- Hey everybody what's going on, it's Chase.
Welcome to another episode of The Chase Jarvis Live Show
here on Creative Live.
You guys know this show, right?
This is where I sit down with the world's top creators,
entrepreneurs and thought leaders
and I do everything I can to unlock their brains
with the goal of helping you live your dreams
and career and hobby and in life.
My guest today is a serial entrepreneur,
he's founded a couple of companies,
one of which I know you all know called Moz.
It revolutionized SEO back in the day.
He's also been 30 Under 30 for Business Week's
top entrepreneurs, and he's got two new things
to talk with us about today, one,
new company called SparkToro;
and second, a new book that just dropped,
my guest today is Rand Fishkin in the house.
(funky instrumental music)
(audience cheering)
- They love you!
- Great to see you man.
- This has literally been more than a year in the making
and we spent, like I spent a good bit of time in Seattle,
mostly San Francisco, but you're here
and we still have taken this long, you're a busy guy.
- I guess yeah, I'm on the road a lot.
- Yeah, and building companies and writing books, of course.
- Yeah, yeah and among other things,
trying to be a good husband to my wife
and trying to be a good person to the world.
- It's a full time job these days, right?
The world needs great people to step up.
- Woof, woof, more than ever.
- Well, I'm super happy to have you on the show,
and one of the things that I was most interested in,
in your new company, I mean that you started something
is a big deal in the entrepreneurial community in Seattle,
I know you've got a lot of very popular backers,
kudos to your new round,
but I was interested in the mission and the vision
that you have for that company
because the audience that we have tuning into the show,
by and large, they're trying to build their own audience
whether it's for a company or as individuals,
and it's a huge part of building a business today online.
And my understanding is that's what SparkToro is all about,
is helping people and companies find where their tribe
hangs out online. - Yeah, that's exactly right.
So if you're, let's say you're an artist,
maybe you're creating a new video game
or a new table top game or something like this,
you might say, gosh, you know one of the challenges I have
is that there's not a lot of people searching for, okay,
what's the new game coming out in this field?
That just doesn't get a ton of interest
and attention passively or actively.
People might be interested passively,
they might say oh I would love to find out about it,
but in order for them to find out about it,
you have to be in the places where they hang out.
And discovering those audiences,
if you are sort of a highly knowledgeable,
well-networked member of that community already, is a pain.
I mean, I'm very unfamiliar with the world of video games,
but not that, I mean I love playing
but I would have no idea.
If you and I launched a new game tomorrow,
I would have no idea where to go promote that.
I don't know who we should be talking to
or what podcast we should try to get on
or what YouTube channel we should try to be on--
- We should do collab with, what to do--
- Yeah, is GameSpot still popular?
I don't know, was when I was a teenager.
So all those kinds of questions are really tough to answer.
And so SparkToro is trying to build this massive database
of here are all these publications and sources and people
that influence these given audiences.
And if you wanna discover who influences your audience,
you can just search, right?
You can say, okay, table top games
or interior designers
and you can get back a list of the places
that are most paid attention to by those groups.
Or you could alternatively say,
I can't really describe my audience,
but I know that they all follow this person on Twitter.
So give me that Twitter username,
and I'll tell you people who follow this person
also pay attention to this podcast.
- It's amazing to me that this tool doesn't exist.
- How does it not exist? - Totally, it's crazy.
- I'm totally with you.
So when I watched people doing this,
which is something you do as an entrepreneur, right,
you try and watch your customers or potential customers,
do the work that you're gonna help them with.
And when I watched it, (mumbles) go to Google,
you know, open up an Excel spreadsheet
and then copy, paste, copy, paste.
- Here's the number of phones,
here's other people that they follow that I know, yeah.
- Yeah, here's how much traffic, you know,
whatever, SimilarWeb estimates their blog gets.
Oh my God, you're kidding me.
Do you have to do this by hand?
- Let the machines do it. - Oh, yeah, of course.
The only thing that does anything like this
is some of the PR databases out there,
right, for journalists.
And I had this like okay, it's not just journalists
who influence the world anymore.
What about the rest of this?
So yes, that's where SparkToro comes from.
- So I wanna put a pin on SparkToro
because I think that's fascinating,
it's huge for the audience that is--
- But it's also a year away from existing.
- Yeah, that's fair, you just raised your new round
so we'll talk a little bit about that,
we'll talk about raising the round
and how you went a very alternative route.
And I also wanna talk about your new book, Lost and Founder.
- Absolutely.
- So the short version there, give us the one liner
and then we're gonna go back in time for a second.
- One liner.
So my opinion is that
the startup culture centered around
Silicon Valley's universe biases startups and entrepreneurs,
even ones who aren't part of that startup world
to make a lot of dumb mistakes
and to do a lot of dumb things that we shouldn't be doing.
And Lost and Founder is here to try and dismantle
some of those myths.
- Awesome, it's been a recurring theme
for despite having you know, Branson's and Reed Hoffmann's
and Joe from Airbnb--
- Oh sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Huge, huge companies and a lot of venture folks,
there is a resounding theme, I think Cuban said it best,
if you raise money, why would you celebrate?
That's your first loss.
- I mean, certainly-- - Cuban is his own man.
- He is, he is. (chuckles)
For Lost and Founder, one of the funny things that I did
is I looked at the statistics, right?
So United States government keeps statistics,
small business administration on you know, companies
of different varieties and what their five-year
survival rates are.
So you can look at, for example, restaurants,
which supposedly are one of the worst businesses
you can possibly get into.
I think their five-year survival rates
are just under 50%, right?
So you flip a coin, you're not gonna last five years.
Consulting businesses are actually
one of the longest lived.
So people who do services, right,
whether that's photography or web design
or SEO consulting or whatever it is,
those businesses have, I think it's above 70%.
So they're doing, doing quite well
on the five-year survival rate.
Startups, tech startups like the day that you raise money,
either you know, convertible note,
traditional convertible note or a venture round,
your five-year survival rates drop below 30%.
- Wow.
- Like, they just don't survive.
I think it might be under 25, it's just awful.
- And that's part of the mechanism
that you're trying to disrupt with the book, right?
Is that, that's just not, it's not your best option.
- Well, I think one of the problems is
we all kind, I don't know about you
but one of the biggest reasons that I raised
venture capital for Moz,
and then you know, went out and tried to raise
another big round and failed for years and years
and then finally got this $18 million round done
and all these things is because I thought
that was what made you a real entrepreneur, right?
I thought that was what was suggested to me
by popular culture, by business culture
and entrepreneurial culture, right?
That's what we celebrate, that who's on the cover of Inc.
If you want you know, your face on these magazines
and books, if you wanna be on you know, the hot podcast,
if you want the people that the press covers
to talk about you, you got to raise a lot of money
from impressive people with you know,
these brand name firms hands.
Then once you go down that road
and experience it for yourself,
you're like huh, you're like wait a minute,
this is not, I get that I'm sure that, that is what makes
some people happy, but I think that it's not--
- And some business. - Successful, yeah.
And some businesses very successful, right?
But it's definitely not right for everyone,
and I think if we can change the narrative,
like as a culture, if we can change the narrative
to support other ideas of what success means
and what it can be and stop glorifying this one path alone,
I think that we can do two things.
One, I think we can build a much healthier
entrepreneurial environment where lots and lots
of different people try to do lots of different things,
which would be awesome.
And second, I think we change who gets to be successful.
Like, do you know how many black women founders
have received venture capital funding in the last 10 years?
- It's got to be less than 5% of the total--
- I think I saw that it was eight.
- Eight, there you go.
Eight! You can count them on your hands.
That's insane, I can't count the number of white guys
who were funded yesterday.
Right? I mean, that's a bigger number.
- Totally. - And that's also crazy
and wrong and messed up, right?
And so I think there's work to be done all around this.
Lost and Founder is just me throwing a pebble
into the ocean, but hopefully you know,
hopefully that pebble will urge a lot of other people
to throw their own rocks.
- Well, that's one of the reasons that we have
several mutual friends
who have tried to connect us over the last I'd say
year or two, I think specifically because
our aspirations are similar personally and professionally.
You know, Creative Live exists
to help you know, be a champion for creators everywhere
and the creativity being, you know,
what I consider to be the new literacy,
and if we over index on the creator,
my, what a more amazing place the world can be.
And I'm trying to also align with that,
that there are so many paths.
I think my personal example of,
I started pursuing professional soccer in medical school
and all these other things
and still found my way to this world,
like that's just a testament to like
you can be anywhere and you can make a 90-degree left turn
and do the thing that you wanna do.
So now I like to, we've set the table a little bit
but now I wanna go back and I wanna go back in part because
I wanna explore what your background was
for getting to here, but also to sort of
connote and share to anyone who is listening
that it doesn't matter if you're at home in your underwear
in Ohio right now listening to this,
or you're on a treadmill in Uzbekistan,
that there are similar elements
to all of our backstory.
And we've all got plenty of skeletons
and you know, we all have our own history,
but I try and unpack every person
who's on the show and pack a little bit of their background.
So give me a little bit of yours.
Start me wherever you wanna start me,
but take me back. - Sure.
So I actually grew up in the Seattle area
in unincorporated King County,
way out in the in the Boonies.
My parents had a house behind which was just woods.
So you know, when I was-- - Where specifically?
- The Renton-Issaquah border. - Oh yeah, sure, sure.
- Up in the Squak mountain.
- Yeah, my wife went to Woodinville high school.
- Oh okay, yup, so north of there, yeah.
So you know, a lot of my childhood was spent
hiking around a forest all by myself
and watching out for mountain lions and watching frogs.
You know, I was obsessed with frogs when I was a kid.
We had a big frog pond, like a quarter mile hike
into the woods and I was obsessed with that.
so I didn't have a ton of friends growing up
because I was in the middle of nowhere
and nobody wanted to drive out to our house, right?
(laughs) - Birthday party!
They're like no, it's like you live 45 miles from anything.
- Yeah, and I've taken some of that with me.
I can be extroverted for a few hours,
but I need a lot of self-care time, alone time
to recuperate from that.
And my mom, interestingly enough,
so she started business in 1981.
I think was called Outlines West
and it was a you know, one woman
marketing consultancy shop, right?
Probably really similar to a lot of people
who are members of Creative Live today, right?
So she would design logos
and she would take pictures,
she would go around to local businesses
and help them get their yellow page ad
and their business card and their letterhead
and all that kind of stuff,
worked with all these print shops.
And so I spent my you know, my childhood,
after school everyday,
I would go to her office
and sort of you know, live there watching her on Photoshop.
That was like, and PageMaker and Aldus PageMaker
back in the day.
And when I went to college,
I got three years in, had a big fight with my dad
and he stopped paying for my tuition
and so I paid for my own tuition for a couple quarters,
this was back when you could still like
work a minimum wage job and pay your way through college,
which I feel terrible that
the current generation, that's impossible
- Not possible. - Yeah.
Not at all.
And I think my last quarter of school, I dropped out.
So two class away from graduating
at the University of Washington,
dropped out to work with my mom building websites.
Fast forward a couple of years, as you might imagine,
a 21-year old web designer is not the most
fiscally responsible individual.
And so we went pretty far into debt.
By 2004, we had $150,000 of like credit card debt
and equipment loan debt and all this kind of stuff.
And then we stopped being able to make the minimum payments
on the debt, which means by 2005,
we were half a million dollars in debt.
And the logical thing to do, right, of course,
is you declare bankruptcy.
You're like okay-- - It all goes away.
- Start clean, right?
There's no more debtor's prison,
we don't have to worry about that.
But we had never told my dad that we had any debt.
So we'd been you know, keeping this like huge, nasty,
the business is not going well,
in fact it was so bad that even though
we had these debt payments,
my mom would bring home some money
to like make it look to my dad
like we had a real business going.
And I think I was making $800 a month.
My girlfriend, Geraldine, who's now my wife,
was paying my rent and all my bills, right?
And yeah, the only thing I had going for me
was this website I had started called SEOmoz.
And SEOmoz was something I started
because when we stopped being able to pay
our subcontractors, including our SEOs, right,
we had to do it all ourselves.
And so I was like, okay, Rand,
well, we promised this client we would do SEO
for their website so you better learn it and do it.
And the world of SEO back then,
I'm sure you remember--
- Sure. - Super secretive,
super weird and sketchy and you know,
no one wanted to touch it with a 10-foot pole.
But powerful because you know, Google was on the rise,
Microsoft and Yahoo were still competing
with them pretty heavily and search was growing,
and so ranking number one for you know, whatever it is,
Seattle photographer, could just blow up your business.
And so we had a lot of clients like that
and I was learning SEO.
I started this SEOmoz website
hoping to make you know, a lot of SEO advice open source.
That started doing well and attracting clients
and ranking well, getting me invitations
to speak at conferences, which I could barely afford to do.
I had to like stay with my grandparents in New York
(chuckles) to the city, that kind of thing.
But yeah, that ended up turning the business around.
And by 2007, we paid off that debt.
- Wow, didn't do bankruptcy.
- Wait, we couldn't.
I mean, we couldn't,
so if we had, A, my dad would have found out.
I think my mom was scared that he would divorce her.
I think she was also scared
that her mother, who passed away a couple of years ago
but was alive at the time,
my parents owned her house and in a bankruptcy situation,
the bank might have taken her house.
So just a lot of nasty impossible to work around stuff.
- But you emerged. - We did, yeah.
I mean, 2007 rolls around,
I remember June of 2007,
my mom and I are high fiving in the backroom
of the office in the university district
because we paid off the last of our debt,
which is just, just incredible.
And that same year, we launched,
so we had a bunch of tools that,
I don't know if you know a guy named Matt Inman.
He's now The Oatmeal, like--
- Oh of course, yeah, yeah! Duh!
Yeah, I was like hmmm, I know him,
and I think he's...
But he's with Brandon Stanton, the Humans in New York guy--
(overlapping dialogue)
I think when Brandon was out here
he was trying to get together with Matt.
But really respect and admire that,
he's really fascinating.
- Yeah, he's an interesting dude.
So Matt was our, like, developer for five years, right?
So Matt and I would build these websites
and he built a bunch these little SEO tools for us to use
so that we can automate a lot of the functions of SEO
that were very manual at the time.
And Matt and I were friends too,
he'd come over to our apartment all the time
and we'd mess around, we'd play Counter-Strike
after work and that kind of thing.
But so he had built these tools
and I was like okay, I want to share them with everybody.
And Matt's like no man, our servers couldn't handle
the traffic and like, we can't do it.
So I was like okay, what if we put up a PayPal paywall
and you have to like PayPal us 39 bucks a month
to get access to the tools?
He's like all right.
So over the weekend, he did that.
And in February of 2007,
we launched these tools.
And by August, July or August,
the subscription revenue from the tools
was doing more revenue than our consulting business.
And we went-- - Wait a minute.
(laughs) - Hang on a second,
what is this, right?
We didn't know what software as a service was.
I got an email from Michelle Goldberg
from Ignition Partners, and I googled venture capital.
(chuckles) Right?
What does that mean?
- Who is this woman? - Exactly, right.
And what do they do, right?
And so at the end of that year, November of that year,
we ended up raising a $1.1 million round with Ignition
and also Curious Office,
I don't know if you know Kelly Smith.
- Sure, of course.
- So they ended up coinvesting
in this company Moz, and we started growing.
You know, we kept building software,
I became the CEO at that time.
So I had a tough conversation with my mom
that was fairly intense.
That was like okay, they want to invest in us but--
- This is an actual businesses
and there's fiduciary responsibilities
and investors and the SEC and these--
- Yeah, and so my mom had obviously been
president and CEO since 1981, right?
And so here was this thing.
I think she felt both you know, pride,
like oh my son's taking this over,
but also kind of this frustration of
gosh, I'm not in charge anymore.
And if this were a novel, that would be foreshadowing.
(sings ominous tune) (chuckles)
So for the next seven years, I was CEO of Moz
and we grew from a few hundred thousand dollars
in software revenue to $30,000,000
and had sort of you know, an exciting experience,
built a company that I felt really proud of and loved.
Went from, I think there were six of us
when we raised the round and gosh,
when I stepped down as CEO, maybe 120, 130,
little more than that.
Similar to this-- - Yeah, really similar
to Creative Live, yeah.
- To what Creative Live is today.
Yeah, so in 2013 and going into 2014,
I got a really nasty episode with depression.
You know, I was not really familiar with what that's like
and certainly unprepared, I think no one is prepared for it,
but you know, I didn't have the knowledge or tools
or resources to know what to do or how to react to that.
But I did know that I was messed up.
And so 2014, I stepped down as CEO
and promoted my long time chief operating officer,
Sarah Bird, to the CEO role
with my investors' permission of course.
And then over the next few years,
I think I did get better on the mental health front
and developed some strategies,
worked with therapists and coaches
and did all sorts of, tried everything from acupuncture
and massage to physical therapy, all sorts of things
and found some things that worked for me.
I think the things that worked for me
won't necessarily work for everyone--
- Yes, there's a pattern there.
- It can be different for everybody.
But ended up having a lot of conflict with the CEO
you know, a few years into that,
and I think that professional conflict
lead into personal conflict and so
at the beginning of this year, left the company
and started something new.
- And wrote a book in the process.
- And wrote a book. - And that's what
we're talking about here.
So I wanna put a couple of pins in there and go back.
So we're in the time machine now, we went back.
A, I think fascinating.
B, thank you for sharing sort of some of the hard parts,
I'm gonna go into that for a second
because I think there's a...
Historically, there has been a culture,
in popular culture we don't talk about that stuff.
- Especially men. - Yeah.
- You are not allowed to have you know,
emotional health problems, right?
That's not a real thing that men,
I mean obviously we have it,
but we're not allowed to talk about it
or make it a real thing.
- And I think disproportionately,
I don't know the math but creators and entrepreneurs,
it is more vocal in that world than others,
and so what we're trying to do in the show,
one of the things is talk about that stuff
whenever it comes up because it is a recurring theme,
and it just so happens that you're not alone
and that's one of the messages that we wanna send.
So you mentioned a handful of strategies.
You tried a bunch of stuff that's after you've figured out
that you were not doing well chemically.
Any otherwise depressed.
What were some of the things that you felt like worked
to help you uncork some of the challenge?
- Sure, yeah.
I think that one of the biggest things certainly was sleep.
And that's a really hard thing for me to recommend
because it is so incredibly hard to sleep when you
have severe anxiety and depression
and those kinds of things.
But some drugs stuff helped me on that front,
and that was worthwhile and I certainly urge folks
who are comfortable with that path to pursue that.
And I also, working with a therapist, right,
found some sort of mental patterns
that I could walk through over and over again
before I went to sleep that would help.
Not surprisingly at all, getting off of screens
an actual 45 minutes an hour before I went to sleep
or before I tried to go to sleep was a big deal
and could help me a lot.
And then I'm actually someone for whom Zzzquil
works really well, so I was thrilled
when that product came out because then I was like
oh great, I don't have to buy NyQuil anymore.
- What is Zzzquil, is it NyQuil without the drug part--
- Without the cold medicine, yeah exactly.
So it's just the part that makes you sleepy about it.
So those things all helped.
Physical therapy was actually big for me too.
- Moving the body. - Yeah, I got a Fitbit.
I know this is not true for everyone,
but for me this you know,
I'm a little bit of an OCD kind of person
and the Fitbit hitting the you know, 10,000 steps,
hitting the you know, 30 minutes of elevated heart rate,
exercise, all that kind of stuff really did
help me quit a bit.
- This is a theme that there are,
that sleep has been huge theme in the show,
not just for entrepreneurs and like go get 'em types
but as a tool to relieve anxiety and depression and stress.
Sleep and exercise and eating well,
- Yeah! - Surprise, right?
(overlapping dialogue) Yeah, oh I'm totally sure.
I can't believe all the things that,
but I think the thing that I dislike,
and this goes back to our earlier conversation
about Silicon Valley sort of you know,
tropes and biases, I mean the glorification
of the I don't sleep, I work all the time,
there's nothing in my life except work,
that's literally not just terrible for us
but it's also proven to be ineffective for you know,
people getting good work done.
It is not the case for 99% of us
that the hour step we work between you know,
hour 45 in a week and hour 80 in a work week
do anything but negatively you know,
detract from your business's outcome.
- Or the next week or the week after.
- Yeah, so you get into a nightmare thing.
I remember at one point
during you know, I think it was 2013 or 2014,
some things were not going great with Moz,
our growth rate had sort of slowed from 100% year over year
to 50, 55%, which is still great, I know,
but it's one of those like,
I felt that very strongly, right?
I was like this declining growth rate is my fault
and I need to step it up.
And so I took away
this thing called anti-work night
where I had one night a week, right,
where I didn't do any work, right?
I'd get off at 5 p.m. and that was like it for the night.
And I remember one of my employees emailed me
and was like yeah, that's probably a good idea
given where we are, you need to step back.
And that is probably the dumbest thing I did.
I should have made four anti-work nights.
That almost definitely would've been better for me
and better for the business.
- Fascinating how the narratives have
sort of reared their heads at different times
and now we're seeing a huge backlash.
I mean, I was one of those people that,
I never glorified it but I stated it
and it seemed to me to be fact.
But what it was is I had a lot of passion
for what I was doing.
And so when you're working on something that you love,
then you're happy to divert sleep because
there's not enough hours in the day
for you to do all the exciting stuff.
That's they way that I looked at it.
And then only recently, probably in about 2016,
I shifted gears at the suggestion
of a lot of my peers
that hey, try and get any more than five hours sleep,
it's gonna be awesome.
And it was, it was incredible.
My health, because when you're invigorated by work
and you're only sleeping four, five hours a night,
it's overtime that, that actually tackles your,
of course different people are different,
but over a sustained period of time,
like we're capable of a lot as a human,
but that erodes that capability pretty quickly.
So I had fallen into that trap as well.
- And your decision making, I mean you know,
statistically speaking, right,
like you go in and take just general logic questionnaires
and you know, try and sort out
this social situation and what you should do correctly--
- It's something along the lines of being drunk, I think.
- Yeah, right?
You know, you think well I'm working really hard
and so I am a good CEO.
And in fact, when you're getting less than eight,
eight and a half hours of sleep,
you are harming your business,
(overlapping dialogue) yeah, statistically speaking
harming your business because the primary job of a CEO
is not get this specific piece of work done, right?
It's not crank out this code or you know,
edit this video or whatever it is.
It is make good decisions.
Be good to your people, hire correctly.
Yeah, help upgrade your team.
- I think it's one of the things
I wanna caution against, is it's not like
you don't have to work hard in order to succeed.
Like, it's what are you doing all the other time,
which is like if you're spending it in front of screens
that are unhealthy, or if you're crushing, you know,
entire seasons of Lost or whatever that thing is,
and I find that it's not about not sleeping,
it's about how can you set up a framework for yourself
where you're able to get enough sleep and eat good,
and that's why I track 10 behaviors every,
that I try and do every day,
one of them is to not do that other stuff and to get sleep.
And I feel like I'm working harder now than ever before.
- And how much did you really need to know about
season nine of Lost?
- I'm not a TV person so I need to know zero.
- I don't actually know if there was a season nine--
- Yeah, me neither, I know nothing,
I don't even know what you said,
it just sounded like blah, blah, blah to me, Lost.
(laughs)
But I think the point,
that's one of the reasons I'm sort of trying to put
an exclamation point on this, is it's not like
we're saying don't work hard
because it's a requirement in order to be successful
that you put forth effort.
But there's smart effort,
and there are the other things that you cut out
in your life, and sleep is not one of those things,
nor is this other list of like taking good care of yourself.
- Yeah, and I think another thing I worry about
tremendously is the,
so after I wrote this book and it came out
45, 50 days ago, something like that,
I've been getting all these emails from people
who read it, which is you know, super rewarding
and feels awesome, but the stories
that people have about the,
not just their own sacrifices and losses
but the people in their lives, right?
The-- - Spouses and family members.
- Yeah, you know.
My mom had cancer and I thought the right thing to do
was bury my head in my company, you know.
My husband was telling me that he needed more time for me
and I invested that in my business instead
and my marriage collapsed and you know,
now what's going on with my kids?
- Yeah, huge, huge, deep real stuff.
- Yeah, what is the point?
Who are you doing this for, right?
I mean-- - Let's assume
that people's intentions are in the right place,
like you wanna build a business
and I'm not trying to judge,
let's just assume that people's hearts and minds
are in the right place and focus on the thing
that they want to do.
How did you, and I think one of the reasons
I'm asking this question is to try and get
how you decided that SEO was interesting
or helping people describe or find their tribe
or help drive traffic or build audience,
and especially now with SparkToro,
like what's the gist?
Because I think it's easy to tell people
that when you find the thing
that you're supposed to be doing,
oh it just feels awesome,
it's like everything's, the skids have been greased
and away you go.
But what you said in your sort of your historical lookback
was like it was necessity for survival of our business.
And I do find that.
But presumably you liked it because you did more.
So how did you decide that you liked something?
- Yeah, I think that accidentally stumbling into things
by having a diverse group of people in your life
and doing lots of different things,
you know, especially when you're young
or when you have the freedom to be able
to potentially pursue an entrepreneurial journey
is an awesome way to do that, right?
So I fell into SEO by necessity
and then found that I loved aspects of it.
I actually hated other aspects of it,
but I knew that at the core of that hate was passion.
- Yeah. - Right?
Like, oh, I despise that this is how this is done.
Can I change that?
Can I make that into something else, right?
So you know, one of the things that was true
in the early SEO world was that lots of consultants,
lots of people who were experts in the field
were very secretive about their knowledge
because they believed it to be their secret sauce, right?
Like, I can't tell you
how or why I know that this thing that we're gonna do
is gonna make your rankings go up
because that's how I sell my services, right?
And of course, anyone who tries to do that to you
in a consulting world, like you should be pretty skeptical.
But in SEO, that was really common.
And I hated it.
So whenever I found something that worked,
I would blog about it.
I would put it up on SEOmoz
and I would make it public.
And as a result, I made a lot of friends
and a lot of enemies, right?
And I think it was sort of interesting to see how over time,
of course like any maturing industry, it changed, right?
As Google became this behemoth that dominates
around the world, there were a lot,
a lot more people who started blogging
and writing more openly about SEO and how it works.
Google themselves became more open about it.
But I think that passion for making things transparent
is what gave me a career.
- Yeah, it's very similar to mine with photography
for what it's worth.
I think that's one of the reasons that TA,
our mutual friend, was like you guys basically
sort of pulled the wool off for a lot of people
in respective industries.
And so I think what I'd like to hear about,
so you talked about finding passion
and the passion is really for making things transparent
in a world that hadn't seen transparency
around SEO for example.
I wanna shift the discussion a little bit
and I might be taking a liberty here so forgive me if I do,
but the term SEO, not a sexy term.
- So true. - So true, not sexy term.
- So true. - But let's refresh it,
and I wanna connect a thread from what SEO,
I'm just gonna put my own, I'm gonna scribe,
conceptually it's like helping people find you
on the Internet, which in a growingly complex Internet
and culture becoming more complex,
that is more important now than ever before.
And if you go back to trace your roots
in non-sexy SEO, we're subbing in,
helping people find you on the Internet
to this new ark that you're working on now
is not only helping people find you on the Internet
but you finding other people.
Because to me this is a core thing
that this show should elevate,
that our conversation should help people understand
what they need to know in order to become successful,
because people are, they wanna create things
and help people see their creations
for whatever purpose, whether it's to make money
or to unlock potential in human beings around the world--
- Or to share their art, yeah.
- Yeah, or just share their art and have an impact
to help you know, people get help or whatever.
There's a million, we're just gonna assume
they're all virtuous.
Tell me what you think these people should be doing.
And be specific, don't be afraid to,
don't overqualify your answers.
Tell us like if you're thinking I'm a creator
and I'm starting a business or whatever,
like how am I supposed to think?
And your tool is not out yet, the new company, like,
(overlapping dialogue) It's today help me.
- The biggest mistake that I see people making is that,
especially creatives and folks who sort of
are solo business owners or small business owners
is they try and build their platform on someone else's land.
Meaning, you know, you go out there and you say
oh well, Facebook is how I get a lot of my traffic
so my Facebook page is where I'm gonna invest
a bunch of my energy or effort.
Or you know, I make beautiful visual things,
I'm gonna make Instagram my primary channel.
Or I'm a writer and you know, Twitter is how I connect
and I'm gonna make my Twitter account my primary place.
That is fundamentally a mistake
and I don't, I cannot recommend highly enough
that you register your own website,
start putting your work, whatever it is
on your own website, in your own user experience,
in your own design and package
and using these other channels,
leveraging these other channels, whichever ones make sense,
as ways to draw people back to your site
and making the two things that you try and capture
be visits to your website, hopefully people come back
again and again and giving them a reason to,
and email addresses.
Those two are vast, I would take,
I literally would take 10 email addresses
from potential customers and customers of mine
over a thousand more Twitter followers,
a thousand more Instagram followers,
which might sound crazy to some people
but I guarantee that, that is a better return
on your investment for your own ability to market
and to reach people.
Because an email address is such a stronger connection.
There's so many more things you can do through marketing,
and many people might not know about them.
So if you have an email address,
you can use a tool like FullContact
to plug that email address in
and to get here are all the social profiles
and now I can get a lot of demographic data
and a lot of statistical data about who my audience is.
If you have an email address,
you can now reach out to those people.
Email open rates, even for pretty bad email newsletters,
are still between five and 15%.
Facebook reach numbers are between 0.3 and 0.7%.
So which one are you gonna take?
Instagram has the highest, I think it's 4%.
You know, an average of 4% of the people
who follow you on Instagram will see any given--
- Fee-- - Yeah, picture that you share
or a story that you share.
Oh god, 4%.
And that's going down, right?
Because of course these businesses,
they're not trying, Instagram and Facebook
are not there to promote you,
they're there to promote Instagram and Facebook.
So yeah, I would strongly urge folks to do that.
I think another really good thing to think about is
having a great answer to the question
anytime you build something or launch something,
whether that is you know, your own website
or work that you're doing, a blog post that you've written,
a new project you're putting up,
a new tool you've created,
is to ask the question who will help me amplify this?
And why?
And if you have a great answer to that,
a great answer to that is here is a specific list
of 20 people who are influential
to the audience that I wanna reach,
and I have a you know, I have some connection to them
or they care deeply about this issue,
I know that they've, you know,
amplified stuff in the past,
they've seen this before at launch
and they told me it was awesome
and that they wanna help share it.
Fantastic, that is the answer that you want
to that question.
You have that?
A lot of the things that you do will be very successful
compared to, I think, unfortunately there's sort of
a marketing obsession with I'm gonna put this out
and I hope it goes viral.
Oh man?
- Said no one who ever built a business.
(chuckles) sustainably over time.
- Yeah exactly, the problem is that there's a few outliers
every month, every year who do have something
that goes viral, and that's what gets press
and that's what gets amplification
and that's what sort of earns our attention,
and then we think oh that must be the way to do it.
And that is not the way.
You know, the way to build a great,
a great sort of marketing machine
is to have a flywheel.
And a flywheel fundamentally, right,
so it's this you know, machine--
- Yeah, I understand it, but for the folks at home--
- Machine, right, from the industrial age, right?
And it's this giant wheel,
it's extremely heavy and electricity would come into it
and the flywheel would start turning
and it would turn faster and faster.
And once it gets going, it's going on inertia, right?
So now you can generate electricity from it.
Okay, but in a marketing sense,
the problem is turning that flywheel initially, right?
Getting your marketing going,
whatever kind of marketing you're doing,
content marketing or social media marketing,
influencer marketing or email or advertising, right?
Whatever you might be doing, events.
Getting that turning is insanely hard.
I mean, you know this well, right?
Creative Live, the first few revolutions,
getting the first thousand customers was so much harder
than getting the next thousand customers today, right?
And that's because of inertia.
Now the Creative Live marketing flywheel is turning,
and so I think that recognizing that
and then getting comfortable with the idea that oh my gosh,
I'm gonna have to put in a tremendous amount of energy
to turn that flywheel initially,
to find the mechanisms that'll create growth for me
as opposed to I'll throw this out there
and see if it works.
Throw that out there and see if it works,
toss this out there.
That would be my big, big picture advice.
And then we can certainly get into other things
like if you would like to rank number one on Google,
I can also talk about that.
- Sure, I wanna touch on that, that is,
I think that, that is a valuable pursuit.
I wanna talk about it generally one more time
in a slightly different axis before we go
into the specifics.
So generally knowing that the tools that we use
to point people are owned by other folks.
I don't think you're saying don't use those channels.
- No, absolutely use them.
But use them to bring people to places that you own,
your website, your email list.
Don't use them as the central hub, right?
So whenever I go to a restaurant and I see them like,
oh, follow us on Facebook and get a discount.
Ah, ask for my email address to get that discount.
I will open that email you know,
10, a hundred times more likely to open that email
than I am to check your Facebook page
or to ever see your Facebook messages in my feed.
- Yeah, even if I did decide to follow your Facebook feed,
right, I'm not gonna see those messages.
Okay, so I think it's,
I'm gonna try and make a counterpoint here.
So what we see in pop culture
is people who have substantial followings
and they have attributed doing great work
to build that following on a,
say they're a YouTuber, for example.
- Sure, yeah. - Which is a very real thing
and it's a way to have a job now
in a way it wasn't before.
Is it that you're suggesting that people
don't aspire to be a YouTuber
because that is a 1/50th of 1% outcome?
Or is it that you aspire people to,
like what kind of business,
maybe it's a little bit too leading
but I guess this is what,
I want people to like, why do you wanna build a business?
Like, what does that business wanna be?
What do you want to wake up and do every day?
And then there's all these other channels.
And if by accident, like my influence socially,
purely accidental, I wanted to build
a great photography business and I started sharing
stories about it and I just turned around,
oh my gosh, I have a million followers
across all these channels.
Accidental. - Yup.
- Helpful, but what about I'm trying to decide
if telling people I've had the idea
that telling people to chase social status online
as the end in itself is potentially catastrophic.
I wanna know your point of view,
throw rocks at what I'm saying or validate it.
- Yeah, so I think that it is,
if your goal is to become someone who is well known
and well regarded and well followed,
leveraging multiple networks and building your base on,
in a home that you own, right,
which is a website and email
is the wisest possible way you can do that.
And that does not mean, I'm not saying that you shouldn't
consider your YouTube channel and your YouTube subscribers
as a great place to start building that brand.
What I think is insanity is
relying exclusively on that and saying oh my,
I am not going to capture any attention
outside of this one network.
And if YouTube tomorrow decides to ban your channel
or decides that-- - Change anything.
- Change their algorithm for how you become visible,
change their system for you know,
what is allowed to be shown,
if governments come in and say basically you know what,
YouTube, you are a monopoly in Europe
and we need to break you up and oh, suddenly you lost
50% of your subscribers.
Well, my friend, guess what?
If you had your own website
and you were building most of that following there,
YouTube is just a channel where you're posting content
and potentially getting that amplification.
But for your hardcore fans, right,
the people who follow you the most,
you own that relationship rather than YouTube
owns that relationship, you have vastly more ability
to control the level of influence
and to keep that audience with you
as you grow and as these networks change.
I think about the people who in the early 2000s
had a million followers on Friendster.
Oops! Right?
Didn't go so well.
Or just a few years ago, you had 50,000 followers on Vine.
Shoot, they're gone.
- Gone. - Right?
And I think that it is not impossible
to imagine that those kinds of things will happen,
whether that's the result of YouTube changing,
the governments changing YouTube,
people shifting their habits.
That's my suggestion.
So I agree with you that you know,
if you wanna build a business,
chasing the dream of being a YouTube star
or an Instagram celebrity
is probably a poor way to do that.
But also, even if you wanna be those things,
have a home base.
- Yeah, and what I find bonkers
is you have to ideally have something
that you are passionate about.
In YouTube land, it can be making films.
And then it's a great natural fit.
But just seeking the ability to be known
and therefore charge for your services
of sharing your audience is a really quick,
it's on the rise as far as a desired outcome
for most of the people that I hear,
which I caution against.
Like, you wanna be known for a thing.
Like, I make cool films
or I am a designer or I am a fill in the blank
because it allows you to have something
for people to rally around
other than just your pretty face.
- I mean, I worry a lot,
if you can't say I am a--
- Fill in the blank?
- Yeah, I am a designer, I am an artist,
you know, whatever it is, a graphic designer, I am a--
- Novelist, philosopher, yeah.
- Yeah, exactly, those kinds of things;
and I'm well known for that as opposed to
I'm well known on this particular network
which controls my destiny exclusively.
- Wooh, and you don't own that network,
you're not a shareholder there,
you don't get to vote at the board meetings, right?
You're not lobbying, a lobbyist there.
That's dangerous my friend.
- Yeah, all right.
So now tell me how to get on the front page of--
(chuckles) - Sure.
(overlapping dialogue) So Google and YouTube
actually have a lot of similarities
in terms of you know, how the ranking systems work.
There's lots of differences,
but Google in particular,
so the organic results,
are driven largely by just a few inputs.
So it is how authoritative and well known is your website,
and that relies a lot on who links to your website.
So other people linking to your website
from their own websites tends to enhance
your importance in Google's eyes.
The more important that people
are linking to you, the better, right?
If you can get a link from the New York Times
or from you know, random Chase's shadysneakers.info,
you should go for the New York Times, right?
That's where you want that link.
Another big piece of that
is certainly using the words and phrases
that people search for.
So you know, if for example you are a graphic designer
and lots of people are searching for you know,
graphic design Seattle
but you wanna be creative and so you've chosen
to describe yourself with these other words and phrases,
you're like no, I'm a-- - Holistic (chuckles)--
- Yeah, I'm a technical master
of visual turned 2D.
Oh no, like that's what, you know,
you wanna have your unique brand, I totally get it,
but no one searches in that way.
One of my favorite examples was actually,
this is years ago, but the New York Times,
there were tons of people,
do you remember this airplane landed in the Hudson River
right, they made a movie about it, like captain,
was it like Sully, Jay Sullenberger
or something like that? (overlapping dialogue)
- Yeah. - Played by Tom Hanks.
- Yeah, played by Tom Hanks, right.
So lands in the Hudson River
and this was one of like The New York Times's
wake up calls on SEO because they wrote something
to the effect of you know,
a creative headline like
plane lands in the river and you know,
captain saves the crew, that kind of thing.
And of course the Washington Post wrote
Hudson River plane crash averted, right?
And what is everyone searching for, right?
Hundreds of thousands, millions of people that day
are searching for Hudson River plane,
Hudson River plane crash, right?
And Washington Post outranks the New York Times,
The New York Times goes okay, maybe we should think about
using the words and phrases people
are actually searching for.
So that is certainly something to do,
and that requires doing some research, right?
You have to research what keywords,
what words and phrases are people entering into Google.
Google has a sort of free tool through AdWords
that you can look up.
But even if you just start typing in Google,
then you see the drop down, right,
and they show you which things are coming up more popularly.
That can help, they have related searches
that they show at the bottom of the search results.
That can help.
And there's some tools, Moz has some tools,
so does some others.
Another big important one, solve the searcher's problem.
When someone enters a query,
what they're saying is I have this problem right now
and I want you to solve it for me.
And that problem is often bigger
than just the question they're asking
with the words they enter.
And Google has gotten extremely good
at recognizing when a website
and when a particular web page
solves that problem for people.
And if you solve that problem better than anyone else
on the first page, that is a true path to ranking
that was, if we were having this conversation
five years ago, that would not be the case.
Google wasn't that sophisticated and advanced.
So that's a big powerful part of that.
- Is the definition of solving a problem
measured by bounce time, by engagement?
What are some of the ways that,
how does Google know that you've done a good job?
- It's pretty sophisticated actually.
So Google is tracking sort of ongoing
long term user behavior.
So let's say for example you and I are looking for
the best sushi restaurant in Seattle.
And so you know, we both,
we and a thousand other people go to Google
and we search for best sushi restaurants
and you know, we visit the TripAdvisor page
and the Yelp page and you know, the Seattle Times page.
And statistically speaking what happens is
what Google sees is that
many of us after visiting,
you know let's say the Yelp results,
go back to Google and search again
or click a different result.
But the people who end up on Eater's website, they stay.
They don't come back to Google.
If they do come back to Google,
they search for different things.
Over the course of the next week, month, year,
they don't perform that search or related searches again.
Oh, wait a minute.
- They found their home. - They found their home.
They found an answer, they have been satisfied,
they don't need to ask this question anymore
and therefore, Eater must be a great place
for people to get the solution.
So even if it doesn't have great links,
even if it's not using keywords perfectly,
maybe we should put them up at the top.
So it's not necessarily bounce rate.
Some queries are solved (finger snaps)
very, very quickly.
You know, if you wanna search for you know,
Seattle home price growth 2016 to 2018, right,
a website should be able to say okay,
the average home price increase was 45%
over that period.
Boom, answered, done.
I got it in four seconds, I'm out of there,
my bounce rate is incredibly high
but I'm not going back to Google and searching it again.
Right? And so they call this pogo sticking
where you jump to a website
and then bounce back to the search results
and choose something else.
And a low pogo sticking rate
will give you a great chance to rank well on Google.
- Mmm, I'm taking some notes here for our team.
- Yeah, yeah, I mean this is definitely a big one.
- Picking your brain here for my own,
no, I think that just conceptually
there's a lot of folks,
obviously finding success on the Internet
is an important part of being a creator,
whether that's at your own website or blog or whatever.
So I think the short answer
if I'm gonna put words in your mouth
is that there's a handful of these things--
- Yeah, and there's another half dozen
that we could talk about but we don't have to get deep into.
But yeah, you can.
In fact I would urge folks
who want to you know, you could search Google
for learn SEO, and if you pick up just the basics
from some of those free guides,
you know there's a good one on Moz,
there's a video class that I did on Skillshare
and Whiteboard Friday, stuff like that,
just a tiny bit, an hour or tow will take you
from I don't know anything about SEO,
to okay, I know enough to you know,
be a little dangerous, to at least get started on this path.
And that can be transformative.
- Yeah, helpful.
All right, so now again we're talking back and forth
between past and present, specific in general.
Now I wanna go to something,
which is the problem you're trying to solve now.
Again, product's not out yet,
what are the things, a handful of behaviors,
not dissimilar to handful of SEO things you need to know
about where your people are.
Where my people at, Rand?
- Yeah, so this is actually an incredibly hard problem
to solve today.
I mean, one of the reasons that we wanted to build
SparkToro is because as I described to you the process that
you know, sophisticated marketers go through
to solve this would be like, I don't wanna do that.
(overlapping dialogue) That sounds so hard.
But if you wanna have a really good idea
of where your audience is actually hanging out,
and this is truly important because there's kind of,
I almost view it like there's these two ways
to reach people.
If people are already searching
for the thing that you offer, right,
there's a bunch of demand, people go to Google
and they search for this thing, great.
SEO is awesome for you.
What if no one's searching for the thing that you make?
What if you're making something totally new?
An example.
In fact, one of the ones that inspires SparkToro
was here in Seattle, a couple of friends of mine
who you might know, Joe Heitzeberg and Ethan from Crowd Cow.
- Yup, (mumbles) from Crowd Cow.
- Okay, so Crowd Cow, you know,
this idea is Ethan was like
I wanna provide high quality, sustainable, you know,
Japanese-style graded beef in the United States
that anyone can order online.
But of course Americans are not used
to ordering beef on the Internet.
Like we went and did,
I did the queried research for them
and I was like okay, yeah, there's about 50 people a month
who are looking for buy stake online.
Like, that is not gonna move the needle on your business
because people, when they want stake,
they go to a grocery store,
they don't think of it as like a,
it's a commodity, right?
It's not thought of as like a high end product.
There's no craft beef movement like there is with beer
or whiskey or-- (laughs)
- We're gonna rank highly for the search term craft beef--
- Craft beef. - When we put this transcript
on the Internet. (chuckles)
It's craft beef.
- Not a hyper competitive thing until Crowd Cow, yeah.
So basically they're trying to create this movement
and they're working with all these farms, and it's awesome.
Like, I got to try some of the beef.
It's different!
like, it's truly different in the way that
a great Scotch is way better than Johnnie Walker, right?
(laughs)
It's a massive, massive upgrade.
And so we talked about this and I said you know,
I think that the only way
you're gonna grow this thing
is by finding the influential people
in like the foodie world,
and not just people but publications
and broadcasts and channels and all these, events
and all this kind of stuff and getting Crowd Cow
to be the thing that they're all talking about, right?
If, you know, you go to a foodie event
and people are up there on stage,
if you go to a restaurant and they say
we serve, you know, Crowd Cow beef,
if you go on Instagram and your favorite food journalist
is posting about visiting farms and ranches
and getting great Crowd Cow beef, okay,
that's how you create this movement.
But it's not gonna happen through search.
- It's not gonna happen overnight.
- Oh no, it's a long process, absolutely.
- This is another thing that nobody wants to hear,
that you have to like eat dirt for awhile,
and everyone wants this sort of quick fix.
- Chase, I don't known about Creative Live,
but I was blogging every night on SEOmoz
from 2003 To 2007, eight.
So four or five years, or five years.
Four nights a week, Monday through Thursday night.
Sorry, Sunday through Thursday nights
before I ever broke 2,000 visits in a day.
Takes a long, long time to build.
Now granted now that I know what I'm doing, right,
it's faster with SparkToro.
- Of course. - But building that flywheel
takes an incredible amount of time.
And so yeah, if you wanna get a great idea
of where is my audience,
you first have to know who they are.
Who is the right audience for you?
And I think that means figuring out people
who are likely to have a high recidivism
or retention rate, right?
Recidivism meaning they come back to you,
your website, your business a lot.
Retention meaning they just stick with it
if you have a subscription or you know,
a product that's multiple use, that kind of thing,
or service like that.
And then what you ideally wanna do
is you sort of wanna steal their phone and their laptop.
I mean this almost literally because,
so you can survey your audience
and you can say like okay, who do you pay attention to?
Who do you follow, what do you read,
what do you listen to, you know, what do you watch?
And they'll give you answers that are biased, right,
by whatever, their own recent experience
or a bunch of other things.
But if you could actually like take their phone
and be like okay, that's who you follow on Instagram,
that's the YouTube channels you subscribe to,
this is the subreddits that you visit, you know,
here's all your bookmarks,
that's what you ideally wanna do.
There are a few other manual ways of getting at that.
One, if you have a lot of money,
you can buy it through click stream services
like Jumpshot and SimilarWeb.
This is what a lot of enterprise businesses will do.
They'll go buy a bunch of click stream data
and then like narrow it down to okay,
people who visit these two sites, you know,
whatever it is-- - Yeah, let's assume
that the listeners-- - Yeah, are not gonna have
access to that.
You can, with SimilarWeb they have a public version
you can do like a trial with them,
then it becomes I think five or 600 bucks a month,
but you can do a trial with them
and go and see like okay, people who visit you know,
savoire.com also go to eater.com,
also go to you know, here's these other foodie websites.
So that might be a way to dig in for a low cost.
The other thing that you can do definitely
is, and a lot of people do this,
is they will go to Google
and just start searching like mad, right?
Search for you know, what are the popular podcasts
in this area, what are the popular YouTube channels
in this area, what are the popular Instagram accounts
and then they'll try and filter that by, yeah,
followers and visitors and all these kinds of things
and build up a big giant database.
That's how a lot of professionals do it.
- All right, very general question, art or science?
- Both, totally both, right?
And SEO is the same way.
Both of these, I think marketing in general,
that's what attracted me to it, right?
Because I-- - What's the saying?
50% of your marketing dollars are wasted,
you just don't know which 50%.
- Right, right.
(laughs) yeah, yeah.
And I think this is why for years
I never spent any money on marketing.
I was an organic-only kind of guy, right?
I love that, I love content, social and search,
that sort of thing.
But yeah, this is a practice
where you'll do a lot of trial and error,
you're gonna do a lot of muddling through.
And building an audience is definitely,
it's in high demand because it is challenging.
- Yes, let's talk about now what kind of content
can build audience?
So what we are disproportionately
is an audience of creators and entrepreneurs.
And the people who listen to the show
watch the show whether it's video, audio, whatever,
and making is in their blood.
We think of ourselves and one another,
and I think of the show as in service
of a really cool part of the Internet,
because you've familiar with the Internet triangle,
you know, the bottom 90% there are laying back,
there's a 9% you know, the top 9% from 90 to 99,
they are participators.
And then there's 1% of the Internet
that actually makes stuff.
And so I like to think of this,
folks who are watching, listening,
everybody's in that 1%.
There's a lot of engaged makers.
And the challenge is like well,
how do I know that my stuff is different or better?
Or how do I stand out in a crowd
especially in a world where content,
if we just think about photography,
there's trillions of photographs uploaded every year.
And so what kind of content, remember the audience,
we're speaking to an audience of makers,
what kinds of content?
Or is there are a rhyme or a reason or a pattern,
or give us a framework for how to think
about the content that we make.
- Yeah, so the advice I always give folks around, you know,
I wanna start doing marketing,
I wanna start creating things
that will grow my audience.
And what I say is let's imagine a Venn diagram
with three circles and you are trying to find
the inner section of these three circles.
Circle number one is a medium
that you personally are passionate about,
that you are interested in.
And I say that not just because, you know,
you'll be able to sort of do better at things
that you are passionate about or because you know,
following your passion is such common advice.
I say it because I have never,
I have never observed a creator, a maker,
who's like I know that I should be on Twitter
but I really hate Twitter.
I've never seen them do well.
It just doesn't, you know, like if that medium
doesn't resonate with you,
if you are not excited and interested in it--
- I hate bench press but I'm gonna become
really strong at bench press, almost no one ever--
- Yeah, I mean (overlapping dialogue)
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Like it's just you need to find that area of passion first.
So find something that you know you could get interested,
even if you're not super excited about it today,
do you feel like oh yeah, I think Instagram or YouTube or--
- You're talking about media right now.
- Yeah, medium. - So it's writing,
photography, video-- - Absolutely, software, right?
Like, I think I could write really cool tools and software.
I think I could do really interesting
visual representations of data.
I think I could do really cool mixed media installation art.
Whatever it is, right?
Those kinds of things.
And also the channels.
I am excited about podcasting,
I am excited about video creation
and leveraging you know, YouTube and potentially
my own website, you know, website for that.
And I am excited about
these other broadcast forms.
Like I love live events, whatever it is.
Okay, next one is area where you believe
you can create something of unique value.
So there are lots of people creating photographs.
What sets yours apart?
What is the unique element?
Why is it not just different but valuable in its difference?
Is it something that you know, oh it has this great
resonance with this audience
or it appeals in a way that other photographs do not.
Or it's perfect for X, and no one else is.
I think that, that can be really exciting.
It exposes, you know, maybe you're doing
journalistic photography that exposes some issue
that no one else is talking about
or that needs attention and awareness,
those kind of things.
And the third one is
an area where your audience actually plays, right?
So you know, going after, saying hey,
I am in the chemical engineering space
and I'm really passionate about creative photography,
and Instagram is one of the places
where I wanna do a lot of my broadcasting
and maybe a few other channels.
Well, if chemical engineers don't hang out there
and that's your audience and that's you need to reach,
got to cross that one off the list
and find something else, right?
So if you can get all three of those aligned
and you can find an intersection of those,
that's where I see magic happen.
- Aha.
So I will use an example, a deconstructed example.
I mentioned earlier my friend, Brandon Stanton,
Humans of New York.
So would his three areas,
I'm gonna try and describe them.
One is he was passionate about photography,
left his job as a bond trader,
moved to New York to try and take 10,000 portraits
because he was just passionate--
- And particularly interested
in specifically portrait photography.
- Specifically portrait photography
and specifically in New York.
He wanted to catalog and put them on a map.
And then when he realized his differentiator was,
and this is like unique value,
was that he had the ability to capture
people's stories auditorily, he was listening to them talk
while he was taking their photographs.
And when he put, it's pretty funny,
he's got a presentation on Creative Live
where he talks about taking a picture
and his first picture has like one like
and it was his mom or something like that.
And then when he started combining a photograph
with a little narrative about, a little backstory
about this person, that, that all of a sudden,
was like exponentially more interesting
than just the photograph.
So his sort of value proposition
was he became the best in the world
at taking a picture, and he describes himself
as a good photographer, not as a great photographer.
But what he's great at is the combination
of these two things.
So that's his unique value add.
So what would his third be?
Is it because people are on Facebook
and people are looking for human interest stories
and for connection?
- Yeah, I mean, and I think that also he found,
so I'm not massively familiar with his work.
I'm definitely familiar with his social accounts, right,
his social accounts which did amazingly well.
And also, at a time when there was a rise in
you can easily combine a photograph
and a block of text together
into a bunch of mediums that have wide reach, right?
So I think that helped.
And then also turning that into you know,
books and mixed media and you know, interviews
and other kinds of things.
- Yeah, now he's got shows, he's got television shows,
he's got a really successful speaking deal.
But it's really about the art for him
and all these other things have become--
- Well, it's ways for the art to reach people.
- For sure, I think that's what I'm trying
to distinguish there.
So I wanna ask you at home if you're listening to this
or watching it, like what is your series
of overlapping Venn diagrams
where you find the thing that you're passionate about,
you find the thing that you are unique,
how do you exploit that and where ar those people?
And the word exploit, I use that term
in the sort of conceptual term,
like what you wanna do is if you have a thing,
a skill that you have, like how do you manifest that?
I'm not trying to exploit any individuals,
it's really how do you maximize
the value of a particular skill or set of interests
that you have.
Okay, so to me we just traced a little bit
sort of the math and the technical about how you,
not, I mean, you can get crazy--
- We can go real deep-- - Yeah, super deep.
And for that, like, if this has been
tantalizing, tantalizing? - Tantalizing.
- Yeah, (chuckles).
Then you've got so many amazing videos--
- Oh yeah, sure. - Where it's you in front
of a whiteboard, so speaking since we're talking
about content now, this was--
- Oh, this is a perfect example of that.
- This is the perfect example,
share your own personal example.
- Yeah, so we, this again was sort of
an accidental discovery but
I started explaining to one of my colleagues at work--
- He's a good explainer, as you can tell
from this particular podcast.
- I sort explained to one of my colleagues at work,
you know, here is how a 301 redirect
is different than a 302 redirect.
You don't have to know much about them but regardless,
Google thinks about them differently,
web browsers treat them differently, et cetera.
So I'm explaining this and my colleague at work
is like hang on, hang on, we just got a new video camera,
I'm gonna grab the camera,
it was a cheap crappy camera in 2007, you know,
and film it and then we'll put it on the blog.
Well, we put it on the blog,
it did not perform well.
In fact, statistically speaking,
we did it again the next week
and kept doing it to try and get better at it
because we were sort of interested in it
and because frankly, it saved me a night of blogging, right?
I can spend 15 minutes in front of a whiteboard
explaining something to one of my colleagues at work,
and now when I go home at night,
I don't have to blog, oh this is great.
So I went from you know, five nights a week
of blogging to four.
And I think a year in, Whiteboard Friday,
which is what we called this video,
we always put it up late Thursday night
for folks to get early Friday morning in the UK and Europe,
the video series did, you know, mediocre.
Not nearly as well as most of our blog content.
Fast forward three years,
we built a studio into our new offices
when we got new offices,
we vastly upgraded the camera,
we sound proofed the studio, you know,
not quite as fancy as this but really, really good for,
we figured out how to not get glare
and reflection on the white board, you know,
all these kinds of basic things.
And I got better at explaining things
and being on camera and all that sort of stuff.
And so Whiteboard Friday became this phenomenon
where all these people in the SEO and web marketing world
would sit down together for lunch on Fridays
in their offices around the world
and they'd watch Whiteboard Friday for you know,
10 minutes and then they talked about
whatever subject matter was in it.
And by I think three years into it,
it was performing as well as you know,
the rest of our blog content.
Five years in, it was consistently
our best-performing content.
So it had built up this following.
And because of its serial nature,
I think it resonated with folks.
And of course, yeah, it was also very unique.
There were not a lot of places (overlapping dialogue)
yeah, not a lot of places to go
and be like okay, how can I, in 10 minutes,
understand a concept in the SEO world?
And I wanna do it via video
because reading something in text,
it doesn't resonate with me in the same way.
And there are lots of, you know,
visual learner who learn better that way.
Obviously many of the folks watching this, right?
- And me. - Yeah, yeah!
Which is awesome, right?
I had this same experience recently.
I started, a friend of mine asked me
to play Dungeons and Dragons
which I had never played.
I wanted to when I was a kid,
but when I asked my friends at school,
I was like shamed and embarrassed so much so
that I wanted to leave that school.
Like, it was just terrible, right?
Because when we were kids, D&D was this awful thing.
So for 25 years, I never played.
And then my friend earlier this year
was like, oh you should play.
And I started googling around to learn how to play.
I found this guy's YouTube channel and it was extraordinary.
I had this like oh, why am I watching,
I'm just watching a talking head on YouTube
but I'm super into it.
And it finally clicked with me,
like oh, I think I'm getting why Whiteboard Friday
worked for other people, right?
- Years ago. - Yeah, years ago
and continuing to this day.
You know, I filmed a bunch of them before I left Moz
and so they continue to put out some with me,
and then they're trying to sort of back fill
other hosts now.
But yeah, that video series hit those
three spots really nicely, right?
It was something that I was passionate about,
I love explaining SEO to people
and helping make this mysterious world less mysterious.
I was uniquely good at being on camera
and filming in a single take
and being able to draw something on the whiteboard
that made sense to people and resonated,
and this was a unique format
that people didn't have before.
And we had a distribution channel
where people actually hung out.
So by putting it, so we did something very unique
which I would actually recommend to anyone
who's a video creator.
We put the videos first using Wistia,
which is a self hosted platform,
put it on Moz, on our blog, our website.
After three months, we then upload the video to YouTube.
And this is because we want everyone to know
and to get into the habit of come to our website
to get the latest and greatest first,
and then yeah, we also want if people are searching
on YouTube to be able to find it there.
And many people did find Whiteboard Friday
initially through YouTube.
We wanna be in there, right, in the recommendation engine
and all those kinds of things,
we can get that visibility,
but it also meant in Google's results,
if you search for you know, whatever it is,
how to do a 301 redirect,
the Whiteboard Friday video that pops up number one
is on moz.com, not on youtube.com--
- Interesting, so you think that's still the case?
- Yeah, mostly still the case.
Sometimes YouTube will outrank us, but pretty rarely.
- Interesting.
And what about as a philosophy?
Like needing to go where the people are?
You're just saying that you developed,
could you only get that sticky
because you already had a place where people
were hanging out that was probably more valuable
than YouTube, and part two is, is that still the case
that you can ever outrank YouTube
for your own video content?
- So yes to both.
So I strongly recommend, especially for B2B, right,
so if your business does something in the, you know,
services world or you're serving businesses,
that kind of thing, putting it on your own site.
And you don't have to do what we did and wait three months.
If you want to-- - Three days--
- Yeah, you could wait a day, a week, right,
and put it up on YouTube and sort of have
your YouTube channel and at the end of every video,
say if you wanna see the latest video,
first go to my website.com and subscribe there.
We always put them up, whatever it is,
a day, a few hours.
And the people who are obsessed with you,
they want that content earlier,
they're gonna come, they're gonna come to you,
they're gonna give you their email address,
you're gonna be able to cookie them on your site,
you get analytics about them that YouTube won't provide,
you can see exactly how far they watch the video.
Like, there's all sorts of cool stuff that you know,
by using Wistia or similar service
and hosting on your own platform, it's awesome.
- You talked about obsessed people.
I think you're really making stuff for that group, right?
Is that a thing for you?
- I think so.
I mean, and obviously I'm someone,
when I find something new that I like,
I get very, very obsessed, right?
So I got obsessed with SEO for 17 years, right?
And I got obsessed, yeah I got obsessed with D&D, right,
in the last like, three months with my friend pretty fast.
And I got obsessed with this world of sort of
finding the publications and people
that influence your audience and--
- Finding your tribe? - Yeah, obsessed with
solving that problem.
I'm a little bit fashion obsessed.
Like, I get into things.
- So I think I'm gonna now,
I'm gonna shoot some darts,
we're gonna play darts. - Excellent!
- So most compelling, your personally most compelling idea
that you believe is in the book.
- Oh gosh.
So there's a story,
there's a story that I tell in the book
about my wife, Geraldine, who a few years ago,
while I was CEO at Moz,
she'd be having bad headaches for a long time,
she went into her doctor's office,
she got an MRI and it turned out it was a brain tumor
on her hypothalamus, which is like
right in the middle of everything,
very hard to access
and they weren't sure whether it was cancerous or not.
They were worried it was something called glioma
and you know, the survival rates are awful for that.
So for the next, you know, month,
while we were sort of waiting to figure out you know,
going through all the medical stuff
and figuring out what we were gonna do and all of that,
you know, my mental,
just existence, was gone.
I did not have the bandwidth
to think about anything else.
I mentioned I'm pretty obsessive,
I have an extremely close, you know,
probably codependent but you know,
in a very romantic loving way with my wife,
who I've been with for forever since '01.
And this just shattered me, right?
I had this like, I think I wrote about this,
like I had this belief in my head,
I was like this is the price you pay.
If you have a romance as good as ours,
you don't get to have it for long.
Like, I see how the world is,
I was sure she was, I was like convinced
that this was gonna be the end
and maybe a little fatalistic on that front.
And I went into Moz, into my company,
there were maybe 60 of us at the time,
and I called an all hands meeting, just impromptu,
like in our lobby, and I shared this.
Like I told everyone, I could barely get it out,
I was like choking on my own tears
and just you know, falling apart, total mess.
And that experience was incredible.
It was so powerful, Chase.
Like people were just like hugging me
and just showing all this love and dedication.
And I mean, the team like stepped up and fired up
and inspired and I don't know, it's a weird thing, right?
Like especially when you're told, hey,
when you have that personal stuff,
don't bring that to the office.
And you know, if you're a real man, you don't cry
and you definitely don't do it in front
of other people and--
- And people that work for you.
- Yeah, people that work for you,
like they'll lose respect for you,
they'll think that the company's in trouble
because you can't focus, all this stuff.
None of that happened, right?
Instead what happened was people like stepped up
and it was very cool because over the last few years,
Google and a number of universities
have been doing a ton of research about
what predicts whether a team performs
incredibly well or not, right?
What makes for an outstanding team inside a company?
And so Google had all these theories, right?
They'd go and test them and try to validate them.
Like, they're made up of the smartest people
or the best programs, or like you know,
if you where the strongest contributor on this team,
you'll be the strong, you know,
and we put all our strongest contributors together,
they'll do this.
Or maybe you know, it's teams that are led by you know,
certain types of managers, whatever it is.
The strongest predictor that they found
was not any of those things.
It was something called psychological safety.
You could get together relatively poor performers
who hadn't gotten great grades,
who like sort of got through the Google interview process
but relatively low, that are somewhat new to the company.
But if the social cohesion of that group,
if everyone in the group basically said you know,
answered yes to questions like
I feel comfortable sharing personal details with my team,
I know that I won't be judged for my failures
or my mistakes; I believe that I could share, you know,
embarrassing things about my work or my personal life
with every other person on my team;
I believe that this is a safe place for me, that.
Not, how good a programmer you were,
not whether your code had done really well,
not if you got straight As in school and went to Harvard.
Nope!
That, psychological safety, was the strongest predictor
of a team's success.
And I not only love, I mean I sort of love that idea
but I love how unconventional it is.
I don't think any of us think about that when we,
I know I hadn't when I was hiring and building teams
and trying to coach people and upgrade them.
And yet I had this experience too, right, where--
- This is a theme that I feel like I'm extracting
in real time from our conversations,
is this unconventional winning.
And whether it's with psychological safety
or what everyone else is telling you, you shouldn't,
that's when you're doubling down on the thing.
Like for example email,
everyone's like, no man, it's all about the thousand more
Twitter followers or Instagram followers.
You're like, I'd rather have 10 email addresses.
This unconventional wisdom to me is almost,
You know I think about zigging instead of zagging,
I've used it doing gallery shows
when I was trying to build an online following, for example.
And that's a really powerful story from the book.
I feel like what I know about the book,
which is not all that much, it's very rare for me
to sit with an interview not having consumed a book and--
- I'll make sure I get you one--
- Yeah, yeah, but is this me ascribing
on you how you've won or how you've been successful?
Or do you feel like this is actually a strategy
that what is the unconventional,
and I mean if I think about it, it's a little bit
of my buddy Tim Ferriss, you know Tim,
just what are the things that are creating
outstanding results when you don't expect them to
and how do you--
- I think there's a little bit of that
and you know, I sort of go a step further which is
can I reverse engineer and truly understand
why do these bits of common wisdom,
or whether they're true or not, right,
whether they're myths or whether they're authentically
part of the story, why do they exist?
In whose interests are they?
Why do we believe the way we do about these things?
And I think by digging into that
you can find out which ones are,
oh this is best practice.
This is a thing that lots of people do
because it's a smart thing to do, right?
- Yeah, getting an hour of sleep.
- We should all do that
if we wanna get ahead.
And then I think there's also when you dig into that
you often find these interesting, you know,
nuggets of that's not actually true.
That's only applicable to these certain types
of you know, businesses or organizations
or worked for these folks but it doesn't necessarily
work for everyone or it's an outlier,
or it's a myth that's propped up
because it's very useful to this particular
class of person or you know,
(chuckles) organization or whatever.
- Rule makers are by and large making the rules
so you play by them.
- Yeah, I mean I think Facebook knew exactly
what they were doing when they said
hey, build your brand and business on Facebook
and we will get you in front of a huge audience.
And for years that worked pretty well
and you could reach regularly 10, 20, 30% of your audience
and then they were like okay, now we are dominant,
now you get no reach at all, right?
That's a smart growth tactic that serves them,
and they knew exactly what game they were playing.
And you know, we sort of had the wool
pulled over our eyes as a result, and so that, yeah--
- Any other unconventional wisdom you can share?
- Oh yeah, I mean--
- Just some one offs, we're throwing darts here.
- Sure, sure.
So one of the other ones,
one of the other ones that I think I made a mistake on
and a lot of people do when they build a team
is that we end up hiring,
trying to hire people who are
extremely good at their particular
sort of job role or function
and not necessarily that they're phenomenal
sort of cultural and social fits for the organization,
you know, things like do you share the same
core values as our team?
Do you believe the same things about work like
I think, I personally have the belief that great work
can be done from anywhere at any time
and that requiring you know,
oh, you should be in the office eight hours a day
at your desk because that's the place
where you'll get the most work done,
I don't think that's particularly true.
Beliefs about who should we,
who should we promote, who should we fire, why?
Those kinds of shared beliefs.
That's not something people optimize for when they hire.
I didn't.
I mean, obviously I don't know what I was doing,
I was a kid when it started this thing.
And then frustratingly we also make the same mistake
once someone gets on to our team.
So it's like okay, you're on a performance improvement plan
and we might have to let you go because
you didn't get as much work
or as high quality work done as we need you to,
as we expect you to.
You, person, who did get that stuff done
but is sort of causing lots of strife and chaos
and is generally perceived as a butt hole by team members,
we're working with you on your social skills
and your cohesion skills,
and we'll invest a lot of energy into that
so long as you perform.
And what we should do is reverse those
because it turns out it is vastly easier,
what is Creative Live all about?
Improving and upgrading the skills,
the actual skills that everyone has, right,
around their particular area of making and creating.
That is the thing that is totally possible.
That is the thing that is pretty easy.
Social cohesion and cultural fit
and getting people to share your values and ethics,
you can work for a long time with people
you will not get those results.
And so unfortunately, what teams do is they don't hire
and they don't keep and train people
who lack the sort of fundamental core skills
around their job and they keep and retain
and try and work on the people
who don't have core value things and are toxic.
And if you could reverse those,
you can get extraordinary results.
And I've actually seen a bunch of organizations,
especially, I know a number of like consulting shops
and creative shops that basically take people
who have very few skills,
they train them up because they're a great culture fit
and as a result, they get them for you know,
a lower cost than a lot of their competitors
and they have more cohesion and more psychological safety
and you know, and a team that's more aligned
and they get more done and their margins are better.
- Culture eats strategy for breakfast, right?
- It definitely eats tactical execution for breakfast.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- So what about in your personal life?
What's the thing that you do that you find
most other people don't do or that people
would be surprised to know?
- Oh yeah.
Gosh, I mean I am...
Like, we talked a little bit about,
I'm someone who...
I think many people who observe me
and sort of you know, feel like oh,
Rand has achieved a lot of success
and a lot of notoriety, whatever,
with the companies he's built and all this other stuff,
I think people would be surprised
to learn how relatively indulgent I am
with sort of personal me time
on all sorts of fronts, right?
So I regularly get eight hours or more of sleep.
I spend a good amount of time
on just you know, my wife and I
having folks, friends over and doing social stuff
and traveling and having fun
and probably more than a lot of people who, you know,
work 40, 45 hours a week, right?
We watch TV, I play some video games.
I am not overly obsessive like,
but I will say what I found that's odd for me, not odd,
I think it's actually true for a lot of people but
I had a hard time recognizing it
so my least productive years
were when I was working the most.
Like the most numbers of hours, right?
And I had plenty of those 60, 70-hour.
I don't think I ever had an 80-hour week
but 60, 70-hour weeks.
And I could get very little accomplished.
And now, with sort of a, I think like a lower
amount of stress lifestyle
when I have something I need to get done,
I need to you know, create a great talk
for Moz com this week and you know,
about marketing launches,
put together you know, this hour-long PowerPoint,
oh and we're gonna launch this piece of software,
this free tool added and all these kinds of things,
I can crank those out (snaps) like that.
Things that would take me during my you know,
60-hour weeks, I'd be like oh man,
I need like three, four weeks to develop this thing;
I can get them done in three or four days.
I can just crank through it in you know,
four or five hours a day and get all of that work done.
I am shockingly productive when I have more personal time.
- Do you meditate or do you have any mindfulness practices?
- Not formally, but I do have--
- A lot of alone time-- - Yeah, the alone time thing
and I worked with my therapist
on sort of identifying just a personal practice for myself
that I do regularly, which is to--
- Like a talk track or something and you're...
- Yeah, like an internal monologue thing
where I just go through the,
what are the things that I did today and this week?
What are the things I'm sort of excited about for tomorrow
and the next week?
What are things that I was frustrated about,
and can I let those frustrations go?
Can I understand why I'm frustrated about them?
And then the next one, and this is like
the help me fall asleep thing,
is the what's something that has nothing to do
with my professional life that I'm sort of like
interested in or thinking about?
So I'll think about a TV show or a game or I don't know,
some friends I'm gonna see or a trip we're planning or D&D,
whatever it is, right?
And I'll put that in my head,
and that helps get me into kind of a peaceful place.
So that practice was really healthy.
Has been healthy for me.
- A, thank you; B, what's the best way
for people to pay attention to you in your new work?
- Oh, sure, sure.
Yes, so you should follow me on Instagram.
No. (laughs)
- No, no, you're basically you're @randfishkin
on most things, right?
- @randfish on, yeah, on Twitter on most things.
Yeah certainly if folks, if creators out there
have questions about, you know, SEO stuff
or web marketing stuff and I can be helpful,
I'm rand@sparktoro.com, it's my email address.
- Spark with an S-P-A-R-K-T-O-R-O.
- SparkToro, exactly, yup. - Got it.
- And yeah, our website you can find that on there as well.
And yeah, I'm most active on Twitter, @randfish.
I'm about 70% web marketing stuff
and then 30% social issues.
So if you're comfortable with that balance, great.
- Sweet.
Thank you so much for sitting down and talking to us.
- Are you kidding me, Chase, this was awesome!
- Long time in the making.
And for those folks at home,
pay attention to this guy right here.
Check out the new book too.
Congradulations on that. - Yeah, thank you.
- I'll see you again probably, hopefully tomorrow.
- Bye. (uplifting music)
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