A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:03:40 · Pablo Srugo
[00:03:40] S0: I think, you know, you mentioned like, it's not about good versus evil, and I think that's totally right. Like, I think what you're really doing is opening the eyes, because the problems really tend to happen when somebody goes into it with their eyes not wide open and not really understanding like what they've gotten themselves into it. And even myself, like when I started my last startup gym track , I didn't know, I mean, you just don't know what you don't know, right? And , and part of it, like, you have to go through it , take the punches to the face, but obviously books like yours , uh, and just content that is open and like actually talks through like the ups and the downs helps. It can help a lot and on both sides, right? Because frankly, like, and I've said this to founders, like, if you don't wanna go for the big, like the big, big outcome and forego everything else, maybe you don't want to take vvc or you certainly don't wanna take too much vc. 'cause it'll be , it is bad for everybody <laugh> , right? Like, you just, you wanna only do it when it's fully aligned. Yeah,
00:04:33 · Rand Fishkin, Pablo Srugo
[00:04:33] S1: Absolutely. And I, I think that there's a big psychological and sort of cultural challenge around this, which is, I , I don't think any single investor or media personality or founder is responsible for this, but overall, the last 25 years have definitely created an environment where almost every founder feels like, if I'm not raising lots of money and trying to become the billion dollar unicorn, then I am not as good of an entrepreneur. I'm not as impressive of a person. I'm not as worthy of professional sort of admiration and, and happiness and feeling accomplished and feeling like I'm enough. That is a serious problem, and it is dumb as hell. <laugh>. Right. [00:05:22] S0: <laugh>, maybe let's start with , uh, with kind of the origin story of Moz . Uh, you know, you were kind of running, you were in the SEO game already. You were doing more of a services type business. How did you transition that into what ultimately became MAs kind of the venture backed startup that, that became very well known , attracted a lot of venture capital , uh, and went on to be acquired. Let's
00:05:22 · Pablo Srugo, Rand Fishkin
[00:05:22] S0: <laugh>, maybe let's start with , uh, with kind of the origin story of Moz . Uh, you know, you were kind of running, you were in the SEO game already. You were doing more of a services type business. How did you transition that into what ultimately became MAs kind of the venture backed startup that, that became very well known , attracted a lot of venture capital , uh, and went on to be acquired. Let's [00:05:43] S1: See, I dropped outta college in 2001 and started building websites, essentially doing, doing web design for local small Seattle businesses , uh, alongside my mom, Jillian, who had been running a small business marketing and advertising consultancy, you know, sort of one woman shop here in Seattle for 20 years before that. So interestingly, you know, if you look at the, the kind of like foundation of, of what became Moz , uh, the company started in 1981. <laugh> , technically right? <laugh> . Um , but , uh, so that, that business kind of transitioned into a web design development business, which was failing miserably, racked up a ton of debt, did not do well, and then we couldn't pay our SEO subcontractors. And so we had a conversation, it was like, Rand , do you need to learn to do SEO and do that? 'cause we really need that money. And we promised it to them, but we can't afford to pay these, you know, these contractors. So dove into SEO and found it extremely frustrating , um, and very secretive, you know, that both the industry and the search engines at the time, what year [00:06:49] S0: Was this? [00:06:51] S1: 2000 2, 3, 4 ?
00:06:51 · Rand Fishkin, Pablo Srugo
[00:06:51] S1: 2000 2, 3, 4 ? [00:06:54] S0: Yeah . Okay. Really , [00:06:56] S1: Um , around that, around that era. So, you know, Google was the most popular search engine by oh four, but MSN , uh, Lycos , Salta , Vista info, c cobot , MSN search, you know , uh, ask Jeeves , like they were all still around. And so, you know, trying to, trying to do all this stuff. I think, in fact, one of the big catalysts for me, trying to kinda reverse engineer and publicize more about how search engines worked and start this website at the time called SEO Moz, I think that started in 2003, was my frustration with the fact that I had, I had gotten a lot of our clients ranking on most of the other search engines, Yahoo and MSN , and Ask , but not Google. Huh . And I was like, what is Google doing? Something's, something's weird, something's different, something's wrong. They don't, you know, they don't like the same things. They seem to have some, some other algorithm at play. [00:07:46] S0: Was the other stuff just, just, and this is kind of historical at this point, but was it just like keyword density? Like I remember there were like keyword clouds and <laugh> just weird things back then. Yeah .
00:07:46 · Pablo Srugo, Rand Fishkin
[00:07:46] S0: Was the other stuff just, just, and this is kind of historical at this point, but was it just like keyword density? Like I remember there were like keyword clouds and <laugh> just weird things back then. Yeah . [00:07:55] S1: Most of the, most of the keyword density stuff ended by the end of the nineties. Okay. Um, but so, so links were a huge part of search engine rankings by the , in the early two thousands. Keyword usage still mattered , um, but it was, it was quite simplistic compared compared to where it is today. And there wasn't a lot of user behavior that went into it , uh, which now today dominates most algorithms, right? Um , brand dominates a lot of algorithms today, so would've been really hard to try to try and rank anything in today's environment. But , uh, we struggled with Google quite a bit, and I started publishing on SEO Moz, it , it was originally on a different domain, but then, then moved it to the SEO moz.org domain. And that website, you know, my, my goal was like, I'm gonna be like the other m's I don't know if Pablo, you remember the early two thousands, but there was like a site called DMOZ , which HA was the Open directory project. There was a site called ChefMoz that was like open recipes. There was a site site called MapMoz . There was Open Geography information. There were all these different Moz websites. The [00:08:58] S0: Only Moss I know I think is Mozilla, that
00:08:59 · Rand Fishkin
[00:08:59] S1: That's, yeah , Mozilla was one of them as well, so , okay. Okay . So I think the only two that kind of survived that long era were Mozilla and Moz <laugh> , which is funny. Uh, basically I started publishing there and we earned quite an audience and that, that sent us some consulting business for SEO, which is what the business transitioned into . So it went from web design fully over to SEO. Uh, and then in 2007, we had built some software that we were using internally for ourselves to try and like, make our processes easier and better. Essentially. I, you know, I really wanted to share that with our community. All these people who were reading the blog. This was sort of a pre, it wasn't pre-social media, but it was pre popular Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, all that kind of stuff. And so I , uh, convinced our developer, Matt, to basically build a PayPal paywall on top of the software that we had behind the scenes. We launched that in, at the start of oh seven, and by the middle of that year, it was already doing more revenue than the consulting business. And that is not because the software was great. I don't think any, no one would say it had product market fit. Like it was, it was crappy little tools that, you know, were barely better than doing it manually. But everyone who was doing SEO was reading our blog. And so we had, we had the audience, and that audience first approach was just incredibly powerful, right? Because they knew us, they liked us, they trusted us. So when we published some software, they were like, oh, yeah, I can, I can do the same processes that the Moz folks have been teaching me and use their software to make some of them easier , uh, and faster. And there weren't a lot of, you know, web cloud-based solutions for , uh, doing SEO. There was no virtually no software as a service in that field at all. And Moz took off. So by the , uh, I think we did about $800,000 of revenue that year, maybe a little bit more, and more than half of that, like 450,000 of that was the software. And that's when Ignition Partners , um, and Curious Office came in and invested at 1.1 million, the TechCrunch. And , uh, w uh , Wikipedia numbers are wrong. I have tried to convince them to change them, but <laugh> , they're, they're like, we can't trust you. You're not a credible source .