Rand Fishkin is the cofounder and CEO of SparkToro, makers of fine audience research software. He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through his writing, videos, speaking, and his book, Lost and Founder. When Rand’s not working, he’s usually cooking a fancy meal for the love of his life, author Geraldine DeRuiter.

Great Moments

05:07 – Mindset of success: More than just numbers

06:36 – Evolution of an agency: From design to SEO

07:39 – The value of imperfect tools in entrepreneurship

09:17 – Blogging success and transition to writing a book

11:26 – Unannounced ventures and being an entrepreneur

12:12 – Shifting focus: From demos to videos for product understanding

15:21 – Building a supportive community and overcoming fears

16:37 – Success and unique approach of SparkToro’s Office Hours

Find Rand Online

https://sparktoro.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/randfishkin/

https://mastodon.social/@randfish

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Transcript (Provided by CastMagic.io)

Seth [00:00:00]:

Entrepreneurs Enigma is a podcast for the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. With the wins and the fails that we all face being entrepreneurs, how we learn from adversity. Every week, I talk to a different entrepreneur with a story to tell. I’m Seth Goldstein. Come with me on the journey. This is Entrepreneurs Enigma. Let’s get started. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Entrepreneurs and Thing of podcast. I am, as always, for the past, my whole life, Seth, I am here with a legend in the digital marketing space, rand Fishkin. He founded the company when he founded it was called SEO Maz. Then it became Maas, and he wrote the book Lost and Founder. If you’re watching the video, you can see behind me, I have it nicely displayed back there. Great book. Pick it up at your local bookseller. He is this co founder and CEO of Sparturo, an audience intelligence platform. He is also the psychic to Geraldine Deruder and helps her in the kitchen with making gourmet meals. So let’s add Rand here. Hey, Rand. How’s it going, buddy?

Rand [00:01:14]:

Good. Seth.

Seth [00:01:15]:

Good. Did I miss anything there? Oh, he’s also a world traveler.

Rand [00:01:21]:

Let’s see. So I do most of the cooking and almost all of the cleaning of the kitchen. Geraldine helps me out.

Seth [00:01:30]:

She’s your psychic in the kitchen. You’re her psychic traveler in the world.

Rand [00:01:34]:

Exactly. But let’s see. I think the only thing that you missed is I am also the CEO and co founder and creative director of a video game studio. But that hasn’t been fully announced yet.

Seth [00:01:50]:

I didn’t miss it. I didn’t know. Video game studio. That’s exciting.

Rand [00:01:55]:

Yeah. I have been running this sort of other side business for a few years now and about to go fundraise for that. Not at all stressful.

Seth [00:02:09]:

Not at all stressful. But you’re a founder. I mean, you kind of lived an entrepreneurial dream. You have an idea, you go out and you run with it.

Rand [00:02:18]:

I think that’s both a blessing and a curse.

Seth [00:02:22]:

It is. You got a book out of the deal. I’m probably have another book. Do you think there’s a sequel to that book?

Rand [00:02:31]:

Yeah, that’s the plan. I think my hope is that we can launch this game, and Spark Toro has been doing quite well. So I hope to sort of tell the Spark Toro journey in the next book and also talk about this very unique project that should be hopefully playable in a couple of years.

Seth [00:02:53]:

Always up to something. If you follow Rand on social media, he’s up to something, whether it’s dropping and breaking his phone abroad may I rest in peace, or just just traveling around. And you’re very public on social media, which I like, but I feel like there’s a healthy respect for social media that you have, because we’re around the same age, and we know what it was like before social media.

Rand [00:03:22]:

Yeah.

Seth [00:03:23]:

So we kind of realized, all right, this could be really addictive, and we all got addicted to it at some point. We’re able to pull back a little easier because we know what it was like beforehand.

Rand [00:03:33]:

I feel like with social, it’s a good tool, but it’s smart not to make it your whole life, right. It’s a fine tool for sharing your adventures and keeping in touch with friends and seeing what they’re up to. And it’s a fine tool for marketing and sharing your business and professional pursuits or interests. But if it becomes more than those.

Seth [00:03:56]:

Things problematic, it can be. I’m trying to teach my ten year old how to not make it problematic, and it’s going to be uphill battle, but we’re working on it with him, so it’s definitely get him young. So you can kind of teach him, this is not everything, and what you see online is not. That’s the thing. People might look at Rand and say, oh, wow, he’s an overnight success. And I’ve said this on all the shows. You’ve been at this for decades. Not to make you feel old or anything. You’ve been at it for a while so people could come in and just see Rand now. He was the CEO and founder of Maz. He’s a published author. He’s now the CEO of Spartoro. He’s going to do a game coming out soon. All that stuff. It’s like, wow, he’s got it made. Well, it’s been a few years in the making, and I’m sure there’s been sleepless nights as well. We’re going to take a quick break here from our sponsors and get right back to the show.

Rand [00:04:56]:

Still plenty of those. Yeah. I think that having it made is a mindset in a lot of ways more than an actual number. I mean, I think you can point to most of the world’s wealthiest people and they obviously have it made, but they don’t seem particularly happy or well rested or relaxed.

Seth [00:05:20]:

Warren Buffett, though, I mean, he seems pretty chill.

Rand [00:05:24]:

Yeah. I think there’s a few counterexamples, right, of folks who’ve whatever, made lots of money and are very happy with that and don’t need to prove things to themselves or anyone else, but watch him.

Seth [00:05:40]:

Be pacing his house every night in Omaha, Nebraska, and we just don’t know about it.

Rand [00:05:48]:

I suspect there’s probably some stress there, but that’s fine. I think that a certain amount of stress in an entrepreneur’s life or anyone’s life is healthy, right. That the struggles that we go through, they make for good stories. They make for good adventures and journeys, good books. And the journey. If you don’t get joy out of the journey, the destination isn’t going to be fulfilling either.

Seth [00:06:11]:

That’s so true. From what I remember from the book. I read the book a little while ago, and I started paging through it today saying, I have to review this because it’s quite a story. It wasn’t SEO maz. It started with your mom back as an agency, you were doing actual not tools, but you were actually helping companies. You’re an agency. That’s what an agency does. And then morphed into the tool, which I actually use and I love, and it’s fantastic. I use sparturo. And you come up with good tools, buddy. You come up with good tools.

Rand [00:06:50]:

Well, thanks.

Seth [00:06:53]:

So what was the genesis of, like, I mean, because this started back in the early aughts, or even before that even.

Rand [00:06:59]:

Well, so my old company, Maz yes, Ma started back in the early Aughts, went from kind of web design and graphic design, struggling there to let’s help people with SEO. And really it was because the blog, the SEO Moz blog, became very big and influential in the sort of sphere of professional search marketers that when we launched software as a subscription, it took off just because people knew us, liked us, trusted us, paid attention to us. And I think that’s the thing, anybody who’s in the agency or consulting world and they say, oh, well, I want to get into software, my response is not, oh, it’s about the quality of your tool, or do you have great product market fit, or those kinds of things. It’s have you captured the audience already that’s going to buy your subscription product, and do they like you and trust you, and are you the best solution for them? So that when you launch this thing, you have this big microphone to speak to your audience. And I think that is not how most agency operators think about their business, and not how folks think about the transition from a services or consulting world to a product world. But it should be, because, very frankly, I mean, Seth, you played around with the early versions of Mosley. That product was not good. Right. In its first three or four years, it was better than what else was out there, which was almost exactly it worked.

Seth [00:08:32]:

I think what you’re aiming for was that we have a good blog and we have a tool that works. It wasn’t pretty either.

Rand [00:08:38]:

Yeah, it was not pretty. It barely functioned, but it was better than the alternative, which was not using any tools at all and doing all this stuff manually. And many agency owners, service providers, entrepreneurs think, I also have that thing. I have that thing that’s better than nothing. And you might be right. You might even have an outstanding, extraordinary product. But if you are not already capturing the audience, right, if people don’t have sort of what I’d call ambient awareness of your brand and the problem your product solves and the reason they should trust you over everyone else, it’s going to be very hard to scale up something the way Maz did. Right. The 30,000, 40,000 people who read the blog every day, that’s where all those sales came from. That’s how the company took off.

Seth [00:09:24]:

That’s pretty wild. And so then, since then, you wrote a book, you’ve left Mods, you started sparturo. That one came out of the box. Pretty. You did a good job on that.

Rand [00:09:37]:

I learned my lesson.

Seth [00:09:38]:

Yeah, but even with sparturo, I remember you announced sparturo. I jumped right in. I was like, Rand did something new. I got to go play with this thing. It was a little rough. It still had some bumps and bruises and stuff like that at the very beginning because you have to kind of learn. And iterate along the way a customer says, I need this. Well, we even think about doing that. Oh, we should do that, and that kind of thing. And that’s sort of what I’ve seen sparturo grow into. Now, have you done Mastodon yet in spartura? Or is that something you’re working towards?

Rand [00:10:10]:

You can see some Mastodon data. I mean, Mastodon is not quite big enough to power a lot of our index, but we do crawl in index data from there.

Seth [00:10:19]:

Because I remember once Maston became the next whatever you want to call what Maston is, you were like, we’re going to get there, guys. We’re going to get there. And you explain, and you’re very transparent, and I love that about you, that you’re like, we’re going to get there. And this is why we’re not there yet.

Rand [00:10:37]:

I think the challenge with Macedon is it’s not quite there yet from a network perspective, 12 million accounts, but I think about three and a half million active users, which is a lot of people like, it really is. I think if this were ten years ago, the media would be talking about Mastodon all day long. But because we’re now in the age of hundreds of millions and billions of users, it’s a little bit of a struggle. And also, I think the media doesn’t know what to do with a distributed nobody particularly owns it, right? They want a bombastic, hard headed CEO.

Seth [00:11:12]:

Who’S got that over there?

Rand [00:11:14]:

Yeah, but I’m just saying, right? Media attention focuses on that because that drives clicks, right? If it’s like, well, here’s this chill thing that a lot of people contribute a little bit to, and it’s going really smoothly. The media is like, well, there’s no story there on Twitter. Everybody’s like, oh man, write about that, click on that.

Seth [00:11:35]:

It’s kind of also why WordPress doesn’t make the mainstream media that often, except for like when there’s a big misstep or Matt puts his foot in his mouth, which happens occasionally, or like, the pandemic happens. He’s like the king of remote everything. Then he became that’s like a story there. Until then, it was like, it’s distributed. Everyone has a blog, blogs are yesterday, so that kind of thing. So you said you’re onto a new book eventually for sparturo, about spartoro and the game, the studio. Here’s a question. What is the best thing about being an entrepreneur versus being in corporate setting? I came kind of corporate eventually, but you were still kind of higher up, so you were still an entrepreneur.

Rand [00:12:21]:

Yeah. Let’s see. I think the answer is probably different for a lot of different people. But for me personally, I love the ability to say no to the ways of doing business that I don’t want to engage with and the people that I don’t want to engage with. And that’s something that you don’t generally have the freedom to do in a larger environment, in a corporate environment, in an environment with a big team. I’ll give you an example. Seth right? So folks reach out to us at SparkToro every week, and they say, like, hey, we’re really excited about Spark Tour. They’re almost always like, a big Fortune 2000 type of company. And they’ll say, we’re excited about working with you. Can you please go through this compliance checklist? And our security team needs to do a sock two review, and you need to jump through these hoops, and then we can sign up, and we’ll send you payment via our payment processing system, which can’t do a credit card. Like, we’ll have to do it this other way. And we reply and we’re like, Sorry, we’re a self service product. We’re kind of like Netflix. There’s no special deals. You can sign up online or not friendly about it. I love helping everyone. I’m happy to help a big company, too. If they want to use Spark Toro, that’s great. I’m excited that they’re excited about it, but we are not going to bend over backwards to make another couple of whatever the subscription price is. It’s very affordable, like just putting your.

Seth [00:13:53]:

Credit card on a team. The marketing team has a credit card somewhere. Come on.

Rand [00:14:00]:

Look, there’s three of us, right? Literally, we would spend weeks of time jumping through these hurdles and hoops for some of these big companies. There’s a big pharmaceutical company that wanted to use us. The same is actually true of demos. So we found early on in sparturo’s lifecycle that we would give a lot of product demos, right? People would reach out and say, hey, can I get a demo of the tool? Sure. We’ll schedule something. So we schedule something. We have to reschedule because their team needs to be on the call. We jump on the call, walk them through the product. At the end of the hour, they have lots of good questions. They’re excited about it. Sometimes they sign up. Most of the time they don’t. Maybe they’ll sign up six months or a year later or whatever, fine. And we realized that this was a terrible use of our time. Just absolutely terrible use of our time. If someone needed a demo, it tended to be the case that they didn’t really understand what the product did or why they should be using it, or they didn’t have the problem as acutely as if to need it right away. So we have now started replying with, hey, here’s some videos you can watch. We don’t do demos.

Seth [00:15:04]:

And you also have offers if you sign up.

Rand [00:15:06]:

If you sign up and you pay, absolutely. We’ll do a demo with you. I love doing that, and that helps people get better at the product and all that kind of stuff. Wonderful. But before and it’s cheap. Doesn’t make sense.

Seth [00:15:17]:

It may be affordable enough that you try it for a month. These big companies, I mean, they’re not even going to even notice that line item. Like, you tried it for a month. What is it, like $100 a month or something?

Rand [00:15:30]:

I think the lowest price package is under $70 a month.

Seth [00:15:35]:

I was overreaching in case I didn’t.

Rand [00:15:36]:

Want to yeah, and this is also true, right? This is the reason why we have a forever free version. So we have like 75,000 people who just use the free version. Go play around with that. If you’re getting value from the free version and you want more of the data that you don’t see in there, you have the paid version. That’s the solution to, is this the right product for you? And if you need a demo, it probably means part of it might be us, right? Part of it might be. We’re not showing off the tool well enough. And I think there is some opportunity there, but a lot of it is.

Seth [00:16:14]:

You’Ve done a pretty good job, I think it’s an office.

Rand [00:16:17]:

It’s about people getting the product or not getting it.

Seth [00:16:19]:

And the office hours are fun too. You’re still doing those, right?

Rand [00:16:23]:

Yeah, every month.

Seth [00:16:25]:

I used to tune in all the time, and then life got busy, but I was always in there like, heckling, like, hi guys. Hi guys, that kind of thing. So, yeah, it’s always me.

Rand [00:16:33]:

Office Hours is, I think, one of Amanda’s biggest success stories. She’s obviously done incredible job marketing Spark Toro. But Office Hours regularly gets 1000 plus attendees, and the live chat is just amazing. She’s brought in some incredible guests. Brittany Mueller gave an Office Hours on AI recently that was probably one of our best reviewed ones ever.

Seth [00:16:56]:

That’s awesome. And I love how it’s not all about you. It’s like, let’s talk about something broad, and then we’ll highlight a little bit of how you can do it in sparturo. There’s a callback, which I like, there’s a callback to the tool. But you don’t have to be a user of Spark Tour necessarily to get something out of the Office Hours, which is a very light touch I really love about it.

Rand [00:17:18]:

Our goal is not with Office Hours absolutely. Is not to convert people to paying customers or anything. There’s not even a call to action for using Spark Tour. Most of the time. What it’s about is the same thing I talked about with the early days of Maz, which is essentially, can we build an audience that knows us, likes us and trusts us? And follows us in our adventures and journeys. And if they never become customers, that’s fine, and maybe they’ll send someone our way, or maybe they will become a customer at some point, or maybe they’ll just use the free version for forever. Honestly, that is not what’s important to us. What’s important to us here is building that community ecosystem around understanding the problem that SparkToro solves, and then helping people to do better marketing in all the ways and have them say, wow, SparkToro was really helpful on my journey, even if they never paid us a dime.

Seth [00:18:08]:

But I also love that following you guys on your journeys, especially you and your journeys around the world, I mean, it makes the company human or has a human feel to it, because it’s three of you running a company and having fun doing it. Now, on the flip side of that, because entrepreneurship is not all sunshine and rainbows here. What is the scariest thing about being an entrepreneur? What keeps you up at night, at least right now?

Rand [00:18:38]:

I mean, right now, finances, actually, of all things, I would say so. Earlier this year. It was Spark Toro. When Elon did his sort of crazy stuff with the Twitter API, we were pretty nervous. Twitter was our central connector network for how we plugged together all the other social networks, right? So we’d say like, oh, here’s Seth, here’s your Twitter account. And then from that, we go and find your website and your podcast and your LinkedIn and your YouTube channel, whatever, all the other ones, right? And so this connector network for us, we worried quite a bit about what would happen with the API. It turns out it’s going to be fine. We’re rebuilding our infrastructure to focus on other things. But we already got so much great data out of the last few years of Twitter that we’re okay.

Seth [00:19:24]:

I was worried. I was like, because I knew you guys were very big on that. And there’s a bunch of other tools that I mean, literally, some of them are like, we’re done. Peace.

Rand [00:19:33]:

Yeah. Like follower wonk, right? Follower Wonk sold to Tweets, Map, and I think they changed their name and that whole thing. So that was certainly keeping me up at night. And I think this is true for a lot of entrepreneurs, right, that they worry about the stability of their product and the ecosystem around it. I think right now, there’s a ton of nervousness of entrepreneurs worried that whatever business they provide could be replaced by a very cheap AI system. In the future, there’s tons of people who are like, oh, I’m going to try and adopt AI to be the leader in that space, or I’m going to try and do things that will prevent AI from taking over what work we do. But for me right now, right, my biggest stress, and certainly keeping me up plenty of nights is we have to fund this video game studio, which is going to be a lot of our personal finances, but then also going to go out and talk to a ton of folks and try and raise some money. And I hate raising money, honestly. I did it for Spark Toro. I did it for Maz in very.

Seth [00:20:37]:

Different you did a lot for Maz and then you also in the book you learned what not to people should get the book. I mean, I’m part of a startup and the first thing I did when I first joined the startup, I bought him your book I’m dead sir. I was like, learn from Rand. Rand has done everything over there. Learn what to do and what not to do from him. I mean, of course we’re going about things in our own way and you can only teach so much before it’s like they’re going to have to learn their own way.

Rand [00:21:04]:

Yeah, well, and I hope that in this next book, which obviously is still a few years out, but I hope that I can write about a different way to start up and fund a business. Right. Because SparkToro’s funding success was terrific. We’re actually very exciting. In the next 30 days we’re going to pay back our investors and then everybody gets the profit share pro rada. So the company has been on this really nice trajectory and I think that’s down to your point came out, was a good product, something people needed and something lots of people use and then the game studio. Here’s my challenge, seth, if I come to you and I’m like, hey, Seth, I want you to put $25,000 into a new marketing technology company that I’m building, I think you and a lot of people would be like rand Fishkin, marketing technology company. I like it, I’m in. Let’s do this thing. But if I come to you and say, hey, I’m building an indie video game studio and I think it can be absolutely huge. And here’s all these great reasons and this great pitch deck and here’s a video demo of the game and here’s this impressive team that we’ve built and all that kind of stuff. You’re like rand, Fishkin and video game. I don’t get it’s.

Seth [00:22:18]:

A different lane. Yeah.

Rand [00:22:21]:

So that is driving me bananas. And I probably have another 30 or 40 days of other work to do before I can actually start making those pitches and find out whether people go, you know what, this is a great pitch. This is a great idea. Yeah, let’s do it. Or whether they’re like, you don’t make any sense for this. I don’t get it.

Seth [00:22:40]:

Honestly, this is me being a fan and knowing you for a while. But I think a little bit of the Randfish can allure will help out. It might not help out as much as sparturo from sparturo, but from us, the God’s ears right now because hopefully it’s good to be a beautiful.

Rand [00:23:01]:

I’m just going to ask you to export that part of the clip, and I’m going to listen to it over and over at night.

Seth [00:23:06]:

I’ll be what’s it called? Your affirmation every morning.

Rand [00:23:09]:

Exactly.

Seth [00:23:10]:

That would be terrifying, actually. Don’t do that. Anyhow, what is the most important thing to carry with you all the time? This can be physical or metaphysical. We can go as deep as you want.

Rand [00:23:25]:

I’m going to say something a little bit cheesy, but it is absolutely true, which is the thing that keeps me solid and feeling okay about everything else in my life is the fact that I have an extremely strong marriage with Geraldine. And that being rock solid, being able to carry that whatever confidence about, hey, if everything else falls apart, this thing will always be solid.

Seth [00:23:53]:

It’s cheesy, but it’s awesome.

Rand [00:23:56]:

It’s so powerful. I don’t think people realize how incredible it is. Even folks who are single or folks who are in rockier relationships, right.

Seth [00:24:09]:

Having that rock and being each other’s rock. I mean, my wife’s the same thing for me. And it’s the best thing ever.

Rand [00:24:16]:

It’s the best thing ever. It’s so much better than it’s so.

Seth [00:24:20]:

Cheesy, but it’s so true.

Rand [00:24:21]:

Yeah. It’s so much better than all of the possible benefits you could imagine from, I don’t know, any other form of living. I’m always quite confused by folks who are like, I love being single. Okay, hey, look, everybody has their own thing. You go to it. Or people who like dramatic relationships, people who like bumpy and rockiness.

Seth [00:24:44]:

People do like that. Some people do like that. I’m like, yeah, I wouldn’t survive.

Rand [00:24:49]:

No, not for me.

Seth [00:24:51]:

Exactly. So to wrap up here, people can find you. You ranfishkin on mastodon, right? Randfishkin at my mastodon social.

Rand [00:25:02]:

No, I’m randfish everywhere. Thankfully. Randfish on Twitter, on Mastodon? On LinkedIn, obviously, it’s my full name.

Seth [00:25:11]:

Randfishkin, you have kind of buttoned up over there.

Rand [00:25:14]:

Yeah, but Randfish at Mastodon Social, and I am fairly active on Mastodon and pretty active on LinkedIn.

Seth [00:25:21]:

You can also apologize. You actually apologize for taking a break from mastodon, and then the next day you start tooting more. And I was like, wait, you’re apologizing for taking a break, but you didn’t take a break?

Rand [00:25:34]:

Seth, I want to work with you on this. I think we should change the name to Masto Blast.

Seth [00:25:38]:

Oh, I like to have so much better in tooting, actually. I made my own mastodon little icon where I make it. Someone put out there where you can make maston farting as you press this is published, and then it farts.

Rand [00:25:53]:

I mean, I think it was supposed to come out the trunk, but the guy who started it is German, and so maybe the translation didn’t quite work perfectly.

Seth [00:26:01]:

It didn’t work too well. But it’s on blue sky, isn’t it? Like Traversing or what is it? Blue sky has even worse one, and the founder of blue sky is like, no, don’t use that. Of course, it’s the wisdom of the crowds. You don’t get to have a say in it. And I think it’s some weird thing that they even said on CNN, which is great, means now it’s a real thing. And you said they can also email you, which you’re breaking.

Rand [00:26:24]:

Yeah, absolutely. Just rand@sparktoro.com and I happily answer people’s questions all day long. I love chatting with folks in marketing, universe or otherwise.

Seth [00:26:35]:

That’s awesome. And so we will see everyone next week. That was a great show. If you’re enjoying entrepreneurs Enigma, please view us in the podcast directory of your choice. Every review helps other podcast listeners find our show. If you’re looking for other podcasts in the marketing space, look no further than the Marketing Podcast Network @ marketingpodcast.net.

Seth [00:27:27]:

Goldstein Media hopes you have enjoyed this episode. This podcast as is one of the many great shows on the MPN Marketing Podcast Network.