SparkToro’s Rand Fishkin on Personal Branding Risks, Why He Left Moz, and Building Companies Without Venture Capital

Rand Fishkin built one of the most recognizable personal brands in tech long before it became trendy, but it came with unexpected costs. In this candid conversation, the SparkToro co-founder and former Moz CEO reveals how his personal brand created challenges when leaving the company, why he spent $60,000 in legal fees during his departure, and his growing disillusionment with venture capital.

Fishkin shares insights on what Moz got right and wrong, why 93% of venture-backed companies fail to return even 1x to investors, and how he’s pioneering alternative funding models with both SparkToro and his gaming company Snackbar Studio.

He also discusses marketing attribution myths he once promoted, why Google still dominates despite AI competition, and his philosophy on building sustainable businesses that prioritize long-term success over explosive growth.

Without further ado, here’s our discussion with Rand Fishkin.

Mark MacLeod:

In this episode, I sit down with Rand Fishkin, co-founder and CEO of SparkToro. Rand is most well-known for Moz. He was kind of, I guess, a celebrity amongst founders long before personal branding became a thing. In this episode, we talk about kind of this trend of CEOs building personal brands.

We talk about kind of his reflections on Moz, what he got right, what he didn’t, kind of his thoughts on venture capital, startup industry in general. Rand is just a colorful character, an amazing human, and that absolutely came through in this discussion. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think you will too.

Rand, welcome to The Startup CEO Show. It’s a true pleasure to have you here. How are you doing today?

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah. All right, thanks for having me, Mark. Good to be here.

Mark MacLeod:

It’s my pleasure. So I first came across you many years ago through Unbounce, and Rick, Ali, and Carter said great things about you. And at the time, I was like a little starstruck. You know, there aren’t too many guys whose books I’ve read. I read your Lost and Founder book when it came out and you really stood out. Everyone knew who Rand was, and it was sort of order of relevance. It’s like Rand and then Moz and then, by the way, this whole kind of inbound movement. So anyway, it’s awesome to be chatting.

Rand Fishkin:

Oh, yeah, wonderful. Actually, Ollie and I got to go on vacation together in Costa Rica was that January of this year. So, yeah, I kept in touch with those guys. Still very grateful to them for all the things they’ve done and excited for all the things.

Mark MacLeod:

You know, they’re dear friends of mine. I led their one and only venture round back when I was a VC.

Rand Fishkin:

Oh, right. Yeah!

Mark MacLeod:

And there were like 14 people at the time. And just shows the strength of that inbound movement that you pioneered. Because, like on $600,000 of financing and a little bit of debt, they built a pretty large business in the tens of millions in revenue and just huge organic inbound kind of acquisition.

Rand Fishkin:

Right, yeah, yeah. Remarkable brand, too.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah. And I’ve spent time with Sarah from Moz, and I’m obviously much more familiar with Unbounce. But like, Moz, a values-driven company. Like they led with values and culture and a really special place. Like, of all the companies I invested in when I was a VC, that was one that I would have happily joined as CFO.

Rand Fishkin:

Oh, well, that is lovely to hear. I’m sure Rick would be honored. I hope he’s doing well. I haven’t seen him since he moved to… was it Toronto?

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, on the east coast of Canada.

Rand Fishkin:

Right, right. All right.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, yeah, he’s doing well. Gardening, of course, and doing CrossFit. I’ve been plugging into CrossFit for years. It’s sort of like the opposite of Fight Club. You have to talk about it. And I’ve been an avid cross-fitter for a long time. And now he is as well.

Rand Fishkin:

My understanding is there’s an overlap. If you’re into astrology podcasts or CrossFit, you have to talk about it all the time.

Mark MacLeod:

Okay, perfect. Oh, that’s it. So check the box. I talked about CrossFit.

Rand Fishkin:

Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about astrology, but we could get to that later.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, exactly. I don’t know anything about it either, but it must be a thing because it stood the test of time.

Rand Fishkin:

True! It’s very, very powerful brand.

Mark MacLeod:

That’s right. And you know, I’m a Virgo, and based on the stereotypical traits of Virgo, they seem pretty right.

Rand Fishkin:

Well, so you know much more about astrology than I do. I don’t know what constellation and I don’t know the traits that are associated with it, but if I looked it up and I found out that I was a Poseidon or whatever it is, and my traits were “doesn’t know things about his own sign,” I would be super impressed. They would really nail me.

Mark MacLeod:

That’s hilarious. So, yeah, like I say, you were a big brand kind of early. And I’ve noticed a trend these days with more and more CEOs building a personal brand. And I’m curious, what are your thoughts on that? First of all, did you set out to build a personal brand, or did it just sort of happen, like, what are your thoughts about that?

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, so I think, let’s see, there’s definitely an overlap in the last 10 years between what was for a while called influencer and now is sort of called creator and building an influencer brand or creator brand and then overlapping that with sort of a CEO brand or startup founder brand I think it’s can be helpful. It served me well at times at Moz. But I think if you were to talk to the company’s board of directors, let’s say just before it sold, I think they would say that on the whole, it was a net negative.

Mark MacLeod:

Interesting. Tell me about that. I’m curious about that.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, well, you know that as a venture capitalist, you need to achieve a certain kind of breakaway growth rate and I think that personal brands, especially when they have the risk of becoming disconnected from the company, carry a lot of challenges and problems that a brand struggles to overcome when a well-known founder, well-known CEO steps away from the brand or is asked to step away from the brand. When that disconnect happens, it gets messy in the minds of people who know the company and brand, and there can be conflict between those two entities.

I think I was sort of nudged to leave Moz about 18 months before I actually did. And those 18 months were a process that involved almost $60,000 in legal fees just on my end personally. I was paying lawyers to interface with Moz’s hired lawyers to negotiate the settlement for my departure. And Mark, I’m sure you can imagine right after I wrote Lost and Founder and after people read the blog post about my departure, I heard from dozens, maybe even a hundred startup founders and CEOs who had had similar experiences.

I had calls with a lot of these people, very therapy-centric types of calls, like, oh, it happened to me too, man, it was the worst. I don’t know who I am anymore. My identity is gone. You know, all that kind of stuff. And then negative impacts on their company, too. So, I don’t know, it’s a messy situation whenever companies and founders break up, and I think doubly so or maybe even 10x so when there’s a personal brand involved in the person departing, that’s just it’s incredibly hard.

Counterpoint, you know, obviously Ali’s not with Unbounce anymore, but it was a very amicable departure, and like there was no bad blood. Everything was great. Ali was like, it’s time for me to move on. And they were like, great, what can we do to support you? No problem. So I don’t want to say that it always ends badly, but it always carries risk. That would be my assessment.

I would argue that if you’re a personal brand startup CEO founder, it does amazing things for your marketing, especially at the small and mid-scale. If what you’re trying to do is go from sort of the zero to $50 million in revenue stage or the zero customers to the first 10,000 customers, awesome. My God, what a superpower.

It will make so many things so much easier if you have both founder market fit and founder marketing fit. It’s amazing. But my assessment is that if you’re in sort of the larger-scale venture world and you need to cross that $100 million revenue scale per year, the value of the personal brand really slows down. It doesn’t have as much of an impact, it can be a drag, and it does carry risk.

Mark MacLeod:

Interesting. Yeah, that’s really valuable insight. You know, when I first saw this trend happening, I was like, these people are distracted. They should be operating. What’s going on? Like. And then I just worried about human nature, which is, I don’t know, you start believing your own hype, and the more followers you have, and then like, oh, let me see who liked my post today? And then you become ungrounded and lose your humility, and then stop learning.

And that’s again, my context is startups that are trying to grow rapidly. As a CEO, you have to grow as fast as your business. If you think your shit doesn’t stink, you stop learning. So that was my concern.

Rand Fishkin:

So this conflicts directly with most, high 80s, low 90s percent of CEOs I know who have become, I would say, sort of extraordinarily successful. Like, they’ve built companies to $100 million, sold them for half a billion or a billion dollars or more, or even become worth those figures. They often believe that their shit doesn’t stink and that their levels of humility, tragically, like many of these people, oftentimes, I’m not going to name names, but oftentimes, I was friends with them in my 20s and 30s and we sort of whatever came up in the world together and I am disconnected from almost all of them these days.

And I think. I think a big part of that is because I’m not entranced by, you know, well, you probably remember my wife. I left her. Now I’m married to somebody who’s in their 20s, and I go to these parties and check out this boat that I have, and my shit has never stunk. I never had problems, you know.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah. I poop diamonds.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, I don’t know. So, I think there’s unfortunately a correlation between those people having those attributes and having that level of success. And I would argue that what really needs to change is that we should change the definition of what success means. Because I’ll tell you, Mark, I’m sure you know plenty of those people, do you think they’re happy?

Mark MacLeod:

I mean, I read Elon Musk’s biography, and I was just like, I would never want to be him, and I’d never want to work for him. Tortured soul.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, and I think that a lot of these people are, right? There’s no limit to greed. There’s no limit to the feeling of inadequacy that is driving a need to present a face that’s different from the one they feel inside. There is no amount of money, notoriety, or mentions on social platforms that will satisfy them.

Mark MacLeod:

Nothing external will satisfy them.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, it’s really tragic. I never see the turnaround story. I never see someone who’s like, gosh, I went through this, I was this big shot, and then I sort of humbly removed myself from that situation. Maybe Bill Gates is sort of there, but I don’t know, the dissolution of his marriage and a lot of the stuff people say in Seattle at least seems like he is also, despite doing many good things, experienced some of those same challenges himself. So, I don’t know. I’m not sure human beings were built for billions of dollars.

Mark MacLeod:

No, no, I’m sure not. I’m curious when you were going through those highs, can talk about the lows separately, but did you have practices to keep you grounded and keep you humble?

Rand Fishkin:

Well, I am very, very deeply in love with and attached to my wife, Geraldine. She self-describes as having poor girl energy. And I think that that really, really helps, in fact. There’s not a moment that goes by where she isn’t conscious of both sorts of our situation and the world around her, and she always brought a lot of humility to me, even during my years of whatever. I never got to the scale that most of these folks that we’re talking about are on.

Mark MacLeod:

But you could have easily gotten caught up in the scene. Look who I’m with, blah, blah, blah. Look what the events I’m speaking at. I’m on the circuit. You could have been that guy, right?

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, sure, sure, sure. I got to meet lots of those people, right, sure. And had, I don’t know, acquaintanceships and friendships with some, and also I think early on got to see some of the dark side of it. That helped, right? That is almost a warning signal.

I remember I had some friends whose companies had been acquired by WeWork, and people who interacted with Adam Neumann and that whole scene and situation.

Mark MacLeod:

Did you watch the TV show about it? It’s worth watching.

Rand Fishkin:

No, I haven’t but all right. I might have to check it out. And then I knew and was not friends, but friendly with many people who had high profiles in the venture capital world. And because I pitched them repeatedly, and some people were investors and some people were regretful non-investors, especially for the kind of five, six years that Moz was really riding high.

Yeah, so that exposure too. Like you’d get together for coffee or drinks or a meal, those people would spill stories that just made your head spin. I think that helped. I don’t know why.

And I will say, I think you know this too, Mark. So, founders like myself and Rick from Unbounce are exceptionally unusual in that we did not come from wealthy backgrounds and didn’t have strong networks when we started our companies. And when I did research for Lost and Founder, you might remember one of the early chapters, I sort of laid out the detailed research that the NVCA did, where they looked at this is these American companies, but which represents still a very large number of venture financing events.

And you know, for the sort of quarter century, from 1995 to 2020, fewer than five in a hundred startup founders who raised more… I want to say it was more than $2 million, but it might have been more than $5 million in venture. Almost all of them were what you would call Nepo babies. Like they were deeply connected to the Bay Area or East Coast financial and startup, and tech worlds. They had gone to these schools. They had grown up in wealthy families. Like wealthy families, meaning a net worth of $10 million or more.

And so you just don’t see middle-class and poor kids becoming founders of venture-backed companies. Not that you don’t see them, but they’re exceptionally rare. It’s like finding a star in Hollywood today who’s related to no one else in Hollywood ever. You know, it’s almost impossible to find.

Mark MacLeod:

That’s fascinating, huh? I definitely want to spend a bunch of time on Spark Toro, but let’s stay with Moz for a bit. Like, I’m curious, when you look back, what did you get right and what did you not get right?

Rand Fishkin:

Well, two things. Riding a big trend that nobody else thought was big. That really helped. So if you are jumping on the AI bandwagon right now, that’s not what I’m talking about. Everybody thinks the AI bandwagon is big. But in 2003, nobody thought SEO was big, and nobody thought search was big.

And so very frankly, I think the thing to try and identify is not what’s a giant market, it’s what’s a medium-sized and growing market that nobody else likes and that nobody else is willing to touch. There was a good Wall Street Journal article recently about sort of the millionaires next door and talking about how many of them were essentially owners of what would be called boring businesses.

Like, what do you do? Well, I run a company that makes a device that rips up carpeting in hotels.

Mark MacLeod:

That’s pretty boring.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, you know. Well, it’s a $20 million-a-year business. You know, like, there you go, right? And I’m one of five companies in the space. And all the small hotels in Ohio hire us to come rip up their carpets. Like, hey, great businesses, right?

I think identifying stuff that other people don’t want to do, don’t have the skills, don’t have the wherewithal, the knowledge, the network, can be a really great thing. And that is something that I did very unintentionally, wisely, at Moz. I was just attracted to SEO because I like to optimize things.

And I got pissed off early on at Google for hiding the way their algorithm works, and that started a fire under me that lasted 17 years. And I just kept pounding away at trying to make Google’s ranking system understandable to laymen. And, yeah, I think that that turned into, I mean, a relatively successful business, except that we raised a bunch of venture, which was, of course, very foolish. There’s no need to if you’ve got a $30 million a year company that’s profitable; you don’t need to give yourself the obligation to get to a hundred.

Mark MacLeod:

Can we talk about that for a minute? And then let’s go back to the postmortem. Just because not only did you raise Venture, but you raised from Foundry, a tier one fund, and that comes with commensurate expectations. So, yeah, let’s talk about that.

Rand Fishkin:

Gosh. So, Brad Feld and I from Foundry Group met through Geraldine, through my wife. Brad’s wife Amy was a big fan of Geraldine’s blog. And Geraldine’s sort of a personality in the travel and now more so culinary world. She has a James Beard Award now and her latest book was a bestseller. And so she’s quite accomplished in her own field.

But Amy, Brad’s wife, was reading her blog, and she had written about my experiences fundraising, and Amy sent it to Brad, and then Brad reached out to me. So that’s how I got connected to Foundry. And, yeah, we formed a close friendship for a number of years. Brad was obviously an investor, and I think I got entranced by the world of venture for a long time.

Like, I wanted to play with the big kids. I felt like an outsider. I felt like I wasn’t good enough. I felt like in order to be somebody, I had to do what all the cool kids on the front page of TechCrunch and the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal were doing.

I don’t know, for whatever reason, I foolishly never even considered the path of, hey, what if I built a quiet, successful business in this field that happened to do really well? Which, interestingly enough, the two companies that beat Moz eventually, that took market share from them and won the space, neither were venture-backed until the very end. Right there. Is that something very, very late?

Mark MacLeod:

Was that Semrush? I’m not super familiar.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, Semrush was one of them. Now they’re a public company. And Ahrefs, which never took money and is still private and is north of $100 million in revenue. And yeah, I mean, that very easily could have been Moz if my ego had been in check and if I had thought more carefully about it, and maybe if the venture community too had looked at our business and said, you guys are onto something amazing. You should not take money from us.

Like, let me show you this other path. But that is not marketed to any founders, Venture is marketed to all founders, even though it’s wrong for 99% of them.

I think even yourself, right, when you were a VC, you would have said, Venture is wrong for 99% of companies.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah. It’s one of the reasons why I stopped being a VC. I believe that the industry was broken. Location mattered a lot more then. I was running a 50 million fund out of Montreal, and I was just like, I can’t out-Sequoia Sequoia. Like, they’re going to kick my ass every single time. And therefore I can’t look limited partners in the eye and be like, hey, I know most fund managers shit the bed, but don’t worry, I got it all figured out. Give me your money.

And then, by the way, backing up that empty promise with my old money. It was literally eating at me. Like, I lost 30 pounds in a year. People thought I had cancer. I had no bum, I was, like, concave. I was just stressed out from being in the wrong industry. So that’s when I hit the eject button.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, I think it takes an incredible amount of self-awareness and an extraordinary amount of empathy and humility to do what you did. And it should be lauded. It is lauded by me as far more impressive than anything, no offense to Brad, but anything that he and his team ever did. I think that’s a truly wonderful, thoughtful way to live your life and to be able to recognize that is a superpower and find things that make you happy and make the world better and make sense for a thoughtful, caring life.

Anyway, obviously, I became disillusioned with Venture over the years as well. And when I started writing a little bit about that, some of that was on the blog. And then, of course, in the book. Gosh, man. Like I said, I heard from so many founders who had experienced really rough times. And a big part of the allure is the notoriety that comes along with being associated with those brands.

So, if Sequoia, Benchmark, or Foundry invests in your company, it’s like Geraldine putting a James Beard award winner next to her name on her book. It just feels so meaningful. And what it actually means, statistically speaking, is I think the numbers are like 93 out of 100 firms that raise venture capital will not return even 1x. So every founder and every employee at those companies is having a bad time, and investors are too.

And then there are another four out of the hundred that will return 1 to 3x. Probably not a good time for anybody there either. Moz was in that group, by the way, in the 1 to 3x group. And then, well, for its early investors, it was a bigger return, but for the later-stage investors, much lower. And then the last two or three make up the fund. Those are the ones that do the 4x, 10x, 50x, and 100x.

Mark MacLeod:

Crazy numbers. Yeah. I’ve got a recent stat for you, actually. I was speaking at the Touring Fest in Edinburgh two weeks ago. This was actually an intro through Ollie. It was my third time speaking, and it was Ollie who connected me. And you can’t tell from my accent, but I lived in Scotland till I was 11, so it was amazing to go back. Anyway, I did some research, and so 70% of venture-backed exits since 2022 were for less than the capital raised.

Rand Fishkin:

And those are the ones that exited, not the ones that shake out.

Mark MacLeod:

Exactly, those are the ones that exit. There was an actual transaction. And then often those are celebrated. Like, it blows my mind.

Rand Fishkin:

Because no one has an incentive to tell the truth. No one has an incentive. The founder, the employees at the company. Even if they get nothing, there’s no incentive to sort of say, hey, I was part of this essentially failed transaction, failed company that didn’t return 1x its investment. And for the investors, there’s no reason for them to publish a list of, hey, we invested in this company and it didn’t do well.

And so, unfortunately, you almost never get the truth of that, and instead, you get a sanitized version of what’s going on. But anyway, going back to your earlier question, I think one of the other things that Moz did really right was marketing.

Mark MacLeod:

100%. I agree with that.

Rand Fishkin:

I don’t think of myself as being an extraordinary product or engineering CEO. I certainly hope that I’m getting better, and it’s something I put a lot more effort into with my new companies. But I would say Moz blew it out of the water marketing-wise. Like, just became this massive brand in the digital marketing space and obviously the SEO space and built up my personal profile probably far more than I ever expected or necessarily wanted, which, yeah, had some helpful effects. But like we mentioned, some challenges for the business at scale.

It’s certainly been helpful to me in future projects. So obviously, I fundraised for my second company for SparkToro, and for Snackbar Studio, my third company. And both of those processes were absolutely helped by the fact that many people already knew, liked, and trusted me, and had this sort of impression of me as someone who was impressive and knew how to do things. And yeah, I’m deeply grateful for that.

We raised in really weird ways, which we can talk about if you want to…

Mark MacLeod:

I think a lot of people raise venture because they think they have to. They think that’s what you do. So, yeah, I’d love to know what you did.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, so SparkToro, I don’t want to say pioneered this. Broadway plays have been raising money this way for years. But essentially, what we did is we made SparkToro an LLC, and we raise money from a lot of people like yourself. Individuals whom I knew through my network who had some net worth. The United States requirement is quite low, I think you only need, I want to say it’s a million dollars of net worth or a salary of $200,000 or more.

So, for many people, if they own a second house, or they have an index fund in the stock market, or even they own private shares in their own company, whose valuation is a few million dollars, they are a qualified investor. And those people put in, I think we raised from 33 or 34 angel investors who put in between $25,000 and $100,000 each and raised a total of $1.3 million.

And that allowed Casey and I to build SparkToro because we did not have the funds to do it ourselves. When I left Moz, I would have needed a salary very shortly. You know, I got a nice severance package, but it wasn’t a multimillion-dollar severance package. It wasn’t even a quarter of a million-dollar severance package. But it was enough to sort of take some months to get off the ground, get SparkToro off the ground, and raise a little bit of money.

Then, essentially, we’ve spent the first 18 months building the product. We were able to pay back our investors four years after we launched. So that was great. Essentially, that $1.3 million we paid back to our investors. Now everybody participates in profit-sharing pro rata. And so our hope is to pay dividends every few years for a long time, for hopefully decades to come.

And that’s kind of an exciting model. It’s sort of, it’s sort of the difference. A lot of people are familiar with investing in the stock market. And there are stocks that you buy on the assumption that they will grow in value and that you’ll sell them someday. And there are stocks that you might buy that just pay dividends. The price doesn’t really grow that much. I think Pepsico is a good example.

Mark MacLeod:

Any utility company like Telecom.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, utility company, sure. Even a Treasury bond. Like you buy it and then it’s going to pay whatever.

Mark MacLeod:

They’ll pay big dividends.

Rand Fishkin:

So we kind of think of SparkToro as that it’s a much lower-risk way to invest in this in the private, small startup world, with the idea that you’re going to get your money back and then get dividends over time. And it works really well for companies that have that lower risk. But also, Casey and I are not trying to build a $100 million company. Like, we’re not even $2 million in revenue, but we only have three people. Our expenses are relatively low. We didn’t raise very much. And so someone who put in $25k can kind of expect to make a nice treasury-style return on SparkToro. And that’s our goal.

We did the same thing with Snackbar Studio just last fall. So in November, we raised $2.15 million, considerably more for that business. And also from about, I want to say, almost 40 investors who put in between $25k and $100k each. That company, I would say it’s a little different. It’s a C corp. The goal is certainly a little bit higher.

Like, the expectation is we’re gonna be a higher return, but also higher risk business. And that’s just sort of the nature of indie video games. You either produce a smash hit or you don’t. Yeah. And so we’re working on our hit, and we hope to get there.

Mark MacLeod:

Maybe you’ll produce the next Slack. That’s how they started off. They were trying to build a video game.

Rand Fishkin:

That’s right. That’s right.

Mark MacLeod:

Was there any concern among investors that you were doing two things at the same time and therefore half-pregnant?

Rand Fishkin:

No, didn’t seem to be. And I do lots of other things too. Like many folks in our demographic, I’m on the board of directors of another company, a hardware company here in Seattle that raised money using SparkToro’s model. It’s called Seattle Ultrasonics. They’re making the world’s first ultrasonic home chef’s knife. Super cool business.

Obviously, tariffs have been a real pain, but that business is fascinating and about to take off, and they got their patent and are doing amazing stuff. So, I think this funding model, my hope is that it’s going to have legs and be used by lots of other folks. And to that end, for anyone who’s listening, if it sounds interesting to you and you would like to raise money this way, I open-source the documents for both companies.

So, Snackbar Studio you can find, if you search for Snackbar Studio funding, you can find the docs open source. We paid our lawyers $10k extra to essentially publish open-source versions of those. You’ll find a Google Drive in the blog post. Same thing with SparkToro. If you want to raise with an LLC, there are reasons described in both posts about why you would choose one over the other.

So, my hope is that we can build a different kind of class of startup and redefine what success means.

Mark MacLeod:

I love that. That’s really cool. Nice public service you did there. I’m curious, even though nobody talks about it there are many founders who go through where they leave one company and then there’s a period where they lick their wounds, heal, learn, and start something else. Could you talk about that period? What was that in-between period like?

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, I think it was almost 10 hours for me.

Mark MacLeod:

Very productive 10 hours. That’s awesome. You had a lot of coffee.

Rand Fishkin:

No, I’ll tell you, quite honestly, it was a marketing thing and a “Oh, my God, I need healthcare.” You know, y’all up in Canada, you’re very lucky that you sort of have this…

Mark MacLeod:

You’re welcome to come.

Rand Fishkin:

I realize Canada has its own challenges, I know, I know. But, yeah, for Americans, healthcare is a panic thing. Many people know that my wife, Geraldine, sort of very famously had a brain tumor a number of years ago and wrote about it in her first book and on her blog and stuff. And anyway, high risk of not having health insurance for any given amount of time. And so I really needed to get that going.

And so, SparkToro started, technically, the day after I left Moz. And so, essentially, I only had those 10 hours of unemployment between when I left one company and started the other. And it was also an intentional marketing thing. Like, I knew that when people heard that I left Moz, there would be a lot of attention around that. And so I wanted to be the person to publish that news, and then to have a new company already announced that you could subscribe to the email list and see what Rand’s up to next.

Mark MacLeod:

Were you working on this in the background as you were winding down?

Rand Fishkin:

No, absolutely not.

Mark MacLeod:

When I was a VC, it took me a long time to figure this out, but I figured out the best opportunities were based on their crisp, simple insight. Simple to communicate, often based on the person’s mastery of a domain, but in no way simple to execute. So I’m curious, what was the insight behind SparkToro?

Rand Fishkin:

A big frustration that had dogged me for years at Moz, especially toward the last sort of four or five years of my tenure there, was that I saw more diversity in how people discovered brands, businesses, and solved their problems than just going to Google and searching for something.

But I had no way to help companies that I advised or wanted to assist, or people who came to Moz and sort of said, hey, how can we get good at SEO? You know, and I look at their product and their space, and I’d say, I don’t think SEO is the thing you need to get good at. I think your customers are going to find you through whatever, social media, through brand marketing, through conferences and events, or through podcasts and YouTube channels, or through content that’s published on the web and PR, and press and media coverage.

I remember I was on the board of directors of one company, and they got one really good publication in a particular educational space who wrote about their product, and it sent them a whole bunch of customers, and we thought, oh, okay, how do we find the other publications that that audience reads, watches, listens to? Other than surveying and interviewing people, which was a manual and very unsuccessful process, it was a real pain.

You know, the founder didn’t really know any people in that world, and so it was this big distraction from all the other things that he had to do. And I thought, there should be software for this. Just like there’s software that tells you what keywords people search for in Google, there should be software that tells you what podcasts do interior designers in California listen to, and what YouTube channels are popular with real estate professionals, and what websites chemical engineers in the UK visit regularly that I would never have heard of and couldn’t find. But if I knew them, then I could target those people in those places and learn a whole bunch about them.

And so this was the impetus for SparkToro, which helps people do audience research. Unfortunately, I’ll tell you the reality, I thought everybody should be doing this. Should be is different from are. So there’s lots…

Mark MacLeod:

It’s like taking vitamins, but you forget.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, you should be taking your vitamins. But actually, I take my vitamins. You know what really helped me with the vitamin thing? They’re little gummy bears, and I really enjoy the gummy experience.

Mark MacLeod:

There you go.

Rand Fishkin:

So maybe I need a gummy audience research that you can take in the morning. But, yeah, so that has proved to be our biggest challenge, which is to get people over the hurdle of, I know I should do this thing, but it’s not part of my job description or title or role or what my boss or client expects of me.

And so we’ve had to essentially market the whole idea of, hey, you should know more about your potential customers before you try and sell to them. Because if you do, your marketing is going to get a lot smarter.

Mark MacLeod:

I’m curious how you see AI changing how brands get discovered. Like, I rarely go to Google anymore. I feel like I discover everything in Perplexity or ChatGPT. What are your thoughts?

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, so we’ve done a bunch of research around this because I have heard that from a number of folks. My LinkedIn feed is filled with people who say they never use Google anymore. And so the back end of SparkToro uses a clickstream data provider called Datos. And for folks who aren’t familiar with what clickstream data is, you might have heard of the old Nielsen set top boxes from the 1950s and 1960s where Nielsen would send a family in the United States a little device that would sit on their TV and it would connect in and it would tell Nielsen every channel and show that the family watched, right?

And so then, whatever, NBC could say the final episode of Mash had a 42% market share or whatever last night. Clickstream data is very similar for the Internet. So Datos has access to tens of millions of devices, phones, desktops, and laptops where people have essentially opted in to provide their click stream, which is the URLs that they visit and the timestamps of those URLs as they’re visited.

And then Datos does a bunch of things to anonymize and aggregate them and remove any potential personally identifiable information sort of in the process. And then they make that available to people like us who can buy the data from them. And so we have data on people who are, whatever, interior designers. We know that they visit these websites because we have the clickstream data and we can map that up to the LinkedIn profiles, etc, right?

So, a bunch of math and engineering is behind the scenes. But as a result, we can answer questions like was Google used less in 2024 than it was in 2023? Was perplexity used more, and how much more? Was ChatGPT used more, and how much more? It’s especially helpful because those products are almost exclusively used on their desktop website interfaces.

Mobile is starting to become a thing, and Datos has data on mobile visits as well. But if they were like apps on the phone, that would be much harder to track. So Datos is not great for telling us how many people use the Pinterest app on their mobile devices. But anything that happens on the web, they can see.

So, we looked at this, and the numbers were that last year, Google grew 22% in terms of number of searches, which is its highest growth rate. That’s a giant denominator in the last few years. So last year was actually Google’s highest rate of growth in the number of searches. And the number of searchers has not grown very much. What happened is people started searching Google more as Google introduced more AI results and AI overviews, instant answers, and all that kind of stuff that makes people Google more.

And it grew by 5 ChatGPTs last year. So ChatGPT is growing fast, absolutely. The percentile growth rate of ChatGPT is much higher than Google. I think ChatGPT grew 180-190%. Like, big growth last year. Perplexity grew like 600% last year. So very fast growth rates, and they will have to 10 or 50x that growth rate in order to catch up to Google ever. Because Google is just way bigger. So, Google is searched for 373 times more than ChatGPT.

Mark MacLeod:

I would have never guessed that. That’s amazing.

Rand Fishkin:

We’re in a unique world, right? We live in tech and cutting edge, and early adopters, and AI is great for everything. And you go to the rest of the world, and it’s just not that way. I like the survey I saw. This was like a few weeks ago, where 60% of Americans were like, I’ve never tried ChatGPT, and I don’t know anything about that.

Mark MacLeod:

Wow, there you go. Different worlds. As we start to approach the finish line, I’d love to do something with you that I’ve never done on this podcast, which is just a little hot seat, rapid-fire, just throw some questions at you randomly, there isn’t a theme to the questions. So, first one, if you had to start over, you don’t have a personal brand, you have no money, you’re starting at the start line, what would you do?

Rand Fishkin:

Figure out what I’m great at. So, let’s see. The thing that I tend to be quite good at is explaining complex topics in simple terms that lots of people seem to find compelling. And I’m pretty good at video. I can do most of my videos in one take.

Mark MacLeod:

Very relevant skills to the current times, you know?

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, and if I were coaching someone else, I would tell them to do the same thing. Find the thing that you’re really good at that also overlaps with what an audience in our era and a space. I like optimizing things, and so I would probably do something that gives me the opportunity to do that. I like optimizing the conversion rate of a web page. I like optimizing the funnel for a business. And I suspect that I could probably get a consulting business off the ground pretty quickly and then pivot that into almost certainly a product.

Mark MacLeod:

Okay, good. So I don’t have to worry about you. If you reinvent yourself, you can put food on the table, and Rand’s going to be okay. Good. I was worried for a minute.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I did talk to our financial advisor when the new administration in the US was sort of destroying our economy, and had this like, yeah, so do we think can we move our money to other markets? And he was like, we’re diversifying. Like, we’re getting out of the US. That’s like, great, good. I don’t trust it here.

Mark MacLeod:

Well, that’s a whole other topic, so I’m not going to bite on that one. But, yes, I get it. All right, next question. What’s the wildest business advice you’ve ever gotten? It could be from an investor, another founder, just without throwing anyone under the bus. The most kind of crazy out there advice you’ve ever gotten.

Rand Fishkin:

Oh, man. Do you remember CryptoKitties?

Mark MacLeod:

Yes. A friend of mine, version one, venture-backed them.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah. Well, I got some wild advice that I should. Cryptokitties, I think the whole Web3 trend hype cycle was really, really problematic for a lot of people who gave me a lot of advice about how I should put my money into that. And I’m very glad I didn’t do that.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, you and me both. Yeah, they know. I ran a record label until last year and just handed it off to one of my artists to run. And NFTs were really big in that space. I was just like, this makes no sense to me whatsoever. I’m either too old or this is bullshit or both. And anyway, I think it’s bullshit.

Rand Fishkin:

It was bullshit. It turned out it was bullshit. You know what, I actually kind of feel this way about cryptocurrency as a whole, but I’m not sure. I think it might have enough momentum that it doesn’t matter that it’s bullshit.

And I think one of the things that is required of people to truly get wise is to recognize when your own BS detector may be finely tuned and even accurate. But it doesn’t matter because other people’s BS detectors are not there. And so bullshit can thrive, right? And you just have to accept that.

Mark MacLeod:

Speaking of bullshit, what is one piece of marketing bullshit that you want to banish forever? Think advice people think is what you should do, but that you just think is totally wrong.

Rand Fishkin:

This is embarrassing because for years, I stood on stages and told people to do this. I told people to stop investing in building their brand and buying advertising that you couldn’t directly attribute to a sale. And that was the dumbest thing ever. If you look at the brands that have been the most successful over the past 30 years, almost none of them did strong focus on attribution-style digital marketing. And almost all of them invested very strongly in unmeasurable or hard-to-measure brand investments.

Mark MacLeod:

Tiffany’s, Rolex, Ferrari.

Rand Fishkin:

Sure, I mean, old-school classic brands, but even super modern businesses. Airbnb, early on, Brian Chesky realized this whole attribution digital marketing thing is BS compared to building the brand of Airbnb and doing crazy stuff like, hey, let’s sponsor a gladiator fight in the Coliseum to market Airbnb experiences. We will never be able to know the return on investment of that. And it doesn’t matter at all.

The people who threw money at Super Bowl ads, and we all made fun of them. And you know what? A lot more of them are around than the ones who didn’t. So, I think attribution was always a mistake, and it’s not measurable in the way that I thought it was, and that I pitch people on it. Attribution today is, in my opinion, a way that Google and Facebook are taking credit for many sales that would have happened anyway.

Mark MacLeod:

What a good insight. I love that. I mean, I can tell you, as a crusty old CFO, I always wanted attribution to be real. When I first entered the tech world, I think the adage was, well, half of my marketing works. I just don’t know which half. And I was like, oh my God, I’m dying.

Rand Fishkin:

And my advice is if you’re not putting half your marketing into things that you don’t know whether they work or not, you are effing up marketing.

Mark MacLeod:

Okay. I love that. Glad I asked that question. Final thing, maybe it’s not a question, but I always love to kind of troll people’s LinkedIn bios and see, I don’t know what stands out. And one word stood out for me, which is you describe yourself as a feminist. Tell me about that.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, I mean, so for people who don’t know, and tragically many people don’t know, that feminism is a belief that there should be equality of opportunity and equality of treatment for men and women. And I believe that strongly. I think even people who wouldn’t call them feminists generally believe them that strongly. And it’s something I’ve fought for my whole life, and been intensely frustrated.

I’m obviously a straight CIS guy, but I’m also very feminine in many of my habits and styles. And I’ve always hated, the more that I learn about how women are treated worldwide, in the United States, in the marketing industry, in the tech industry, and the venture industry, the more of a feminist I become, the more ardent and militant I become about that.

I think that it’s a tragedy that it somehow developed a bad name. It’s something we should all aspire to as much as we aspire to racial equality and religious equality. Equality of opportunity is something I strongly believe in.

You know what this fits with? There’s another word on my bio, which is I love underdogs. And I think it’s really hard to be a good person and cheer for, I don’t know, the Yankees, whatever, the New England Patriots of the 2000s, right? Like, if you’re cheering for the team that’s always winning, straight white CIS dudes, the Yankees, or the Patriots, or, I don’t know, the big dog, that’s not the way. That’s not the way that’s ever resonated with me, and I don’t think it’s fun for anyone.

Even people who disagree with me on every other political vector, I often find some camaraderie in the I also like underdog stories. I think it’s natural as a human to recognize that it’s nice to cheer for the little guy.

Mark MacLeod:

Yep. I love it. Well, that’s. You know, our startup world is pretty male-dominated, and so I think that’s some great food for thought to end on. I was pretty sure I was going to love this conversation, and I was right. This was a true pleasure, Rand. Thank you so much.

Rand Fishkin:

Mark, right back at you. You are, as my people say, a mensch, and I think what you’ve done is truly impressive and far exceeds that of many of your venture colleagues from the past. And I hope that we get a chance to hang out in person.

Mark MacLeod:

Me too. I would love that. Thank you, Rand.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Startup CEO Show. If you’d like to connect with me, be sure to visit my website at markmacLeod.me, or follow me on LinkedIn at The Mark MacLeod, or X account @markmacleod_, and if you want to tune in again next week, be sure to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time!