it’s a new audience because I have a new company, or I’m trying to expand my audience and grow. But I’m trying to reach this audience, and I don’t know where I should I go to reach them. Because of that, I spend all my money with Google and Facebook and the rest is sort of, eh, I don’t know what do to.” As a result, those behemoths become even more giant.

When in fact, if you dig into any audience, there’s almost certainly podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they subscribe to and people they follow on social networks. There’s publications that they read and news media and blogs that they consume and online forums that they hang out in and events that they go to offline, places they actually go to and participate in. Discovery of those different people and publications and sources is an incredibly manual, challenging, often weeks or month-long process for a marketer to discover and uncover. If you have to do it every six months or every year, it’s even more painful. That’s what we’re trying to solve with SparkToro through technology.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The idea is that you could plug in something very broad like, “I’m interested in reaching travelers to Southeast Asia,” or you could go for something more niche like, “I want interior decorators on the West Coast,” or you could go for something hyper-niche like, “I’m looking for mechanical engineers who work in clean water facilities.”

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

Rand Fishkin: Well, since we just started, it’s going to be nine months maybe a little more away before we have any kind of product. You can go check it out certainly and read a little more about the problem. If you want, you can sign up and get an email when we launch, but there’s nothing there yet. The eventual idea, though, is that I want to do something very much like I did with Moz. I don’t want to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to use this product. I want this to be something that anyone can subscribe to and use, sort of a search engine for marketers to learn more about their audiences’ affinities and where they pay attention.

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

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Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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Transcript

John Jantsch: If you’re a founder of a startup, maybe you need some brutally honest advice from somebody who’s been there. For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I visit with Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz, and he’s written a book that you’re going to want to get into because it’s got some really practical and heartfelt advice of what he learned along the way.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help the support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz. I think people used to call him the Wizard of Moz. He actually has a new venture called SparkToro, which we’ll touch on today. But we’re going to talk a lot about his new book called, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.” Rand, thanks for joining me.

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I said off air but I’ll say it on air as well, I’ve been doing this podcast forever as a lot of my listeners know, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve had you on. It’s a treat for me. We are going to talk about your book, but I got to ask one SEO question. It’s a really broad one. Where does SEO sit today?

Rand Fishkin: Where does SEO sit today? Well, it’s at an interesting point in its history in that, in a lot of ways, search has become a mature industry and SEO has, too. That means that it’s more competitive than it’s ever been, and for the first time I think, thanks to the growth of voice search and how Google is displaying answers, there’s actually not the same acceleration rate of increasing opportunity in SEO. It’s sort of everyone is warring for more competition but with less potential new opportunity. So interesting timeframe.

John Jantsch: I’ve been coaching a lot of business owners that I think there’s a element of SEO that needs to be much more strategic. As we plan the website, they’re messaging their content, even SEO has to be a part of that, even how we structure their entire business to some degree before we even start talking about, as you said, the technical aspects. I think that’s a message that’s starting to make sense to people maybe because it’s gotten so competitive.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

John Jantsch: I’ve been doing this a long time. I can’t tell you how many small business owners would get a website built, put some form of content on it, and then come to me and say, “Would you SEO this?” You used to be able to do that.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

John Jantsch: You used the word ‘startup’ in the title, or at least the subtitle of the book. That’s such a term anymore that gets bantered around. I’d love to know what you consider … if you have a definition of a startup.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

Rand Fishkin: Well, I would hope that most mature businesses are seeking to maintain their growth rate or maybe grow it a little, and most of them have already found a scalable, repeatable business model, so startups are unique from both those aspects.

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. In many cases, a mature business, the founders are not involved anymore. In many long-standing businesses, the founders are retired or passed away. In many other businesses that are mature, founders have left and they’re off doing other things. But typically in startups, founders are still heavily involved and so that changes culture and a whole bunch of other things, yeah.

John Jantsch: This book is certainly a guide for somebody who’s starting a business, so in that way it’s kind of a how-to book, but it’s also very much a memoir. I’m curious if there was something that really compelled you to include the painfully honest part.

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s something that I’ve always been passionate about, and part of that is the catharsis that comes from the release of writing about something. A big part of it, also, is that when we share something that is not often shared, that the painful parts of journey or the hard issues, we help people to feel like they’re not alone in their journey. That is a really, really important aspect of all the work that I did at Moz and that I think I’ll ever do is trying to hopefully forge a path for other people to follow in and to be able to feel less [inaudible 00:05:49].

John Jantsch: Of course, while that is obviously an awesome contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, I suspect that it also in a lot of ways … you’ve got a new venture going, in a lot of ways I guess the question is what do you learn from it.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, sure, absolutely. I think “Lost and Founder” is really exactly that. It’s kind of a, “Hey, what are all the lessons that you’re taking away that you wish you could have known before you started Moz?” and trying to pass that on to a next generation of entrepreneurs but also to myself. When you sit down and collect your accumulated knowledge and put it into a written form, I think you process it in a way that you would not otherwise be able to do. So this is a very positive learning experience for me as well. I hope it’ll have a good impact on SparkToro.

John Jantsch: I’ve written five books now, and they are me postulating ideas, I suppose, which hopefully brings some value to the world. The idea that I would also share things that were painful that showed that I was actually vulnerable, that I didn’t have all the answers maybe at some point, was that scary at all for you?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I think it’s always scary. I mean the difference between transparency and marketing or honest marketing at least is that when you’re doing honest marketing, you are not telling any lies and you are showing off the good things that you’ve done and things that you’ve learned. When you’re being transparent, you are both being honest and embracing, wholeheartedly embracing the hardest, toughest, nastiest, ugliest parts of yourself and your journey and exposing things that other people would normally want to hide, things that could embarrass you and make you look bad. I think there’s actually more power in that one, certainly from a representation and a helping people feel not alone part of it. The, “Oh, I’m going to tell you the Facebook story of how I became the third richest person in the world,” neh, it’s not that interesting to me.

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

Rand Fishkin: I would say people who have known me and followed me for a long time, this book probably was a very good match. I think the one frustration, which Andrew Warner from Mixergy noted when I talked to him, was that there’s maybe two or three chapters that touch on SEO and web marketing kinds of things, but this is not an SEO-centric book. Of course, most of the people who’ve followed me historically over the last 17 years have done so because I’m in the SEO world and I help people learn more about that topic. So I think it’s a departure on that front and I think for folks who have read it, which is a few … I don’t know. Something between two and 7,000 people, I think, have bought the book so far. For those folks, it seems to be doing well. I get a lot of nice comments online so far.

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Again, the world of what … maybe it’s a misperception about what startup life is really like. Do you feel like a lot of people who are starting businesses look at the Silicon Valley common advice and common model and really fall prey to that in a not so positive way?

Rand Fishkin: I think one of the challenges is that Silicon Valley startups are built for a very specific asset class, venture capital, which is an asset class that’s designed to invest in 100 companies and three or four of them will return the entire fund and another 10 will be doing okay. The rest will hopefully die because the partners don’t even have time to engage with 100 companies. You don’t want to be putting money toward an investment that’s not return 5X, 10X. The advice that the Silicon Valley startup world gives to companies is very good if you fit that model, and it’s pretty bad if you don’t fit that model. I think the challenge is that popular media and culture and all of the focus of entrepreneurship especially over the last two decades has been so heavily centered, so heavily biased toward that model that the vast majority of businesses, which are not in that vein and shouldn’t follow that advice, can’t helped but be seduced by it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a big challenge. It’s a challenge in all sorts of things. If all the toys are geared towards, “Well, if you’re a boy, you have to play with Army toys. If you’re a girl, you have to play with princesses.” Well, no wonder kids want to dress up as certain things for Halloween and act certain ways when they grow up.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

John Jantsch: Years ago I’d take my kids to McDonald’s … Okay, I’m just going to admit it. We got the odd Happy Meal every now and then. They would always say, “Do you want a boy toy or a girl toy?” I was like, “What does that mean?” It drove me crazy.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

Rand Fishkin: I’m one of those people who absolutely fell prey to the classic Silicon Valley startup, taking venture. That’s the ultimate challenge, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what every entrepreneur … If you’re a great entrepreneur, you seek to do that. Of course, now that I’ve been through that experience, I have the wisdom to say, “Hang on a minute. That’s a totally biased perspective.” There’s no one class of entrepreneur that’s so much better than another. If you start a bakery, you are no less an entrepreneur than someone who starts a tech company. If you raise venture capital versus getting a bank loan, you are no less or more of an entrepreneur. So I think removing some of that external input is certainly a big thing.

The other big one I’d say, for me at least, is having a lot more self-knowledge, so some of that’s being able to push exterior forces away and recognize what I want, but also some of it is being able to say, “Okay, I know that I often fall prey to these problems or these mistakes. I know that I’m good at this and not good at that. I know that I need to shore up these weaknesses, and I know that I have challenges with hiring,” whatever it is. I think that’s why so many more entrepreneurs who start businesses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s tend to, on average, have higher success rates than those who start them earlier in life. No surprise.

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Oo, that’s an interesting one. Let’s see. I would say in my life personally and broadly, I’m a very mission-driven person, but as far as the business goes, SparkToro for me is not, “Oh, I want to solve this bordering on philanthropic problem.” It’s very much a, “Hey, this particular marketing problem that I kept seeing people have and that I encountered a lot when I worked with newer companies or companies for whom SEO wasn’t a good match.” That problem feels like there’s a great technological solution that could help with it. No, I think I’m still very innovation-driven when it comes to product market.

John Jantsch: Do you get, I’m assuming, a lot of startups or wannabe startups writing you and saying, “What should I do first? Where do I start?” What’s your one piece of advice that everybody always likes to … the one thing?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: Not necessarily how do you manage that, but do you have sage advice for the person that you decide, “I’m going to sit down and write a long, thorough fulfilling email back to them”?

Rand Fishkin: “Lost and Founder” has been great on that front because for a lot of the, “Hey, what should I do? What should I not do? How should I think about this?” there’s a chapter for a lot of those items in the book. That being said, I think probably one of the most common ones I get, no surprise because of my background in web marketing, is, “Where should I start my web marketing efforts, and how should I attract my first customers?” For me, the answer to that is always the intersection of three things. One, an area where you have personal passion and interest. I have never found, literally never found anyone who said, “You know what? I hate Instagram. Hate the whole platform. Ugh, it’s terrible. But I do get most of my business that way.” It doesn’t happen. People who are not interested in or passionate about or have some value they can just [inaudible 00:17:28] that they’re just not great at it. So I tell people to pick a marketing channel that they personally like. If you hate SEO, you hate content marketing, fine. Go for ads or PR or something else.

The second thing is somewhere where you can add unique value, and the important word in that statement is unique. Many people can add value. Many people can copycat other people who are adding value. It’s very difficult for a lot of organizations to recognize how they can add unique value. Why is this thing that you’re doing more uniquely valuable to the audience? If you have a great answer to that question and the first one, the third thing is you need to pick channels where your audience actually pays attention. So you find something at the intersection of those three.

John Jantsch: A lot of people really struggle with that uniquely valuable thing because they just say, “Hey, what I created, surely it’s valuable.” I find the best way to find those is find problems. What are people complaining about? What are they not getting? Like when they leave reviews with competitors and they talk about, “They didn’t show up on time,” or just whatever goofy things they’re saying, those are the problems that you need to figure out.

Rand Fishkin: Or problems where people are only solving them in one way. For example, lots of people are having this problem, and no one is helping those who prefer video content or those who like podcasts, or no one’s doing visual-centric content, or no one’s solving this in a way that’s accessible for whatever, an older demographic or that kind of thing.

John Jantsch: I’m certain because of your front of the leading edge, I suppose, SEO online stuff, you occasionally have people who say, “Okay, on this stuff that’s coming, what’s coming next?” Maybe just riff for a minute on voice search and assistance and AI and bots. That seems to be kind of the thing that’s got a lot of people’s attention but they’re not sure if they should pay attention yet.

Rand Fishkin: First off, my broad advice on this is that when you are investing in marketing, you do not need to and should not be leading your market. You should be following. That sounds weird because we have this culture that’s so innovation-centric, like what’s the next big thing? How do I make sure I don’t get left behind?

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

Rand Fishkin: Right, right. There’s a first mover advantage. In marketing, there’s a first mover advantage but not until the market moves. For example, I know a bunch of companies that invested very heavily in chatbots over the last few years. They were sure three, four years ago that chatbots were going to be the next big thing, and they built a bunch of tech around this. Those have not paid dividends for very many companies at all. In fact, I would say the majority of folks I’ve talked to who’ve invested there regret investing deeply. They still think maybe in the next few years it will be something that consumers really want but so far, meh, not so much. My broad advice is follow the market. Don’t try and adopt something before it’s popular. Don’t be on, whatever, [Kick 00:20:49] who went out of business or-

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a product for a lot of different marketers who encounter a consistent problem that we saw which was basically folks who’d try and figure out, “I have this audience I want to reach. Maybe it’s a new audience because I have a new company, or I’m trying to expand my audience and grow. But I’m trying to reach this audience, and I don’t know where I should I go to reach them. Because of that, I spend all my money with Google and Facebook and the rest is sort of, eh, I don’t know what do to.” As a result, those behemoths become even more giant.

When in fact, if you dig into any audience, there’s almost certainly podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they subscribe to and people they follow on social networks. There’s publications that they read and news media and blogs that they consume and online forums that they hang out in and events that they go to offline, places they actually go to and participate in. Discovery of those different people and publications and sources is an incredibly manual, challenging, often weeks or month-long process for a marketer to discover and uncover. If you have to do it every six months or every year, it’s even more painful. That’s what we’re trying to solve with SparkToro through technology.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The idea is that you could plug in something very broad like, “I’m interested in reaching travelers to Southeast Asia,” or you could go for something more niche like, “I want interior decorators on the West Coast,” or you could go for something hyper-niche like, “I’m looking for mechanical engineers who work in clean water facilities.”

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

Rand Fishkin: Well, since we just started, it’s going to be nine months maybe a little more away before we have any kind of product. You can go check it out certainly and read a little more about the problem. If you want, you can sign up and get an email when we launch, but there’s nothing there yet. The eventual idea, though, is that I want to do something very much like I did with Moz. I don’t want to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to use this product. I want this to be something that anyone can subscribe to and use, sort of a search engine for marketers to learn more about their audiences’ affinities and where they pay attention.

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

https://ift.tt/2LBrz2p

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Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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John Jantsch: If you’re a founder of a startup, maybe you need some brutally honest advice from somebody who’s been there. For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I visit with Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz, and he’s written a book that you’re going to want to get into because it’s got some really practical and heartfelt advice of what he learned along the way.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help the support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz. I think people used to call him the Wizard of Moz. He actually has a new venture called SparkToro, which we’ll touch on today. But we’re going to talk a lot about his new book called, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.” Rand, thanks for joining me.

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I said off air but I’ll say it on air as well, I’ve been doing this podcast forever as a lot of my listeners know, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve had you on. It’s a treat for me. We are going to talk about your book, but I got to ask one SEO question. It’s a really broad one. Where does SEO sit today?

Rand Fishkin: Where does SEO sit today? Well, it’s at an interesting point in its history in that, in a lot of ways, search has become a mature industry and SEO has, too. That means that it’s more competitive than it’s ever been, and for the first time I think, thanks to the growth of voice search and how Google is displaying answers, there’s actually not the same acceleration rate of increasing opportunity in SEO. It’s sort of everyone is warring for more competition but with less potential new opportunity. So interesting timeframe.

John Jantsch: I’ve been coaching a lot of business owners that I think there’s a element of SEO that needs to be much more strategic. As we plan the website, they’re messaging their content, even SEO has to be a part of that, even how we structure their entire business to some degree before we even start talking about, as you said, the technical aspects. I think that’s a message that’s starting to make sense to people maybe because it’s gotten so competitive.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

John Jantsch: I’ve been doing this a long time. I can’t tell you how many small business owners would get a website built, put some form of content on it, and then come to me and say, “Would you SEO this?” You used to be able to do that.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

John Jantsch: You used the word ‘startup’ in the title, or at least the subtitle of the book. That’s such a term anymore that gets bantered around. I’d love to know what you consider … if you have a definition of a startup.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

Rand Fishkin: Well, I would hope that most mature businesses are seeking to maintain their growth rate or maybe grow it a little, and most of them have already found a scalable, repeatable business model, so startups are unique from both those aspects.

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. In many cases, a mature business, the founders are not involved anymore. In many long-standing businesses, the founders are retired or passed away. In many other businesses that are mature, founders have left and they’re off doing other things. But typically in startups, founders are still heavily involved and so that changes culture and a whole bunch of other things, yeah.

John Jantsch: This book is certainly a guide for somebody who’s starting a business, so in that way it’s kind of a how-to book, but it’s also very much a memoir. I’m curious if there was something that really compelled you to include the painfully honest part.

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s something that I’ve always been passionate about, and part of that is the catharsis that comes from the release of writing about something. A big part of it, also, is that when we share something that is not often shared, that the painful parts of journey or the hard issues, we help people to feel like they’re not alone in their journey. That is a really, really important aspect of all the work that I did at Moz and that I think I’ll ever do is trying to hopefully forge a path for other people to follow in and to be able to feel less [inaudible 00:05:49].

John Jantsch: Of course, while that is obviously an awesome contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, I suspect that it also in a lot of ways … you’ve got a new venture going, in a lot of ways I guess the question is what do you learn from it.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, sure, absolutely. I think “Lost and Founder” is really exactly that. It’s kind of a, “Hey, what are all the lessons that you’re taking away that you wish you could have known before you started Moz?” and trying to pass that on to a next generation of entrepreneurs but also to myself. When you sit down and collect your accumulated knowledge and put it into a written form, I think you process it in a way that you would not otherwise be able to do. So this is a very positive learning experience for me as well. I hope it’ll have a good impact on SparkToro.

John Jantsch: I’ve written five books now, and they are me postulating ideas, I suppose, which hopefully brings some value to the world. The idea that I would also share things that were painful that showed that I was actually vulnerable, that I didn’t have all the answers maybe at some point, was that scary at all for you?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I think it’s always scary. I mean the difference between transparency and marketing or honest marketing at least is that when you’re doing honest marketing, you are not telling any lies and you are showing off the good things that you’ve done and things that you’ve learned. When you’re being transparent, you are both being honest and embracing, wholeheartedly embracing the hardest, toughest, nastiest, ugliest parts of yourself and your journey and exposing things that other people would normally want to hide, things that could embarrass you and make you look bad. I think there’s actually more power in that one, certainly from a representation and a helping people feel not alone part of it. The, “Oh, I’m going to tell you the Facebook story of how I became the third richest person in the world,” neh, it’s not that interesting to me.

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

Rand Fishkin: I would say people who have known me and followed me for a long time, this book probably was a very good match. I think the one frustration, which Andrew Warner from Mixergy noted when I talked to him, was that there’s maybe two or three chapters that touch on SEO and web marketing kinds of things, but this is not an SEO-centric book. Of course, most of the people who’ve followed me historically over the last 17 years have done so because I’m in the SEO world and I help people learn more about that topic. So I think it’s a departure on that front and I think for folks who have read it, which is a few … I don’t know. Something between two and 7,000 people, I think, have bought the book so far. For those folks, it seems to be doing well. I get a lot of nice comments online so far.

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Again, the world of what … maybe it’s a misperception about what startup life is really like. Do you feel like a lot of people who are starting businesses look at the Silicon Valley common advice and common model and really fall prey to that in a not so positive way?

Rand Fishkin: I think one of the challenges is that Silicon Valley startups are built for a very specific asset class, venture capital, which is an asset class that’s designed to invest in 100 companies and three or four of them will return the entire fund and another 10 will be doing okay. The rest will hopefully die because the partners don’t even have time to engage with 100 companies. You don’t want to be putting money toward an investment that’s not return 5X, 10X. The advice that the Silicon Valley startup world gives to companies is very good if you fit that model, and it’s pretty bad if you don’t fit that model. I think the challenge is that popular media and culture and all of the focus of entrepreneurship especially over the last two decades has been so heavily centered, so heavily biased toward that model that the vast majority of businesses, which are not in that vein and shouldn’t follow that advice, can’t helped but be seduced by it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a big challenge. It’s a challenge in all sorts of things. If all the toys are geared towards, “Well, if you’re a boy, you have to play with Army toys. If you’re a girl, you have to play with princesses.” Well, no wonder kids want to dress up as certain things for Halloween and act certain ways when they grow up.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

John Jantsch: Years ago I’d take my kids to McDonald’s … Okay, I’m just going to admit it. We got the odd Happy Meal every now and then. They would always say, “Do you want a boy toy or a girl toy?” I was like, “What does that mean?” It drove me crazy.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

Rand Fishkin: I’m one of those people who absolutely fell prey to the classic Silicon Valley startup, taking venture. That’s the ultimate challenge, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what every entrepreneur … If you’re a great entrepreneur, you seek to do that. Of course, now that I’ve been through that experience, I have the wisdom to say, “Hang on a minute. That’s a totally biased perspective.” There’s no one class of entrepreneur that’s so much better than another. If you start a bakery, you are no less an entrepreneur than someone who starts a tech company. If you raise venture capital versus getting a bank loan, you are no less or more of an entrepreneur. So I think removing some of that external input is certainly a big thing.

The other big one I’d say, for me at least, is having a lot more self-knowledge, so some of that’s being able to push exterior forces away and recognize what I want, but also some of it is being able to say, “Okay, I know that I often fall prey to these problems or these mistakes. I know that I’m good at this and not good at that. I know that I need to shore up these weaknesses, and I know that I have challenges with hiring,” whatever it is. I think that’s why so many more entrepreneurs who start businesses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s tend to, on average, have higher success rates than those who start them earlier in life. No surprise.

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Oo, that’s an interesting one. Let’s see. I would say in my life personally and broadly, I’m a very mission-driven person, but as far as the business goes, SparkToro for me is not, “Oh, I want to solve this bordering on philanthropic problem.” It’s very much a, “Hey, this particular marketing problem that I kept seeing people have and that I encountered a lot when I worked with newer companies or companies for whom SEO wasn’t a good match.” That problem feels like there’s a great technological solution that could help with it. No, I think I’m still very innovation-driven when it comes to product market.

John Jantsch: Do you get, I’m assuming, a lot of startups or wannabe startups writing you and saying, “What should I do first? Where do I start?” What’s your one piece of advice that everybody always likes to … the one thing?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: Not necessarily how do you manage that, but do you have sage advice for the person that you decide, “I’m going to sit down and write a long, thorough fulfilling email back to them”?

Rand Fishkin: “Lost and Founder” has been great on that front because for a lot of the, “Hey, what should I do? What should I not do? How should I think about this?” there’s a chapter for a lot of those items in the book. That being said, I think probably one of the most common ones I get, no surprise because of my background in web marketing, is, “Where should I start my web marketing efforts, and how should I attract my first customers?” For me, the answer to that is always the intersection of three things. One, an area where you have personal passion and interest. I have never found, literally never found anyone who said, “You know what? I hate Instagram. Hate the whole platform. Ugh, it’s terrible. But I do get most of my business that way.” It doesn’t happen. People who are not interested in or passionate about or have some value they can just [inaudible 00:17:28] that they’re just not great at it. So I tell people to pick a marketing channel that they personally like. If you hate SEO, you hate content marketing, fine. Go for ads or PR or something else.

The second thing is somewhere where you can add unique value, and the important word in that statement is unique. Many people can add value. Many people can copycat other people who are adding value. It’s very difficult for a lot of organizations to recognize how they can add unique value. Why is this thing that you’re doing more uniquely valuable to the audience? If you have a great answer to that question and the first one, the third thing is you need to pick channels where your audience actually pays attention. So you find something at the intersection of those three.

John Jantsch: A lot of people really struggle with that uniquely valuable thing because they just say, “Hey, what I created, surely it’s valuable.” I find the best way to find those is find problems. What are people complaining about? What are they not getting? Like when they leave reviews with competitors and they talk about, “They didn’t show up on time,” or just whatever goofy things they’re saying, those are the problems that you need to figure out.

Rand Fishkin: Or problems where people are only solving them in one way. For example, lots of people are having this problem, and no one is helping those who prefer video content or those who like podcasts, or no one’s doing visual-centric content, or no one’s solving this in a way that’s accessible for whatever, an older demographic or that kind of thing.

John Jantsch: I’m certain because of your front of the leading edge, I suppose, SEO online stuff, you occasionally have people who say, “Okay, on this stuff that’s coming, what’s coming next?” Maybe just riff for a minute on voice search and assistance and AI and bots. That seems to be kind of the thing that’s got a lot of people’s attention but they’re not sure if they should pay attention yet.

Rand Fishkin: First off, my broad advice on this is that when you are investing in marketing, you do not need to and should not be leading your market. You should be following. That sounds weird because we have this culture that’s so innovation-centric, like what’s the next big thing? How do I make sure I don’t get left behind?

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

Rand Fishkin: Right, right. There’s a first mover advantage. In marketing, there’s a first mover advantage but not until the market moves. For example, I know a bunch of companies that invested very heavily in chatbots over the last few years. They were sure three, four years ago that chatbots were going to be the next big thing, and they built a bunch of tech around this. Those have not paid dividends for very many companies at all. In fact, I would say the majority of folks I’ve talked to who’ve invested there regret investing deeply. They still think maybe in the next few years it will be something that consumers really want but so far, meh, not so much. My broad advice is follow the market. Don’t try and adopt something before it’s popular. Don’t be on, whatever, [Kick 00:20:49] who went out of business or-

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a product for a lot of different marketers who encounter a consistent problem that we saw which was basically folks who’d try and figure out, “I have this audience I want to reach. Maybe it’s a new audience because I have a new company, or I’m trying to expand my audience and grow. But I’m trying to reach this audience, and I don’t know where I should I go to reach them. Because of that, I spend all my money with Google and Facebook and the rest is sort of, eh, I don’t know what do to.” As a result, those behemoths become even more giant.

When in fact, if you dig into any audience, there’s almost certainly podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they subscribe to and people they follow on social networks. There’s publications that they read and news media and blogs that they consume and online forums that they hang out in and events that they go to offline, places they actually go to and participate in. Discovery of those different people and publications and sources is an incredibly manual, challenging, often weeks or month-long process for a marketer to discover and uncover. If you have to do it every six months or every year, it’s even more painful. That’s what we’re trying to solve with SparkToro through technology.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The idea is that you could plug in something very broad like, “I’m interested in reaching travelers to Southeast Asia,” or you could go for something more niche like, “I want interior decorators on the West Coast,” or you could go for something hyper-niche like, “I’m looking for mechanical engineers who work in clean water facilities.”

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

Rand Fishkin: Well, since we just started, it’s going to be nine months maybe a little more away before we have any kind of product. You can go check it out certainly and read a little more about the problem. If you want, you can sign up and get an email when we launch, but there’s nothing there yet. The eventual idea, though, is that I want to do something very much like I did with Moz. I don’t want to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to use this product. I want this to be something that anyone can subscribe to and use, sort of a search engine for marketers to learn more about their audiences’ affinities and where they pay attention.

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

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Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: If you’re a founder of a startup, maybe you need some brutally honest advice from somebody who’s been there. For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I visit with Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz, and he’s written a book that you’re going to want to get into because it’s got some really practical and heartfelt advice of what he learned along the way.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help the support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz. I think people used to call him the Wizard of Moz. He actually has a new venture called SparkToro, which we’ll touch on today. But we’re going to talk a lot about his new book called, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.” Rand, thanks for joining me.

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I said off air but I’ll say it on air as well, I’ve been doing this podcast forever as a lot of my listeners know, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve had you on. It’s a treat for me. We are going to talk about your book, but I got to ask one SEO question. It’s a really broad one. Where does SEO sit today?

Rand Fishkin: Where does SEO sit today? Well, it’s at an interesting point in its history in that, in a lot of ways, search has become a mature industry and SEO has, too. That means that it’s more competitive than it’s ever been, and for the first time I think, thanks to the growth of voice search and how Google is displaying answers, there’s actually not the same acceleration rate of increasing opportunity in SEO. It’s sort of everyone is warring for more competition but with less potential new opportunity. So interesting timeframe.

John Jantsch: I’ve been coaching a lot of business owners that I think there’s a element of SEO that needs to be much more strategic. As we plan the website, they’re messaging their content, even SEO has to be a part of that, even how we structure their entire business to some degree before we even start talking about, as you said, the technical aspects. I think that’s a message that’s starting to make sense to people maybe because it’s gotten so competitive.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

John Jantsch: I’ve been doing this a long time. I can’t tell you how many small business owners would get a website built, put some form of content on it, and then come to me and say, “Would you SEO this?” You used to be able to do that.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

John Jantsch: You used the word ‘startup’ in the title, or at least the subtitle of the book. That’s such a term anymore that gets bantered around. I’d love to know what you consider … if you have a definition of a startup.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

Rand Fishkin: Well, I would hope that most mature businesses are seeking to maintain their growth rate or maybe grow it a little, and most of them have already found a scalable, repeatable business model, so startups are unique from both those aspects.

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. In many cases, a mature business, the founders are not involved anymore. In many long-standing businesses, the founders are retired or passed away. In many other businesses that are mature, founders have left and they’re off doing other things. But typically in startups, founders are still heavily involved and so that changes culture and a whole bunch of other things, yeah.

John Jantsch: This book is certainly a guide for somebody who’s starting a business, so in that way it’s kind of a how-to book, but it’s also very much a memoir. I’m curious if there was something that really compelled you to include the painfully honest part.

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s something that I’ve always been passionate about, and part of that is the catharsis that comes from the release of writing about something. A big part of it, also, is that when we share something that is not often shared, that the painful parts of journey or the hard issues, we help people to feel like they’re not alone in their journey. That is a really, really important aspect of all the work that I did at Moz and that I think I’ll ever do is trying to hopefully forge a path for other people to follow in and to be able to feel less [inaudible 00:05:49].

John Jantsch: Of course, while that is obviously an awesome contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, I suspect that it also in a lot of ways … you’ve got a new venture going, in a lot of ways I guess the question is what do you learn from it.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, sure, absolutely. I think “Lost and Founder” is really exactly that. It’s kind of a, “Hey, what are all the lessons that you’re taking away that you wish you could have known before you started Moz?” and trying to pass that on to a next generation of entrepreneurs but also to myself. When you sit down and collect your accumulated knowledge and put it into a written form, I think you process it in a way that you would not otherwise be able to do. So this is a very positive learning experience for me as well. I hope it’ll have a good impact on SparkToro.

John Jantsch: I’ve written five books now, and they are me postulating ideas, I suppose, which hopefully brings some value to the world. The idea that I would also share things that were painful that showed that I was actually vulnerable, that I didn’t have all the answers maybe at some point, was that scary at all for you?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I think it’s always scary. I mean the difference between transparency and marketing or honest marketing at least is that when you’re doing honest marketing, you are not telling any lies and you are showing off the good things that you’ve done and things that you’ve learned. When you’re being transparent, you are both being honest and embracing, wholeheartedly embracing the hardest, toughest, nastiest, ugliest parts of yourself and your journey and exposing things that other people would normally want to hide, things that could embarrass you and make you look bad. I think there’s actually more power in that one, certainly from a representation and a helping people feel not alone part of it. The, “Oh, I’m going to tell you the Facebook story of how I became the third richest person in the world,” neh, it’s not that interesting to me.

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

Rand Fishkin: I would say people who have known me and followed me for a long time, this book probably was a very good match. I think the one frustration, which Andrew Warner from Mixergy noted when I talked to him, was that there’s maybe two or three chapters that touch on SEO and web marketing kinds of things, but this is not an SEO-centric book. Of course, most of the people who’ve followed me historically over the last 17 years have done so because I’m in the SEO world and I help people learn more about that topic. So I think it’s a departure on that front and I think for folks who have read it, which is a few … I don’t know. Something between two and 7,000 people, I think, have bought the book so far. For those folks, it seems to be doing well. I get a lot of nice comments online so far.

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Again, the world of what … maybe it’s a misperception about what startup life is really like. Do you feel like a lot of people who are starting businesses look at the Silicon Valley common advice and common model and really fall prey to that in a not so positive way?

Rand Fishkin: I think one of the challenges is that Silicon Valley startups are built for a very specific asset class, venture capital, which is an asset class that’s designed to invest in 100 companies and three or four of them will return the entire fund and another 10 will be doing okay. The rest will hopefully die because the partners don’t even have time to engage with 100 companies. You don’t want to be putting money toward an investment that’s not return 5X, 10X. The advice that the Silicon Valley startup world gives to companies is very good if you fit that model, and it’s pretty bad if you don’t fit that model. I think the challenge is that popular media and culture and all of the focus of entrepreneurship especially over the last two decades has been so heavily centered, so heavily biased toward that model that the vast majority of businesses, which are not in that vein and shouldn’t follow that advice, can’t helped but be seduced by it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a big challenge. It’s a challenge in all sorts of things. If all the toys are geared towards, “Well, if you’re a boy, you have to play with Army toys. If you’re a girl, you have to play with princesses.” Well, no wonder kids want to dress up as certain things for Halloween and act certain ways when they grow up.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

John Jantsch: Years ago I’d take my kids to McDonald’s … Okay, I’m just going to admit it. We got the odd Happy Meal every now and then. They would always say, “Do you want a boy toy or a girl toy?” I was like, “What does that mean?” It drove me crazy.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

Rand Fishkin: I’m one of those people who absolutely fell prey to the classic Silicon Valley startup, taking venture. That’s the ultimate challenge, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what every entrepreneur … If you’re a great entrepreneur, you seek to do that. Of course, now that I’ve been through that experience, I have the wisdom to say, “Hang on a minute. That’s a totally biased perspective.” There’s no one class of entrepreneur that’s so much better than another. If you start a bakery, you are no less an entrepreneur than someone who starts a tech company. If you raise venture capital versus getting a bank loan, you are no less or more of an entrepreneur. So I think removing some of that external input is certainly a big thing.

The other big one I’d say, for me at least, is having a lot more self-knowledge, so some of that’s being able to push exterior forces away and recognize what I want, but also some of it is being able to say, “Okay, I know that I often fall prey to these problems or these mistakes. I know that I’m good at this and not good at that. I know that I need to shore up these weaknesses, and I know that I have challenges with hiring,” whatever it is. I think that’s why so many more entrepreneurs who start businesses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s tend to, on average, have higher success rates than those who start them earlier in life. No surprise.

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Oo, that’s an interesting one. Let’s see. I would say in my life personally and broadly, I’m a very mission-driven person, but as far as the business goes, SparkToro for me is not, “Oh, I want to solve this bordering on philanthropic problem.” It’s very much a, “Hey, this particular marketing problem that I kept seeing people have and that I encountered a lot when I worked with newer companies or companies for whom SEO wasn’t a good match.” That problem feels like there’s a great technological solution that could help with it. No, I think I’m still very innovation-driven when it comes to product market.

John Jantsch: Do you get, I’m assuming, a lot of startups or wannabe startups writing you and saying, “What should I do first? Where do I start?” What’s your one piece of advice that everybody always likes to … the one thing?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: Not necessarily how do you manage that, but do you have sage advice for the person that you decide, “I’m going to sit down and write a long, thorough fulfilling email back to them”?

Rand Fishkin: “Lost and Founder” has been great on that front because for a lot of the, “Hey, what should I do? What should I not do? How should I think about this?” there’s a chapter for a lot of those items in the book. That being said, I think probably one of the most common ones I get, no surprise because of my background in web marketing, is, “Where should I start my web marketing efforts, and how should I attract my first customers?” For me, the answer to that is always the intersection of three things. One, an area where you have personal passion and interest. I have never found, literally never found anyone who said, “You know what? I hate Instagram. Hate the whole platform. Ugh, it’s terrible. But I do get most of my business that way.” It doesn’t happen. People who are not interested in or passionate about or have some value they can just [inaudible 00:17:28] that they’re just not great at it. So I tell people to pick a marketing channel that they personally like. If you hate SEO, you hate content marketing, fine. Go for ads or PR or something else.

The second thing is somewhere where you can add unique value, and the important word in that statement is unique. Many people can add value. Many people can copycat other people who are adding value. It’s very difficult for a lot of organizations to recognize how they can add unique value. Why is this thing that you’re doing more uniquely valuable to the audience? If you have a great answer to that question and the first one, the third thing is you need to pick channels where your audience actually pays attention. So you find something at the intersection of those three.

John Jantsch: A lot of people really struggle with that uniquely valuable thing because they just say, “Hey, what I created, surely it’s valuable.” I find the best way to find those is find problems. What are people complaining about? What are they not getting? Like when they leave reviews with competitors and they talk about, “They didn’t show up on time,” or just whatever goofy things they’re saying, those are the problems that you need to figure out.

Rand Fishkin: Or problems where people are only solving them in one way. For example, lots of people are having this problem, and no one is helping those who prefer video content or those who like podcasts, or no one’s doing visual-centric content, or no one’s solving this in a way that’s accessible for whatever, an older demographic or that kind of thing.

John Jantsch: I’m certain because of your front of the leading edge, I suppose, SEO online stuff, you occasionally have people who say, “Okay, on this stuff that’s coming, what’s coming next?” Maybe just riff for a minute on voice search and assistance and AI and bots. That seems to be kind of the thing that’s got a lot of people’s attention but they’re not sure if they should pay attention yet.

Rand Fishkin: First off, my broad advice on this is that when you are investing in marketing, you do not need to and should not be leading your market. You should be following. That sounds weird because we have this culture that’s so innovation-centric, like what’s the next big thing? How do I make sure I don’t get left behind?

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

Rand Fishkin: Right, right. There’s a first mover advantage. In marketing, there’s a first mover advantage but not until the market moves. For example, I know a bunch of companies that invested very heavily in chatbots over the last few years. They were sure three, four years ago that chatbots were going to be the next big thing, and they built a bunch of tech around this. Those have not paid dividends for very many companies at all. In fact, I would say the majority of folks I’ve talked to who’ve invested there regret investing deeply. They still think maybe in the next few years it will be something that consumers really want but so far, meh, not so much. My broad advice is follow the market. Don’t try and adopt something before it’s popular. Don’t be on, whatever, [Kick 00:20:49] who went out of business or-

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a product for a lot of different marketers who encounter a consistent problem that we saw which was basically folks who’d try and figure out, “I have this audience I want to reach. Maybe it’s a new audience because I have a new company, or I’m trying to expand my audience and grow. But I’m trying to reach this audience, and I don’t know where I should I go to reach them. Because of that, I spend all my money with Google and Facebook and the rest is sort of, eh, I don’t know what do to.” As a result, those behemoths become even more giant.

When in fact, if you dig into any audience, there’s almost certainly podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they subscribe to and people they follow on social networks. There’s publications that they read and news media and blogs that they consume and online forums that they hang out in and events that they go to offline, places they actually go to and participate in. Discovery of those different people and publications and sources is an incredibly manual, challenging, often weeks or month-long process for a marketer to discover and uncover. If you have to do it every six months or every year, it’s even more painful. That’s what we’re trying to solve with SparkToro through technology.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The idea is that you could plug in something very broad like, “I’m interested in reaching travelers to Southeast Asia,” or you could go for something more niche like, “I want interior decorators on the West Coast,” or you could go for something hyper-niche like, “I’m looking for mechanical engineers who work in clean water facilities.”

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

Rand Fishkin: Well, since we just started, it’s going to be nine months maybe a little more away before we have any kind of product. You can go check it out certainly and read a little more about the problem. If you want, you can sign up and get an email when we launch, but there’s nothing there yet. The eventual idea, though, is that I want to do something very much like I did with Moz. I don’t want to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to use this product. I want this to be something that anyone can subscribe to and use, sort of a search engine for marketers to learn more about their audiences’ affinities and where they pay attention.

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

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Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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Transcript

John Jantsch: If you’re a founder of a startup, maybe you need some brutally honest advice from somebody who’s been there. For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I visit with Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz, and he’s written a book that you’re going to want to get into because it’s got some really practical and heartfelt advice of what he learned along the way.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help the support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz. I think people used to call him the Wizard of Moz. He actually has a new venture called SparkToro, which we’ll touch on today. But we’re going to talk a lot about his new book called, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.” Rand, thanks for joining me.

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I said off air but I’ll say it on air as well, I’ve been doing this podcast forever as a lot of my listeners know, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve had you on. It’s a treat for me. We are going to talk about your book, but I got to ask one SEO question. It’s a really broad one. Where does SEO sit today?

Rand Fishkin: Where does SEO sit today? Well, it’s at an interesting point in its history in that, in a lot of ways, search has become a mature industry and SEO has, too. That means that it’s more competitive than it’s ever been, and for the first time I think, thanks to the growth of voice search and how Google is displaying answers, there’s actually not the same acceleration rate of increasing opportunity in SEO. It’s sort of everyone is warring for more competition but with less potential new opportunity. So interesting timeframe.

John Jantsch: I’ve been coaching a lot of business owners that I think there’s a element of SEO that needs to be much more strategic. As we plan the website, they’re messaging their content, even SEO has to be a part of that, even how we structure their entire business to some degree before we even start talking about, as you said, the technical aspects. I think that’s a message that’s starting to make sense to people maybe because it’s gotten so competitive.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

John Jantsch: I’ve been doing this a long time. I can’t tell you how many small business owners would get a website built, put some form of content on it, and then come to me and say, “Would you SEO this?” You used to be able to do that.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

John Jantsch: You used the word ‘startup’ in the title, or at least the subtitle of the book. That’s such a term anymore that gets bantered around. I’d love to know what you consider … if you have a definition of a startup.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

Rand Fishkin: Well, I would hope that most mature businesses are seeking to maintain their growth rate or maybe grow it a little, and most of them have already found a scalable, repeatable business model, so startups are unique from both those aspects.

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. In many cases, a mature business, the founders are not involved anymore. In many long-standing businesses, the founders are retired or passed away. In many other businesses that are mature, founders have left and they’re off doing other things. But typically in startups, founders are still heavily involved and so that changes culture and a whole bunch of other things, yeah.

John Jantsch: This book is certainly a guide for somebody who’s starting a business, so in that way it’s kind of a how-to book, but it’s also very much a memoir. I’m curious if there was something that really compelled you to include the painfully honest part.

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s something that I’ve always been passionate about, and part of that is the catharsis that comes from the release of writing about something. A big part of it, also, is that when we share something that is not often shared, that the painful parts of journey or the hard issues, we help people to feel like they’re not alone in their journey. That is a really, really important aspect of all the work that I did at Moz and that I think I’ll ever do is trying to hopefully forge a path for other people to follow in and to be able to feel less [inaudible 00:05:49].

John Jantsch: Of course, while that is obviously an awesome contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, I suspect that it also in a lot of ways … you’ve got a new venture going, in a lot of ways I guess the question is what do you learn from it.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, sure, absolutely. I think “Lost and Founder” is really exactly that. It’s kind of a, “Hey, what are all the lessons that you’re taking away that you wish you could have known before you started Moz?” and trying to pass that on to a next generation of entrepreneurs but also to myself. When you sit down and collect your accumulated knowledge and put it into a written form, I think you process it in a way that you would not otherwise be able to do. So this is a very positive learning experience for me as well. I hope it’ll have a good impact on SparkToro.

John Jantsch: I’ve written five books now, and they are me postulating ideas, I suppose, which hopefully brings some value to the world. The idea that I would also share things that were painful that showed that I was actually vulnerable, that I didn’t have all the answers maybe at some point, was that scary at all for you?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I think it’s always scary. I mean the difference between transparency and marketing or honest marketing at least is that when you’re doing honest marketing, you are not telling any lies and you are showing off the good things that you’ve done and things that you’ve learned. When you’re being transparent, you are both being honest and embracing, wholeheartedly embracing the hardest, toughest, nastiest, ugliest parts of yourself and your journey and exposing things that other people would normally want to hide, things that could embarrass you and make you look bad. I think there’s actually more power in that one, certainly from a representation and a helping people feel not alone part of it. The, “Oh, I’m going to tell you the Facebook story of how I became the third richest person in the world,” neh, it’s not that interesting to me.

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

Rand Fishkin: I would say people who have known me and followed me for a long time, this book probably was a very good match. I think the one frustration, which Andrew Warner from Mixergy noted when I talked to him, was that there’s maybe two or three chapters that touch on SEO and web marketing kinds of things, but this is not an SEO-centric book. Of course, most of the people who’ve followed me historically over the last 17 years have done so because I’m in the SEO world and I help people learn more about that topic. So I think it’s a departure on that front and I think for folks who have read it, which is a few … I don’t know. Something between two and 7,000 people, I think, have bought the book so far. For those folks, it seems to be doing well. I get a lot of nice comments online so far.

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Again, the world of what … maybe it’s a misperception about what startup life is really like. Do you feel like a lot of people who are starting businesses look at the Silicon Valley common advice and common model and really fall prey to that in a not so positive way?

Rand Fishkin: I think one of the challenges is that Silicon Valley startups are built for a very specific asset class, venture capital, which is an asset class that’s designed to invest in 100 companies and three or four of them will return the entire fund and another 10 will be doing okay. The rest will hopefully die because the partners don’t even have time to engage with 100 companies. You don’t want to be putting money toward an investment that’s not return 5X, 10X. The advice that the Silicon Valley startup world gives to companies is very good if you fit that model, and it’s pretty bad if you don’t fit that model. I think the challenge is that popular media and culture and all of the focus of entrepreneurship especially over the last two decades has been so heavily centered, so heavily biased toward that model that the vast majority of businesses, which are not in that vein and shouldn’t follow that advice, can’t helped but be seduced by it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a big challenge. It’s a challenge in all sorts of things. If all the toys are geared towards, “Well, if you’re a boy, you have to play with Army toys. If you’re a girl, you have to play with princesses.” Well, no wonder kids want to dress up as certain things for Halloween and act certain ways when they grow up.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

John Jantsch: Years ago I’d take my kids to McDonald’s … Okay, I’m just going to admit it. We got the odd Happy Meal every now and then. They would always say, “Do you want a boy toy or a girl toy?” I was like, “What does that mean?” It drove me crazy.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

Rand Fishkin: I’m one of those people who absolutely fell prey to the classic Silicon Valley startup, taking venture. That’s the ultimate challenge, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what every entrepreneur … If you’re a great entrepreneur, you seek to do that. Of course, now that I’ve been through that experience, I have the wisdom to say, “Hang on a minute. That’s a totally biased perspective.” There’s no one class of entrepreneur that’s so much better than another. If you start a bakery, you are no less an entrepreneur than someone who starts a tech company. If you raise venture capital versus getting a bank loan, you are no less or more of an entrepreneur. So I think removing some of that external input is certainly a big thing.

The other big one I’d say, for me at least, is having a lot more self-knowledge, so some of that’s being able to push exterior forces away and recognize what I want, but also some of it is being able to say, “Okay, I know that I often fall prey to these problems or these mistakes. I know that I’m good at this and not good at that. I know that I need to shore up these weaknesses, and I know that I have challenges with hiring,” whatever it is. I think that’s why so many more entrepreneurs who start businesses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s tend to, on average, have higher success rates than those who start them earlier in life. No surprise.

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Oo, that’s an interesting one. Let’s see. I would say in my life personally and broadly, I’m a very mission-driven person, but as far as the business goes, SparkToro for me is not, “Oh, I want to solve this bordering on philanthropic problem.” It’s very much a, “Hey, this particular marketing problem that I kept seeing people have and that I encountered a lot when I worked with newer companies or companies for whom SEO wasn’t a good match.” That problem feels like there’s a great technological solution that could help with it. No, I think I’m still very innovation-driven when it comes to product market.

John Jantsch: Do you get, I’m assuming, a lot of startups or wannabe startups writing you and saying, “What should I do first? Where do I start?” What’s your one piece of advice that everybody always likes to … the one thing?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: Not necessarily how do you manage that, but do you have sage advice for the person that you decide, “I’m going to sit down and write a long, thorough fulfilling email back to them”?

Rand Fishkin: “Lost and Founder” has been great on that front because for a lot of the, “Hey, what should I do? What should I not do? How should I think about this?” there’s a chapter for a lot of those items in the book. That being said, I think probably one of the most common ones I get, no surprise because of my background in web marketing, is, “Where should I start my web marketing efforts, and how should I attract my first customers?” For me, the answer to that is always the intersection of three things. One, an area where you have personal passion and interest. I have never found, literally never found anyone who said, “You know what? I hate Instagram. Hate the whole platform. Ugh, it’s terrible. But I do get most of my business that way.” It doesn’t happen. People who are not interested in or passionate about or have some value they can just [inaudible 00:17:28] that they’re just not great at it. So I tell people to pick a marketing channel that they personally like. If you hate SEO, you hate content marketing, fine. Go for ads or PR or something else.

The second thing is somewhere where you can add unique value, and the important word in that statement is unique. Many people can add value. Many people can copycat other people who are adding value. It’s very difficult for a lot of organizations to recognize how they can add unique value. Why is this thing that you’re doing more uniquely valuable to the audience? If you have a great answer to that question and the first one, the third thing is you need to pick channels where your audience actually pays attention. So you find something at the intersection of those three.

John Jantsch: A lot of people really struggle with that uniquely valuable thing because they just say, “Hey, what I created, surely it’s valuable.” I find the best way to find those is find problems. What are people complaining about? What are they not getting? Like when they leave reviews with competitors and they talk about, “They didn’t show up on time,” or just whatever goofy things they’re saying, those are the problems that you need to figure out.

Rand Fishkin: Or problems where people are only solving them in one way. For example, lots of people are having this problem, and no one is helping those who prefer video content or those who like podcasts, or no one’s doing visual-centric content, or no one’s solving this in a way that’s accessible for whatever, an older demographic or that kind of thing.

John Jantsch: I’m certain because of your front of the leading edge, I suppose, SEO online stuff, you occasionally have people who say, “Okay, on this stuff that’s coming, what’s coming next?” Maybe just riff for a minute on voice search and assistance and AI and bots. That seems to be kind of the thing that’s got a lot of people’s attention but they’re not sure if they should pay attention yet.

Rand Fishkin: First off, my broad advice on this is that when you are investing in marketing, you do not need to and should not be leading your market. You should be following. That sounds weird because we have this culture that’s so innovation-centric, like what’s the next big thing? How do I make sure I don’t get left behind?

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

Rand Fishkin: Right, right. There’s a first mover advantage. In marketing, there’s a first mover advantage but not until the market moves. For example, I know a bunch of companies that invested very heavily in chatbots over the last few years. They were sure three, four years ago that chatbots were going to be the next big thing, and they built a bunch of tech around this. Those have not paid dividends for very many companies at all. In fact, I would say the majority of folks I’ve talked to who’ve invested there regret investing deeply. They still think maybe in the next few years it will be something that consumers really want but so far, meh, not so much. My broad advice is follow the market. Don’t try and adopt something before it’s popular. Don’t be on, whatever, [Kick 00:20:49] who went out of business or-

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a product for a lot of different marketers who encounter a consistent problem that we saw which was basically folks who’d try and figure out, “I have this audience I want to reach. Maybe it’s a new audience because I have a new company, or I’m trying to expand my audience and grow. But I’m trying to reach this audience, and I don’t know where I should I go to reach them. Because of that, I spend all my money with Google and Facebook and the rest is sort of, eh, I don’t know what do to.” As a result, those behemoths become even more giant.

When in fact, if you dig into any audience, there’s almost certainly podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they subscribe to and people they follow on social networks. There’s publications that they read and news media and blogs that they consume and online forums that they hang out in and events that they go to offline, places they actually go to and participate in. Discovery of those different people and publications and sources is an incredibly manual, challenging, often weeks or month-long process for a marketer to discover and uncover. If you have to do it every six months or every year, it’s even more painful. That’s what we’re trying to solve with SparkToro through technology.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The idea is that you could plug in something very broad like, “I’m interested in reaching travelers to Southeast Asia,” or you could go for something more niche like, “I want interior decorators on the West Coast,” or you could go for something hyper-niche like, “I’m looking for mechanical engineers who work in clean water facilities.”

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

Rand Fishkin: Well, since we just started, it’s going to be nine months maybe a little more away before we have any kind of product. You can go check it out certainly and read a little more about the problem. If you want, you can sign up and get an email when we launch, but there’s nothing there yet. The eventual idea, though, is that I want to do something very much like I did with Moz. I don’t want to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to use this product. I want this to be something that anyone can subscribe to and use, sort of a search engine for marketers to learn more about their audiences’ affinities and where they pay attention.

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

https://ift.tt/2LBrz2p

[famlawatty6000]

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: If you’re a founder of a startup, maybe you need some brutally honest advice from somebody who’s been there. For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I visit with Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz, and he’s written a book that you’re going to want to get into because it’s got some really practical and heartfelt advice of what he learned along the way.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help the support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz. I think people used to call him the Wizard of Moz. He actually has a new venture called SparkToro, which we’ll touch on today. But we’re going to talk a lot about his new book called, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.” Rand, thanks for joining me.

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I said off air but I’ll say it on air as well, I’ve been doing this podcast forever as a lot of my listeners know, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve had you on. It’s a treat for me. We are going to talk about your book, but I got to ask one SEO question. It’s a really broad one. Where does SEO sit today?

Rand Fishkin: Where does SEO sit today? Well, it’s at an interesting point in its history in that, in a lot of ways, search has become a mature industry and SEO has, too. That means that it’s more competitive than it’s ever been, and for the first time I think, thanks to the growth of voice search and how Google is displaying answers, there’s actually not the same acceleration rate of increasing opportunity in SEO. It’s sort of everyone is warring for more competition but with less potential new opportunity. So interesting timeframe.

John Jantsch: I’ve been coaching a lot of business owners that I think there’s a element of SEO that needs to be much more strategic. As we plan the website, they’re messaging their content, even SEO has to be a part of that, even how we structure their entire business to some degree before we even start talking about, as you said, the technical aspects. I think that’s a message that’s starting to make sense to people maybe because it’s gotten so competitive.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

John Jantsch: I’ve been doing this a long time. I can’t tell you how many small business owners would get a website built, put some form of content on it, and then come to me and say, “Would you SEO this?” You used to be able to do that.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

John Jantsch: You used the word ‘startup’ in the title, or at least the subtitle of the book. That’s such a term anymore that gets bantered around. I’d love to know what you consider … if you have a definition of a startup.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

Rand Fishkin: Well, I would hope that most mature businesses are seeking to maintain their growth rate or maybe grow it a little, and most of them have already found a scalable, repeatable business model, so startups are unique from both those aspects.

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. In many cases, a mature business, the founders are not involved anymore. In many long-standing businesses, the founders are retired or passed away. In many other businesses that are mature, founders have left and they’re off doing other things. But typically in startups, founders are still heavily involved and so that changes culture and a whole bunch of other things, yeah.

John Jantsch: This book is certainly a guide for somebody who’s starting a business, so in that way it’s kind of a how-to book, but it’s also very much a memoir. I’m curious if there was something that really compelled you to include the painfully honest part.

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s something that I’ve always been passionate about, and part of that is the catharsis that comes from the release of writing about something. A big part of it, also, is that when we share something that is not often shared, that the painful parts of journey or the hard issues, we help people to feel like they’re not alone in their journey. That is a really, really important aspect of all the work that I did at Moz and that I think I’ll ever do is trying to hopefully forge a path for other people to follow in and to be able to feel less [inaudible 00:05:49].

John Jantsch: Of course, while that is obviously an awesome contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, I suspect that it also in a lot of ways … you’ve got a new venture going, in a lot of ways I guess the question is what do you learn from it.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, sure, absolutely. I think “Lost and Founder” is really exactly that. It’s kind of a, “Hey, what are all the lessons that you’re taking away that you wish you could have known before you started Moz?” and trying to pass that on to a next generation of entrepreneurs but also to myself. When you sit down and collect your accumulated knowledge and put it into a written form, I think you process it in a way that you would not otherwise be able to do. So this is a very positive learning experience for me as well. I hope it’ll have a good impact on SparkToro.

John Jantsch: I’ve written five books now, and they are me postulating ideas, I suppose, which hopefully brings some value to the world. The idea that I would also share things that were painful that showed that I was actually vulnerable, that I didn’t have all the answers maybe at some point, was that scary at all for you?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I think it’s always scary. I mean the difference between transparency and marketing or honest marketing at least is that when you’re doing honest marketing, you are not telling any lies and you are showing off the good things that you’ve done and things that you’ve learned. When you’re being transparent, you are both being honest and embracing, wholeheartedly embracing the hardest, toughest, nastiest, ugliest parts of yourself and your journey and exposing things that other people would normally want to hide, things that could embarrass you and make you look bad. I think there’s actually more power in that one, certainly from a representation and a helping people feel not alone part of it. The, “Oh, I’m going to tell you the Facebook story of how I became the third richest person in the world,” neh, it’s not that interesting to me.

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

Rand Fishkin: I would say people who have known me and followed me for a long time, this book probably was a very good match. I think the one frustration, which Andrew Warner from Mixergy noted when I talked to him, was that there’s maybe two or three chapters that touch on SEO and web marketing kinds of things, but this is not an SEO-centric book. Of course, most of the people who’ve followed me historically over the last 17 years have done so because I’m in the SEO world and I help people learn more about that topic. So I think it’s a departure on that front and I think for folks who have read it, which is a few … I don’t know. Something between two and 7,000 people, I think, have bought the book so far. For those folks, it seems to be doing well. I get a lot of nice comments online so far.

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Again, the world of what … maybe it’s a misperception about what startup life is really like. Do you feel like a lot of people who are starting businesses look at the Silicon Valley common advice and common model and really fall prey to that in a not so positive way?

Rand Fishkin: I think one of the challenges is that Silicon Valley startups are built for a very specific asset class, venture capital, which is an asset class that’s designed to invest in 100 companies and three or four of them will return the entire fund and another 10 will be doing okay. The rest will hopefully die because the partners don’t even have time to engage with 100 companies. You don’t want to be putting money toward an investment that’s not return 5X, 10X. The advice that the Silicon Valley startup world gives to companies is very good if you fit that model, and it’s pretty bad if you don’t fit that model. I think the challenge is that popular media and culture and all of the focus of entrepreneurship especially over the last two decades has been so heavily centered, so heavily biased toward that model that the vast majority of businesses, which are not in that vein and shouldn’t follow that advice, can’t helped but be seduced by it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a big challenge. It’s a challenge in all sorts of things. If all the toys are geared towards, “Well, if you’re a boy, you have to play with Army toys. If you’re a girl, you have to play with princesses.” Well, no wonder kids want to dress up as certain things for Halloween and act certain ways when they grow up.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

John Jantsch: Years ago I’d take my kids to McDonald’s … Okay, I’m just going to admit it. We got the odd Happy Meal every now and then. They would always say, “Do you want a boy toy or a girl toy?” I was like, “What does that mean?” It drove me crazy.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

Rand Fishkin: I’m one of those people who absolutely fell prey to the classic Silicon Valley startup, taking venture. That’s the ultimate challenge, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what every entrepreneur … If you’re a great entrepreneur, you seek to do that. Of course, now that I’ve been through that experience, I have the wisdom to say, “Hang on a minute. That’s a totally biased perspective.” There’s no one class of entrepreneur that’s so much better than another. If you start a bakery, you are no less an entrepreneur than someone who starts a tech company. If you raise venture capital versus getting a bank loan, you are no less or more of an entrepreneur. So I think removing some of that external input is certainly a big thing.

The other big one I’d say, for me at least, is having a lot more self-knowledge, so some of that’s being able to push exterior forces away and recognize what I want, but also some of it is being able to say, “Okay, I know that I often fall prey to these problems or these mistakes. I know that I’m good at this and not good at that. I know that I need to shore up these weaknesses, and I know that I have challenges with hiring,” whatever it is. I think that’s why so many more entrepreneurs who start businesses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s tend to, on average, have higher success rates than those who start them earlier in life. No surprise.

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Oo, that’s an interesting one. Let’s see. I would say in my life personally and broadly, I’m a very mission-driven person, but as far as the business goes, SparkToro for me is not, “Oh, I want to solve this bordering on philanthropic problem.” It’s very much a, “Hey, this particular marketing problem that I kept seeing people have and that I encountered a lot when I worked with newer companies or companies for whom SEO wasn’t a good match.” That problem feels like there’s a great technological solution that could help with it. No, I think I’m still very innovation-driven when it comes to product market.

John Jantsch: Do you get, I’m assuming, a lot of startups or wannabe startups writing you and saying, “What should I do first? Where do I start?” What’s your one piece of advice that everybody always likes to … the one thing?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: Not necessarily how do you manage that, but do you have sage advice for the person that you decide, “I’m going to sit down and write a long, thorough fulfilling email back to them”?

Rand Fishkin: “Lost and Founder” has been great on that front because for a lot of the, “Hey, what should I do? What should I not do? How should I think about this?” there’s a chapter for a lot of those items in the book. That being said, I think probably one of the most common ones I get, no surprise because of my background in web marketing, is, “Where should I start my web marketing efforts, and how should I attract my first customers?” For me, the answer to that is always the intersection of three things. One, an area where you have personal passion and interest. I have never found, literally never found anyone who said, “You know what? I hate Instagram. Hate the whole platform. Ugh, it’s terrible. But I do get most of my business that way.” It doesn’t happen. People who are not interested in or passionate about or have some value they can just [inaudible 00:17:28] that they’re just not great at it. So I tell people to pick a marketing channel that they personally like. If you hate SEO, you hate content marketing, fine. Go for ads or PR or something else.

The second thing is somewhere where you can add unique value, and the important word in that statement is unique. Many people can add value. Many people can copycat other people who are adding value. It’s very difficult for a lot of organizations to recognize how they can add unique value. Why is this thing that you’re doing more uniquely valuable to the audience? If you have a great answer to that question and the first one, the third thing is you need to pick channels where your audience actually pays attention. So you find something at the intersection of those three.

John Jantsch: A lot of people really struggle with that uniquely valuable thing because they just say, “Hey, what I created, surely it’s valuable.” I find the best way to find those is find problems. What are people complaining about? What are they not getting? Like when they leave reviews with competitors and they talk about, “They didn’t show up on time,” or just whatever goofy things they’re saying, those are the problems that you need to figure out.

Rand Fishkin: Or problems where people are only solving them in one way. For example, lots of people are having this problem, and no one is helping those who prefer video content or those who like podcasts, or no one’s doing visual-centric content, or no one’s solving this in a way that’s accessible for whatever, an older demographic or that kind of thing.

John Jantsch: I’m certain because of your front of the leading edge, I suppose, SEO online stuff, you occasionally have people who say, “Okay, on this stuff that’s coming, what’s coming next?” Maybe just riff for a minute on voice search and assistance and AI and bots. That seems to be kind of the thing that’s got a lot of people’s attention but they’re not sure if they should pay attention yet.

Rand Fishkin: First off, my broad advice on this is that when you are investing in marketing, you do not need to and should not be leading your market. You should be following. That sounds weird because we have this culture that’s so innovation-centric, like what’s the next big thing? How do I make sure I don’t get left behind?

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

Rand Fishkin: Right, right. There’s a first mover advantage. In marketing, there’s a first mover advantage but not until the market moves. For example, I know a bunch of companies that invested very heavily in chatbots over the last few years. They were sure three, four years ago that chatbots were going to be the next big thing, and they built a bunch of tech around this. Those have not paid dividends for very many companies at all. In fact, I would say the majority of folks I’ve talked to who’ve invested there regret investing deeply. They still think maybe in the next few years it will be something that consumers really want but so far, meh, not so much. My broad advice is follow the market. Don’t try and adopt something before it’s popular. Don’t be on, whatever, [Kick 00:20:49] who went out of business or-

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a product for a lot of different marketers who encounter a consistent problem that we saw which was basically folks who’d try and figure out, “I have this audience I want to reach. Maybe it’s a new audience because I have a new company, or I’m trying to expand my audience and grow. But I’m trying to reach this audience, and I don’t know where I should I go to reach them. Because of that, I spend all my money with Google and Facebook and the rest is sort of, eh, I don’t know what do to.” As a result, those behemoths become even more giant.

When in fact, if you dig into any audience, there’s almost certainly podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they subscribe to and people they follow on social networks. There’s publications that they read and news media and blogs that they consume and online forums that they hang out in and events that they go to offline, places they actually go to and participate in. Discovery of those different people and publications and sources is an incredibly manual, challenging, often weeks or month-long process for a marketer to discover and uncover. If you have to do it every six months or every year, it’s even more painful. That’s what we’re trying to solve with SparkToro through technology.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The idea is that you could plug in something very broad like, “I’m interested in reaching travelers to Southeast Asia,” or you could go for something more niche like, “I want interior decorators on the West Coast,” or you could go for something hyper-niche like, “I’m looking for mechanical engineers who work in clean water facilities.”

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

Rand Fishkin: Well, since we just started, it’s going to be nine months maybe a little more away before we have any kind of product. You can go check it out certainly and read a little more about the problem. If you want, you can sign up and get an email when we launch, but there’s nothing there yet. The eventual idea, though, is that I want to do something very much like I did with Moz. I don’t want to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to use this product. I want this to be something that anyone can subscribe to and use, sort of a search engine for marketers to learn more about their audiences’ affinities and where they pay attention.

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

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[seo53703]

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: If you’re a founder of a startup, maybe you need some brutally honest advice from somebody who’s been there. For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I visit with Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz, and he’s written a book that you’re going to want to get into because it’s got some really practical and heartfelt advice of what he learned along the way.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help the support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz. I think people used to call him the Wizard of Moz. He actually has a new venture called SparkToro, which we’ll touch on today. But we’re going to talk a lot about his new book called, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.” Rand, thanks for joining me.

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I said off air but I’ll say it on air as well, I’ve been doing this podcast forever as a lot of my listeners know, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve had you on. It’s a treat for me. We are going to talk about your book, but I got to ask one SEO question. It’s a really broad one. Where does SEO sit today?

Rand Fishkin: Where does SEO sit today? Well, it’s at an interesting point in its history in that, in a lot of ways, search has become a mature industry and SEO has, too. That means that it’s more competitive than it’s ever been, and for the first time I think, thanks to the growth of voice search and how Google is displaying answers, there’s actually not the same acceleration rate of increasing opportunity in SEO. It’s sort of everyone is warring for more competition but with less potential new opportunity. So interesting timeframe.

John Jantsch: I’ve been coaching a lot of business owners that I think there’s a element of SEO that needs to be much more strategic. As we plan the website, they’re messaging their content, even SEO has to be a part of that, even how we structure their entire business to some degree before we even start talking about, as you said, the technical aspects. I think that’s a message that’s starting to make sense to people maybe because it’s gotten so competitive.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

John Jantsch: I’ve been doing this a long time. I can’t tell you how many small business owners would get a website built, put some form of content on it, and then come to me and say, “Would you SEO this?” You used to be able to do that.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

John Jantsch: You used the word ‘startup’ in the title, or at least the subtitle of the book. That’s such a term anymore that gets bantered around. I’d love to know what you consider … if you have a definition of a startup.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

Rand Fishkin: Well, I would hope that most mature businesses are seeking to maintain their growth rate or maybe grow it a little, and most of them have already found a scalable, repeatable business model, so startups are unique from both those aspects.

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. In many cases, a mature business, the founders are not involved anymore. In many long-standing businesses, the founders are retired or passed away. In many other businesses that are mature, founders have left and they’re off doing other things. But typically in startups, founders are still heavily involved and so that changes culture and a whole bunch of other things, yeah.

John Jantsch: This book is certainly a guide for somebody who’s starting a business, so in that way it’s kind of a how-to book, but it’s also very much a memoir. I’m curious if there was something that really compelled you to include the painfully honest part.

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s something that I’ve always been passionate about, and part of that is the catharsis that comes from the release of writing about something. A big part of it, also, is that when we share something that is not often shared, that the painful parts of journey or the hard issues, we help people to feel like they’re not alone in their journey. That is a really, really important aspect of all the work that I did at Moz and that I think I’ll ever do is trying to hopefully forge a path for other people to follow in and to be able to feel less [inaudible 00:05:49].

John Jantsch: Of course, while that is obviously an awesome contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, I suspect that it also in a lot of ways … you’ve got a new venture going, in a lot of ways I guess the question is what do you learn from it.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, sure, absolutely. I think “Lost and Founder” is really exactly that. It’s kind of a, “Hey, what are all the lessons that you’re taking away that you wish you could have known before you started Moz?” and trying to pass that on to a next generation of entrepreneurs but also to myself. When you sit down and collect your accumulated knowledge and put it into a written form, I think you process it in a way that you would not otherwise be able to do. So this is a very positive learning experience for me as well. I hope it’ll have a good impact on SparkToro.

John Jantsch: I’ve written five books now, and they are me postulating ideas, I suppose, which hopefully brings some value to the world. The idea that I would also share things that were painful that showed that I was actually vulnerable, that I didn’t have all the answers maybe at some point, was that scary at all for you?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I think it’s always scary. I mean the difference between transparency and marketing or honest marketing at least is that when you’re doing honest marketing, you are not telling any lies and you are showing off the good things that you’ve done and things that you’ve learned. When you’re being transparent, you are both being honest and embracing, wholeheartedly embracing the hardest, toughest, nastiest, ugliest parts of yourself and your journey and exposing things that other people would normally want to hide, things that could embarrass you and make you look bad. I think there’s actually more power in that one, certainly from a representation and a helping people feel not alone part of it. The, “Oh, I’m going to tell you the Facebook story of how I became the third richest person in the world,” neh, it’s not that interesting to me.

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

Rand Fishkin: I would say people who have known me and followed me for a long time, this book probably was a very good match. I think the one frustration, which Andrew Warner from Mixergy noted when I talked to him, was that there’s maybe two or three chapters that touch on SEO and web marketing kinds of things, but this is not an SEO-centric book. Of course, most of the people who’ve followed me historically over the last 17 years have done so because I’m in the SEO world and I help people learn more about that topic. So I think it’s a departure on that front and I think for folks who have read it, which is a few … I don’t know. Something between two and 7,000 people, I think, have bought the book so far. For those folks, it seems to be doing well. I get a lot of nice comments online so far.

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Again, the world of what … maybe it’s a misperception about what startup life is really like. Do you feel like a lot of people who are starting businesses look at the Silicon Valley common advice and common model and really fall prey to that in a not so positive way?

Rand Fishkin: I think one of the challenges is that Silicon Valley startups are built for a very specific asset class, venture capital, which is an asset class that’s designed to invest in 100 companies and three or four of them will return the entire fund and another 10 will be doing okay. The rest will hopefully die because the partners don’t even have time to engage with 100 companies. You don’t want to be putting money toward an investment that’s not return 5X, 10X. The advice that the Silicon Valley startup world gives to companies is very good if you fit that model, and it’s pretty bad if you don’t fit that model. I think the challenge is that popular media and culture and all of the focus of entrepreneurship especially over the last two decades has been so heavily centered, so heavily biased toward that model that the vast majority of businesses, which are not in that vein and shouldn’t follow that advice, can’t helped but be seduced by it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a big challenge. It’s a challenge in all sorts of things. If all the toys are geared towards, “Well, if you’re a boy, you have to play with Army toys. If you’re a girl, you have to play with princesses.” Well, no wonder kids want to dress up as certain things for Halloween and act certain ways when they grow up.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

John Jantsch: Years ago I’d take my kids to McDonald’s … Okay, I’m just going to admit it. We got the odd Happy Meal every now and then. They would always say, “Do you want a boy toy or a girl toy?” I was like, “What does that mean?” It drove me crazy.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

Rand Fishkin: I’m one of those people who absolutely fell prey to the classic Silicon Valley startup, taking venture. That’s the ultimate challenge, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what every entrepreneur … If you’re a great entrepreneur, you seek to do that. Of course, now that I’ve been through that experience, I have the wisdom to say, “Hang on a minute. That’s a totally biased perspective.” There’s no one class of entrepreneur that’s so much better than another. If you start a bakery, you are no less an entrepreneur than someone who starts a tech company. If you raise venture capital versus getting a bank loan, you are no less or more of an entrepreneur. So I think removing some of that external input is certainly a big thing.

The other big one I’d say, for me at least, is having a lot more self-knowledge, so some of that’s being able to push exterior forces away and recognize what I want, but also some of it is being able to say, “Okay, I know that I often fall prey to these problems or these mistakes. I know that I’m good at this and not good at that. I know that I need to shore up these weaknesses, and I know that I have challenges with hiring,” whatever it is. I think that’s why so many more entrepreneurs who start businesses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s tend to, on average, have higher success rates than those who start them earlier in life. No surprise.

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Oo, that’s an interesting one. Let’s see. I would say in my life personally and broadly, I’m a very mission-driven person, but as far as the business goes, SparkToro for me is not, “Oh, I want to solve this bordering on philanthropic problem.” It’s very much a, “Hey, this particular marketing problem that I kept seeing people have and that I encountered a lot when I worked with newer companies or companies for whom SEO wasn’t a good match.” That problem feels like there’s a great technological solution that could help with it. No, I think I’m still very innovation-driven when it comes to product market.

John Jantsch: Do you get, I’m assuming, a lot of startups or wannabe startups writing you and saying, “What should I do first? Where do I start?” What’s your one piece of advice that everybody always likes to … the one thing?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: Not necessarily how do you manage that, but do you have sage advice for the person that you decide, “I’m going to sit down and write a long, thorough fulfilling email back to them”?

Rand Fishkin: “Lost and Founder” has been great on that front because for a lot of the, “Hey, what should I do? What should I not do? How should I think about this?” there’s a chapter for a lot of those items in the book. That being said, I think probably one of the most common ones I get, no surprise because of my background in web marketing, is, “Where should I start my web marketing efforts, and how should I attract my first customers?” For me, the answer to that is always the intersection of three things. One, an area where you have personal passion and interest. I have never found, literally never found anyone who said, “You know what? I hate Instagram. Hate the whole platform. Ugh, it’s terrible. But I do get most of my business that way.” It doesn’t happen. People who are not interested in or passionate about or have some value they can just [inaudible 00:17:28] that they’re just not great at it. So I tell people to pick a marketing channel that they personally like. If you hate SEO, you hate content marketing, fine. Go for ads or PR or something else.

The second thing is somewhere where you can add unique value, and the important word in that statement is unique. Many people can add value. Many people can copycat other people who are adding value. It’s very difficult for a lot of organizations to recognize how they can add unique value. Why is this thing that you’re doing more uniquely valuable to the audience? If you have a great answer to that question and the first one, the third thing is you need to pick channels where your audience actually pays attention. So you find something at the intersection of those three.

John Jantsch: A lot of people really struggle with that uniquely valuable thing because they just say, “Hey, what I created, surely it’s valuable.” I find the best way to find those is find problems. What are people complaining about? What are they not getting? Like when they leave reviews with competitors and they talk about, “They didn’t show up on time,” or just whatever goofy things they’re saying, those are the problems that you need to figure out.

Rand Fishkin: Or problems where people are only solving them in one way. For example, lots of people are having this problem, and no one is helping those who prefer video content or those who like podcasts, or no one’s doing visual-centric content, or no one’s solving this in a way that’s accessible for whatever, an older demographic or that kind of thing.

John Jantsch: I’m certain because of your front of the leading edge, I suppose, SEO online stuff, you occasionally have people who say, “Okay, on this stuff that’s coming, what’s coming next?” Maybe just riff for a minute on voice search and assistance and AI and bots. That seems to be kind of the thing that’s got a lot of people’s attention but they’re not sure if they should pay attention yet.

Rand Fishkin: First off, my broad advice on this is that when you are investing in marketing, you do not need to and should not be leading your market. You should be following. That sounds weird because we have this culture that’s so innovation-centric, like what’s the next big thing? How do I make sure I don’t get left behind?

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

Rand Fishkin: Right, right. There’s a first mover advantage. In marketing, there’s a first mover advantage but not until the market moves. For example, I know a bunch of companies that invested very heavily in chatbots over the last few years. They were sure three, four years ago that chatbots were going to be the next big thing, and they built a bunch of tech around this. Those have not paid dividends for very many companies at all. In fact, I would say the majority of folks I’ve talked to who’ve invested there regret investing deeply. They still think maybe in the next few years it will be something that consumers really want but so far, meh, not so much. My broad advice is follow the market. Don’t try and adopt something before it’s popular. Don’t be on, whatever, [Kick 00:20:49] who went out of business or-

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a product for a lot of different marketers who encounter a consistent problem that we saw which was basically folks who’d try and figure out, “I have this audience I want to reach. Maybe it’s a new audience because I have a new company, or I’m trying to expand my audience and grow. But I’m trying to reach this audience, and I don’t know where I should I go to reach them. Because of that, I spend all my money with Google and Facebook and the rest is sort of, eh, I don’t know what do to.” As a result, those behemoths become even more giant.

When in fact, if you dig into any audience, there’s almost certainly podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they subscribe to and people they follow on social networks. There’s publications that they read and news media and blogs that they consume and online forums that they hang out in and events that they go to offline, places they actually go to and participate in. Discovery of those different people and publications and sources is an incredibly manual, challenging, often weeks or month-long process for a marketer to discover and uncover. If you have to do it every six months or every year, it’s even more painful. That’s what we’re trying to solve with SparkToro through technology.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The idea is that you could plug in something very broad like, “I’m interested in reaching travelers to Southeast Asia,” or you could go for something more niche like, “I want interior decorators on the West Coast,” or you could go for something hyper-niche like, “I’m looking for mechanical engineers who work in clean water facilities.”

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

Rand Fishkin: Well, since we just started, it’s going to be nine months maybe a little more away before we have any kind of product. You can go check it out certainly and read a little more about the problem. If you want, you can sign up and get an email when we launch, but there’s nothing there yet. The eventual idea, though, is that I want to do something very much like I did with Moz. I don’t want to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to use this product. I want this to be something that anyone can subscribe to and use, sort of a search engine for marketers to learn more about their audiences’ affinities and where they pay attention.

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

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Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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Transcript

John Jantsch: If you’re a founder of a startup, maybe you need some brutally honest advice from somebody who’s been there. For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I visit with Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz, and he’s written a book that you’re going to want to get into because it’s got some really practical and heartfelt advice of what he learned along the way.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help the support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz. I think people used to call him the Wizard of Moz. He actually has a new venture called SparkToro, which we’ll touch on today. But we’re going to talk a lot about his new book called, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.” Rand, thanks for joining me.

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I said off air but I’ll say it on air as well, I’ve been doing this podcast forever as a lot of my listeners know, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve had you on. It’s a treat for me. We are going to talk about your book, but I got to ask one SEO question. It’s a really broad one. Where does SEO sit today?

Rand Fishkin: Where does SEO sit today? Well, it’s at an interesting point in its history in that, in a lot of ways, search has become a mature industry and SEO has, too. That means that it’s more competitive than it’s ever been, and for the first time I think, thanks to the growth of voice search and how Google is displaying answers, there’s actually not the same acceleration rate of increasing opportunity in SEO. It’s sort of everyone is warring for more competition but with less potential new opportunity. So interesting timeframe.

John Jantsch: I’ve been coaching a lot of business owners that I think there’s a element of SEO that needs to be much more strategic. As we plan the website, they’re messaging their content, even SEO has to be a part of that, even how we structure their entire business to some degree before we even start talking about, as you said, the technical aspects. I think that’s a message that’s starting to make sense to people maybe because it’s gotten so competitive.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

John Jantsch: I’ve been doing this a long time. I can’t tell you how many small business owners would get a website built, put some form of content on it, and then come to me and say, “Would you SEO this?” You used to be able to do that.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

John Jantsch: You used the word ‘startup’ in the title, or at least the subtitle of the book. That’s such a term anymore that gets bantered around. I’d love to know what you consider … if you have a definition of a startup.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

Rand Fishkin: Well, I would hope that most mature businesses are seeking to maintain their growth rate or maybe grow it a little, and most of them have already found a scalable, repeatable business model, so startups are unique from both those aspects.

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. In many cases, a mature business, the founders are not involved anymore. In many long-standing businesses, the founders are retired or passed away. In many other businesses that are mature, founders have left and they’re off doing other things. But typically in startups, founders are still heavily involved and so that changes culture and a whole bunch of other things, yeah.

John Jantsch: This book is certainly a guide for somebody who’s starting a business, so in that way it’s kind of a how-to book, but it’s also very much a memoir. I’m curious if there was something that really compelled you to include the painfully honest part.

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s something that I’ve always been passionate about, and part of that is the catharsis that comes from the release of writing about something. A big part of it, also, is that when we share something that is not often shared, that the painful parts of journey or the hard issues, we help people to feel like they’re not alone in their journey. That is a really, really important aspect of all the work that I did at Moz and that I think I’ll ever do is trying to hopefully forge a path for other people to follow in and to be able to feel less [inaudible 00:05:49].

John Jantsch: Of course, while that is obviously an awesome contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, I suspect that it also in a lot of ways … you’ve got a new venture going, in a lot of ways I guess the question is what do you learn from it.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, sure, absolutely. I think “Lost and Founder” is really exactly that. It’s kind of a, “Hey, what are all the lessons that you’re taking away that you wish you could have known before you started Moz?” and trying to pass that on to a next generation of entrepreneurs but also to myself. When you sit down and collect your accumulated knowledge and put it into a written form, I think you process it in a way that you would not otherwise be able to do. So this is a very positive learning experience for me as well. I hope it’ll have a good impact on SparkToro.

John Jantsch: I’ve written five books now, and they are me postulating ideas, I suppose, which hopefully brings some value to the world. The idea that I would also share things that were painful that showed that I was actually vulnerable, that I didn’t have all the answers maybe at some point, was that scary at all for you?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I think it’s always scary. I mean the difference between transparency and marketing or honest marketing at least is that when you’re doing honest marketing, you are not telling any lies and you are showing off the good things that you’ve done and things that you’ve learned. When you’re being transparent, you are both being honest and embracing, wholeheartedly embracing the hardest, toughest, nastiest, ugliest parts of yourself and your journey and exposing things that other people would normally want to hide, things that could embarrass you and make you look bad. I think there’s actually more power in that one, certainly from a representation and a helping people feel not alone part of it. The, “Oh, I’m going to tell you the Facebook story of how I became the third richest person in the world,” neh, it’s not that interesting to me.

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

Rand Fishkin: I would say people who have known me and followed me for a long time, this book probably was a very good match. I think the one frustration, which Andrew Warner from Mixergy noted when I talked to him, was that there’s maybe two or three chapters that touch on SEO and web marketing kinds of things, but this is not an SEO-centric book. Of course, most of the people who’ve followed me historically over the last 17 years have done so because I’m in the SEO world and I help people learn more about that topic. So I think it’s a departure on that front and I think for folks who have read it, which is a few … I don’t know. Something between two and 7,000 people, I think, have bought the book so far. For those folks, it seems to be doing well. I get a lot of nice comments online so far.

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Again, the world of what … maybe it’s a misperception about what startup life is really like. Do you feel like a lot of people who are starting businesses look at the Silicon Valley common advice and common model and really fall prey to that in a not so positive way?

Rand Fishkin: I think one of the challenges is that Silicon Valley startups are built for a very specific asset class, venture capital, which is an asset class that’s designed to invest in 100 companies and three or four of them will return the entire fund and another 10 will be doing okay. The rest will hopefully die because the partners don’t even have time to engage with 100 companies. You don’t want to be putting money toward an investment that’s not return 5X, 10X. The advice that the Silicon Valley startup world gives to companies is very good if you fit that model, and it’s pretty bad if you don’t fit that model. I think the challenge is that popular media and culture and all of the focus of entrepreneurship especially over the last two decades has been so heavily centered, so heavily biased toward that model that the vast majority of businesses, which are not in that vein and shouldn’t follow that advice, can’t helped but be seduced by it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a big challenge. It’s a challenge in all sorts of things. If all the toys are geared towards, “Well, if you’re a boy, you have to play with Army toys. If you’re a girl, you have to play with princesses.” Well, no wonder kids want to dress up as certain things for Halloween and act certain ways when they grow up.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

John Jantsch: Years ago I’d take my kids to McDonald’s … Okay, I’m just going to admit it. We got the odd Happy Meal every now and then. They would always say, “Do you want a boy toy or a girl toy?” I was like, “What does that mean?” It drove me crazy.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

Rand Fishkin: I’m one of those people who absolutely fell prey to the classic Silicon Valley startup, taking venture. That’s the ultimate challenge, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what every entrepreneur … If you’re a great entrepreneur, you seek to do that. Of course, now that I’ve been through that experience, I have the wisdom to say, “Hang on a minute. That’s a totally biased perspective.” There’s no one class of entrepreneur that’s so much better than another. If you start a bakery, you are no less an entrepreneur than someone who starts a tech company. If you raise venture capital versus getting a bank loan, you are no less or more of an entrepreneur. So I think removing some of that external input is certainly a big thing.

The other big one I’d say, for me at least, is having a lot more self-knowledge, so some of that’s being able to push exterior forces away and recognize what I want, but also some of it is being able to say, “Okay, I know that I often fall prey to these problems or these mistakes. I know that I’m good at this and not good at that. I know that I need to shore up these weaknesses, and I know that I have challenges with hiring,” whatever it is. I think that’s why so many more entrepreneurs who start businesses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s tend to, on average, have higher success rates than those who start them earlier in life. No surprise.

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Oo, that’s an interesting one. Let’s see. I would say in my life personally and broadly, I’m a very mission-driven person, but as far as the business goes, SparkToro for me is not, “Oh, I want to solve this bordering on philanthropic problem.” It’s very much a, “Hey, this particular marketing problem that I kept seeing people have and that I encountered a lot when I worked with newer companies or companies for whom SEO wasn’t a good match.” That problem feels like there’s a great technological solution that could help with it. No, I think I’m still very innovation-driven when it comes to product market.

John Jantsch: Do you get, I’m assuming, a lot of startups or wannabe startups writing you and saying, “What should I do first? Where do I start?” What’s your one piece of advice that everybody always likes to … the one thing?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: Not necessarily how do you manage that, but do you have sage advice for the person that you decide, “I’m going to sit down and write a long, thorough fulfilling email back to them”?

Rand Fishkin: “Lost and Founder” has been great on that front because for a lot of the, “Hey, what should I do? What should I not do? How should I think about this?” there’s a chapter for a lot of those items in the book. That being said, I think probably one of the most common ones I get, no surprise because of my background in web marketing, is, “Where should I start my web marketing efforts, and how should I attract my first customers?” For me, the answer to that is always the intersection of three things. One, an area where you have personal passion and interest. I have never found, literally never found anyone who said, “You know what? I hate Instagram. Hate the whole platform. Ugh, it’s terrible. But I do get most of my business that way.” It doesn’t happen. People who are not interested in or passionate about or have some value they can just [inaudible 00:17:28] that they’re just not great at it. So I tell people to pick a marketing channel that they personally like. If you hate SEO, you hate content marketing, fine. Go for ads or PR or something else.

The second thing is somewhere where you can add unique value, and the important word in that statement is unique. Many people can add value. Many people can copycat other people who are adding value. It’s very difficult for a lot of organizations to recognize how they can add unique value. Why is this thing that you’re doing more uniquely valuable to the audience? If you have a great answer to that question and the first one, the third thing is you need to pick channels where your audience actually pays attention. So you find something at the intersection of those three.

John Jantsch: A lot of people really struggle with that uniquely valuable thing because they just say, “Hey, what I created, surely it’s valuable.” I find the best way to find those is find problems. What are people complaining about? What are they not getting? Like when they leave reviews with competitors and they talk about, “They didn’t show up on time,” or just whatever goofy things they’re saying, those are the problems that you need to figure out.

Rand Fishkin: Or problems where people are only solving them in one way. For example, lots of people are having this problem, and no one is helping those who prefer video content or those who like podcasts, or no one’s doing visual-centric content, or no one’s solving this in a way that’s accessible for whatever, an older demographic or that kind of thing.

John Jantsch: I’m certain because of your front of the leading edge, I suppose, SEO online stuff, you occasionally have people who say, “Okay, on this stuff that’s coming, what’s coming next?” Maybe just riff for a minute on voice search and assistance and AI and bots. That seems to be kind of the thing that’s got a lot of people’s attention but they’re not sure if they should pay attention yet.

Rand Fishkin: First off, my broad advice on this is that when you are investing in marketing, you do not need to and should not be leading your market. You should be following. That sounds weird because we have this culture that’s so innovation-centric, like what’s the next big thing? How do I make sure I don’t get left behind?

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

Rand Fishkin: Right, right. There’s a first mover advantage. In marketing, there’s a first mover advantage but not until the market moves. For example, I know a bunch of companies that invested very heavily in chatbots over the last few years. They were sure three, four years ago that chatbots were going to be the next big thing, and they built a bunch of tech around this. Those have not paid dividends for very many companies at all. In fact, I would say the majority of folks I’ve talked to who’ve invested there regret investing deeply. They still think maybe in the next few years it will be something that consumers really want but so far, meh, not so much. My broad advice is follow the market. Don’t try and adopt something before it’s popular. Don’t be on, whatever, [Kick 00:20:49] who went out of business or-

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a product for a lot of different marketers who encounter a consistent problem that we saw which was basically folks who’d try and figure out, “I have this audience I want to reach. Maybe it’s a new audience because I have a new company, or I’m trying to expand my audience and grow. But I’m trying to reach this audience, and I don’t know where I should I go to reach them. Because of that, I spend all my money with Google and Facebook and the rest is sort of, eh, I don’t know what do to.” As a result, those behemoths become even more giant.

When in fact, if you dig into any audience, there’s almost certainly podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they subscribe to and people they follow on social networks. There’s publications that they read and news media and blogs that they consume and online forums that they hang out in and events that they go to offline, places they actually go to and participate in. Discovery of those different people and publications and sources is an incredibly manual, challenging, often weeks or month-long process for a marketer to discover and uncover. If you have to do it every six months or every year, it’s even more painful. That’s what we’re trying to solve with SparkToro through technology.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The idea is that you could plug in something very broad like, “I’m interested in reaching travelers to Southeast Asia,” or you could go for something more niche like, “I want interior decorators on the West Coast,” or you could go for something hyper-niche like, “I’m looking for mechanical engineers who work in clean water facilities.”

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

Rand Fishkin: Well, since we just started, it’s going to be nine months maybe a little more away before we have any kind of product. You can go check it out certainly and read a little more about the problem. If you want, you can sign up and get an email when we launch, but there’s nothing there yet. The eventual idea, though, is that I want to do something very much like I did with Moz. I don’t want to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to use this product. I want this to be something that anyone can subscribe to and use, sort of a search engine for marketers to learn more about their audiences’ affinities and where they pay attention.

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

https://ift.tt/2LBrz2p

[seo19107]

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: If you’re a founder of a startup, maybe you need some brutally honest advice from somebody who’s been there. For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I visit with Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz, and he’s written a book that you’re going to want to get into because it’s got some really practical and heartfelt advice of what he learned along the way.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help the support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz. I think people used to call him the Wizard of Moz. He actually has a new venture called SparkToro, which we’ll touch on today. But we’re going to talk a lot about his new book called, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.” Rand, thanks for joining me.

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I said off air but I’ll say it on air as well, I’ve been doing this podcast forever as a lot of my listeners know, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve had you on. It’s a treat for me. We are going to talk about your book, but I got to ask one SEO question. It’s a really broad one. Where does SEO sit today?

Rand Fishkin: Where does SEO sit today? Well, it’s at an interesting point in its history in that, in a lot of ways, search has become a mature industry and SEO has, too. That means that it’s more competitive than it’s ever been, and for the first time I think, thanks to the growth of voice search and how Google is displaying answers, there’s actually not the same acceleration rate of increasing opportunity in SEO. It’s sort of everyone is warring for more competition but with less potential new opportunity. So interesting timeframe.

John Jantsch: I’ve been coaching a lot of business owners that I think there’s a element of SEO that needs to be much more strategic. As we plan the website, they’re messaging their content, even SEO has to be a part of that, even how we structure their entire business to some degree before we even start talking about, as you said, the technical aspects. I think that’s a message that’s starting to make sense to people maybe because it’s gotten so competitive.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

John Jantsch: I’ve been doing this a long time. I can’t tell you how many small business owners would get a website built, put some form of content on it, and then come to me and say, “Would you SEO this?” You used to be able to do that.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

John Jantsch: You used the word ‘startup’ in the title, or at least the subtitle of the book. That’s such a term anymore that gets bantered around. I’d love to know what you consider … if you have a definition of a startup.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

Rand Fishkin: Well, I would hope that most mature businesses are seeking to maintain their growth rate or maybe grow it a little, and most of them have already found a scalable, repeatable business model, so startups are unique from both those aspects.

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. In many cases, a mature business, the founders are not involved anymore. In many long-standing businesses, the founders are retired or passed away. In many other businesses that are mature, founders have left and they’re off doing other things. But typically in startups, founders are still heavily involved and so that changes culture and a whole bunch of other things, yeah.

John Jantsch: This book is certainly a guide for somebody who’s starting a business, so in that way it’s kind of a how-to book, but it’s also very much a memoir. I’m curious if there was something that really compelled you to include the painfully honest part.

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s something that I’ve always been passionate about, and part of that is the catharsis that comes from the release of writing about something. A big part of it, also, is that when we share something that is not often shared, that the painful parts of journey or the hard issues, we help people to feel like they’re not alone in their journey. That is a really, really important aspect of all the work that I did at Moz and that I think I’ll ever do is trying to hopefully forge a path for other people to follow in and to be able to feel less [inaudible 00:05:49].

John Jantsch: Of course, while that is obviously an awesome contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, I suspect that it also in a lot of ways … you’ve got a new venture going, in a lot of ways I guess the question is what do you learn from it.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, sure, absolutely. I think “Lost and Founder” is really exactly that. It’s kind of a, “Hey, what are all the lessons that you’re taking away that you wish you could have known before you started Moz?” and trying to pass that on to a next generation of entrepreneurs but also to myself. When you sit down and collect your accumulated knowledge and put it into a written form, I think you process it in a way that you would not otherwise be able to do. So this is a very positive learning experience for me as well. I hope it’ll have a good impact on SparkToro.

John Jantsch: I’ve written five books now, and they are me postulating ideas, I suppose, which hopefully brings some value to the world. The idea that I would also share things that were painful that showed that I was actually vulnerable, that I didn’t have all the answers maybe at some point, was that scary at all for you?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I think it’s always scary. I mean the difference between transparency and marketing or honest marketing at least is that when you’re doing honest marketing, you are not telling any lies and you are showing off the good things that you’ve done and things that you’ve learned. When you’re being transparent, you are both being honest and embracing, wholeheartedly embracing the hardest, toughest, nastiest, ugliest parts of yourself and your journey and exposing things that other people would normally want to hide, things that could embarrass you and make you look bad. I think there’s actually more power in that one, certainly from a representation and a helping people feel not alone part of it. The, “Oh, I’m going to tell you the Facebook story of how I became the third richest person in the world,” neh, it’s not that interesting to me.

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

Rand Fishkin: I would say people who have known me and followed me for a long time, this book probably was a very good match. I think the one frustration, which Andrew Warner from Mixergy noted when I talked to him, was that there’s maybe two or three chapters that touch on SEO and web marketing kinds of things, but this is not an SEO-centric book. Of course, most of the people who’ve followed me historically over the last 17 years have done so because I’m in the SEO world and I help people learn more about that topic. So I think it’s a departure on that front and I think for folks who have read it, which is a few … I don’t know. Something between two and 7,000 people, I think, have bought the book so far. For those folks, it seems to be doing well. I get a lot of nice comments online so far.

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Again, the world of what … maybe it’s a misperception about what startup life is really like. Do you feel like a lot of people who are starting businesses look at the Silicon Valley common advice and common model and really fall prey to that in a not so positive way?

Rand Fishkin: I think one of the challenges is that Silicon Valley startups are built for a very specific asset class, venture capital, which is an asset class that’s designed to invest in 100 companies and three or four of them will return the entire fund and another 10 will be doing okay. The rest will hopefully die because the partners don’t even have time to engage with 100 companies. You don’t want to be putting money toward an investment that’s not return 5X, 10X. The advice that the Silicon Valley startup world gives to companies is very good if you fit that model, and it’s pretty bad if you don’t fit that model. I think the challenge is that popular media and culture and all of the focus of entrepreneurship especially over the last two decades has been so heavily centered, so heavily biased toward that model that the vast majority of businesses, which are not in that vein and shouldn’t follow that advice, can’t helped but be seduced by it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a big challenge. It’s a challenge in all sorts of things. If all the toys are geared towards, “Well, if you’re a boy, you have to play with Army toys. If you’re a girl, you have to play with princesses.” Well, no wonder kids want to dress up as certain things for Halloween and act certain ways when they grow up.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

John Jantsch: Years ago I’d take my kids to McDonald’s … Okay, I’m just going to admit it. We got the odd Happy Meal every now and then. They would always say, “Do you want a boy toy or a girl toy?” I was like, “What does that mean?” It drove me crazy.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

Rand Fishkin: I’m one of those people who absolutely fell prey to the classic Silicon Valley startup, taking venture. That’s the ultimate challenge, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what every entrepreneur … If you’re a great entrepreneur, you seek to do that. Of course, now that I’ve been through that experience, I have the wisdom to say, “Hang on a minute. That’s a totally biased perspective.” There’s no one class of entrepreneur that’s so much better than another. If you start a bakery, you are no less an entrepreneur than someone who starts a tech company. If you raise venture capital versus getting a bank loan, you are no less or more of an entrepreneur. So I think removing some of that external input is certainly a big thing.

The other big one I’d say, for me at least, is having a lot more self-knowledge, so some of that’s being able to push exterior forces away and recognize what I want, but also some of it is being able to say, “Okay, I know that I often fall prey to these problems or these mistakes. I know that I’m good at this and not good at that. I know that I need to shore up these weaknesses, and I know that I have challenges with hiring,” whatever it is. I think that’s why so many more entrepreneurs who start businesses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s tend to, on average, have higher success rates than those who start them earlier in life. No surprise.

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Oo, that’s an interesting one. Let’s see. I would say in my life personally and broadly, I’m a very mission-driven person, but as far as the business goes, SparkToro for me is not, “Oh, I want to solve this bordering on philanthropic problem.” It’s very much a, “Hey, this particular marketing problem that I kept seeing people have and that I encountered a lot when I worked with newer companies or companies for whom SEO wasn’t a good match.” That problem feels like there’s a great technological solution that could help with it. No, I think I’m still very innovation-driven when it comes to product market.

John Jantsch: Do you get, I’m assuming, a lot of startups or wannabe startups writing you and saying, “What should I do first? Where do I start?” What’s your one piece of advice that everybody always likes to … the one thing?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: Not necessarily how do you manage that, but do you have sage advice for the person that you decide, “I’m going to sit down and write a long, thorough fulfilling email back to them”?

Rand Fishkin: “Lost and Founder” has been great on that front because for a lot of the, “Hey, what should I do? What should I not do? How should I think about this?” there’s a chapter for a lot of those items in the book. That being said, I think probably one of the most common ones I get, no surprise because of my background in web marketing, is, “Where should I start my web marketing efforts, and how should I attract my first customers?” For me, the answer to that is always the intersection of three things. One, an area where you have personal passion and interest. I have never found, literally never found anyone who said, “You know what? I hate Instagram. Hate the whole platform. Ugh, it’s terrible. But I do get most of my business that way.” It doesn’t happen. People who are not interested in or passionate about or have some value they can just [inaudible 00:17:28] that they’re just not great at it. So I tell people to pick a marketing channel that they personally like. If you hate SEO, you hate content marketing, fine. Go for ads or PR or something else.

The second thing is somewhere where you can add unique value, and the important word in that statement is unique. Many people can add value. Many people can copycat other people who are adding value. It’s very difficult for a lot of organizations to recognize how they can add unique value. Why is this thing that you’re doing more uniquely valuable to the audience? If you have a great answer to that question and the first one, the third thing is you need to pick channels where your audience actually pays attention. So you find something at the intersection of those three.

John Jantsch: A lot of people really struggle with that uniquely valuable thing because they just say, “Hey, what I created, surely it’s valuable.” I find the best way to find those is find problems. What are people complaining about? What are they not getting? Like when they leave reviews with competitors and they talk about, “They didn’t show up on time,” or just whatever goofy things they’re saying, those are the problems that you need to figure out.

Rand Fishkin: Or problems where people are only solving them in one way. For example, lots of people are having this problem, and no one is helping those who prefer video content or those who like podcasts, or no one’s doing visual-centric content, or no one’s solving this in a way that’s accessible for whatever, an older demographic or that kind of thing.

John Jantsch: I’m certain because of your front of the leading edge, I suppose, SEO online stuff, you occasionally have people who say, “Okay, on this stuff that’s coming, what’s coming next?” Maybe just riff for a minute on voice search and assistance and AI and bots. That seems to be kind of the thing that’s got a lot of people’s attention but they’re not sure if they should pay attention yet.

Rand Fishkin: First off, my broad advice on this is that when you are investing in marketing, you do not need to and should not be leading your market. You should be following. That sounds weird because we have this culture that’s so innovation-centric, like what’s the next big thing? How do I make sure I don’t get left behind?

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

Rand Fishkin: Right, right. There’s a first mover advantage. In marketing, there’s a first mover advantage but not until the market moves. For example, I know a bunch of companies that invested very heavily in chatbots over the last few years. They were sure three, four years ago that chatbots were going to be the next big thing, and they built a bunch of tech around this. Those have not paid dividends for very many companies at all. In fact, I would say the majority of folks I’ve talked to who’ve invested there regret investing deeply. They still think maybe in the next few years it will be something that consumers really want but so far, meh, not so much. My broad advice is follow the market. Don’t try and adopt something before it’s popular. Don’t be on, whatever, [Kick 00:20:49] who went out of business or-

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a product for a lot of different marketers who encounter a consistent problem that we saw which was basically folks who’d try and figure out, “I have this audience I want to reach. Maybe it’s a new audience because I have a new company, or I’m trying to expand my audience and grow. But I’m trying to reach this audience, and I don’t know where I should I go to reach them. Because of that, I spend all my money with Google and Facebook and the rest is sort of, eh, I don’t know what do to.” As a result, those behemoths become even more giant.

When in fact, if you dig into any audience, there’s almost certainly podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they subscribe to and people they follow on social networks. There’s publications that they read and news media and blogs that they consume and online forums that they hang out in and events that they go to offline, places they actually go to and participate in. Discovery of those different people and publications and sources is an incredibly manual, challenging, often weeks or month-long process for a marketer to discover and uncover. If you have to do it every six months or every year, it’s even more painful. That’s what we’re trying to solve with SparkToro through technology.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The idea is that you could plug in something very broad like, “I’m interested in reaching travelers to Southeast Asia,” or you could go for something more niche like, “I want interior decorators on the West Coast,” or you could go for something hyper-niche like, “I’m looking for mechanical engineers who work in clean water facilities.”

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

Rand Fishkin: Well, since we just started, it’s going to be nine months maybe a little more away before we have any kind of product. You can go check it out certainly and read a little more about the problem. If you want, you can sign up and get an email when we launch, but there’s nothing there yet. The eventual idea, though, is that I want to do something very much like I did with Moz. I don’t want to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to use this product. I want this to be something that anyone can subscribe to and use, sort of a search engine for marketers to learn more about their audiences’ affinities and where they pay attention.

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

https://ift.tt/2LBrz2p

[seocompany35203]

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: If you’re a founder of a startup, maybe you need some brutally honest advice from somebody who’s been there. For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I visit with Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz, and he’s written a book that you’re going to want to get into because it’s got some really practical and heartfelt advice of what he learned along the way.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help the support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz. I think people used to call him the Wizard of Moz. He actually has a new venture called SparkToro, which we’ll touch on today. But we’re going to talk a lot about his new book called, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.” Rand, thanks for joining me.

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I said off air but I’ll say it on air as well, I’ve been doing this podcast forever as a lot of my listeners know, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve had you on. It’s a treat for me. We are going to talk about your book, but I got to ask one SEO question. It’s a really broad one. Where does SEO sit today?

Rand Fishkin: Where does SEO sit today? Well, it’s at an interesting point in its history in that, in a lot of ways, search has become a mature industry and SEO has, too. That means that it’s more competitive than it’s ever been, and for the first time I think, thanks to the growth of voice search and how Google is displaying answers, there’s actually not the same acceleration rate of increasing opportunity in SEO. It’s sort of everyone is warring for more competition but with less potential new opportunity. So interesting timeframe.

John Jantsch: I’ve been coaching a lot of business owners that I think there’s a element of SEO that needs to be much more strategic. As we plan the website, they’re messaging their content, even SEO has to be a part of that, even how we structure their entire business to some degree before we even start talking about, as you said, the technical aspects. I think that’s a message that’s starting to make sense to people maybe because it’s gotten so competitive.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

John Jantsch: I’ve been doing this a long time. I can’t tell you how many small business owners would get a website built, put some form of content on it, and then come to me and say, “Would you SEO this?” You used to be able to do that.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

John Jantsch: You used the word ‘startup’ in the title, or at least the subtitle of the book. That’s such a term anymore that gets bantered around. I’d love to know what you consider … if you have a definition of a startup.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

Rand Fishkin: Well, I would hope that most mature businesses are seeking to maintain their growth rate or maybe grow it a little, and most of them have already found a scalable, repeatable business model, so startups are unique from both those aspects.

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. In many cases, a mature business, the founders are not involved anymore. In many long-standing businesses, the founders are retired or passed away. In many other businesses that are mature, founders have left and they’re off doing other things. But typically in startups, founders are still heavily involved and so that changes culture and a whole bunch of other things, yeah.

John Jantsch: This book is certainly a guide for somebody who’s starting a business, so in that way it’s kind of a how-to book, but it’s also very much a memoir. I’m curious if there was something that really compelled you to include the painfully honest part.

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s something that I’ve always been passionate about, and part of that is the catharsis that comes from the release of writing about something. A big part of it, also, is that when we share something that is not often shared, that the painful parts of journey or the hard issues, we help people to feel like they’re not alone in their journey. That is a really, really important aspect of all the work that I did at Moz and that I think I’ll ever do is trying to hopefully forge a path for other people to follow in and to be able to feel less [inaudible 00:05:49].

John Jantsch: Of course, while that is obviously an awesome contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, I suspect that it also in a lot of ways … you’ve got a new venture going, in a lot of ways I guess the question is what do you learn from it.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, sure, absolutely. I think “Lost and Founder” is really exactly that. It’s kind of a, “Hey, what are all the lessons that you’re taking away that you wish you could have known before you started Moz?” and trying to pass that on to a next generation of entrepreneurs but also to myself. When you sit down and collect your accumulated knowledge and put it into a written form, I think you process it in a way that you would not otherwise be able to do. So this is a very positive learning experience for me as well. I hope it’ll have a good impact on SparkToro.

John Jantsch: I’ve written five books now, and they are me postulating ideas, I suppose, which hopefully brings some value to the world. The idea that I would also share things that were painful that showed that I was actually vulnerable, that I didn’t have all the answers maybe at some point, was that scary at all for you?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I think it’s always scary. I mean the difference between transparency and marketing or honest marketing at least is that when you’re doing honest marketing, you are not telling any lies and you are showing off the good things that you’ve done and things that you’ve learned. When you’re being transparent, you are both being honest and embracing, wholeheartedly embracing the hardest, toughest, nastiest, ugliest parts of yourself and your journey and exposing things that other people would normally want to hide, things that could embarrass you and make you look bad. I think there’s actually more power in that one, certainly from a representation and a helping people feel not alone part of it. The, “Oh, I’m going to tell you the Facebook story of how I became the third richest person in the world,” neh, it’s not that interesting to me.

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

Rand Fishkin: I would say people who have known me and followed me for a long time, this book probably was a very good match. I think the one frustration, which Andrew Warner from Mixergy noted when I talked to him, was that there’s maybe two or three chapters that touch on SEO and web marketing kinds of things, but this is not an SEO-centric book. Of course, most of the people who’ve followed me historically over the last 17 years have done so because I’m in the SEO world and I help people learn more about that topic. So I think it’s a departure on that front and I think for folks who have read it, which is a few … I don’t know. Something between two and 7,000 people, I think, have bought the book so far. For those folks, it seems to be doing well. I get a lot of nice comments online so far.

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Again, the world of what … maybe it’s a misperception about what startup life is really like. Do you feel like a lot of people who are starting businesses look at the Silicon Valley common advice and common model and really fall prey to that in a not so positive way?

Rand Fishkin: I think one of the challenges is that Silicon Valley startups are built for a very specific asset class, venture capital, which is an asset class that’s designed to invest in 100 companies and three or four of them will return the entire fund and another 10 will be doing okay. The rest will hopefully die because the partners don’t even have time to engage with 100 companies. You don’t want to be putting money toward an investment that’s not return 5X, 10X. The advice that the Silicon Valley startup world gives to companies is very good if you fit that model, and it’s pretty bad if you don’t fit that model. I think the challenge is that popular media and culture and all of the focus of entrepreneurship especially over the last two decades has been so heavily centered, so heavily biased toward that model that the vast majority of businesses, which are not in that vein and shouldn’t follow that advice, can’t helped but be seduced by it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a big challenge. It’s a challenge in all sorts of things. If all the toys are geared towards, “Well, if you’re a boy, you have to play with Army toys. If you’re a girl, you have to play with princesses.” Well, no wonder kids want to dress up as certain things for Halloween and act certain ways when they grow up.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

John Jantsch: Years ago I’d take my kids to McDonald’s … Okay, I’m just going to admit it. We got the odd Happy Meal every now and then. They would always say, “Do you want a boy toy or a girl toy?” I was like, “What does that mean?” It drove me crazy.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

Rand Fishkin: I’m one of those people who absolutely fell prey to the classic Silicon Valley startup, taking venture. That’s the ultimate challenge, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what every entrepreneur … If you’re a great entrepreneur, you seek to do that. Of course, now that I’ve been through that experience, I have the wisdom to say, “Hang on a minute. That’s a totally biased perspective.” There’s no one class of entrepreneur that’s so much better than another. If you start a bakery, you are no less an entrepreneur than someone who starts a tech company. If you raise venture capital versus getting a bank loan, you are no less or more of an entrepreneur. So I think removing some of that external input is certainly a big thing.

The other big one I’d say, for me at least, is having a lot more self-knowledge, so some of that’s being able to push exterior forces away and recognize what I want, but also some of it is being able to say, “Okay, I know that I often fall prey to these problems or these mistakes. I know that I’m good at this and not good at that. I know that I need to shore up these weaknesses, and I know that I have challenges with hiring,” whatever it is. I think that’s why so many more entrepreneurs who start businesses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s tend to, on average, have higher success rates than those who start them earlier in life. No surprise.

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Oo, that’s an interesting one. Let’s see. I would say in my life personally and broadly, I’m a very mission-driven person, but as far as the business goes, SparkToro for me is not, “Oh, I want to solve this bordering on philanthropic problem.” It’s very much a, “Hey, this particular marketing problem that I kept seeing people have and that I encountered a lot when I worked with newer companies or companies for whom SEO wasn’t a good match.” That problem feels like there’s a great technological solution that could help with it. No, I think I’m still very innovation-driven when it comes to product market.

John Jantsch: Do you get, I’m assuming, a lot of startups or wannabe startups writing you and saying, “What should I do first? Where do I start?” What’s your one piece of advice that everybody always likes to … the one thing?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: Not necessarily how do you manage that, but do you have sage advice for the person that you decide, “I’m going to sit down and write a long, thorough fulfilling email back to them”?

Rand Fishkin: “Lost and Founder” has been great on that front because for a lot of the, “Hey, what should I do? What should I not do? How should I think about this?” there’s a chapter for a lot of those items in the book. That being said, I think probably one of the most common ones I get, no surprise because of my background in web marketing, is, “Where should I start my web marketing efforts, and how should I attract my first customers?” For me, the answer to that is always the intersection of three things. One, an area where you have personal passion and interest. I have never found, literally never found anyone who said, “You know what? I hate Instagram. Hate the whole platform. Ugh, it’s terrible. But I do get most of my business that way.” It doesn’t happen. People who are not interested in or passionate about or have some value they can just [inaudible 00:17:28] that they’re just not great at it. So I tell people to pick a marketing channel that they personally like. If you hate SEO, you hate content marketing, fine. Go for ads or PR or something else.

The second thing is somewhere where you can add unique value, and the important word in that statement is unique. Many people can add value. Many people can copycat other people who are adding value. It’s very difficult for a lot of organizations to recognize how they can add unique value. Why is this thing that you’re doing more uniquely valuable to the audience? If you have a great answer to that question and the first one, the third thing is you need to pick channels where your audience actually pays attention. So you find something at the intersection of those three.

John Jantsch: A lot of people really struggle with that uniquely valuable thing because they just say, “Hey, what I created, surely it’s valuable.” I find the best way to find those is find problems. What are people complaining about? What are they not getting? Like when they leave reviews with competitors and they talk about, “They didn’t show up on time,” or just whatever goofy things they’re saying, those are the problems that you need to figure out.

Rand Fishkin: Or problems where people are only solving them in one way. For example, lots of people are having this problem, and no one is helping those who prefer video content or those who like podcasts, or no one’s doing visual-centric content, or no one’s solving this in a way that’s accessible for whatever, an older demographic or that kind of thing.

John Jantsch: I’m certain because of your front of the leading edge, I suppose, SEO online stuff, you occasionally have people who say, “Okay, on this stuff that’s coming, what’s coming next?” Maybe just riff for a minute on voice search and assistance and AI and bots. That seems to be kind of the thing that’s got a lot of people’s attention but they’re not sure if they should pay attention yet.

Rand Fishkin: First off, my broad advice on this is that when you are investing in marketing, you do not need to and should not be leading your market. You should be following. That sounds weird because we have this culture that’s so innovation-centric, like what’s the next big thing? How do I make sure I don’t get left behind?

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

Rand Fishkin: Right, right. There’s a first mover advantage. In marketing, there’s a first mover advantage but not until the market moves. For example, I know a bunch of companies that invested very heavily in chatbots over the last few years. They were sure three, four years ago that chatbots were going to be the next big thing, and they built a bunch of tech around this. Those have not paid dividends for very many companies at all. In fact, I would say the majority of folks I’ve talked to who’ve invested there regret investing deeply. They still think maybe in the next few years it will be something that consumers really want but so far, meh, not so much. My broad advice is follow the market. Don’t try and adopt something before it’s popular. Don’t be on, whatever, [Kick 00:20:49] who went out of business or-

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a product for a lot of different marketers who encounter a consistent problem that we saw which was basically folks who’d try and figure out, “I have this audience I want to reach. Maybe it’s a new audience because I have a new company, or I’m trying to expand my audience and grow. But I’m trying to reach this audience, and I don’t know where I should I go to reach them. Because of that, I spend all my money with Google and Facebook and the rest is sort of, eh, I don’t know what do to.” As a result, those behemoths become even more giant.

When in fact, if you dig into any audience, there’s almost certainly podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they subscribe to and people they follow on social networks. There’s publications that they read and news media and blogs that they consume and online forums that they hang out in and events that they go to offline, places they actually go to and participate in. Discovery of those different people and publications and sources is an incredibly manual, challenging, often weeks or month-long process for a marketer to discover and uncover. If you have to do it every six months or every year, it’s even more painful. That’s what we’re trying to solve with SparkToro through technology.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The idea is that you could plug in something very broad like, “I’m interested in reaching travelers to Southeast Asia,” or you could go for something more niche like, “I want interior decorators on the West Coast,” or you could go for something hyper-niche like, “I’m looking for mechanical engineers who work in clean water facilities.”

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

Rand Fishkin: Well, since we just started, it’s going to be nine months maybe a little more away before we have any kind of product. You can go check it out certainly and read a little more about the problem. If you want, you can sign up and get an email when we launch, but there’s nothing there yet. The eventual idea, though, is that I want to do something very much like I did with Moz. I don’t want to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to use this product. I want this to be something that anyone can subscribe to and use, sort of a search engine for marketers to learn more about their audiences’ affinities and where they pay attention.

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

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