Full Transcript for Rand Fishkin on Why Google Is Your Competitor

Speaker 1

Welcome to Growth Marketing Today, where marketers, designers, and product owners level up their growth marketing chops from experts in today's top startups. Here's your host, Ramli John.

Speaker 2

Welcome to episode 65 of Growth Marketing Today. I'm your host, Ramli John, and I'm here on a mission to help marketers and founders like you sharpen their marketing skills by talking to some of today's top experts. Well, this is it. This is the two-year anniversary episode of this podcast. Give you some claps.

And I'm super excited to bring to you someone I've looked up to since the beginning of my marketing career, Rand Fishkin, the CEO and co-founder of SparkToro, and previously that Moz. SparkToro is a new software company that makes it easier for you to connect with your audience in a less expensive and more effective way. Rand's such a great guy.

He was so warm when I chatted with him. He's dedicated his professional life to helping people to do better marketing through the Whiteboard Friday video series, his blog, and his book, go read it, it's so good, Lost and Founder, A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World. In this episode, you'll learn, first, why Google isn't just a search engine anymore, it's going to be one of your competitors, or it already is.

Second, what marketers should do with the recent Google algorithm updates. Third, the mistakes Rand made in scaling Moz, and how he's avoiding those in building SparkToro. Now, I put together all the action Small tips that Rand gives in this episode on a one-page growth cheat sheet that you can download for free. Why take notes from this podcast when you can just steal mine? You can go to growthtoday.fm forward slash 65, or you can find it in the link in the description of wherever you get your podcasts, whether that's Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Breaker, or Google Podcasts, you can find that link in the description somewhere.

Before we jump in, I just want to thank those who made this episode possible. Now, this is a one-person show. This last two years, I've recorded, edited, and created all my marketing materials for this podcast in my quote-unquote free time. So I just want to thank the sponsor for this episode, 42 Agency. They are a demand generation and ops agency.

You can check them out at 42.agency forward slash GMT. That's F O U R T Y T W O dot agency forward slash GMT. I also want to thank my Patreon supporters who get an ad-free version of this podcast. Thank you, Jamie Ward. Vegas, Veronica from London, UK, Fabrizio Marcias from Brazil, Nicholas Vargas from Sydney, Sam Grover from New Zealand, Joseph Valenti from Canada, and Louis Nichols from Switzerland.

And now about this, let's jump in in my chat with Rand Fishkin. Hey, everybody, I'm excited to have Rand Fishkin. He is somebody that I've looked up to, and I read his book. I'm a big fan of his vulnerability and transparency, and I can't believe I'm here chatting with him.

Speaker 3

Great to be here with you, Ramli. How's it,

Speaker 2

how's it going? How are, how are things with you today?

Speaker 3

Yeah, good. It's sunny in Seattle, which is rare for the fall.

can't beat that.

Speaker 2

Awesome. I'm gonna do some quick fire lightning questions. I just wanted to just warm you up. are you, are you okay with that? All right. Coffee or tea?

Speaker 3

Coffee.

Speaker 2

What kind of coffee? Not Starbucks.

Speaker 3

I mean, this is, this is, I make, I make espresso on the stovetop like the Italians do. My, my mother-in-law, who's Italian, got me a stovetop espresso maker. I love that thing.

Speaker 2

Better than drip?

Speaker 3

It's my preference. I mean, everybody has what they like, you

Speaker 2

know. Okay. Wine or beer?

Speaker 3

beer.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Speaker 3

But tough, tough. I'm both.

Speaker 2

IPA, dark, light. What kind of beer?

Speaker 3

Okay. All right. Interesting.

Speaker 2

Interesting. Super Mario or Donkey Kong? Oh, okay.

Yeah, that's

Speaker 3

an easy one, All

Speaker 2

right. Okay, this probably would be hard for you. Settlers of Catan or Dungeons and

Speaker 3

Dragons? Okay, that was easy.

Speaker 2

That's easier than you thought. Well, thank you for that. I want to jump in. I've read your book. Love it. I recommend it to everybody. I love your comparison to startups with video games because I grew up 85 and I grew up with Super Mario and Nintendo and Sega Genesis. You know, you talked about the first time you play a level, it's, you're gonna suck.

Like Super Mario, you're gonna fall in the hole. Now you have, if you have the cheat codes, it gets easier. Now that you're working on SparkToro, is it, did it, did it get easier?

Speaker 3

It is. It's disturbingly easier. I think that when you do your second business, especially when, you know, Moz was a very relatively complete journey for me. You know, it obviously hasn't had a sale or an exit or those kinds of things, right? But I got to see it from no people, no product, just me with an idea. all the way through the process of building an audience, building a product, having that product be very successful, having that product stumble and, plateau, right? Having growth sort of cut off there.

we went through times where we raised a lot of money and spent a ton of money. We went through times where we, were extremely frugal and, you know, had to count every penny and, and be profitable. So I got a, a real wealth of experience. And Moz was like a 17-year journey for me. now SparkToro, you know, a lot of things that Casey and I are doing, the, you know, the fundraising process early in our, process, that, that was about a year, not quite a year and a half ago.

That was relatively smooth. The product building process has been relatively smooth. The audience building process, pretty darn smooth, right? We're going through all of our customer feedback, which has been super smooth. Although this morning I do have, an email from a beta tester who's like, gosh, you know, this, the look and feel of your product is really web 1.0 and I think it's a little childish.

I think you got to like go back to the design drawing board. So, you know, there's, there's occasional stumbles, but I, I think that, you know, quite frankly, I totally understand why investors strongly prefer multiple time founders, right? Because like you said, you know that level. I have played world 2-2, right? I know exactly where the Koopa Troopa is.

I know where to get the star. I know where to jump over the pit. I know which pipe goes down, right? And that That's just impossible to do the first time you play.

Speaker 2

What is the best cheat code you've taken over from Moz to SparkToro? Like, what is that? I wish I knew this cheat code, and now you do, and like, everybody should know this cheat code.

Speaker 3

I think the biggest one is how you fund your company. So SparkToro is funded by, we did raise some money, right? Because Casey and I aren't, you know, independently wealthy or anything. So we raised, we raised some money. it was from 36 angel investors. we raised 1.3 million, but we kept a structure whereby our investors can profit, can make, you know, a good amount of money, a very healthy return, even if SparkToro only ever gets to a few million dollars in revenue.

That is extremely unusual. Most startups are built in such a way that either you have a, you know, what, what investors would call a home run, right? You make a billion plus dollars, you're a unicorn, or you die, right? Like you go, I don't mean like you, the founder die, I mean the company dies, right? The company goes away, it does nothing, it sells for parts, nobody makes any money on it, maybe the investors get their money back.

And, and that's kind of the model of venture investing and, of a lot of startup accelerators, of most startup angels, especially in Silicon Valley, right? They put their money into a thousand companies, they hope that 10 of them turn into something, the other 990 are going to fail. That model can work if you have a big portfolio, but If you can only invest in a few companies, you got to get real lucky.

And if you're a founder, you're only investing in one company, your company, right? So I think that this structural issue around how startups are funded and the fact that we market venture capital to every single founder, that we tell, you know, tech founders, especially software founders, especially that they are nothing unless they get venture, right? That venture is the pinnacle of achievement.

And when you raise money, oh, you're, you know, so amazing. And now, you know, now you've made it. Now you're in the big leagues. And if you're doing your own thing, you know, you're in the kiddie pool. That, that attitude has to change. And so that's what we're trying to do with SparkToro.

You know, I think, Ramli, you probably saw, I put, my wife and I put some money into tiny seed fund, which is trying to sort of be an alternative model for SaaS companies in particular around this. And I'm a huge believer that if we can change that world, we can make a lot more people successful, because we changed the definition of what's success.

Speaker 2

That's so good. And it just brings back this story I just actually heard from a friend of mine who came back to Toronto from San Francisco and One of his friend was crying to him because he built a startup, 27 year old, and he's crying because he built a $10 million company and it's not, he, he hasn't built a billion dollar company yet and he's depressed.

Speaker 3

Like that,

Speaker 2

it's destructive in not just the, the funding realm, but also I think in, in founders, like it's destructive in their mental health.

Speaker 3

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, this sounds like madness to me, you know, growing up, a million dollars was a huge amount of money. A million dollars is still a huge amount of money, right? Most people in North America, whether it's the United States or Canada or Mexico, a million dollars is absolutely life changing, right? That means that your kids can go to college and you don't have to sweat it.

That means that you can pay off your house, house's mortgage. That means that, right, a ton of things just are removed from your shoulders, this massive unburdening. And yet, everyone who builds a company, you know, in this, in this tech field, we're sort of told $10 million, that's, that's chicken poop, you know, you Call me when you're, you know, somebody real, right? Moz, the company I founded previous to SparkToro, probably do somewhere between 55 and 60 million dollars in revenue this year.

And it is a stuck in the middle, like, meh, you know, not really all that interesting to venture investors type of company. That's, that's weird.

That is a ton of money. I mean, that business is going to kick off, I don't know, five or six million dollars in profit, right? Is it's profitable to the tune of about 10%.

That's a great company to own if you are you and me, right? But Because it's, it's venture backed, it just didn't work. And so I, I really don't like the, the, the structure around this. And, and this is why I think it's such a cheat code to be able to alter that mentality, right? To say to yourself, I don't have to be a billion dollar unicorn.

Just that alone is hugely freeing. That takes an incredible weight off your shoulders to say, hey, I want to build a business that is profitable and independent and that does the right things by me, my customers, and my employees. Instead of, you know, a billionaire asset class, which it, which frankly, right, venture is. It's mostly, you know, pension funds and, and very, you know, private wealth and Saudi oil money, right, which is backing most of the WeWork, stuff.

And, and yeah, frankly, that, I'm not passionate about making those people money. That doesn't get me out of bed in the morning. I'm like, oh man, I got to work hard so that billionaire has more.

Really? Does that excite you? But hey, a lot of these, you know, a lot of these folks, that's, that's what they're getting out of bed to do.

Speaker 2

Wow. What gets you excited then? What is the thing that gets you up Monday morning, pumped up, ready to go?

Speaker 3

I get really excited by the idea of fucking convention, right? Of sort of being, looking at things that exist in the way they are today and tearing that down and creating a new paradigm, especially, especially when that new system,

helps with sort of the, the big Social and political things that I believe in, which is essentially, I want more wealth distribution, right, so less concentration, and I want more opportunity for more people of all kinds, right? So I want startups to be able to be more successful in, more geographic regions than just Silicon Valley and Seattle and New York and Austin and a couple others.

I want people who aren't just You know, 20 to 50 year old white dudes to be able to build great companies and to have wonderful careers in tech and marketing and, I want, you know, those are, those are sort of on the broad scale, on the, on the tiny scale, right? I want individual marketers who are doing content marketing campaigns to have way better ideas, of where their audience actually participates than just doing a Google search and pulling from whoever has the most followers.

So all the way from big, big picture stuff to tactical stuff, I, I feel like the thing that makes me excited to go to work is Changing existing systems to give more people more opportunity and better.

Speaker 2

That's one thing that you talked about in your book is that startup CEOs should have like a vision. And once that company they build exists, to accomplish that mission, the world will change forever because of it. And is that the vision that you're talking about in the future world that you see with SparkToro?

Speaker 3

Yeah, yeah. And I think what's exciting is when you think about like, oh, how do I build a vision that's going to change the world? Just remember that the world we're talking about can be very small, right? It can be very, very tiny. We can be talking about, hey, I really like landscapers in,

Seattle, Washington, right? And I feel like landscapers in Seattle, they have a tough time with their, with the management and maintenance of their clients and the consistency issues and payment on time and yada, yada. I want to change the world for them. That's what my startup is going to do. And that is an awesome vision. That is totally fine.

Your startup can be very localized. Your solution can be very tactical. But if it succeeds, it does change those people's lives for the better. And that's, that's where I think a startup can truly be exciting versus, you know, sort of going into work at a big company and clocking in your hours. And it's, it's really difficult to see how your contribution is making, you know, a difference a lot of the time.

this, even if it's only for a few people, even if it's only in one little corner of the world, it does change lives. And that, that That makes me excited. I think that can, give people the motivation that they need at an early company that, that, you know, has high risk.

Speaker 2

Now, talking about getting excited, are you excited about being CEO the second time? Because in your book, you, you talked about how you, you, you kind of at one point hated being the CEO. You're, you'd rather do work. You were, you, you didn't really love recruiting and managing people and handling people and setting and amplifying mission, which you look back should be one of the votes of the CEO.

Do you love being a CEO now, second time around?

Speaker 3

I do, although most of the work I'm doing is the actual work as opposed to management, right? Because I, I think a big part of that is realizing the difference between what it means to be CEO of a company with hundreds of people versus a CEO with less than a dozen people. Right. And, you know, SparkToro is just two of us full-time, myself and Casey.

We have a few contractors, who I also manage, but ninety percent of my day I'm doing the work, not worrying about management and overhead and structure and all those kinds of things. And that's, that is a huge, huge relief for me. I think I'm gonna really enjoy being CEO up until SparkToro becomes, you know, maybe forty or fifty people. And then I think it'll be a decision point, right? An inflection point for, well, what do I want to do? Do I want to hire, a president to come in and sort of run the day-to-day operations and I'll maintain, you know, a sort of less hands-on CEO role, at least in the management side or, or other options.

But we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Speaker 2

That's so true. One other thing that I noticed with your book is you were talking a lot about founders with their baggages, how startups carry traits of their founders, and we actually saw this with Uber, right? And we also saw this with WeWork, where they've, the founders have carried on their baggages and they've hired people who are like them.

I'm curious how you're intentionally making sure that you're not carrying any baggage to SparkToro as a sponsor. Yeah,

Speaker 3

well, I mean, part of that is just being extremely small, right? By, limiting the number of people who, that, that, that, you know, the business builds and, and leveraging a lot of outside help. initially we

You know, we can sort of end around a lot of those conversations and challenges. That said, over time, that will change. We will need to, hopefully, right, if the, knock on wood, if the product is successful, if the company is successful, we will have to start doing more hiring. And I think that will mean being very conscientious of how we

instill values and work style and what we hire for and don't. I think that also means, in this case,

generally speaking, probably hiring folks who have, I want to say, more independence in their experience. You know, at Moz, I hired a lot of people who were accustomed to a very classic sort of work experience in the technology and, and IT fields. and I'm not saying I wouldn't do that again, but I would definitely be looking for people who have built their own thing, who love to work independently, who are not very, who are less process-driven and more results-driven.

you know, Moz, oddly enough, even though I am not this way, I, I, I think I overcompensated thinking, hey, we're a growing company. We need to build more process. We need to have more structure. We need more experienced people around the table. We need folks who have been there and done that before at Microsoft and Amazon and Google and Facebook and all these kinds of places, right? And so how do I bring those cultures into Moz? And I, I don't think I will do that at SparkToro.

I think it's going to be much more remote first, if not entirely remote. I believe we're going to do,

we're going to have, much more of a focus on getting the work done versus going through the right process.

have much, much fewer, if any, approval system. I think that that really slows down individual contributors and, I'm not, I'm not super passionate about that. I don't intend to build up many layers of management. That was another thing that happened at Moz. I think it happens at a lot of growing companies, like the CEO feels pressure from people who've performed, who want people to manage underneath them, right? And so they say, hey, I've done a great job.

I want to build a team. And frankly, I, I think that the right answer most of the time is, you have done a great job. How can I reward you that is not giving you people to manage? I don't want you to have people to manage. I don't want six layers of management. I don't want you managing. I want you doing work. Right? So what's a thing, what's another thing you want? Like, give, give me your second favorite birthday present.

So I, I think those are going to be ways that we, we sort of work around it.

Speaker 2

You dedicate a whole chapter on that, on like, there's this, you're challenging that, that idea and assumption that to progress in your career, you have to manage, you have to become a manager of people. And you talked about the value of individual contributors in your book. I totally, totally see that.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I don't, I don't like that's the, the structure that we've sort of built into society around, oh, how many people did you manage? And what level were you? Oh, you were a vice president. Oh, you were an executive vice president. Oh, you were a senior executive vice president. Oh, you were a C-level exec. Like, God, come on. It does not, you think those things matter.

They do not matter. and I think if we can get rid of that title inflation and that title worship, we can really change the world for the better.

Speaker 2

When we come back in just a moment, Rand talks about how they purposely didn't build a minimum viable product for SparkToro, but something he calls an exceptional viable product. He also argues that marketing flywheels, if you don't know what that is, he explains it, are so much better than growth hacks. Finally, why Google isn't your friend anymore, but is becoming one of your competitors.

Just a quick thank you to my sponsor for this episode, 42 Agency. If you need help growing your revenue as a B2B SaaS founder or marketer, you gotta talk to Camille from 42 Agency. Camille and his team helps B2B SaaS businesses streamline operations, implement new tech stack and design, ABM, and demand generation strategies. They help create predictable revenue pipeline for companies like OnFleek, HopDoc, GuestLogix, FlexDay, and more.

I cannot highly recommend Camille enough. You know, there's a lot of marketers out there who have a lot of talk but don't have a lot of things that they can show for it. Camille is opposite. He can talk and he can also deliver the results. You can book a free roadmapping session at 42.agency forward slash GMT. That's F O U R T W O dot agency forward slash GMT.

Also want to thank my Patreon supporters. If you don't like ads like this, you can support me for as little as $2 per episode for an ad-free version of this podcast. You'll also know who I have Coming up as guests, be part of a private Slack group, and have monthly Patreon video calls with me. You can go to patreon.com forward slash grow today to help with the cost to maintain and grow this podcast, or you can find that link in the description of wherever you get a podcast.

Well, enough about this. Let's jump back in in my chat with Rand Fishkin. I want to talk about SparkToro, and, and building and growing that. For my listeners who might not be aware of, what is, what is SparkToro?

Speaker 3

Sure. So, SparkToro is a tool that is, that helps people discover attributes of their audience. It's, it's audience intelligence software, and it's super simplistic. I think the best way to explain it is for me to give an example. So, Ramli, let's say that you and I, start a new company together, right? And we are going to sell, we are going to sell

lighting to interior designers. We, you know, we've come up with some brand new, amazing, beautiful lighting system that goes into, I don't know, rich people's houses. And so interior designers, interior decorators, those are our audience. That's the people that are going to buy our product. I don't know anything about lighting, about interior designers.

I, I really don't. I, I don't think I have a single one in my network. Oh, maybe, I think I have one friend who does interior design, right? But, but, you know, if I go on my LinkedIn, like, I don't know anything about that audience. I don't know where to reach them. I don't know what they watch or listen to or follow or read. I don't know what websites they visit.

None of it. And so how, where are we going to go do our marketing? Probably we'll just throw a bunch of money at Google and Facebook and tell them to figure it out, right? Which is very frankly an incredibly wasteful, way to do it. They will get it in front of our audience, but they will charge us the maximum amount, right? And our stuff will be probably shown to a lot of the wrong people.

And there's not, there's less and less organic opportunity, especially with Facebook. So if we wanted to be guests on the podcast that interior designers listen to, be at the conferences and events that they go to,

go get on the YouTube channels that they're on, go, you know, get our articles on the websites that they are on. That's, that's really tough to figure out right now. Most people do that through, large-scale surveys, which have a bunch of bias built in and are expensive and hard to run, and you need a big audience to do it. or they do it through, they do it through just Googling around, right, which is highly inaccurate.

And so SparkToro, you can go search for interior designers Los Angeles, or you can go search for interior decorators in Canada, or you can go search for,

nonfiction authors in the UK, or you can go search for,

what do you call it? Audio files, right? People who are super into high-quality sound systems, right? Audio file, and I want to find them in Boston, right? Because that's my target, or my target is,

Philadelphia Eagles fans, right? Whatever Well, if you can describe an audience, you can search for it in SparkToro, and then you get a list of tabs that will show you a bunch of information about those folks. They'll, they'll tell you, details of what words and phrases they use to describe themselves, hashtags they tend to use on the web, what websites they tend to visit, and share and link to, what, social media accounts, right? Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit.

they, they follow, which YouTube channels they watch, what podcasts they listen to, all of that stuff, all that data is right there. And it's sorted by percentage. So we'll say, hey, we have a sample set of 1840 people, in our database, profiles in our database describe themselves as interior designer. And of those, 17% listen to this podcast.

Speaker 2

Wow.

Speaker 3

So you, you know, you, you just get, you get exactly the marketing intelligence that you want right at your fingertips. This is data that, you know, kind of behind the scenes Facebook knows, right? They have all of this incredible demographic and profile and psychographic data, but they never show it to you. They're not going to tell you, oh yeah, you know, 22% of, people who believe in this follow this thing.

But SparkToro can do that. Right? SparkToro will, will essentially crawls all this data across the web, the social web and, and websites and pages, and then aggregates it together to build these profiles of individuals, anonymizes them because we don't, we don't want to show any personally identifiable information, and we don't really care about it anyway, right? We're just trying to aggregate, and then show, the aggregate statistics around these groups.

So, It's super powerful. It was kind of a theory that Casey and I had initially that you could do this and then get this data out. And we built a beta product and it kind of works. Like it, you know, it's amazing to see this thing come to life. And you imagine in your head, you're like, well, we'd have to crawl like a hundred million, you know, profiles.

And then could we use like, okay, what if we did a Google search for every one of these? And then we aggregated all the Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Reddit and YouTube links and their website. And then we combine that into a profile set. And what if we had millions of those? Could we search across them quickly? Oh my God, it worked.

Kind of amazing.

Speaker 2

That is, that is amazing. The first time I heard that from Andrew Warner's podcast, you were on that show last year and I was, I was blown away. I was like, this is a game changer. And I want to ask you about that beta because you did have a chapter in your book about minimum viable products. And you're like, sometimes you need to build an exceptional but valuable product.

And you wrote a blog post about it. There's so much data with SparkToro, you can totally run with it. Like, how did you make sure that It wasn't too minimum, and it wasn't too exceptional.

Speaker 3

Yeah, so we, I, I think we're still in that phase right now of trying to figure that out, right? We have about 350 or so beta testers. they are, you know, using the product. Some of them are using it very frequently, some of them are using it less frequently, and we are trying to figure out whether we're close to a launch or whether we still have a bunch of work to do.

Like I mentioned that email in my inbox this morning, you know, giving us a hard time about the design, and I think that's, you know, that's something to address. Is it, is this one person's critical feedback, and other people don't really feel that way, or is this something that is more universal, and we need to take a, you know, a hard right turn on, on, on that front? And I, I don't know what the right answer is, right? I want to, I really want to launch.

I want to start getting paid customers and getting their feedback and that kind of thing. But at the same time, I know that, a huge audience of people, I, I don't know whether it's 10,000 or 100,000 or more, but those marketers, right, sort of follow me and SparkToro already. And when we launch, they're going to look at it in those first few days and they're going to make a determination that will last for years, right? You know, you'll, you'll look, you're a marketer, you see Rand's tweet like, it's finally alive, check out SparkToro, right? And you go for the first time and you play with the free version and you run a few searches and That sticks in your mind as that's

what the product does, and that's how it works, and this is what they can and can't do for me. And it could be four years later, and someone could be like, "Oh yeah, you can use SparkToro for that." And they're like, I checked out SparkToro when they launched. They didn't do what I wanted." So I, I feel that pressure very much to have an extraordinary product at launch, and I, I think probably we're going to push it to, the beginning of the year before we, before we get out there live.

Speaker 4

And you're, you're right. People do remember their first experience, like you remember your first car or your first time having sushi, right? Like it's,

Speaker 2

it's going to stick with them. I remember the

Speaker 3

first time I used Slack, right? I, I can't, I have a tough time like envisioning Slack as something other than the first version of the product I played with.

Speaker 2

And you're right, once you open up the floodgates, they're going to come in and break through the door. I don't know how to, yeah, they're going to break right through the door. You have some hypothesis already on who your best customers are? Like who are, who are the ones that are logging in consistently?

Speaker 3

Yeah, that's exactly, that's exactly what we're using, right? So we're, we're sort of, when folks became beta testers, we surveyed them, right? We asked people to fill out a survey. they told us their title and role and sort of job description and, and what they needed audience. Data four. And using that, we have sort of looked through the 350 people who've used the product, and we look at the folks who've used it most heavily.

Like, they've run, you know, hundreds of searches in the product, they've come back week after week. What's their profile, right? And about, I think, you know, if we were talking hundreds of searches and come back week after week, it's maybe around 10, 15% of the beta testers fit into that. And those folks, right, tend to be, right now at least, tend to be small agency owners and founders, right? So they're sort of folks who have

three to 25 employees in their marketing agency, and they help a number of companies with marketing strategy and tactics and, you know, oftentimes things like SEO and social media marketing and influencer marketing and content marketing. and, and PR, actually, PR is a, seems like it's a big one for us as well. And then, you know, we think, we think because those people are using the product that they are the right customers, for us, but we, we have a few outliers too.

There's a few entrepreneurs who have built their own startups, right? And they have come back a lot and used it. there's a handful of folks who are in-house marketers, who I think have regular recurring content campaigns, like they're pushing out content. And so each time they do, they come back to SparkToro to figure out the audience to try and, push that to or to, reach out to, to help amplify it, which is, is a great use of the tool, but we have to figure out who we're Primarily marketing to and, and how we're going to reach them.

Speaker 2

I mean, to talk about who, I'm curious what their trigger point of, like, logging in to SparkToro is it, for the agencies it makes sense because they're launching campaigns for aid, for some companies that they work with. Are there any other interesting trigger points you're finding, like, like the other one that you talked about, like they're trying to promote their content?

Speaker 3

Like,

Speaker 2

what would make somebody say, I need to, I need to go to SparkToro to figure this out?

Speaker 3

Yeah, yeah. So for example, like you, you have a blog post that you're putting up, right? Or you have a, you have a podcast episode, right? So every week, right, you've got a new podcast guest on. And so you might go to SparkToro and say, hey, this episode we talked a lot about, you know, with Rand, we talked a lot about launching a SaaS business, right? So let me go look up SaaS and the SaaS hashtag, and I don't know, the SaaS TR conference.

Website, right? And plug in a few things that I know people in that world pay attention to and see who are their, you know, who are the sources of influence for them so that then I can go, you know, hey, let me jump on Twitter. I'll DM this person and be like, hey, we had Rand on. I think you're going to want to like check this out. Check this piece between like six minutes and nine minutes.

He talks about this thing that I'm pretty sure is going to resonate with you, right? And then the person writes back to you like, oh, damn, yeah, that's really cool. Oh my gosh. And then they share it, right? And now you've got in front of their audience, right? And it took you, instead of taking you, I have no idea how you do that research, right? Before SparkToro, which is, which is why we built it, but you, you can get that whole process done in five minutes, right? And now you've achieved amplification of A much great, you know, much greater, source than you had previously.

You do the same thing, right? Find, oh, let me see. Oh, cool. All right. They're on this YouTube channels. Let me put up the YouTube video. And then I want to, I want to just run like a cheap ad on this YouTube channel for my YouTube channel.

Speaker 4

Right.

Speaker 3

Boom, right? Totally

Speaker 4

makes sense.

Speaker 3

Okay, sweet. And I get, you know, a few percentage of those people come over to mine. They watch the video. They're engaged by it. Now it starts getting recommended after that video.

Speaker 4

That's a good example. I like that sound effect as well. I know it's probably not time for you to like scale this up, but have you already started talking, thinking about your marketing flywheel, which is another thing that you talked about in your, in your book is that people should avoid growth hacks and think about flywheels. What is your flywheel? You know, first of all, why should people think about flywheels? And secondly, have you thought about what your flywheel will be when you launch like, the beginning of next year?

Speaker 3

Yeah. So I, I think the reason to invest in a flywheel, there's, there's, there are many. One of the biggest for sure is that it scales with decreasing friction. So if you think about a classic growth hack, right, like I found this one trick where I can post things here and sort of, you know, drag my audience over and it'll work for a certain amount of time and then someone else will figure it out or it'll get spammed to death and no one will pay attention to it and it won't work anymore.

Those types of growth hacks, they're high investment cost per output, and they, they almost always die over time, right?

if it's, if it doesn't die over time, it's not really considered a growth hack generally, right? Then it's just a marketing channel. But, if you find those and invest in them, you are going to be putting in input to get out output. as opposed to the flywheel model, which is essentially that you put in input and you get only a little bit back, but the next time you put it in, you get a little more, and then a little more, and then a little more, and then a little more, and now you're putting in, you know, a small amount of input for a gigantic amount of output.

But you've built, because you've built up a flywheel that scales over usually, years, right? This is usually a few years, to do that. And there, you know, there are numerous ways to build this flywheel. You can have, you know, an events, an event marketing flywheel, where essentially you are identifying the events that your customer, target customers go to, and you're sort of, you know, you've got your booth and your salespeople and your pitch, and you're figuring out, okay, what's the next event that all of these folks are going to, and how, how do we best sponsor it, and, how do we get on the stage, et cetera, et cetera, right? you could have a PR flywheel, right?

Public relations, where essentially you're just leveraging journalists and news outlets and, and the, you know, whatever the, the press sources are in your field or industry to kind of get you in front of, get your brand known, liked, trusted by all of these folks, right? And so you build up, whatever it is, the, the hooks that are going to get journalists, bloggers, you know, news folks to write about you, to cover your stuff.

And then, content marketing, right, is a great flywheel where you sort of use, you know, search traffic plus content to build up this, this flywheel. That's very much what we did at Moz with the blog there. you can do this with social media where you sort of build up a, I, I love my, probably my favorite example is, Merriam-Webster, the dictionary.

Have such an awe, I mean, the dictionary, like you can't get more boring than the dictionary. And they have such an awesome presence on social, like they've really, they've built up this audience of people who are passionate about everything they share and talk about and subtweet and they kind of have this snark to their brand, you know, super cool.

the, but all of these flywheels do that same thing, right? They scale with decreasing friction. So you don't have to put as much in, you know, you only have to put as much in each time, but you're getting increasing output back out. The return keeps improving and that, that gives you true leverage in the market, right? So yeah, with SparkToro, we have been playing a little bit of the game of the free tool thing.

So we have this, we have a tool called SparkToro Trending, which is kind of like a hacker news for marketers. and it's self-built, so as people connect their Twitter accounts and share content on there, they kind of, you know, those count as votes, and then that stuff gets to the top. And a few hundred people every day visit SparkToro Trending.

We're trying to get that up to a few thousand people every day. we have another free tool that is, that helps you analyze fake followers.

yeah, that you have on Twitter. We have another one called Spark Score that sort of tells you, gives you a better metric than follower count to try and estimate the number of impressions that a, a, a tweet would get when shared there. And we're probably going to basically build those same things for Instagram in the future, is that we think that's,

where a lot of the social activity is, is headed. So those are,

That's kind of our big investment. We like it because it is, it's sort of content, but content in a way where it continues to be interesting to people long after it's published, right? A tool can be useful for years to come, even if a piece of content kind of goes stale. So I'll still keep doing a bit of content marketing and blogging, you know, speaking and events and that kind of stuff.

But I think free tools are probably how we're going to get a lot of the traction and early adoption and awareness of people trying us out, understanding what we do.

Speaker 4

It only makes sense. I've used the Twitter follower thing on my own Twitter account and I forget how many percentage of my things are bots, but it was on the average that you suggested, but.

Speaker 3

Oh yeah, because there's sort of a, it shows you the distribution and what the average is for each account size, yeah.

Speaker 4

I want to shift gears and talk about something that was really near and dear to the book that you wrote, transparency. And one thing that you talked about and it kind of stuck with me is about whenever you write emails, you got to make sure that you write it in such a way that you're going to assume in the, in the future is going to go public.

Speaker 3

Yeah. You,

Speaker 4

you want to be honest like that. You know, first of all, why is transparency so important to you?

Speaker 3

I, I think it's because I really hate, secrecy. I hate things being hidden. I hate,

I hate the idea that some people have more information than others and they use that to manipulate or to take advantage of people. that, that really frustrates me. I think that's, I don't know, there's something fundamentally ethically wrong to me about that. and, and I also love the power of transparency to inspire people, to bring them together, to, to build trust,

authentic trust, and am to, you know, very frankly do marketing, right? It's, it's, it's so unusual to find people who are, vulnerable and transparent, right? Truly transparent, which isn't just being honest, but talking about all the hard stuff and the stuff that people don't usually talk about as well. That,

that is a powerful way to build up an audience of people who really care about you, right? And what you're doing.

Speaker 4

That really struck with me. I'm trying to like be more transparent. I, I started publishing my podcast stats every month that things like that have like built up that audience.

Speaker 3

I'm

Speaker 4

curious, I'm curious about finding that balance with being transparent and being too transparent that it becomes a burden because you did tell a story about, you know, every, everybody needs to know what everybody's doing at Moz and then it became too much. Like, where is that balance between transparency and it becoming a burden?

Speaker 3

Yeah, I think, I, I think that the job of a great,

leader, In that sense or of, you know, an artist or a content creator like you are, is to find the intersection of this is truly interesting and unique and people will care about it, and also it is not a negative drain on my resources.

It has a positive impact return, right? And so I think that can be challenging, right? It can be hard to sort of identify, oh, this is something people truly care about, let's talk about that, versus, well, this other topic, I could be transparent about it, but I don't think there's that many people who are interested.

Yeah, that's a judgment call. I think it's something that you instinctually learn over time, right? And if you have great curation instincts, that can be very powerful, right? Because you can identify when people care about what they don't.

Speaker 4

I want to talk about transparency in a sense of Google doing some really untransparent stuff. Tim Salau from EHREF just posted up that they've started hiding domains, like off the search result. This is kind of, very sketchy, right? Like, why, why should marketers care about, about this? And why should the public care? Like, there's not enough, I feel like there's not enough uproar against what they're doing, and why, why should we care? Why should people care?

Speaker 3

Well, so I think the, I think the biggest issue with, Google's moves around all, all sorts of things,

But the biggest issue, the biggest problem is that essentially they are becoming gatekeepers to commerce and information, across the web. And that really means across life and society, and, that has significant ramifications, especially economic ramifications, right? So it really means that, opportunity is limited in fields where Google enters.

So, well, you know, you want to talk about three years ago, if you had a jobs website, you know, you could get a lot of traffic, and today you search for any kind of job, Google puts their own Google jobs site ahead of everyone else's. They do the same with flights, they do the same with hotels, they do the same with maps, they do the same with videos, they only show YouTube.

They do the same with news, where they show Google News. They do the same with the AMP boxes. They started doing it with colleges a couple of months ago, right?

That gets intense, right? And I think every single sector, every vertical, every niche kind of looks at Google and goes, oh, damn, if they come to my sector, I'm going to lose 60, 80, 90% of my traffic opportunity. Should I even build something, right? So Google is essentially removing the opportunity, the reason to build in front of, to build content, to build a website, to build a better mousetrap, right? Because even if you build something better, if Google's always first, what are you going to do, right? Everybody goes to Google for everything.

And so this is fundamentally why antitrust laws exist, right? Antitrust laws say, hey, if you're a monopoly in one space, like you control the railroads, you don't also get to say, well, no oil and gas companies are allowed to ship any gasoline on our railways unless we own it. So then you use your monopoly in the railroad to make sure that you control gas and oil as well.

And, and, you know, the United States government basically, what, 200 years ago said, well, that's really bad for the country, that's bad for people. We're not going to allow that, right? We're going to create these antitrust laws. And I think, frankly, when it comes to Google, antitrust laws have not been fairly applied. Right? They were applied to Microsoft, they've been applied to AT&T, they probably should be applied to, to internet ISPs like Comcast, who also are limiting innovation, and they should be applied to Google, right? and I think that frankly, the, the FTC and, and the Justice Department, right, who are looking into Google's antitrust activities now,

probably should have in 2013, when they, when they initially made their judgment against Google and it was kind of politically shut down,

they, they probably missed an opportunity there to create more opportunity. I think a lot of A ton of people across political spectrums and economists and lawyers and attorneys, people inside and outside Microsoft, are generally in agreement that the government's lawsuit against Microsoft, the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in the late 1990s, which was, you know, had mixed opinion.

A lot of people had mixed opinions about it at the time. But looking back, a lot of people say that is how we got an open internet. That is how Google, Facebook, all these other companies were able to build their presences. Because if they hadn't, Microsoft would have controlled the browser, they would have controlled the web, they would have controlled mobile, and we would have basically one company dominating all of that.

And the opportunity that's been created by the World Wide Web would be much less. So I think we got to look at it the same way with Google. Like, let's not let Google put a stranglehold or anyone, right?

I think, you know, there are people who have concerns about Amazon having a stranglehold over certain sectors of e-commerce. There are people who have concerns about, Facebook having, you know, a stranglehold over social media there, right? and you can see, you can see this in some campaigns. The, the

Republicans and Democrats in the United States agree on almost nothing, but But the Trump administration and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, right, are all like, I think tech companies have too much power and we should probably start some antitrust investigations. So that, you know, okay, we find a little place of agreement.

Speaker 4

All they're doing is doing like a wrist slap on like five billion on Facebook, like they need to probably do more. But I, I, I want to ask this question about what SEO specialists should be doing in response to this. Like what should marketers do in terms of what Google's are? I,

Speaker 3

I think there's sort of macro things that you can do and then micro level things that you can do. So macro level, I think it's reasonable to pay some attention to the political landscape and to recognize, what's going on and what, you know, who you want to support, as a result of that. I think, for example, you know, let's say that you are very much a Republican, you probably should still care about the Democratic primary and look at candidates who you would like to, because one of those candidates might win the presidency and then, you know, you might want to have some influence over, over which one you prefer.

The, the other thing that you can do, on the macro level is to, basically, if you have examples where Google, Amazon, Facebook, whoever, right, has, essentially used their monopoly power in one sphere to harm your business, specifically your business, you should write about it. You should publish and write about it, you should show statistics, because the That is exactly, those blog posts, as, as small as they might seem, that is exactly what the Department of Justice and the congressional investigations and the, attorneys general investigations, that is what they're looking for.

They are looking for those examples. They want to bring those up. and so if you can publish those stats, that'll make a difference. At the micro level, right at the, at, at the sort of tactical actionable level, I think one thing we all have to realize is that a ton of search, more than half of all searches that happen on Google end without a click, right? The rise of zero-click searches is absolutely huge.

It's not going anywhere. Google is taking advantage of that. And I think that means as an SEO,

one of the big things that we have to figure out is how do we get value from a zero-click search? There's some way that I can get, that I can present information to searchers, in such a way where my company still benefits, even if no one ever makes that click. And if you find those opportunities and invest in those spaces, you're going to have a big advantage because most of your competitors are not.

Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you're interested in the SparkToro beta, you can come to SparkToro.com and click on the What We're Building page. If you want to follow me in particular, I am most active on Twitter where I'm at Rand Fish.

Speaker 4

Awesome. Well, thank you so much.

Speaker 3

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Well,

Speaker 2

that was it. That was a two-year anniversary episode of this podcast. I can't believe I got Rand Fishkin on this episode. There's actually somebody special that I want to thank who introduced me to him, Caitlin Burgoyne. Thank you so much for the introduction. And with that, I just want to share my three key takeaways from this podcast. First of all, the traditional VC and angel investment funding model is broken.

Rand points out in this podcast and his book that for most investors, it's a numbers game. It's a zero-sum game that they either, that you either become a billion dollar company asset to them or your company is absolutely worthless to them. There's gotta be a better way, and that's why he raised funds for SparkToro in a different way. Second, first impressions of your product matters, so don't make your MVP too crappy.

I've heard a saying once that if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you built too much. Rand somewhat disagrees. If you do have a following, the first impression is critical in whether users will stick around for the long term. This is something that he learned with Moz, where they released a feature too quickly, and people couldn't let go of how bad it was.

Third, marketing flywheels are almost always better than growth hacks. With growth hacks, it works for a little while, then it sputters off. On the other hand, a marketing flywheel is something that you build that generates inertia and energy, such that each effort and piece of energy that you put into it helps it spin faster and faster, and it carries through.

That's much better than a one-off trick. Did I miss something? Share with me your takeaways from this episode. You can find me on Twitter at Ramly John. My DMs are open. You can email me at ramli at growthtoday.fm. Before we end, I just want to thank you for sticking around for this past two years. If you just started listening to this podcast this year, I also want to thank you.

You are one of the reasons why I create this podcast, is to help you, whether you're a founder or a marketer or a product person, to really sharpen your skills in marketing. I've been, I've met so many awesome people through this podcast, and I hope to meet you someday face-to-face, whether that's at a conference or if you're ever in Toronto, Canada, do reach out and we can meet up face-to-face.

I also want to thank my sponsor for this podcast. So much work to put together an episode like this. I record, I schedule my guests, I edit the podcast and create marketing materials for the podcast by myself. That's a lot of time. I was calculating how many hours each episode I spend. It takes about four to eight hours just for one episode.

So sponsors like these and my Patreon supporters help cover the cost of all the tools that I use, but also to almost pay me back for my time that I create something valuable for folks. So I want to thank my sponsor, 42 Agency. They're a demand generation and ops agency. It's founded by one of my good friends, Camille Rexton. If you're looking to grow your revenue and you're a B2B SaaS company, Camille has been there.

He's helped out some really big companies like OnFleet, HopDog, GuestLogix, FlexDay, and more. If you want a revenue pipeline roadmapping session for free, you can go to 42.agency4.gmt. That's F O U R T W dot agency4.gmt. I also want to thank my Patreon supporters and early adopters who helped make this episode happen. Jamie from Las Vegas, Veronica from London, UK, Provisio Marsis from Brazil, Nikos Vargis from Sydney, Sam Grover from New Zealand, Joseph Valenti from Canada, and Louis Nichols from Switzerland.

Also, if you, if you've been listening in for some time now, I really would love your support. Three easy ways to do it. First, tell a friend about this podcast. You can leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Second, you can join the Growth Today mailing list. You'll get the growth cheat sheets directly emailed to you.

I'll also tell you who my next guests are coming. By email. And third, support me on Patreon for as little as $2 per episode for exclusive access to content. You can also get an ad-free version of this podcast so that I can pay for my hosting fees, marketing tools, and finally get someone to help edit this show with me. With your help, I can continue to get some amazing experts on this show.

Once again, thank you for listening on this two-year anniversary of this podcast. I really, really do appreciate your support. And I'd like to end this as usual, as always, keep on growing.