Building Teams, Pivoting, and the Future of Marketing with Rand Fishkin

AI and content, my fundamental belief is all the things that AI can make is now the floor. That's like the worst thing that can be produced on the internet, right? The cost is incredibly low, lower than any human effort. Anyone can do it. So it is not of unique value. It's not special. I don't care how much prompt engineering you think you're great at. The content that is outputted by a large language model or by a an image generation model will not— it will not stand out in the field. It will be the crowd. So to stand out in that field, you have to do things that humans are uniquely good at.

I want to start like at the genesis, you know, like we know Rand Fishkin, Moz, SparkToro, what you've been up to with, with your author. Like, I personally don't know too much about like, like, again, I've done my research, but like for the audience, like Let's go all the way back. How did you get into entrepreneurship and starting your first company? I read in one of your bios, you kind of had a tough time in the start, you lost all the money and then you started something out of university, but really give the audience a background on how you get started. How did you get started in the space of entrepreneurship and what was that natural transition into digital marketing? And let's set the stage. If you can share some dates, that would be helpful as well, like years.

Sure. Yeah. So I actually, I think I started in digital marketing before I became an entrepreneur. So I dropped out of college in 2001 and joined my mom's business, which she had been doing offline marketing, right? Like old school marketing, logos, letterhead, Yellow Pages ads, that kind of stuff, print, print ad design. And I started working with her building websites for her clients. This is like, you know, in the late '90s, early 2000s, lots of people wanted to get on the web for the very first time. So we were building websites for lots of small businesses in the Seattle area. And that did not go so well. After a few years of that, we were deep in debt and the business was doing miserably. Could barely, you know, make payroll. We couldn't make payroll most of the time. She wasn't getting paid. I was barely getting paid. And that is when I started having to do SEO because we had SEO subcontractors who would kind of help do that for our clients, but we couldn't afford to pay them, you know, and we still needed the money from our clients. And so it was like, okay, Rand, you got to figure out SEO and go do that for You know, for our clients. And so I struggled quite a bit, but eventually got relatively good at it. And then I started this blog called SEOmoz that detailed a lot of the things that I had learned about SEO and a lot of the things I was frustrated about with Google and how they worked. And over the next few years, that blog took off like a rocket. I think there just wasn't a lot of good information about SEO. We, unintentionally, you know, had, were sort of adopting the content marketing mindset. I was publishing 5 nights a week, you know, putting up a blog post every night. Um, and many, many people in the early SEO communities gravitated toward Moz. In 2007, um, I became the CEO of SEOmoz and the old entity, uh, that had done like website design and all that went away. And we raised a round of venture capital funding at the end of '07 and had started to build some software and had success with it. And then that really took off after '07. So we basically doubled revenue, software revenue every year after that. So having gone from SEO consulting and a blog to Software just took off like a rocket. We were obviously riding a couple trends. The growth of Google was a big one and the growth of SaaS was a big one. So people wanted to use software on the web and not have to get it installed. And we were at the right time, right place with both of those. And we had the right audience, right? All these people who are already paying attention to what we did. And I think that's why the business worked so well.

Yeah, awesome. Thanks so much for that background. Like, it's late '90s, you kind of give us the genesis, and, you know, obviously we know Moz was a great successful— like, it's still like, we use it internally at F5. I don't know if you know that we're a customer. Um, and then, um, yeah, then you kind of— you didn't really talk about it, but obviously that led to SparkToro. And, you know, the audience members who don't know, Rand also wrote a book called Lost and Found, which is Really interesting too. Like, do you wanna just dovetail a little bit and like tell us a little bit about the book and like, you know, you talk a little bit about the resilience of an entrepreneur and like, that would, that would be helpful to kind of just dive a little bit deeper into because, you know, a lot of our audience members would be watching this are first-time founders, maybe they're mentors who are like participating in early-stage companies, but we're definitely at the early stage or we have like investors at the early stage. So, and I think that is not a topic that's talked a lot. For various reasons, you know, it could be cultural or it could be— yeah, there's a lot of different dynamics, but would love to just like, again, we're just starting to set the stage right now, but like, can you tell us a little bit about the book and like kind of the premise around it? And then I'll kind of get into some of these heavy-hitting questions. Okay.

Yeah, so let's see. I was the CEO at Moz for many years and then stepped down from the role in 2014 during a bout with depression, and I promoted my longtime chief operating officer to CEO with the board's approval, of course. And then I stayed at the company for another 4 years, which probably was a mistake. I think that those, you know, those years were really, really tough. On everyone involved with Moz. And the company did not continue to grow as well. Growth rate sort of shrank, you know, every year thereafter, which obviously, you know, when you're a venture-backed company, the growth rate, they need that exponential hockey stick. How do you get to $1 billion? And Moz kind of tapped out around $50 million in revenue. And during that same time, I disagreed with a lot of the leadership team's, new leadership team's direction and decisions and became very frustrated with that. And so in, I think it was 2016, I started writing this book, Lost and Founder, about my experiences and sort of the things that I had learned good and bad about entrepreneurship, and my hope with the book was to be very open about the things that people usually don't discuss around companies and especially venture-backed startups because it doesn't make anybody look good. The overwhelming majority, 97%, 99%, of all companies that receive venture backing are going to fail to meet their investors' expected rate of return. 95%, I believe, will fail to meet even a minimal rate of return, like what, like, you know, 2x or something. And something over 80% won't even get investors their money back. So not even a 1x, right? Not even as good as giving a zero-interest loan. You're going to lose money on it. And in all of those companies, right? And all of those 99 out of 100 cases, the story is pretty ugly. Um, but no one has any interest in telling those. And so the only stories that entrepreneurs hear are the Facebooks and the Googles and the Apples and the Amazons. And, um, obviously, you know, people like WeWork and Uber who had meteoric rises and then spectacular falls too. But I think unfortunately, for whatever reason, you know, especially young folks in the entrepreneurship world are very attracted to the huge hypergrowth success stories. And there are so, so few of them, vanishingly few of them that happen. And so I wanted to, I wanted to tell the story of what, what that ugly middle Yeah, section looks like Moz wasn't a failure. I think, you know, after I left the company in 2021, Moz did sell, right? So like a private equity company bought Moz, but I don't think, you know, maybe our early stage investors made 5, 6x their money. Maybe our late stage investors made 1.5, 2x, you know, somewhere out there, way, way below. Obviously the sort of an X minimum that they're looking for. Got it. And that was really, yeah, it was not great. So Lost and Founder sort of tells this story. In recent years, a lot of folks have passed it around as kind of a cautionary tale of why you shouldn't raise venture capital. And it's, I think the Lost and Founder has become associated with an anti-VC movement. Which, which I'm not, I'm not mad about.

I, I, um, it's funny you bring that up. I interviewed Adam Robinson from RB2B. I don't know if you've seen him floating around on LinkedIn a little bit, but he's bootstrapped himself like 3 times over. And, and I'm like, hey, like, what's your deal? Like, well, do you not want to take venture capital money? He's like, I guess I, like, maybe if I hit like $10, $20 million in ARR or something like that, then like if I want to get at that point, but maybe he's like, but like, I like the freedom. I don't like someone breathing down my neck. I can take really bold decisions and not have a board breathe down my neck, right? And like, I don't wanna say it's a, like, I think you hit it spot on. There is like a bigger trend now. And we also advocate at F5, we tell our founders like, don't even think about venture. Like, you're not ready for that. Like, go, go get customers, go get customer revenues, grow organically and stuff. It's very interesting. I think you kind of saw that very, very early on, and now a lot of people are breathing it because like a lot of the venture capital dollars are also drying up, right? So you just need to get better at like generating revenue from your customers.

Well, and I want to be, you know, I want to be fair here. I did not, when I left Moz, I did not have the money to start SparkToro on my own. So SparkToro is not a bootstrapped company, but we also didn't want venture. And my frustration was that there's nothing in the middle, and there should be. There should be an asset class where people who want to build profitable long-term companies that can produce dividends, that can return money, um, to their investors, can be able to build that without the requirement of becoming a billion-dollar unicorn or dying by trying. And And there's nothing. It doesn't exist. And so we created our own docs. We worked with an attorney here in Seattle to create our own document structure that basically gave— so SparkToro is structured with 35 angel investors. So a lot of folks like yourself, right? And they put in between $15,000 and $100,000 checks each. We raised $1.3 million. And this is in 2018. And then in 2023, so last year, we paid them back their $1.3 million. And now every few years we pay dividends on the profits that the business makes. And we don't have a board of directors. We don't have a lot of investor input. Our investors are obviously happy to help us and they have been helpful, but they are very hands-off. And the beautiful thing about this is because they got their money returned to them and now they make profits. And if the company ever sells, of course, they get their money from that too. They can reinvest that money back into the startup ecosystem. And I think that's a really beautiful value proposition. I think that SparkToro can function as a dividend type of stock rather than a growth stock. And I'm actually— so my other company, Snackbar Studio, funded in exactly the same way. It's two classes of shares. One class of shares disappears after we make the payment back to our investors, repay them. I think this model could be really wonderful for businesses going forward. So I would love to see it take off. We actually did take our documents and open source them. So if you search Google for SparkToro funding, you'll find a blog post from me that links to Google Docs. That are lawyer-prepared, that are ready for use by anyone. So they're open-sourced and a few companies have raised money with them.

Yeah, that's great. I didn't know that that exists. Definitely we'll throw that up in the FII resources as well. No, that's a great, yeah, that's a great resource. I'm glad you're sharing it with the audience here. I do want to kind of, so we talked a little bit about Sparktor, we talked a little bit about the book, and all that. So I want to kind of get specific down to the founder and like the founder traits. And like, you picked up a lot of tidbits of advice on building teams, what type of traits a founder should have. So like, let's kind of start with like leadership and team building. Like, you build teams obviously, Moss, at SparkToro, and at your, uh, the other entity that you just mentioned. So like, a lot of the founders here, they're still starting out. So like, let's go back to like the days when you're starting off, um, like when you were starting maybe Moz, like when you're on a shoestring budget, like, and you're starting to build out your first team, what are, what are you exactly looking for? How are you evaluating it? And like, yeah, like maybe what is your advice around that, around that? And if you want to share whatever you can from your experience.

Yeah. I think my advice here is probably pretty succinct, which is I would encourage everyone to work with people who you really enjoy working with. Not the absolute best, most talented, worked at big company or has crazy success in the past. Work with people whose company you truly enjoy. You love being around them. They make you feel good about your work and your day. Going to work with people you dislike or that you're just kind of putting up with sucks. It really sucks. I'm going to tell you right now, like, it sucks away energy from your team. It makes you less productive. It makes you less excited about going to work. Don't do it. If you can possibly avoid it, just don't do it. And I would, if over time you discover that your team is not enjoying working with each other, I would urge you to make the hard decision and let go of the people who are the most difficult to work with, who everyone sort of is frustrated about. If they're going out for, you know, a drink after work and they're complaining about that person, let them go. No matter how important and how valuable you think they are, let them go. I wish I could go back in time to my early Moz days and and shake myself, just give him a slap and be like, just fire him. Just fire that asshole engineer that no one likes working with. My God.

It's funny, we had Bethany from SenseSpark. She's like a fairly new younger founder and like her wisdom on this was pretty interesting. She's like, hey, you have 5 people. If there's one bad apple, that's 20% of your workforce. You have 20% of like a naysayer.

I disagree. I fully disagree with that. That is not 20% of your workforce. That is 80% of your workforce. One bad apple will drag down everyone else's productivity and happiness. It is not just that person. I'm not talking about underperformance. That person, that wonderful, that like person that you need to let go, they might be the most productive member of your team. They are the person who you think is carrying the company and they are actually dragging it down because they are making it so that everybody else does not enjoy working with, working with them. And that means they don't enjoy working at your business. And that means your business is suffering. I promise you.

Yeah, that's spot-on wisdom. Highly recommend the founders, whoever was on this call, staple that on their board or whichever. Like, just work with great people. It makes a significant—

it's just what, uh, Tabitha said in the comments, right? One, one bad apple, it makes the other apples rot.

Yeah, perfect. Um, one, I want to just talk about one thing around— just to, again, we're trying to be more founder-centric and talk about the qualitative traits. Let's talk about decision-making. And you do talk about this in tidbits. It's like, as a founder, we're making decisions with like sometimes no data because it doesn't exist. We're going into a brand new market, we're figuring this out. You know, Reid Hoffman said, it's like you jump out of a plane, you build you build out a solution as you're going down. You've done this, this is not your first rodeo, this is like your third or fourth, and I'm sure you've had some small stuff in between. Let's talk about like, how are you making, like how does Rand Fishkin like make a decision like with all this experience and wealth, like especially if you like, you're going into an uncertain territory with limited data, right? Do you have a framework, do you flip a coin? Hey, how do you feel about this?

So I think one of the biggest things, I mean, look, I respect Reid Hoffman, but I don't like this analogy. I think, well, let's see. I think it does apply to a lot of venture-backed companies because you have a very short timeframe in which to prove that your thing works. I just hate that model. I think it's dumb as hell. And I would, I would argue that what you should instead have done is rather than jumping out of a plane, maybe you should try learning to ride a bike first. And then once the bike gets going at a nice speed, all right, maybe you transition to an electric bike. And then once that gets going, you can figure out a car. And the plane is like years and years and years in the future. What I'm saying is you can minimize your risk by structuring your business in such a way that not every decision has to be right, that you give yourself time to fail and find the right path. And that means that a lot of decisions are not life or death for the business. One of the things, when SparkToro started, I had lots of theories about things that would work in the product. I tell Casey this all the time, my co-founder. Who's our CTO and builds most of the product, almost all the product. And I often have this conversation with Casey where I say, hey, I'm going to suggest that we build features in the product that are not going to work. People will not like them. They won't resonate. They won't work. 80% of the features that you're going to build, that I'm going to tell you to build, are not going to work. But 20% are. And we don't know what those are, but But because of the way we've raised money, because of the way we structure our business, because we're profitable and we have very low expenses, we can afford to wait. We can afford to be wrong a bunch of times before we're right. Venture world does not let you do that, right? They basically say, no, no, we're going to invest in 100 companies and one of them is going to accidentally be right. And then we're going to, you know, make them seem like geniuses in the press 10 years later. And I ain't about that life. I'm telling you, right? If you can give yourself the freedom to fail, to make lots of poor decisions, will your intuition catch up? Yes, absolutely. Do I make way better decisions now than I did 20 years ago in my career? Absolutely. Of course. Did that come through a framework or a process, or I'm going to give you this 10-step list? No. Hell no. The decisions you make are going to be better than the decisions I'll make because you know your business, you know your customers, you know your audience. The only thing I could possibly tell you to do, which unfortunately very few startups do, is just talk to your customers all day, every day if you possibly can. Talk to your customers a lot. That will give you the intuition to make right decisions and then structure your business in such a way that it's okay to be wrong.

Yeah, I love that. I love the last part there, structure the business so you can— you're— it's okay to fail and it's okay to just learn, learn and iterate.

Learn.

Yeah. That's a big one because not a lot of people emphasize that. It's just like, let's go. I guess on that note, I asked this question to a few product people. I'd be curious, how do you define product-market fit?

I have a blog post about this. Hang on, I'm gonna put it in the chat because I think the whole concept is dumb. I don't think it exists. I'm serious.

I'm gonna change something in the FI curriculum. Like, there's a whole—

yeah, yeah, here we go. So the thing, the thing that's broken about the idea, the concept of product-market fit, is this weird belief that you either have it or you do not have it. And that is not true for any— it is completely and absolutely a spectrum. You are always on a spectrum of, is the product that we've built resonating with the audience and customers who need it. And that is more true for some businesses and less true for other businesses. But this binary is insane. It's just so dumb. Like, oh, until you have product market fit, you should do these things. And then once you flip the switch, you should do these other things and none of these other of these things. And that is not how any of this works. I Yeah, I can't argue against that enough. I'll give you an example. So I run an indie video game studio, right? Snackbar Studio. It's working on its first game, but it doesn't have a lot of failure tolerance. If we launch, if we release that game, it's not like software as a service, right? Moz and Sparktoro, where if we release something, we can improve it, we can upgrade it, we can roll back a change, we can add something else in, like we can modify the product and then see how it lands with customers. Games are not that way. Games are a lot like movies or a book. When you launch it, the product is what it is, and people are either going to love it or hate it. And, you know, you're sort of off to the races. So that sounds like the binary product-market fit that I'm arguing against. And here would be my argument, which is very few small studios playtest. They don't get large groups of people to play their game and see if those people come back to the game again and again and resonate with it and put more hours into it. And that is a sign that your game is fun. That is a sign that your game is having success. And so one of the things that we did in our budget with Snack Bar is say, we're going to, on a small scale, act like a big AAA studio and see if our game is fun before we ever release it. We are going to do extensive playtesting and we're going to check hours in and all that type of stuff rather than releasing and crossing our fingers and hoping for the best. That's what I'd argue for in every other kind of business too.

Yeah, very, very interesting. Um, just like, there's like a bunch of webinar content we have around PMF. That whole playlist is just, just throw it out the door. Um, but yeah, no, it's good. I'm glad you're giving contrarian thinking around this because like we've been harping on— there's like schools of thought around PMF, around it. So, and you've kind of been like, yeah, That doesn't make sense. It's either you got it or not. I remember Eric Ries talks about this in his interview with Lenny and he's like, if you have to ask me about product market fit, like, you know the answer to that question already, right? And that was kind of his approach to it and stuff. But yeah, I think there is maybe—

Yeah, I like and respect Eric a bunch. Eric was very kind. He actually introduced me to my agent for Lost and Founder for the book. I think very highly of him, but I strongly disagree. There's no such thing as product market fit. No one has it, no one doesn't have it. It's just how much or little is your product resonating with customers and what can you do to improve that over time?

Yeah, and I don't think there's a right or wrong around that. It's just like ultimately you guys are landing at the same conclusion, right? It's like, well, how much will your customer love your product, right?

Cool.

I think that was a bombshell right there. But no, I definitely appreciate that.

To me, you know what I equate it to? I equate it to this. It's like someone saying, does your business have revenue or not? And that's not the point, right? Like the goal is you want more of the revenue and not less of the revenue. And all the things that you can do in the world around your business are like to grow, get better, Yeah, so this idea of this binary just boggles my mind. No, no, we should go to the other questions.

But yeah, no, no, we have a whole talk on this, like why product market fit doesn't exist. But no, like, I'm glad that you do bring it up because it does show the founders here that are following this type of content, like, hey, you need to look at both sides, right? Um, one of the things I do want to kind of dive deep into— how are we for time? Okay, we have a I will do about like 3 more questions and then jump into audience Q&A. But let's talk about like, you know, you've been in this space, you said since late '90s, we're in the 2020s. I was born in the '90s, so I always think like, hey, like 2000 is just like 5 years down, but I was like, what, it's 20 years ago? But anyway, you've been in the space for some time. Space is always evolving, like digital marketing and all the types of like, We'll talk about like learning and development and how are you always on top of it? And like, you've been right. Like, even when I watched your video when you're talking about, um, you opened up with what's your favorite pasta and risotto and all that type of stuff. I really like that, by the way, and that definitely resonated quite a bit. But like, how are you like on this? Like, how are you able to consume content and know kind of like, look what the trends are, provide advisory around like, hey, this is kind of where you guys should be thinking about. Like, how, like, again, Amanda came up with zero-click, uh, the zero-click content. I don't know if that was— I'm assuming it was the two of you, but like, you've been on it. So then, and the reason I want to bring this is not specific to digital marketing. I think digital marketing is any field, but as that founder, that continuous learning, adaptability, development, like that hunger and desire has to be there. And you've been doing that for like 20+ years. Like again, like are you doing this with a bottle of wine? Like is there a pill you take to like absorb all this? Like what's your practice on that? Because I do feel like eventually you get to a local maximum and be like, hey, I'm not learning anymore. Like I feel like I'm the king of my domain, which is probably the wrong attitude or probably is the wrong attitude. But yeah. Would love to kind of get your thoughts on professional development, learning as a founder and like your journey around that.

Let's see. I would say a quality that I have that probably helps here is a deep, genuine curiosity and care for other people. So, you know, I get to meet a lot of people as part of my work, right? So just before this webinar, I was speaking at Seattle Interactive Conference, which is obviously here in Seattle, about a 15-minute drive from my house. And yeah, like after my session this morning, I talked to half a dozen folks about like their experiences and what they had seen in the world and what problems they were having. And some of them, you know, reached out to me on LinkedIn and great, like wonderful that I think that that is constant learning for me, like absolutely always learning, always talking to new people. Even here, right? Like we're in the comments together and, you know, people are telling me that, you know, I'm the founder and CEO of this. Here's what we do. And even that tells me, oh, okay, this is a space that people are interested in. Oh, there's not that many people interested in this other thing. You know, this question got a bunch of thumbs up. That must be something people are deeply curious about. I should go research that more. I think it's just that natural desire to learn more and know more, and also just an empathy for people, right? If we're on this call together and you're trying to build your business, start up your company, I love that. I care so much. I care so deeply about people who are trying to start new things, especially things that can exist profitably for a long period of time because I I truly believe that's what's good for the world. I think that right now wealth and power and economic prowess is far too concentrated. And the only way to break the stranglehold is innovation from small new companies. I want to see tons of competition in the economy. I think that will lift up people's, you know, standard of living and it will spread wealth throughout the world. And that wealth can be used to, you know, fight hunger and disease and climate change and all the threatening, you know, fascism that we're facing. I love that. I think that's a beautiful thing. That's why I love entrepreneurship, right? Because I think it is a solution to all this stuff. And so I care about entrepreneurs and so I want to talk to them and so I want to learn what troubles they're facing and then try and help them solve whichever problems I can. I don't know how, you know, you see this online sometimes like, I don't know how to tell you how to care about other people. Care about other people. That is the biggest solution. I think the worst entrepreneurs out there are the ones who are in it exclusively for themselves. They're not there to solve someone else's problem. But that solving someone else's problem is the core of what makes a good product and good company. And I know, I know there are people out there who will say, well, but look at Elon Musk. He clearly cares about no one but himself. I think you're probably right today, but I truly believe when he started The companies that he started and mostly the ones he runs now are the ones he's bought. But I think he cared about that problem too, right? He cared about solving that problem. And more directly, the people who work at those companies care about solving those problems. So ignore the rich billionaire guy who bought his way into Tesla and Starlink and all this other stuff. The people who work at those companies want to solve those problems.

No, I appreciate that. Like the, those, that kind of breakdown and overview, like you talked about. It's like humility, it's empathy, it's always being curious. I think that's like the main thing. As long as you're curious, the rest will follow type of thing. Um, one more question, and then I do want to ask the final question, which is going to be about like the future, but, and then we'll open up for audience. But you hinted a little bit towards this when you were talking about your earlier entrepreneurship journeys, but like, let's talk about the pivots, the art of the pivots, and how do you kind of evaluate that as a founder? Because I think that's a really tough decision to make, um, should probably come naturally, ideally with data. But like, I think you do talk about it as well in some parts when I was doing the research, it came up. But like, you know, I'd be curious to know, like, when you're advising and you speak to other founders and they're like, hey, we're thinking of pivoting, from one point to another. What are your kind of like, what's your thought process around that? Like, is that, again, maybe just like, let's not think about the venture-funded companies because for them it's like, they're kind of like sniffing like wherever money is. Like, oh yeah, let's go. And like they'll pivot every like third week. But like, you know, as like a bootstrapped or like a, let's say lightly funded company, which is I'm calling your company's architecture. As a lightly funded company, like where do you kind of see that? Because I would imagine like SparkToro, like probably also internally you've had those conversations, you know, like how do you navigate that, right? So would love to get your two cents on that.

So I did write a chapter about pivots in Lost and Founder, although it is sort of centered on the venture world's advice around pivoting. and my, my general argument is that if you are pivoting exclusively for the sake of chasing the money and where growth is, is going, you should just be very careful not to do that until, until and unless you have really exhausted your opportunities in, in one field. Um, I think pivoting, for example, is what killed Moza's growth. So Moz, you know, at the board of directors level, we had big conversations for, you know, many quarters in a row. This is like 2012, 13, 14. And the fear from the board was the SEO software market is not big enough. It won't be big enough to produce a billion-dollar company. And so therefore, Moz should expand its offerings and go after, you know, email marketers and content marketers and social media marketers and influencer marketing and all these other disciplines. Because it, you know, we, we believed that those markets were growing and were also going to be big. But we did that way before Moz, the product, was mature and secure in its leadership position. Um, and as a result, we turned off a lot of our historic customers who switched to other products. Um, SEMrush, which, which became a public company. Um, and Ahrefs, which, you know, is doing north of $100 million in revenue. So those two companies proved that if we had stayed focused on SEO and continued to be the market leader, we almost certainly would have achieved our investors' goals and our outcomes that we wanted. But instead we pivoted because we believed there was more growth to be had elsewhere. And I think that that's where that chapter comes from. My advice on pivoting is if you have intuition that something is not working, that the business you've chosen isn't working, it's not resonating, the market is changing and moving. I think that intuition should be trusted, but interrogated. And it can be interrogated with 3 things. Data, passively collected, like large-scale data. So, you know, market research, you buy a bunch of clickstream data, you buy a bunch of market intelligence data. Surveys. Good to run surveys to your audience. Try to run them to other broader audiences. You can pay people to distribute those. You can co-market with surveys. And third is interviews. Have actual calls and interviews and sit-downs and coffees and chats with lots of people who are your existing customers and the market you're thinking about pivoting to. Talk to them about what you're thinking, get their feedback and thoughts. I do recommend hiring someone to do those interviews or contracting because I have found that as the founder of the business, people don't tell you the truth. They tell you what they think you want to hear. Right? People are just nice. Like, I know, you know, in the United States, there's like the belief that people are not nice or not kind, but a lot of people are very kind. And when I have a conversation, you know, me and you, Eihan, get on the phone, I'm like, hey, I'm thinking about doing this with SparkToro. 9 times out of 10, even if you don't think it's a great idea, you'll be like, Rand, that's a great idea. I love that. I want to see you do that. So I don't do it. We hired Asia Aranjio, who runs Demand Maven. To do all of our customer interviews. And she's amazing because she does this thing that I cannot do, which is she will ask a question. She'll be like, yeah, tell me how you do your prioritization of your content process. And then the person will be like, well, yeah, we use a checklist. And she'll just sit there and wait. She'll just wait for them to give more. And then they will, they'll expand on it. I watch the video recordings because Casey and I try and learn from them.

It's awesome. So that's my advice. No, that's great. And like also you're removing bias, right? There's so much bias, like especially if you're going to people that you know and then you're very public, so people probably don't wanna let you down or say something that's off. So like, so there's different like confirmation biases and stuff and all that. All right, I gotta ask the question. A lot of people, you know, you're Rand Fishkin, Moz marketing guru, all that stuff. I wanna talk about the future of vision and like, you know, you talk a lot about this in your posts with the zero click, Clicks and like, and I think you in that pasta, that's pasta, I'm calling the pasta video, but the, or the ravioli video, sorry, the risotto video.

It's, yeah, I'll put the link in the chat.

Yeah. You talked about this where it's like marketing today is like as much as it's futuristic AI and all this other fancy stuff, it's actually marketing from the '70s. It's like right place, right person, right time. And all that type stuff. So like, you know, maybe you wanna take a few minutes here as the closer and then we'll go to the audience questions. Folks, if you're in the Q&A, please upvote the one you want so I know which one to ask Rand. But like, I'd love to get your thoughts. Like where are we going with all this? Like the future of marketing, we've got AI going on, there's AI content generation, there's multimedia generation. Like I can create these videos, I can create a 3D Rand to say whatever I want. A lot of that is noise and there's signal versus noise, but like, yeah, I would love to get your, your take on it. Yeah. Right. As someone who's been in this space and, and been a market leader.

So let's see, here's what I'd say about AI in marketing. Well, let's see, AI in content. My fundamental belief is all the things that AI can make is now the floor. That's like the worst thing that can be produced on the internet, right? The cost is incredibly low, lower than any human effort. Anyone can do it. So it is not of unique value. It's not special. I don't care how much prompt engineering you think you're great at. The content that is outputted by a large language model or by an image generation model will not, it will not stand out. In the field. It will be the crowd. So to stand out in that field, you have to do things that humans are uniquely good at. Here are some things that large language models are terrible at. Having a new perspective. It just doesn't. AI will never have a new perspective because a large language model is tokens that are coming after other tokens, right? And it's good at predicting which tokens come after other tokens. So it cannot do new and novel things. Comedy, humor, fun. Have you ever tried to get ChatGPT to make something funny, to tell you a joke? It is god-awful. I swear to God, dad humor is 100 times better than what ChatGPT will do. It just has no— there's no soul to it. There's no— it's not funny. Like, it's the worst. I also think it's really bad at insight. So it can give you lots of information, but it cannot give you insight. It's almost never the case that you'll look at something, read something produced by a large language model and say, wow, that's really insightful. Could it ever get there?

I doubt it.

I don't think that's how tokens that come after other tokens ever work. I think insight comes from a novel approach and novel thinking. But that's, you know, that's just my 2 cents. In terms of where I think—

So one thing I would add to that list, just so we're on that, is survey data. So like if you're able to survey your, an audience and get something that's a little bit unique that you can like maybe—

I mean any kind of, yeah, like any kind of research.

Yeah.

Like a chart, a graph. I mean here, Here's an example. I did a post on SparkToro that is not, has nothing to do with like my own research. I mean, I did research. I put together a chart. It went crazy bonkers viral because I had this insight that over time email marketing, you know, open and click-through rates probably hadn't changed. So I went back and got the data. ChatGPT was useful to me because I asked it, hey, will you pull up any study from the past 20 years that's ever mentioned an email click-through rate or open rate or delivery rate? And then I put all of those together into one chart and ta-da, like this did extraordinarily well. It was like the cheapest market research I've ever done. Because it was just citing a bunch of other people's studies, did great, right? So I, yeah, I think, I think you're absolutely right. That, that novelty and that insight, uniqueness, things that a large language model can't do, that, that to me is how you stand out.

Yeah, so I didn't mean to interrupt your flow there, but like, I do, because we're really, we're looking at that at F5 and be like, okay, like, how do we produce this stuff? And because, you know, like, we grew organically the same way that you've done, which is like, hey, let's just optimized for SEO, but like now it's becoming super saturated. Okay, look, hey, like we have this network, global network of like great people. How do we capture that and present it to life? But yeah, sorry to interrupt your flow. So you're talking about the vision and the future of marketing?

No, I mean, I think I'm pretty good there. The only thing I would say is marketing is moving from a world that is attribution-centric to a world that's gonna have to be lift-based measurement-centric. And so yeah, I shared that, that video you mentioned on the risotto one is in the comments there.

So, you know, when you release that attribution one, I think of like companies like HockeyStack, which is like this YC company that's like doing really well on B2B and like you're coming back at, it's really interesting. And then I remember seeing a keynote by Gaetano at CXL Live a few years ago and he's like, all this attribution data is like mumbo jumbo. Like just because you saw this person click like 3 times, that's not gonna work on the next prospect, right? Especially in the B2B. In B2C maybe, like I've been on both sides of B2B and B2C and there's like, I hate when marketers are like, hey, B2B and B2C are the same type. It's not the same. Significantly different. On the B2B side attribution, like it's a little bit wonky. B2C maybe, like I could see some benefit, but like, yeah, those are, anyway, audience, Ryan's been very generous and shown some great content there. Please go and look and we'll definitely add this all to the show notes and the recording if you're watching this. My team will kind of go through this. All right, how are we for time? Okay, we're at 46. I want to take a few audience questions and then what we'll do is we'll break out for some networking. So whoever's in the audience, we'll have some virtual tables, you guys can network with one another. All right, I had one question which I really liked about an experimentation because you briefly talked about it and love to go deep. So Scott from Toronto is asking, when experimenting with new features, do you value, do you value early feedback on prototypes before building the feature, or if you had more success of building them right into the product, getting feedback on a live version. So from a product development perspective, are you doing customer development, right? Yeah. And then launching. But yeah.

So this one, it's, it's real simple. It's kind of a binary for me. If the feature is very big and it's gonna take weeks or months of effort, then I absolutely would encourage you to do feedback and testing on the prototype, right? A wireframe, a sketch, just a conversation even. If the feature is going to take KC 2 weeks or less to build, just build it. You don't know, right? The product, getting the feedback, that whole process will take longer than 2 weeks. So just build it, build it, use your intuition, go for it. Especially if we're talking about, you know, software as a service. In the video game, for example, right? Or when I was writing Lost and Founder, I didn't have those opportunities. And so then you really have to have phenomenal instincts that come from deep experience and background because you don't have the chance. The only thing you can really do is like build, right? I can write the book and then have people read it or read a chapter to a friend, to my wife, get feedback from my editor, that kind of thing. But I don't have the opportunity to like put it out there and float it and see how it goes. Same thing is true in the game, right? We can, we can build something in that we think is right, that we think is going to help the player enjoy the game more, get more fun out of it. We can playtest, but we can't put it out in the wild.

Got it. Yeah, sound advice. I'm gonna try— Naveen from Dayton is asking, how do you keep up with market expectations? Did you follow them closely or totally focus on the product or service you provide. So this is, I think, still on the same path, like how you're collecting customer feedback, or maybe what's your frequency of market feedback. Yeah, like do you have a CSM team? Like how do you evaluate that?

No, I, like I said, there's 3 of us who work at Sparktor, right? It's me, Amanda, and Casey.

Um, oh, I didn't know the team was that small. I thought it was—

okay, wow, just the 3 of us.

Yep.

Um, so yeah, we— I do pay attention to market trends and market data, market research reports. I, I find that stuff fascinating. I use it to inform, you know, the decisions that I make around what to invest in for the future, but not exclusively. Like, I combine that with what do I think about, you know, um, customer feedback and things people have been telling us. We get a ton of emails from our customers. I shouldn't say a ton. We get a small number of emails from our customers every week. Those obviously go into our decisions as well. So, but yeah, nothing formal. I like it that way.

Okay, awesome. And then what's the, like, the frequencies weekly you said on getting feedback, or like, is it like how often?

I mean, it's all the time. Yeah, feedback is like all the time, just constant in the background. It's always happening. I'm sure there's a few emails in my inbox right now with with feedback or thoughts around things, you know, comments that people leave on my LinkedIn videos when I post about the product, all that kind of stuff. So it's constant.

Got it.

Cool.

Let's move on to the next. Ronald from Mount Laurel is asking, can you elaborate on the customer adoption spectrum? You talked a little bit about PMF and we think, but like, how do you actually apply this in practice?

Yeah, it's basically the, a philosophy of regular improvements as opposed to a philosophy of one day we will have this thing called product market fit and then we will change all the things that we do in our business from product development and market research and audience understanding to sales, right? Like push it out, sales, distribution, marketing. That philosophy I find maddening and dumb. And the constant improvement I think that's the way to go.

Okay, on that note, Landry from Tunisia or from Tunis is asking, when you're building, when you're thinking about MVPs, what would your advice be to founders? Should they be building a lot? What is that threshold of how many features that you'd be building and all that?

Yeah, so I think about, I have a lot of thoughts on MVP as well. And I've written about that. But broadly speaking, my belief is that you should make sure that the core problem is being solved by what you release. Some number of features are needed to do that, but certainly not all of them. And you can validate this by having private testing groups of people, right? People who say, I'm really interested in the problem that you're solving. I wanna beta test, I wanna see the thing before it comes out. I wanna, you know, play around with it. That's a great way to build up an email list too, which is super helpful when you launch. So I would just urge people to do that. I do, I think I have a post about this.

It's like the death of MVPs.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean, I think it's called, I have a buddy who wrote about like, he's like MVPs are like, don't like, build them, but always optimize for the experience because you'll end up with something called the minimum viable experience, and that's the work that's even significantly worse. His name is Mo Ali, but, um, but yeah, like, I think that's very true. It's like you definitely want to build for, for something, um, very, very specific, right? And that's where B2B, like, you— the customer conversations are really, really helpful versus B2C. Um, Michael, you shared that. Let's try to do— we're running pretty close.

Yeah, um, I was gonna say I have to run in just a minute, so—

okay, let's do one more question here. Uh, this one from Scott again on the angel path is, uh, you said very appealing versus the VC path. Is it— is there a particular profile you're looking for in that investor? Again, most of these founders here are early stage.

Yeah, so the frustrating part here is not a lot of investors are familiar with this. And so you have to get people comfortable with it. But what I've found is, you know, you got to build your network of people who have money. The good news is, you know, like 1 in 20 Americans have more than $1 million. So they're accredited investors. And you have to be able to get people who know you, like you, and trust you so that when you send them an email and you say, hey, like, I think, you know, I think this idea is going to work and here's all this stuff, um, you can sort of get them over the hurdle of this is a different new type of investing. Personal network is, is all that's there. You— I have not found that people who didn't know me already were willing to invest in Snack Bar or SparkToro. Um, so that's a, that's a networking process. And, and one of the best ways to build up your network, like I said, is empathy and care for other people. I think my whole network comes because I was like, oh man, I'm really interested in what you're doing. Like, tell me more about that. Let's hang out. I want to learn. How can I help you? You know, I had this like unique expertise first in, in SEO and then in digital marketing as a whole. And so I was able to help lots of people. And those people that I helped, many of them are who became investors for us. Um, I also really— this is weird, but I I know people recommend against that. I like raising money from friends. I really do. I like my friends to be part of the business. I don't think, you know, we're mature, emotionally secure adults. They know it's a risky thing. I know it's risky. Like, I'm going to try and keep it as low risk as possible, but I love having people that I enjoy, people that I like along for the journey. And I have I would say almost everyone who's a SparkToro investor I would count as a friend, probably at least two-thirds. Almost everyone who's a Snack Bar investor, a friend.

Nice. Get your friends to invest. Ryan, thank you so much. This has been fun. I, like, again, I wish we had you for another hour.

Yeah, my pleasure. And thank you so much for having me. Thanks to everyone in the comments for keeping it really active and vibrant. And I wish all of you the very best of luck. If I can be helpful to anyone, you guys have my LinkedIn. You can also contact me. I'm rand@sparktoro.com.

Perfect. Yeah. Well, thanks so much. We'll let you go. Yeah, Rand, thank you so much. It's been awesome. We'll publish this and then we'll share the details with you later. But everyone wants to—

Thank you.

Thanks, Rand. We're going to end this session now, and what we'll do is we'll be able to do some light networking. Feel free to stick around and discuss with each other. There'll be some virtual tables. We'll have some team members on it. We still have about 50 people live, so hopefully it will be enjoyable. If you want to learn a little bit more about App-Fi, there's Emilian from our team has shared some more information. Thanks everyone. Enjoy the rest of your day. We'll see you at another online event.

Thanks.