In this GYDA Talks, Robert talks to Rand Fishkin. Rand is the Co-Founder and CEO of SparkToro. He has dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through his blogging, videos, speaking, and his book, ‘Lost and Founder’. When Rand’s not working, he’s most likely to be in the company of his partner in marriage and (mostly petty) crime, author Geraldine DeRuiter. If you feed him great pasta or great whisky, he’ll give you the cheat code to rank #1 on Google.
Rand dropped out of the University of Washington in 2000 to work full-time at his mother’s small business marketing firm as a web designer. In 2004, he created the SEOmoz blog, which, over the next decade, became the world’s most popular community and content resource for search marketers. In 2007, Rand became CEO of SEOmoz, Inc (now called Moz), the software company he co-founded with his mom based on the blog’s success. In seven years as CEO, Rand grew Moz from seven employees to 134, revenues from $800K to $29.3m, and traffic from 1 to 30m annual visitors.
In 2018, Rand founded SparkToro and published, with Penguin/Random House, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.
Robert and Rand spend an hour discussing the state of play for digital and Rand’s insight into how to run a successful agency.
- Are there secrets of success?
- What did you learn from the Moz experience?
- What are the myths of start-up/business growth?
- SparkToro– why? And why another ‘start-up’?
- What have you done differently this time?
- What separates the successes from the failures?
This is a bite-size version of the hour-long video. To watch the rest head over to GYDA Member Hub