Moz CEO Rand Fishkin on Building Company Culture and Inbound Marketing

Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Growth Everywhere where we introduce successful entrepreneurs and interview them and bring you successful or tips on how to grow your business. Today we have Rand Fishkin who is the CEO and founder of Moz which is inbound marketing software that helps you grow your business online and he is also a well-known speaker in the internet marketing space and he is also the co-founder of inbound.org where you can get the latest internet marketing news. How are you doing today, Brent?

A little under the weather, but I'm sure I'll recover soon. Thanks for having me, Eric.

Hope you get better soon. So great, I want to dive right into this right here. In 2012, Moz was doing really well. You guys did $18 million in revenue, 16,000 customers according to the blog post that I read.

So how are things going today?

Let's see.

2012, we did $21.9 million in revenue.

Okay.

But yeah, I think we ended the year right about 19,000 customers.

Got it. Okay. And how are things looking today?

So we're on track to do between $29 and $30 million this year, and we've got about 20,000, 22,000 paying subscribers right now.

Got it. Okay, cool. Do you want to give our audience like a quick, like, 2 or 3 sentence overview of what Moz does exactly?

Sure. So we make software primarily for professional web marketers, both in-house or consultant agency marketers, to help them measure and improve inbound channels like SEO, social media, content marketing, branded mentions, links, those kinds of things.

Got it. Okay, perfect. So, you know, a few years ago you guys made a jump from, you know, doing consulting, like online marketing consulting, and you decided to go more towards a product focus. What was kind of the aha moment where you figured out that product is the right way to go and to move away from consulting?

Gosh, that was in late 2007 when— so this is many years ago now, but late 2007 when we saw that our subscription revenue from this new sort of very basic suite of software tools that we'd been offering was going to eclipse our consulting revenue for the year, you know, in the first 9 months that it had been out. And that was sort of a wake-up call. I think software might be something that we're better at and a better path for us.

Got it. And for the consulting, like at the peak, how much were you guys doing in revenue?

Gosh, I think our biggest Year of consulting, well, we sort of had 2. There's an interesting story there. In 2006, I think we did about $600,000, $500,000 in consulting revenue. But in 2009, we actually, at the end of 2008, you know, it was the financial crisis, the board met, and there was kind of that, I don't know if you remember, but there was that Sequoia memo out, right?

Yeah.

And the Sequoia memo was like, you know, everyone's going to die, RIP good times, all the startups are going to hell, technology sector is going to be screwed, which didn't actually happen of course, but that led us to make the decision to ramp up consulting even though we had been about to shut it down completely. And so we hired a full-time consulting manager, grew that team to a couple people, and did a million dollars, just about a million dollars in consulting revenue in 2009, and by November of 2009, it was clear that our software was doing fantastic and taking off, and the market was not soft. And so we actually shut it down entirely, gave that— we handed off our consulting business to a company called Distilled, which had offices in the UK. They opened a Seattle office, and by December of— or by January of 2010, we had no more consulting.

Got it. So is there like a certain point where you decided, okay, you know, we're doing X amount in revenue for software, you know, what like, what was like the one defining moment where it's like, okay, we need to move over now, let's just shut down consulting?

Well, so like I said, there's kind of two of those, one in 2007 and one again in 2009 when we ramped it back up and then shut it back down again. You know, one of the big takeaways for me is that I wish we had been— I wish we had been more— we had stuck to our guns more and not decided in late 2008, not been spooked by the market into starting back up into consulting, because I think it actually has created a beast that's been very hard to get away from. So even though it's been 4 years since we had any consulting revenue on our books, tons of people still think of Moz as Right. And that's really dangerous. It's really bad. In fact, it creates a lot of bad market impressions. It creates a lot of bad investor perception. You want your brand to be associated with one thing and for people to be very confident that they know exactly what it is that you do. And that story has been hard for us to tell over the last 4 or 5 years because we didn't, you know, I think make that And I think the other thing we could have done that would have been smart is probably to change our name from SEOmoz to Moz back in 2007 when we did software and stuck with that name throughout so that people wouldn't have the association of the consultancy with the SEOmoz branding.

Got it. So the key takeaway here is, you know, when you're doing something like this, you know, for entrepreneurs, it's to You want to focus, right? You want to focus and not kind of, you know, distribute it where you're not exactly sure what you want to do, right?

Absolutely, my God. I mean, especially if you're building a brand, and this is, you know, for B2B folks who are doing more enterprise-style sales, less of a concern, right? Because the relationships are very one-to-one. If you're pivoting and changing and offering new things, not as hard. If you're doing something like we're doing, which is technically B2B but in a very B2C fashion, right? Tens of thousands of subscribers, hundreds of people taking a new free trial every day, you know, massive millions of visits to the website, and we have pretty much a consumer-style brand in the marketing world. It's deadly. It's deadly to have multiple associations with your brand and have brand confusion. I think that's something that the experts in the B2C marketing world learned early on. And then the other thing that's really hard is just That hedgehog concept, right, that Jim Collins describes.

Right.

You want to be able to have that focus to get that singular flywheel going and to keep pushing on that. You generally will see much better returns continuing on the same track than kind of being diverted in 50 different directions.

Got it. Cool. So you just mentioned a flywheel. Can you explain to our audience what the flywheel is exactly?

Sure, yeah. So for For me, when I think about a flywheel, the idea is that it takes a massive amount of energy, right? It's this industrial contraption that's designed to generate electricity, generally used in electrical plants. And the idea is that it is very tough to get a flywheel started because it's extremely heavy, it's slow moving, it's a massive contraption. But even though that first quarter of a turn quarter of a cycle around the wheel takes, you know, an incredible amount of energy. The next quarter of a cycle takes a little bit less, still an incredible amount of energy, but a little bit less. And then as you get that first cycle of the wheel going, it gets easier to push on. And the faster it gets going, the easier it is to push, the easier it is to make a new revolution. And this is a great analogy for the way technology startups work because in your first few months, right, in your first year, developing something incredibly hard. But once you have a product launched, iterating on that product becomes easier. You learn lessons about the technology and the software engineering behind it, the architecture and infrastructure needed. You learn things about how your customers are using it. You learn things about marketing to them. You learn things about which channels work for you and don't. And as you have all those learnings, you're able to apply them and make the flywheel of your business Turn faster and faster. You're trying to find that flywheel effect in everything that you do. So, you know, for folks who— if you're looking at a business line that has an investment that is non-flywheel, essentially takes just as much energy and effort to do this thing the second time as it did the first time, and the 10th time as it did the first and second time, that's not a win. That's not scalability, and that's not leveraging your strengths in finding a flywheel. What you want to do is find things where that 10th turn is 10 times easier than that first turn, and the second turn was only half as hard as the first turn. That's what you're seeking, and that's why I'm such a big proponent of inbound marketing channels in general.

Got it. So would you say your blog, the SEOmoz blog, is the perfect example of the flywheel in action?

Gosh, I don't know about the perfect, but it is a decent example for sure, right? So the, you know, the first few hundred blog posts I wrote, those were of mediocre quality and they didn't generate a huge audience. But even after that, those first few, it got a little bit easier. I got a little bit better at it. I learned what the audience wanted. I was getting more and more visits. And as that content grew out, right? Of course, all of that's getting indexed in search engines. It's generating more traffic. That traffic is getting links back to the blog. That's making it earn more and more business. So it really is generating a flywheel. That's the beauty behind content marketing in general and a blog specifically.

Got it. So how important would you say the blog is for— let's say, how important has the blog been for Moz's success, and how long would you say it took to get to that level of success? Or what you consider to be success?

That was— gosh, I would say it's been instrumental, maybe even fundamental to our success because we are really a business that was built on the back of the blog, right? So the blog had started— I started the blog in 2003. By 2007, it already had about 10,000 visits a day. And because that audience was the folks who we eventually were building software for, It was a fantastic market research and testing tool. It was a great brand building tool. It was a great audience development tool, great marketing channel. It just turned into all of these great things, but it really, it didn't start that way, right? It started as, I just want to share my knowledge with the world. Let's see who's interested. Let's see if this can generate valuable discussion. And then as it did, that turned into a, hey, we should really leverage this opportunity and build something that these people want. So I'm kind of a fan nowadays of the blog-first strategy. And you can see there's a few blog posts up on the web now. I think William Wogar, who runs Startup Management, put together a great post listing businesses that have all started on blogs first. And that's really cool to see.

That's a good post. So what would you say to people that are in really small niches? Let's say I sell plungers. Or a really niche product. What would you say to these people that want to get started with content marketing, with blogging, but they say, oh, I can't do it because my product is too niche? What do you say to these people?

So there's 2 things. Number one, if you're trying to build a very scalable business, right, one that's going to go far and wide, that's going to build a national or a global brand, then I think investing in content marketing probably has, you know, at a high level, has eventual high rates of return. And it doesn't matter how small your niche is, so long as there's a big market, content marketing will make sense. If you're talking about small local businesses, right? So someone who's like, hey, I sell plungers. I sell them in Cleveland, Ohio. I don't really have designs to take over the rest of Ohio and eventually build this national brand. Well, fine. Then content marketing is content marketing for you might be a piece of content a year, one great thing that attracts some attention to your brand that people are going to come back to and say, oh yeah, you know, that's a really great resource because he listed, you know, maybe think of common problems that people who are buying plungers might have, and those might be primarily, you know, if you're selling plungers, you're probably not selling them to consumers, you're probably selling them mostly to suppliers. And so you might say that the big thing that these suppliers need is they need a list of great independent locally sourced creators of all sorts of goods in the home improvement and repair sector. So I'm going to make that. I'm going to make the Ohio small business— the Ohio guide to sourcing locally.

Yeah.

And it's going to have, you know, all of these great things. And all those suppliers are going to go like, man, what a great resource. I'm going to come back to that again and again and again because I love buying locally. I love supporting Ohio businesses. Fantastic. You don't need to be blogging every day. You just need to build it once. So that's the kind of content marketing that I encourage for small local business.

That's a really good example, and that actually brings me to my next question where Moz has done a lot of these guides, like Beginner's Guide to SEO and all these different things that are super helpful to people that are just starting to learn inbound marketing and things like that. How long did it take to produce things like this, and How important would you say these little guides were for the success of Moz? Yeah.

So, we do really 2 kinds of content. We do big content, which would be things like MozCast or the Google Algorithm History or the Beginner's Guide to SEO or the one that was released last night, this morning, the Web Developer's Cheat Sheet, SEO Cheat Sheet. Those types of things tend to take between several weeks to a couple months to develop, build, launch, and they take multiple team members— someone from design and UI, someone on the content side, proofreaders, contributions from industry folks, all that kind of stuff. So they're intense, they really are, but the return is clearly worthwhile. I shared a blog post on Twitter the other day called Why Is Big Content Worthwhile? And you can see some of the statistics around measuring kind of how the blog and You Must perform against these big content pieces. And I would urge anyone who's very serious in the content marketing world to make a considered decision around, is blogging every day the right move, or should I be spending 2, 3, 4 weeks investing in one project that's going to have, you know, 10, 20 times the return of the best blog post I'll write all year?

Interesting. I'll have to look for that one. So, you know, how do you— for entrepreneurs that want to create this kind of, you know, I'll call it cornerstone content, you know, how would you say, you know, they would go about finding like the right people to create this content? Do you have any tips?

I tend to think, you know, if you're a small team, small startup team, it tends to be the people on that team, right? It's the founder, it might be, you know, if you have a marketer or a designer or a developer, an engineer, right? who has like a great idea of, hey, you know what would be incredibly useful to the audience we want to reach? This thing. And not just incredibly useful, but also something that is likely to inspire sharing.

Right.

So, you know, there's lots of folks who build something that's very, very useful, but when, you know, a particular segment of the market sees it, A, they're not the type of people who are on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and, you know, Google+, and they're not doing all these broad kinds of sharing. They don't have blogs of themselves. They don't have megaphones, and so they're less likely to share. And they might see this resource and think, oh man, I hope nobody else finds this because it's a great competitive advantage for me to have it.

Right.

And nobody else to have it. That's less of what you're looking for. More of what you're looking for is Hey, here's something that is massively useful or interesting and fascinating that lots of people who have those megaphones will share, and they won't be the kinds of things where they say, hey, it's a competitive advantage for me to be the only person who has this. I'll look good. It's more valuable for me to share because I'll look good to my audience, and I'll earn more of a following if I share this piece of content.

Got it. So it sounds like promotion is obviously a big part of content marketing. If you were to produce a big piece of content, what percentage would you say is important to create a good piece of content? What percentage would you say is the promotion part? How would you split the two?

Yeah, yeah. It really depends. If you already have a built-in audience, it's generally 80/20. 80% is the, what did you build and how great is it? And 20% is the, you know, how you do the amplification of it. If you don't yet have an audience, that sort of flips on its head, right? It's 20% what you build and 80% can you start getting that flywheel going of building that audience. That doesn't mean— I don't mean by 20% that you should invest less in the content and invest less in making something remarkable. I just mean don't expect that Hey, I just made the best resource of its kind on the web by a mile. It's so much better than what this other big company has done. Then I go and share it and I don't get much attention. I don't get much energy. Don't attribute that to the quality. Attribute that to I don't have much of a megaphone yet. I need to work on my megaphone. And working on your megaphone is very akin to all of the best practices for SEO and social media. Those are the primary channels, and email marketing if you're doing a lot of email sharing. But those channels are the primary ones by which your content will be amplified.

Got it. And if you guys are wondering, there's a lot of great posts on Moz about outreach, kind of building that megaphone, building that audience. I highly recommend you guys read some of the stuff on there. Cool. So the next thing I wanted to talk about was Kind of the culture at Moz, you know, tag team. How important has that been, and how did you come up with those 6 specific traits, I guess?

Yeah, so this was back in, gosh, I think 2007 again. We kind of met as a whole company, decided, you know, went through this exercise of what are the values that are important to us and which ones of those are shared. A writer actually put together the tag fee guidelines and structured that for us. And that's, you know, it's been a fantastic founding document, and I believe a critical part of not necessarily our success from a financial perspective, but certainly our success from a culture-building, team-building, and making Moz a place where people want to come work. Certainly a place where I want to go into work every day.

Cool. And what are those 6 traits?

So Tacti is transparency, authenticity, generosity, fun, empathy, and being the exception.

Got it. Those are all really good. I feel like copying those for ours. But I guess that brings me to my next point. You know, there's a lot of different companies that have their cultures, you know, their 4 values posted, and the tendency is, or it can be sometimes, where other founders just want to copy what's written there. How do you guys come up with these? Do you guys have the management team get together, or is it you coming up with most of these traits? What is it exactly?

So like I said, this was back when there was only 6 people on our team, and we created Techie. It actually hasn't changed in the last 6 years.

Right.

So it's stayed a very permanent document, and I would suspect that it will continue to be that way. So values don't really change. I think the things that do change are the ways that you build systems, structure, and process to maintain tag fee, right? And that's very— it's very easy when you are 10 people. It gets a little harder at 50. It gets a lot harder at 130, which is where we are today. And so there's a lot of work going into a new process, well, many new processes that we're working on around making TAGFI actionable and being accountable to TAGFI and to the metrics that we set for ourselves. So I think that work will be a really interesting process, and I hope to have something more to share about that maybe early next year.

Yeah, no, that would be great. And would you say you guys hire based on your core values? Do you guys look at these 6 things?

Yeah, so core values, the whole idea is that you use it in your hiring, you use it in your reviews, and you use it in how the company makes decisions, right? How we choose what to do and what not to do. It's an architecture for all of the big important things that we do. So, you know, it should be a barrier to entry that a person who doesn't inherently reflect Tagfee shouldn't be someone that we hire. A, I don't think they're going to be happy here, right? And B, the rest of the team isn't going to be happy with them. It's just not a match. And that's not to say that people who aren't Tagfee aren't good people, aren't plenty wonderful employees for some other company. It's just not a match here.

Got it. Makes perfect sense. So I want to dive into kind of like the tactics/growth part from Moz. What would you say are— what were the real big tactics that helped push growth for Moz in the early days?

Well, so we already talked about the blog. SEO's been a big part of our growth as well. And I think for us, building and maintaining a really measurable funnel, right? From— we can track people who visit the site, people who get to our product pages, people who take a free trial. How many people do we lose in the free trial before they become paying subscribers? And then what's the churn rate in different cohorts of months, and in people who sign up, people who use different tools? So measuring all of those things and having that data has been tremendously valuable to informing the kinds of growth tactics that we've pursued.

Got it.

Okay.

And a lot of what you guys do is inbound, right? What percentage would you say is paid stuff? How much paid acquisition do you guys do?

About 15% of our budget on average over the last few years has been spent on paid marketing. Those are channels like paid search, display, retargeting, affiliates, social media ads, et cetera. This year's actually been a little bit lower, but I suspect we're going to ramp up a bit in Q4. A very slow 4 months because we kind of shut down our funnel when we launched— when we rebranded from SEOmoz to Moz and launched Moz Analytics in beta. You could sign up for the invite list, but taking a free trial of the old product was kind of a secondary behind-the-scenes thing. And so we haven't actually been doing much promotion there. And our new product is launching probably in September, and so then— publicly in September, and so then we'll kind of ramp up.

Okay. Cool. Can't wait to see that. So, you know, in the tech startup world, a lot of the investors will be like, okay, it's all about, you know, we'll give you an injection of $5 to $10 million and let's just go all out with paid acquisition, let's keep the CPM low, blah, blah, blah.

Boo!

But yeah, like, what do you— you know, obviously you guys had some struggles with getting investors, so did they have a lot of pushback to like this inbound marketing methodology? How do you convince an investor to go with inbound and that's the right way to go long-term?

No, actually it wasn't our methodology. I think actually our acquisition strategies and tactics were fascinating and clearly of interest to investors. Where we really had challenges was primarily on our— the model that we've got, which is self-service SaaS as opposed to Classic enterprise SaaS. So investors always looked at us and benchmarked us against classic software as a service companies. Those would be, you know, think Salesforce or Oracle or those kinds of things, right? The metrics that a SaaS company has are really based on how many salespeople do you have, what's your cost of customer acquisition, and then once you get someone in, what's retention over time and those sorts of things.

Right.

When you're self-service, it looks really, really different. And so cost of customer acquisition, right? They looked at our cost of customer acquisition, which is on average to acquire a new customer, if you take all of our marketing costs, which is primarily staff and a few paid channels. I think, you know, last time we fundraised, which was 2012, that was like $79 to acquire a new customer. Customer payback period, 1 month. And so investors looked at that and went, this is crazy, this makes no sense to me. You know, if that's the case, you guys, A, shouldn't need to raise money, and B, you should be, you know, you should be acquiring customers at the nominal rate. And why aren't you pouring tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of more dollars every month into paid marketing? You want to increase that cost of customer acquisition and just acquire, acquire, acquire. But that's not actually what we want to do, and I can explain, you know, there's lots of detail around that. When you go in with that mindset, it's hard to change. The other thing that they looked at is churn rate. So we gave them, you know, they asked for what's your average monthly churn rate. I think our average monthly churn rate is 8 or 8.5%, and what investors want to see is 2%.

Yep.

So, but that actually is hiding a much more complex story. What happens in a self-service model Is that in the first 3 months, churn rate's like 16%, 17%. Then it drops after month 3 to around an average of 6%, all the way up to month 9 when it drops to like 2%. So what's actually happening is about, you know, between 15% and 20% of the customers that we acquire on a given day turn into long-term customers, 9+ month customers with that, you know, beautiful 2% or less churn curve. That's great. But investors looked at it and said, hey, you're acquiring all these customers, you're not keeping them, you must not have a good product. You know, this is a churn and burn kind of game, which isn't the case, right? What we're doing is we're just acquiring a lot of people who A, can't afford us, B, aren't really sophisticated enough to use the product, and C, don't know what they're doing.

Right.

And then a lot of people who think of SEO As a one-time activity. Like, well, I'm done SEOing my site. I'll see you guys in a couple of years when we do a redesign. Great. So very kind of different metrics, different story there. And so I think Brad Feld, who we pitched at Foundry, was really the first investor who was sophisticated enough to understand the model. He looked at our numbers and was like, you guys don't have a churn problem. You have a problem describing your churn. Like, this is a marketing problem, not an institutional numbers problem. He's like, you've got a fantastic business, look at this. If you, you know, what you're really doing is acquiring these people at an incredibly low cost. The people who do churn out are still profitable for you. Like, you're crazy. All these investors who look at you are also crazy. You know, here's, here's how you should be viewing the business. And so since then, I think we've gotten much more intelligent, sophisticated, and we've actually been able to work on some churn, uh, since his investment too, so it's been good.

Got it. No, that's a really fantastic story. And so if you guys aren't dumping all that VC money into acquisition, where is it going?

So most— so let's see, we had about $20 million in the bank right after Brad's investment in April of last year, and I think we've got about $9 million left today. And the vast majority of that has gone to 3 things. Oh, 4 things, sorry. 3 acquisitions. We acquired 3 companies. GetListed, which does local SEO, helps local small businesses with SEO. That's going to be a new product line for us, probably the end of this year. Followerwonk, which does Twitter analytics and details follower walks. Just a fantastic product. Lots of people who use Moz already were using Followerwonk, so we just said, hey, you know what? Now it's part of your subscription. You pay for Moz, you get Follow Along for free. And that's been awesome. And Peter Gray is the founder of Follow Along. He's kind of a rogue genius. It's very cool having him on the team. And then we also acquired AudienceWise, which was a consulting firm that had some software. We primarily acquired them for talent. And Matt and Tim have been instrumental to the growth and success of Moz over the last 9 months. And then the fourth thing is we built several new data centers, one in Tukwila, which is near Seattle, one in Texas, and one in Virginia, so that we can move off of Amazon's cloud, have redundancy across our own data centers. And we realized that by building these, which is a big upfront investment, I think nearly $5 million of upfront investment, But for that, we can actually— whatchamacallit— save money, save a considerable amount of money, like many hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, and get a payback in 6 to 12 months from running our own private data center as opposed to using AWS. And then actually there's a 5th thing, which is we've hired a ton. So we— when April of last year we were about 60 people, today we're about 130.

Wow, okay. And is the— you guys have an office in Seattle and like one in Portland too, right?

That's right, yeah. So GetListed, Follow Along, and AudienceWise all turned out to be in Portland, Oregon. And so opening a small office there made a lot of sense.

Awesome. So in 2007, how many employees did you guys have?

6.

6? And that's all the way up to 130 now in 2013. So phenomenal.

Yeah, well, 6 years is a lifetime in startup land.

Yep. Cool. So I'm going to go through kind of what I call the speed round right here. I'm going to ask you some quick questions and then we can wrap things up. So what would you say are some companies right now that are kind of killing it with inbound marketing? Gosh.

I've seen a number of good ones, but, you know, I actually have a few examples right here. Let me just pull them up. I maintain lists and then I have pictures of them and all that kind of stuff. I'm always impressed when people do a good job of that. So let's see, FullContact is doing a great job, another Foundry Portfolio company.

And that's Brad Feld's portfolio company, right?

Yeah, that's one of his investments. Very early-stage startup and in the travel space, Mapdia. who I think is just on the verge of launching their product. They've been doing a really good job. I've seen some impressive examples from Shutterstock, which is the stock images company, Minted, which is a greeting card company, and actually it's sort of a design of all kinds, all things company based down in San Francisco, great startup. They've been doing a good job. Uber, I mean Uber's been doing a wonderful job of both paid and inbound marketing, but you know, I think their virality, but combined with content that they do, promotions that they do, they're an incredibly generous company. Yeah, and their social media is second to none. Betabrand, doing a lot of cool things with their products, with their website, with SEO actually. MailChimp's been doing a terrific job. In the recipe space, Serious Eats, they're a good one too.

Yeah. Okay, well, this is a really phenomenal list, and I'll make sure to list this in the blog post. Thanks for that. What would you say is one must-read book entrepreneurs need to look at?

You know, personally, I'm always attracted to stories, narratives, and so my favorite book, the one that inspired me the most over the years, is called The Billionaire Who Wasn't.

Oh, that's my favorite book too.

Yeah, it's the story of Chuck Feeney.

Good book. I give that 2 thumbs up.

Cool.

And how about a must-use productivity tool?

I don't actually use any specific productivity tools, but I am addicted to inbox zero philosophy with Gmail. So I try and keep everything simple. If it doesn't exist in my email or my calendar, it never existed. It's not on my In my life at all. And so that way I never have to go to multiple places to worry about what I'm doing. I always have those 2 kind of reliable systems. And hey, if it's not there, well, it never gets done.

That's a good philosophy. I like that. I should try that too. You know, there's also one thing that you— I think there's very few entrepreneurs that do this. Like, you know, when I first started in internet marketing, I emailed you, you know, And you've been on that ever since. So it's been like since 2008, 2009, but why do you respond to every single email? What benefit do you get out of it, and why should entrepreneurs do that?

You know, I don't actually know whether this is something that you benefit from. This is more a case of me— so one of the driving emotions of my life is guilt.

Mm-hmm.

I always feel guilty. I feel bad about things. I feel like I should do more. You know, and I feel like I'm a disappointment to myself and to what I should be accomplishing. And so the way that, you know, the reason that I respond to every email is because it always really pissed me off early in my career that I would email people and they would just brush me off, never reply. And I thought, you know what, if my profile ever gets to be larger in the space or I'm running a business like they are, I'm not going to do that. And so that's really where it comes from. I do think I might need to wisen up one of these days and maybe stop replying to every email I get because it does get very challenging, very overwhelming, it's very time-consuming, and I don't know that there's actually a big return on that investment. But I would feel really guilty if I didn't, so that's why I do it.

No, I think it's really admirable, and it's something I'm definitely trying to strive more towards now. I feel like I'm kind of paying it forward when I do it now, so the longer you can do it—

Yeah, I mean, I hope for that positive result too, but there's definitely a lot of email that I get and reply to that is probably not an excellent use of my time.

I can imagine. So I want to talk about the kind of the dark days of Moz when you guys first started out, having to go into debt, like, you know, shouldering that big weight.

How would you—

I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurs have to go through these dark days, so what would be your big takeaway from that experience?

I mean, gosh, I was such a newbie, such a— You know, greenhorn, like, I don't really think— I don't think there's a ton of learning from that experience other than don't do that again, right? And, you know, learn something about the field that you're going into before you try it. I didn't do that, right? I didn't try and learn, hey, how do you build a great marketing consultancy? And, oh, let me talk to some people who've done it before.

Right.

Let me go spend some time on the web kind of looking around for resources to learn more. I didn't do any of that. We just kind of played it by ear, and we were idiots about it, right? So of course we went into deep debt. Today, I think most folks who get into the technology startup space are 10 times more wiser and more intelligent. Even if they're 19-year-olds who just dropped out of college, they know a lot more about the process, what it should look like, what it shouldn't look like, than I did.

Got it. Okay. Well, I mean, I'm sure it was a very helpful experience.

Yeah, don't be an idiot. Cool.

No, that's always good advice. I should follow more too. Final question here. So obviously, you know, the team is really important at Moz. You guys have 130 people. Hiring people is probably one of the most important things you can do. What's your criteria when you are hiring people? What do you look for?

Yeah, so we have a set number of traits, and there's a few different interview systems. So our recruiters focus on, basically, do they possess the basic skills, and are they kind of a cultural and tacty match? And then we'll have whoever it is, the software engineers, marketing team, Sit down with those folks and go through their own rounds. There's a lot of things that we've found that predict a good, you know, predict a good moderator. So one of the big ones is humility.

Mm-hmm.

If you tend to be the type of person where we ask you, you know, tell me about something very impressive or things that you're very proud of in your career, and you cite things where you worked with a team and the team accomplished something and you were really proud of being on that team, And proud to help enable the success of that team versus saying, well, you know, I was saddled with a bunch of do-nothing losers and, you know, I was the hero. That tends to predict someone who's not going to be as good a match. And there's a number of others like that, but yeah, I think figuring those out for your own culture can be— and for your own team can be really helpful.

Wow, that actually reminds me of that book, Tribal Leadership that Tony Hsieh gave away for free. You guys can actually download it now, where he talks about people that are kind of level 3, where it's like, oh, I'm great. You really want to get to a company where it's level 4, where everyone talks about how great the whole team is. I think that's exactly what you're getting at. But Ren, thanks so much for this interview. I think this is really helpful stuff, and I think it's really going to help entrepreneurs grow their business.

My pleasure.

Thanks, Ren.