Rand Fishkin is co-founder and CEO of audience research software startup, SparkToro. He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through his writing, videos, speaking, and his books. Rand is the Author of Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World, co-contributed to two books: Art of SEO and Inbound Marketing & SEO.
Creativity Without Frontiers available at all relevant book retailers
Stay in touch with Unknown Origins
Music by Iain Mutch
Rand Fishkin is co-founder and CEO of audience research software startup, SparkToro. He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through his writing, videos, speaking, and his books. Rand is the Author of Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World, co-contributed to two books: Art of SEO and Inbound Marketing & SEO.
Creativity Without Frontiers available at all relevant book retailers
Stay in touch with Unknown Origins
Music by Iain Mutch
Hello, I'm Roy Sharples, welcome to the unknown origins podcast. Why are you listening to this podcast? Are you seeking inspiration? an industry expert, looking for insights, or growing your career? I created the unknown origins podcast to provide access to insights and content from creators worldwide with inspirational conversations and storytelling, about art, architecture, design, entrepreneurship, fashion, film, music and pop culture. Rand Fishkin is co-founder and EO of audience research sof ware startup, SparkToro. Hes edicated his professiona life to helping people do bette marketing through his writi g, videos, speaking, and h s books. Rand is the Author of
ost and Founder:A Painfully onest Field Guide to the Start p World, co-contributed to t o books: Art of SEO and In ound Marketing & SEO. Hello, and welcome, Rand,! What attracted and inspired you to become an entrepreneur in the first place?
Rand Fishkin:I'm I'm actually a little bit of an accidental entrepreneur, at least the first time, I dropped out of college in 2001. And started working with my mom, Julian, who had been running a small business marketing consultancy for forever in the Seattle area. And I just wanted to build websites. So I was like, Oh, I love designing websites. And I like building them. It's really fun. And the internet is cool. So that's what I'm going to do. And then, you know, we sort of had our struggles and trials and tribulations trying to build that business. And eventually, it came to this point where, you know, I started to do SEO, because we couldn't afford to pay our SEO subcontractors. And that, you know, spiraled into this, this business that became, you know, Moz versus a consulting business, and then as a software company, and when the venture capital folks invested, they wanted me to be CEO. So that's kind of how I got started as an entrepreneur. And then with Spark Toro, I think what I discovered my last few years at Moz, you know, I had stepped down as CEO and was working at the company for a few years after is that I felt a significant need to prove myself, you know, I needed to prove that Moz wasn't a fluke, and that I could do it again. And that, you know, maybe some of my board members were or had made bad decisions about how to treat me. And, and hence, I wanted to be an entrepreneur again,
Roy Sharples:Well, you're certainly not one to rest on your laurels. On that a role model for growth mindset, by being mindful and selective, and what you do in your entrepreneurial pursuits and being open minded and progressive by pushing yourself to get out of your comfort zone and trying out new things and experimenting, and new areas, rather than standing still and milking the cash cow until it's dried out. What is your creative process in terms of how do you go about making the invisible visible by dreaming up ideas, developing them into concepts and then bringing them to actualization?
Rand Fishkin:I am very driven, especially these days by a combination of feasibility. So what I think is possible to build and relatively straightforward to, you know, connect strukton launch, and also by what I personally want to see exist in the world, and what I feel like I can effectively market to people. So, you know, I come from a marketing background, obviously. And I think that informs a lot of my my creativity, I think it also limits it in some ways, right? I do a lot of things. Before I ever launch a product, or a service, or, or even a blog post, to consider whether that thing that I'm producing, has an audience who cares deeply about what I'm creating, and who would be likely to share it and amplify it and help it reach more people? I think that's I think those inputs are something that, you know, a real artist almost wouldn't consider. Yeah, you know, because they, their art is very pure. And I have some respect, and actually a lot of jealousy around that, you know, I have often wished that I could create things just because I thought they were amazing and should exist and not have to worry about whether you know, how possible it is or how much time and budget it's going to take or who could build it or you know, whether it's going to resonate with anyone but me. Yeah, I think I think this is the beauty that, you know, that artists get to embrace and entrepreneurs don't, at the same time, there. There's benefits to having limitations. Yes. Right. It is, it is absolutely the case, right? That when you put restrictions and caps on what's doable, you can sometimes get more interesting, almost more creative ideas sometimes. So, you know, it's a love hate relationship.
Roy Sharples:Yeah, having constraints can drive more explicit scope, and being more clinical, and your focus and committing to it by making sacrifices and invest in the long hours of effort by doing the work with persistence. And that's worth the price for success over the long term. Your other point around the viability of what you do. And I think that really is the the most important thing as an entrepreneur, is having a viable business with a clearly differentiated value proposition is priority. Number one, knowing your industry and business and having an effective strategy with a clear value proposition that understands your audience, and delivers a solution to what they actually need. And get value from
Rand Fishkin:The beauty of entrepreneurship is creating something that's never existed in the world before, something that you wanted to see exists that you feel proud of, and that other people find valuable. That is just a wonderful feeling. And, you know, in some, in some ways, it it almost doesn't matter how much money you make with that, as long as you sort of make enough to do well, you know, in your life and sort of support your life. That's, that's a phenomenal thing. I think there's, you know, there's a lot of misconceptions that entrepreneurship is purely about, you know, driving for the most money possible. And I think, unfortunately, especially the American media, particularly in technology, you know, the field that I'm in, celebrates this idea of these, you know, billionaire entrepreneurs, and makes them role models, but I, I can be honest, I think really, that those people, despite all their accomplishments, I think the vast majority of them are less happy than I am, I think they're less happy than most people who, you know, make fresh pasta on the streets of Italy. I don't think that their lives are all that awesome. And you know, the few people that I know who run public companies and, you know, have these incredible obligations there. Yeah, their days are not filled with doing what they want to do. They're filled with doing what they have to do. And I think they, their minds sort of shift to a focus on wealth and finance that is not not a happy place.
Roy Sharples:There is no true love and heart. It's transactional, and it's mirrored within the cultures they curate, and the products and services they provide, which is about the transaction, making money purely and simply done making humanity and the world better. Their motivations value Using ethics are different from the socially conscious and purpose led entrepreneur, where you tend to hold yourself sincerely and accountable for your actions by having a social conscience and empathy for the environment by continuously managing innovation in a way that it powers the products you design make and sell, and the businesses you run.
Rand Fishkin:It feels very bifurcated to me. Yeah, right. I think that there's, you know, they're, they're sort of this significant group of people who, as you say, are trying to build companies that benefit the world around them that benefit their communities that are not, you know, harmful and don't have all these negative externalities. And then there are people who, you know, intentionally embrace and, you know, purposefully ignore or downplay the the negative impacts that their businesses have, I think, in particular, a lot of the entrepreneurship and you know, part of me almost wants to call it grifting around kind of blockchain companies and NF T's and cryptocurrency I don't think it's true to say that every single business and and operator in that world is, is trying to grift but a huge percent are and they are absolutely yeah, ignoring the really negative ramifications that they're that their businesses have on a lot of people.
Roy Sharples:On the topic of digital marketing, we live in a consumer land, instant gratified celebrity culture that fuels the world, everyone looks the same, and everything is for sale. Social media, mobility and the Internet dominate our daily lives if we allow it to, of course, where people have an insatiable appetite, to be engaged by an curiosity for authentic experiences and content, we have become increasingly driven by our primal need to be social, by our need for social recognition, and celebration. Western society in particular, has become more augmented by interactive digital content and information. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tik Tok, and LinkedIn have become the fabric of our lives and part of our social routine. From your perspective, Ron, how should we best consider how we cut through the noise and communicate with our audience, when they're being besieged with content,
Rand Fishkin:Social media is dominating a lot of time spent online and time online is dominating a lot of free time. Certainly for Americans, I would I would say that the the answer to the question about how do you reach the right audience with the right message at the right time in the right place? is different for every different business? Yeah. And that, you know, the best answer in to all digital marketing questions is always It depends. And this is this is, of course, one of those, right? So, you know, I would not tell restaurant tour and a software provider, that they should do marketing in the same places with similar messages. in similar ways, I would tell them, that the channels they choose the tactics, they engage in their strategy for how to make people aware of what they provide, and then, you know, get them into their sort of conversion funnel, which is a funny thing to say, for a restaurant, but it exists, that it's entirely different. So if you are a creator, this is this is how I would think about your strategy for digital marketing, which is I would do audience research, before you do anything else. I would talk to your customers and your potential customers, and people in your field who influence your customers. And I would have conversations with them about, hey, what do you pay attention to? And where do you get your information? And how do you make decisions around this problem space and talk to me about the problem itself and how you're solving it today. And what's painful about your solutions, and what you feel like is missing and all those kinds of things that you would do for product research, you should be doing for marketing research as well. You want to understand those people at a core level. And then you want to get data at scale. Right? So interviews and surveys are great. They can they can give you a lot of you know, sort of individual data. But you also want to understand the field as a whole. And so you take those learnings that you have from talking to, I don't know, a dozen potential customers, and then you try and validate them statistically across the board. So you might say, Oh, well, you know, these dozen people told me that they Whatever I listened to this podcast or subscribed to this email newsletter, or that they, you know, pay attention this website go to this conference, that the place that they start doing restaurant research is TripAdvisor or Yelp or Google Maps, or whatever it is. And now you go try and get data at scale to say, okay, look, let's see, if we, you know, maybe we would use similar web to go get a huge download of, you know, all these restaurant websites, and where do they all get traffic from? And oh, look at that, okay, Google Maps is number one, and TripAdvisor is number two, and Yelp. Number three, okay, boom, I've got some of that statistical data to back it up. And, you know, maybe you do, you know, you try and figure out some podcasts. And you might use something like Spark Toro for that. And my contention is that every different business has a different audience that they're serving. And your goal is to be in front of that audience, through the sources where they pay attention to the problem where they try and solve it. You want to be there early and often. But if you don't know what those are, or you don't know the messages that are going to resonate, you don't understand the problem from their perspective, you're not going to do marketing effectively,
Roy Sharples:Right! So knowing your audience by determining what they are most likely to need from your your product or service, and then building audience specific narratives and themes, and show up where your audiences and make the difference. So understand how your audience discovers a need and becomes aware of you through a search engine, word of mouth, website, testimonial, social post, podcast or, or blog piece, and then getting them to adopt your product or service by absorbing the content, such as product or service descriptions, reviews, q&a is and then consuming the product or service, then after that, that the ongoing nurturing, retaining and growing of your audience rund What are the key skills needed to survive and thrive as an entrepreneur?
Rand Fishkin:It depends on what your goals are, as an entrepreneur, if you want to be someone who maximizes the raw financial gain that you personally achieve, I think that is a very different set of skills and inputs and mental models than if you are someone who wants to create a business that survives for a long time, and you want to do beautifully at your craft, and you want to have, you know, very happy customers and, you know, a wonderful community around you, those two points are at opposite ends of the spectrum. And, and they require very different, you know, skills and input. So I can only speak to the one that that I play toward, which is, which is sort of, you know, how do I have a wonderful life in wonderful relationships with people around me and build a business that I hope can have an impact on a positive impact on the world, at least the world of marketing. And that is, I think you need a lot of self awareness, I think you have to know what drives you. And you need a lot of empathy. Yeah, you need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of your customers of your audience of the sources of influence that reach that audience of people who might have the problem that you are trying to solve. You probably want to be able to be empathetic to people who write about and talk about your problem space publicly and and have influence there. Those those skills, right, that I know myself, I know how I work. Well, I know how I don't work. Well, I know the kind of team that I would do well with, I know the kind of people that will energize me and, you know, fit well with my skills and abilities and make up for the areas of weakness that I have. You've got to be able to know those areas of weakness, right, that self awareness is is one side and then the empathy for others. Is the other one if you get those right. I think a lot of the rest falls into place
Roy Sharples:Upon reflection Rand, what are your lessons learned in terms of the pitfalls to avoid, and the keys to success that you can share with aspiring or existing entrepreneurs?
Rand Fishkin:One of not all of the keys to success, but one of the keys to success is choosing to invest in areas where you have personal passion and interest because it is very tough to do well in a sector where you that you don't personally care about Yeah, that you're not interested in and you know, You exclusively are doing it for the money. That's that's not to say some people don't have success there. But I would argue that having passion and interest and being personally excited about it is a wonderful thing, right? If you are reading articles late at night on your phone about this topic, and you're, you know, tweeting to people about it, and when you get into dinner conversations with your friends, you constantly want to bring it up. That's the kind of thing that you probably should start your company product service in those types of spaces, rather than something where you think, Oh, well, it looks like there's a lot of money floating around in that other field over there. Granted, you can, you know, you can find some overlap in those two things. But that would, that would be one big piece. And then, and then I think you should intentionally design your business to be structured, and to have the criteria for success that you most want to aim for. So that sounds like very obvious advice, but I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs, you know, especially in my field, but in many others, you know, we'll build their businesses with the idea that they're supposed to follow a set regiment of steps, you know, step one, then we have the idea, and then I'm going to make a business plan for it. And I'm going to go try and find funding, and based on what the, you know, funding is available, and what the investors say, then I'm going to try and build the business to, you know, serve investors as needs, which often, you know, at least if you're if you're going to classic venture route, which is, you know, a ton of entrepreneurship these days, that's very much, you know, 99, businesses fail for everyone that succeeds. And a very high growth rate is needed to prove, you know, to investors, that you're, you're doing the right thing. And so you sort of get on this hamster wheel of having to raise more money every few years, I think that, that default, does not need to exist. And you can break the chains of how those structures are crafted, and invent your own. Just as you're inventing a new product or a new service, or you're competing in a sector, you can also invent the way that you want to build your business, you can invent how many people you ever want to hire, you can choose to be a solo entrepreneur, you can choose to only ever use contractors, you can choose to be entirely remote, you can choose to never learn to code and use no code solutions to build a software product, even though you are not a software engineer, that the number of options, opportunities and options available to an entrepreneur today is incredibly vast. And I'm a little bit saddened that so few. So few of us break out of the chains of what we think we're supposed to do. And I'm guilty of this myself, especially with my first company
Roy Sharples:Tilting forward, what's your vision for the future of entrepreneurship?
Rand Fishkin:Yeah, I mean, my my big goal, with the impact that I hope to have on the world of entrepreneurship is to serve as an example to other founders and creators, that you can build a business that follows a lot of the classic pathways of tech entrepreneurship, but that you don't need to be a growth at all costs business, you don't need to raise traditional kinds of venture, you can build a business that is intentionally made to be profitable and long term and long lasting, and serve its customers and team first before it serves its investors. And that that can be a really beautiful way to design and fund and run a company. I'm also hoping that I don't know ROI if you've seen some of my blog posts or you know, social posts or conversations about chill work. But I'm also hoping to amplify and exemplify this idea of chill work, which is essentially not optimizing for how many hours can I possibly put in and, you know, let me let me hustle and grind all the time, but rather, how can I create a business that can be done in 20 hours of work a week, and still be very successful because of those 20 hours? are high quality hours, where I'm doing my best work. And I'm working on the most important things instead of, you know, I'm throwing spaghetti at the wall 60 hours a week and hoping for something that sticks. So those are the changes that I'm trying to have on the entrepreneurial world what what the future looks like? I don't have a crystal ball. So I can't say and I don't have an ego large enough to think that my little contributions will will become that future. But I hope I hope that it opens up some other avenues for other people.
Roy Sharples:Just how soon is the future? One thing for sure is, the future is unwritten and everything is possible. Do you want to learn more about how to create Without Frontiers by unleashing your creative power? Then consider getting
Creativity Without Frontiers:How to make the invisible visible by lighting the way into the future. It's available in print, digital and audio on all relevant book platforms. You have been listening to the Unknown Origins podcast. Please follow subscribe, rate and review us. For more information go to unknownorigins.com. Thank you for listening.