Rand Fishkin CoFounder of Moz

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today we are talking to Rand Fishkin, the co-founder of SEO Moz, and we discuss how he got his nickname Wizard of Moz, the future of SEO, and his new book, Lost and Founder. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. So probably the most common question ever: I've got to know the backstory of your amazing nickname.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:00:39) Well, you know, you have a company named Moz, you can't abscond with something that's not a pun. You've got to lean into that, man. No, so my wife came up with Wizard of Moz actually, when Moz was still called SEO Moz.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:54) Mm-hmm.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:00:55) And I think it was a reference to two unusual abilities. Well, one reference is obviously Seattle is called the Emerald City, so Wizard of Oz made sense, right? And then the second one is I have two strange superpowers. Well, one's not so super anymore. I used to be able to take down websites by tweeting them. Now server technology has gotten way better, and so, you know, they can handle a burst of a few hundred visits simultaneously. But that wasn't the case back in like 2008, 2009. The second one was, you know, just the ability to rank websites in Google, which I'm less of a full-time, hardcore professional SEO these days, so...

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:45) Now I remember. CloudFlare definitely thwarted you, right? You can't take the websites out anymore.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:01:50) Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, there's some that still get brought down. I did notice Martha Stewart has that ability. She tweeted a link to my wife's blog, everywhereist.com, and yeah, Martha Stewart sends, you know, tens of thousands of visits in a minute, and that actually did crash the site.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:11) Yeah, I remember it was about 13, 15 years ago. I got an email from Oprah Winfrey's technical producer that said, "I just wanted you to know that the show is going to air tomorrow, and you should expect between like 100,000 and 300,000 unique visits." You know? And we had to go talk to—I think at the time it was like HostGator or something—and get them to prepare for it.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:02:38) Oh wow. Jeez.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:39) Yeah, they had a whole—when the producers reached out to us, they had a whole checklist of items because whenever they mention someone's website, these things happen, so they prepare us for it.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:02:49) It's amazing. If only you could measure that referral traffic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:53) Right.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:02:54) There's no—it doesn't come with a source. Well, long story that I won't get into, but Geraldine and I were on Oprah's show many years ago. What was that, 2008? And yeah, the producers there were very strict, very regimented. You know, Oprah herself is super professional and polished as all get out. It was an interesting experience for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:16) What was the topic?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:03:18) I had proposed to my wife on a television commercial, and they wanted to have us on for their Valentine's Day episode. And so we said, "Well, you know, we weren't giant Oprah fans, but we had really wanted to go to the Museum of Art in Chicago." So we said, "Well, if you fly us in a day early and we can go to the art museum, we'll come out." And they agreed. And so yeah, we went on the show.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:39) Oh, that's fantastic, man. I haven't been on Oprah. I don't think I have any plans. Is she even still doing the show?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:03:45) I don't think so, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:47) No, she's just like, "Instead of the show, I will own a network, and that's what I will do."

(Rand Fishkin at 00:03:51) And run for president. It's going to be great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:54) Or she's going to run for president now.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:03:55) Well, I can't decide if I want her to or not. I'm not sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:59) What if our country had like a series of TV show hosts becoming president? It would be like that movie Idiocracy. Or what is it called? Yeah, Idiocracy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:08) Yeah. Oh man, I'm scared because I'm living through a poorly imagined future. Okay, so you've got a new book. I want to know what's going on with that book. Is it out yet?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:04:21) Yeah, it just went up for pre-orders on Amazon, actually. So it's coming out April 24th, and the title is Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide—

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:36) I think—

(Rand Fishkin at 00:04:36) —if you search for just Lost and Founder book, you'll find it. Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:42) So what are like the big core pillars of your experiences writing that book?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:04:49) Of the experience writing the book? Yeah. Well, I certainly went into it with eyes somewhat open. My wife had written a book as well, and so, you know, I knew a little bit of what that was like from watching her go through the process. But it was definitely much longer, more intense, and much more formal than I expected. If you have experience with kind of the stereotype or archetype of what, you know, publishing a book was like in the 1960s or '70s or '80s, right, from watching movies or TV, it's actually not that different, right? You build a close relationship with your editor. You're having late-night phone calls. You've got deadlines, and there's tons of changes. And it goes through, you know, layers of fact-checking and research and all this kind of stuff. So compared to the books I'd written previously for Wiley and O'Reilly, which were very much just write it, it gets copy-edited, it's published—this was, you know, this felt like a true torturous writing process, which I actually enjoyed quite a bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:59) And what was the total length of time from start to finish?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:06:02) So I pitched publishers basically with an outline or with a document that included an outline that I put together with my agents, and that was pitched in January 2016.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:17) Oh, wow.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:06:18) Basically signed a deal, I think, in March 2016, had a finished rough draft at 10:30 p.m. on 12/31/2016. And so the last year has been kind of the massaging of that rough draft and updating, editing, you know, the whole publishing process, which it kind of shocks me that it takes a year, but it does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:49) Is it a long book?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:06:51) No, I don't think so. I would say it's pretty average length for a business book. I think around 300 pages, but reasonably sized type font and spacing and a good number of images in there as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:06) Did you do the Audible?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:07:07) Not yet. I actually haven't heard from them about the Audible. I'm a little nervous about doing that. You've got to sit in a quiet room for, you know, four days reading your own book. It's a little awkward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:17) No, I'm a big fan. So I consume Audible at scale, right? And the best ones are when the authors do them.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:07:25) I mean, I kind of want like a Steve Buscemi or Alec Baldwin. You think I can get that sketch to read my book?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:33) That's hilarious. Yes. Or a William Shatner.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:07:37) Oh god. Oh, Shatner. Jeez.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:42) Yeah. So I like it when the—I was talking, do you know Marty Kagan?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:07:45) No, I don't know him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:47) Oh, he's this really popular UX author. He talks about building products. He's the Silicon Valley Product Group. I mean, they did like eBay, like every big product they've had their hands in designing like the part of the user experience and stuff. So we had him on the show, and he has a best-selling book called Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love. And he works with Envision and all the big, you know, Slack and all those people. Yeah. So they—he had a 10-year anniversary, and they did a rewrite of it to update it. And he came on the show. He said that the publisher didn't want him to do the voiceover. I was like, "Marty, come on, man. That's the best."

(Rand Fishkin at 00:08:33) Interesting, interesting. Yeah, I knew Geraldine had a fight with her publisher to be able to record her own audio version. They do like to hire voice actors, and I think that's probably because it's more professional and polished. Those people are really familiar. They can probably get it done more quickly. And I suspect a lot of authors don't have phenomenal voices, don't have tremendous variation and flux in their intonation and their tone, so...

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:04) Yeah, I could see. You have a beautiful voice, Rand.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:09:07) Oh, you guys, come on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:10) You do. Hey, it's beautiful. I heard your voice and I was like, "Jake, who's that angel? Who is that?" He's like, "It's Rand Fishkin." I was like, "Get him on the show." Now I was like, "Call Jenny. Have Jenny get him on the show. We've got to make this happen."

(Rand Fishkin at 00:09:23) But you—I mean, Joel, you must have that experience where you listen to yourself—

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:27) Yeah.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:09:28) —and you think, "Dear God, I sound like that. Who would want to hear that?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:32) No, I love me. No, here's the thing: of course, at first, right? So it was real difficult at first. And then I'm one of the people that, like, if you own a bakery and you're making cake, you've got to eat the cake. So I listen to the podcast, and that's how we incrementally make it better. Like right now, we're working on an Alexa briefing because we want to get—oh, thanks.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:10:00) Alexa, stop.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:00) Alexa, stop. There we go. So we were working on our Alexa Flash Briefing, and what we do is we actually make variations. Have you used them at all? Do you have an Alexa?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:10:14) I do. I'm scared to admit it, but I actually don't trust that thing, so I don't keep it plugged in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:21) Yes! You would be great with Christian Saucier. We had a guy on the show and he's a security expert, specifically with blockchain. And he was talking about how he does the same thing because he wants the voice system to come out that keeps it locally, so it's not actually on servers of anyone else's because he doesn't want the data breach.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:10:45) I don't trust where that audio file is going to end up or how it's going to be used or how it can be reused to construct something that I never said through understanding and listening to all the words that I say. I'm just—I'm not a big—I don't put a whole lot of faith in Amazon's privacy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:08) Alright, I'll text Bezos, tell him to get on top of it. Like, "Dude, you've got to do better."

(Rand Fishkin at 00:11:12) Yeah. Better if he doesn't know I exist. Let's just do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:15) Okay, so I won't text him then.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:11:17) Yeah. Well, it's pretty easy. I've run into him in restaurants a few times in Seattle, so it was awkward, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:23) Yeah. You just—because he knows what's on your Alexa when it is plugged in. You just can't look him in the eye.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:11:29) In his two, right? It's all world domination.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:34) Did you see the—I mean, especially after—who's the guy in X-Men who's bald and in the wheelchair? Professor Xavier. Yeah, Professor Xavier. Like, he's getting more of a devious Professor Xavier look compared to his like 1995 interviews where he looks like a geek.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:11:50) Yeah, he definitely went from Bill Gates to like—well, now he's all buffed up. I mean, his arms are gigantic and, you know, he looks like he could bench press a bouncer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:01) With Alexa, she has a motivational skill and she helps him work out.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:12:07) She speaks to his muscles at night.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:09) She does. "Grow larger." I wrote a book, and it was my first book, and it was super interesting. But here's what I took from it. So I was so nervous about what people would think. That's how the podcast got started, by the way, was the book. Okay, so I was talking with people. We were having these conversations over and over and over. I work with VC firms and build products and apps, all this stuff. So I kept having these CTO conversations over and over. So I put them in writing, and I started writing, and then they eventually turned into these conversations. I wanted to get a bunch of other CTOs involved with writing the book so that I didn't look stupid when it came out and get flamed by everyone. So then those conversations turned into—we recorded them, and then that turned into a podcast. And then boom, before we know it, we have 70,000 CTOs and lead developers. That's kind of our audience of who listens to this. So going through that process, I wanted to see what the world thought of other than just my 30-plus CTO friends. So what I did is I actually released summarized versions of the chapters as blog posts and then ran ads against them to see which ones were popular and what the most popular parts were and where people would analyze like where I left stuff out or good points to add in.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:13:27) Fascinating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:28) Yeah, yeah. I love that.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:13:30) That's wonderful. Very crowdsourced solution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:33) Right? But I didn't present it to them as that because it would be like the whole issue with, like, if people think they're giving their opinion, it's a whole different world. I just did microblog posts and then saw which ones were most popular and then did an edit of the book, included a lot of stuff that would handle different people's perspectives. And then now we've just got it through formatting. And this week we should get the sign-off and go to print, and it's been about a year.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:13:58) Wow. Well, congratulations. Who are you using to publish?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:02) His name is Joel Beasley. That's me. I'm just self-publishing it.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:14:07) Alright, yeah. Interesting. Well, I'll be fascinated to hear about that. I had considered a bunch of options, including the self-publishing and other ones, but yeah, eventually figured—I just wanted to experiment, right? And I thought, "Well, I've made a lot of stuff myself on the web and promoted it. I'd be really interested to see what the classic publishing process is like." And so yeah, I've been working with Penguin Random House, which is a classic old-school, you know, Big Five publisher and really interesting experience. But yeah, looking forward to hearing your story too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:37) It's all about what's interesting for you too because you have to put in the work and go through it.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:14:41) Right, yeah. The financial model is definitely very odd with traditional publishing. It's, yeah, different. Super different. It seems like it makes no sense that—when you dig in, you sort of understand why it works the way it does and has these sort of anachronisms attached to it. But yeah, that's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:01) Are there still bookstores?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:15:03) Mm-hmm. You know what? One of the weirdest things is, so Amazon, you know, between whatever it was, 1997 and 2011, I think took about 60% of the book sales market, maybe a little less than that, 55%, something like that. What's crazy is that traditional bookstores experienced a significant decline in sales over that period, but have almost recovered. And so basically, if you were to look at what were total book sales in 1999 and what are total book sales—physical book sales in physical bookstores—you would find that they're not very different. Most of the difference is like Barnes & Noble and Borders and a couple other of the big chains. But independent bookstores have actually been growing. There are more of them now than there were 10, 15 years ago, which is just incredible. It's sort of an amazing thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:59) So they get you on the shelves?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:16:01) Yeah. Yeah. They get you. I mean, paying a Random House certainly gets you on shelves. Absolutely. You know, what percent of my audience, right, of the world of tech entrepreneurs and startup people and web marketers, who, you know, are this book's primary audience, I suspect a great deal of them are going to buy online through Amazon or Kindle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:25) I buy online through Amazon and then through Audible. Sometimes I buy the physical book. Like, usually when my friend gives me—I have, like, I have one friend who gives me books, and then he always wants them back. And I really like the covers, and I think it makes me look smart having them scattered around the office. So I'll go buy the physical books off Amazon and then use them as sort of props.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:46) But I consume the content just with Audible.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:16:49) Yeah. I find that I have a much harder time internalizing the content. So if there's a great lesson to be learned and something that I feel like I should really remember, if I read the physical book, it sticks with me sort of harder and longer than if I simply listen to it, you know, on Audible or if I read the Kindle version or read it on my phone with Google Books or what have you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:16) Yeah. It's called the forgetting curve. So it's the rate at which you forget information based on how you consumed it. We forget at the rate of one bit per neuron per second. So you can actually look up—it's a curve, it's a chart. You could say, "I'm going to consume one hour of a speaker in person," and then it'll show you how the reduction of knowledge you'll have about that over a course of time. So it'll say, okay, well, in three months, you'll be able to remember the general topic and maybe one quote.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:46) But, like, at one week, you'll be able to remember, like, four of the subtopics. So—

(Rand Fishkin at 00:17:51) Interesting. Yeah. That's really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:53) Yeah. One day I was sitting around, I was like, man, I forget stuff. I wonder if there's research on how people forget, and I found it. I'm like, oh, cool. That's how we forget.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:18:03) Yeah. That's terrific. Well, unless I have far fewer neurons than a lot of people because I have a terrible memory.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:11) Well, I have a good one for you, a good question for you. First of all, I've been—how long was—when did you start Moz?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:18:20) 2000, end of 2003, beginning of '04. That's going to be the official day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:24) So you're who I'm thinking of. So I've been paying attention to your work since, like, '14, '15. Oh. I'm 30 now. Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:33) So, yeah, so when I was—you know, my dad taught me how to program. He was an engineer. He taught me how to program around the age of eight. And then I was programming for a couple years, and then I started getting into Internet web technologies. And I specifically remember you were one of the first pieces of content. And so when I was doing your show prep today, I was like, this is the guy because your face is very memorable.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:18:56) Oh, sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:57) So yeah. And so I was paying attention to that. And I'm curious to know, like, how is—you're in the SEO world. You've been writing about SEO forever, and it's changing now. The way we're consuming the Internet's changing with a lot of the traffic going through Facebook, and a lot of the traffic now is going to be going through Alexa and things of that nature. So, like, do you ever see SEO not existing?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:19:25) Yeah. I can imagine it. I actually think it's quite unlikely, but I can imagine it. The reason is every time there's a big new technology that's going to supposedly completely cannibalize and eliminate some old technology—Kindle killing books, for example, or Amazon killing all of retail, or, you know, Snapchat killing Facebook, or gosh, mobile killing desktop.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:19:57) Right? That's actually probably my favorite example. Right? Mobile is supposed to kill desktop. What actually happened?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:20:03) Desktop plateaued, but it remains just under 50% of web traffic and has not really budged in all these years that mobile is supposed to kill it. So it never died. Right? It just stuck with us, just like books have—physical books have stuck with us. I think there's very few technologies that actually get truly killed. Maybe the newspaper is an example. But magazines—magazines were supposed to be totally dead because the Internet. Guess what? Physical magazine sales still just as high, just sort of at their height. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:40) So here's a question. Can the—can the SEO concept—let's say I'm just playing hypothetical because—

(Rand Fishkin at 00:20:47) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:47) I don't know what else to do on the show. If it were to start going away, let's pretend it does die or whatever, I believe SEOmoz or the whole concept could pivot to the optimization for search within the network. So, like, optimizing your content for a search within Facebook search or within Instagram's or Snapchat search. You guys could pivot that way. What do you think of that idea?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:21:12) I don't love it, but I agree. I think if Moz is going to survive long term, it'll have to be ready for upheaval. The nice thing about being a marketing-focused software company is that you skate to where the puck has already gone instead of to where it's going. I think I learned my lesson well on that one. If you try and market to a place where you think, you know, attention is going to be in a few years, you actually find yourself in a poor position pretty often, and it's fine to trail. Right? It's absolutely fine to say, oh, lots of attention is going to Facebook. Let's see if this takes off. Oh, it did take off, but the network keeps changing, keeps changing, keeps changing. All right.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:21:58) Now, you know, seven years in, maybe that's the right time to build a great social media suite of software like a, you know, a Hootsuite or a TruSocial Networks or Brandwatch or somebody like that. Right? And so laggards actually, at least in marketing software, tend to do better than the early adopter innovators, many of whom just die on the vine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:18) So you pay attention to when the attention has, like, proven itself?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:22:22) Exactly. Like, we try and watch where it's actually going as opposed to theorizing where it might go. So I have a blog post, for example, on my personal blog, moz.com/rand. Just recently in December, I got a bunch of data from Jumpshot who monitors web traffic through clickstream data. And so—

(Rand Fishkin at 00:22:42) You know, my big question to them was, is search dying? Right? Are there fewer searches being performed on Google, you know, now than there were a year ago or two years ago? Are we actually seeing Alexa or other kinds of voice search eat into that? Answer, no. Growth rate remains very similar from 2015 to '16, 2016 to '17, and 2017 into 2018. So that cannibalization doesn't look like it's happening yet, at least. You know, the other thing we were curious about is what about SEO? You know, Google's got all these crazy types of results in there now, the featured snippets and instant answers and all these answer boxes up at the top, the knowledge graph on the side, etcetera, etcetera. Is that cannibalizing clicks?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:23:26) Right? Are fewer people clicking on organic search results than they were a year ago or two years ago. And that answer was a little more complicated because, basically, that's been growing at a steady rate until just about the middle of last year when on mobile devices, Google started being so aggressive with some of these other kinds of content that we did see a decrease in the clicks to organic. So there's a little bit less opportunity now in mobile SEO than there was, say, a year ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:01) Yeah. I noticed they really favored when I started adding the AMP to my site for the mobile search results for just for me. Because we, you know, came out and we are ranking for the term Modern CTO. So when the site launched, I don't know, a couple months ago, we were, like, on page six. And now we're the, you know, first result for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:23) Yeah. Because people can do us and everything. But it was really interesting watching how—watching it go up through the different pages, you know, over the course of time. And when I did the AMP thing, it just shoved all my AMP results, like, right to the front of the line. And then it took forever for the rest of my actual site to catch up, the non-AMP pages.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:24:44) Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, we—so what we generally see is that AMP can get better click-through rates and better engagement rates, and that can sometimes lead to, you know, higher rankings. I think the connection is second order, but it's there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:05) I ultimately removed the AMP. It was getting—after my whole site like, I was doing it as an experiment, and I think I removed it from, like, 80% of my pages. Only text-based blog posts have the AMP now because it's just—it's too much to maintain for too little benefit.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:25:23) Well and if you can, the ideal thing is to make your site screaming fast on your own. Right? I mean, AMP is just a sort of easy cheat for people who can't be bothered to do all the work that's required to make a very quick loading website. And so I'd certainly urge everyone, if it is at all possible, don't lean on AMP, which is a crutch. Do it yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:48) Okay. So you see AMP as—that's interesting because I don't have much experience with this, so I don't know.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:25:53) Yeah. I mean, the other thing is AMP means that Google controls a lot of the user experience around how people engage with your site. Right? So, you know, how the link copy-paste functions work, how the sharing functions work, you know, how it loads in the browser, all that kind of stuff. What information you can collect and what cookies you can drop and all sorts of things that they control. So, yeah, I'd absolutely suggest that folks do it on their own if they can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:24) Yeah. I noticed that there—I got a bump on the Facebook when I did the Facebook and Instagram articles too. But when—just real quick, because we only have ten minutes left here. We're being respectful of your time. We like—I said, our audience are mostly CTOs, lead developers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:40) I'd say a good portion of them are co-founders. Yeah. Everything from just two people starting a project to having 600 or 1,000 employees. So what sort of—I know it's a big spectrum, but do you have any quick advice that you would give as an expert with searching and being, you know, the Wizard of Oz that you would give to these individuals?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:27:03) Well, I mean, I think that a good way to think about SEO is that it is a tactic. It's not a strategy. Right? So I think that a lot of the time folks think about SEO the wrong way. Right? They think, how do I get my rankings up? How do I, you know, get more links and then get more search traffic? And some benefit will come from that. Surely, if I get more traffic from search engines, I'll benefit. And I think the right way to think about it is this is our organizational goals. Right? This is what we as a business need to accomplish. So, you know, you're a two-person SaaS startup. I'm actually leaving Moz in a month and going to be starting a two-person SaaS business with a co-founder. So that's definitely top of mind for me.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:27:46) Right? And one of the big challenges—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:47) What is that? Sorry? What is it? I got to know what it is.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:27:50) Oh, it—we don't have anything yet. Right? So it's just, yeah, me and a friend who are going to tinker until we get something launched. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:02) I'll just tell everyone it's killer robots.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:28:04) Yeah. Yeah. Ask me in six months. I'll be able to tell you more probably. But, you know, for that group, one of the biggest things is how do I get my first customers? Right? And if you know that you have a problem that people are searching for or a set of problems that people search for that your product can do a great job of solving, ranking for those problems and the problems leading up to them is a terrific way to go. Right? And so I think that's a strategic approach where you say, hey, customer growth is a huge problem for us.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:28:38) SEO looks like one of the best tactics to solve it because we're serving an existing audience that's already performing queries for this problem set. Now if you're solving a new problem that people don't really know that they have and that they're not searching for, then SEO is probably not the way to go. Right? Then you need other forms of, you know, branding and broadcast media and potentially social media and influencer marketing, those types of things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:04) You're a fan of influencer marketing?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:29:08) I am in the broad sense. I am not a fan of the very narrow definition of it that's come to exist where it means, like, you know, buy a sponsored post from an Instagram celebrity. I don't think that's a particularly excellent tactic. But I do think that earning the awareness and trust and amplification of a group of influential people and publications in your space is a phenomenal way to grow attention.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:35) Right. I fully agree with that. Because when, like, a technology company says, "Oh, we're just going to go, you know, hashtag, see who's the top person for this and go pay them to do a post," I'm like, well, no. What you need to do is you need to go find the quiet, smart people who, when they say something, there's a lot of weight behind it.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:29:56) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:56) And who do the loud people listen to the most? Like, I want to know who Marty Kagan reads. Right? Because he's real smart with writing on his UI/UX stuff. So I want to know who he—I want to know the content consumers of the smart—like, who is Rand's—like, the smartest person ever for SEO. I want to know who Rand is consuming. I'm sure it's just a lot of your experiences from actually being a practitioner and doing it. But—

(Rand Fishkin at 00:30:21) Yeah. I think that there's definitely a big need to go beyond the vanity metrics of follower counts and look at, you know, what is the actual influence of a person. I also think that influencer marketing has gotten far too focused on individuals and not focused enough on publications. I think that a lot of smart people in many spaces read content from certain publications. Right? They subscribe to email newsletters. They're subscribed to a YouTube channel. They listen to certain podcasts. They go to certain events. Right? And figuring out what those are in your space oftentimes has more impact than, well, this person has the most followers and they have this word in their bio, so let's go pay them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:13) Right. It's about reverse engineering your consumer and then going where they go to hang out.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:31:19) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:20) So when you—so you're obviously going to kill it with the startup because you say and do all the right things. So I'm very pumped about that.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:31:27) You know, so Joel, you and I both know startups have a 90% failure rate. So I would say it is a risky venture. It's always a risky venture. You know, the only thing that I'm very hopeful for is that I learned a lot of painful lessons the first time around, and maybe I won't make those mistakes. So looking forward to making some new mistakes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:52) Yeah. Well, I mean, I like to oversimplify things because that always gets people yelling. But if you pay attention to where everybody's at and what they're demanding, like, a lot of people will come and they'll pitch market, like, ideas for apps and stuff. And I'll say, how did you think of this? I'm like, well, I thought of it. I'll say, all right. Well, how many people have you talked to about it? Well, none, but I Googled and there's 100,000 of these people in this job style in the U.S. economy. And if we get 0.01%, like that. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:17) You pay it. Rather than coming up with an idea in your head, that's one way to do it. But that I think has a 99.999% failure rate. I see the ones that have less of a failure rate is the ones that say, oh, this is what everybody is demanding. Everybody already wants this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:34) We don't have to convince anybody of this. All we have to do is fulfill the need. And yeah, that way you save on your marketing budget significantly. Now all you gotta do is tell people about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:43) You don't have to convince people of it.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:32:45) Yeah. I think it's actually incredibly smart to use one of the processes in search engine optimization, which is keyword research. Right? Looking at what are the terms and phrases that people search for and how often versus other things to say, oh my gosh, there's a huge demand for X or there's a lot of people who have problem Y.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:33:06) Where are they geographically? What else do they search for? What answers are they finding right now? Oh, their problem is not getting solved. Look at the Q&A in forums.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:33:16) Look at what Quora says. Look at what Stack Overflow is saying. Man, we've gotta help these people. And by the way, you know, I know 50 of them personally and spend time with them, and I've done that job myself, and so I feel their pain. I think those entrepreneurs are ones with a much higher success rate.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:33:34) They're just not sexy to, they're not sexy to venture investors typically, right? Because the problem is usually too small and narrow. But I think if you're going for anything but a venture backed startup, that is a great way to play it. And many of those actually turn into venture backed startups. Moz did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:54) Do you have tools for that process you just mentioned about finding what people are searching for and...

(Rand Fishkin at 00:33:58) Yeah. So, Moz has one that I worked on with a team called Keyword Explorer that I actually think is quite good. I don't often endorse Moz's products because I feel a little, you know, dirty, sort of self-promotional, but that one is actually probably the best one out there. I think many SEOs would say the same. If you're looking for free tools, Google's AdWords keyword planner is free.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:34:19) You have to sign up for an account with them. You can use it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:23) I wanted something professional because I've used it before, and it's just...

(Rand Fishkin at 00:34:27) It's pretty terrible. I mean, Keyword Explorer is really good. Right? You can search by all sorts of different ways and it gives you tons of suggestions. The volume ranges are actually really accurate instead of AdWords stuff.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:34:38) We buy that data from Jumpshot, that clickstream provider I mentioned. And then you can, you know, you can click on things and add them to a list and see what's ranking and see how difficult it's gonna be. So that, yeah, that's a good one. There's a good competitor called Ahrefs that also has a tool also called Keyword Explorer. That's a, they have a good one too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:00) Hey, check those out. Last question. We'll let you go because it looks like your time's here. You do a little bit of investing, right? It says you got some Backstage Capital, Techstars type stuff.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:35:11) I do very tiny, tiny amounts of investing. And now that I'm starting my own startup, I think I'm gonna do zero investing. But, yeah, it's an interesting thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:23) Just as the, just curious. Do you think we are in a little bit of a tech bubble?

(Rand Fishkin at 00:35:31) Yeah. Yeah, I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:34) I do too.

(Rand Fishkin at 00:35:35) There's almost certainly more cash than there is great outcomes floating around, and I think it's gonna take ten or fifteen years to see it. But I certainly believe that's the case.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:51) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:58) I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.