A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:36:48 · Pablo Srugo, Rand Fishkin
[00:36:48] S0: Fundraise. What was that ? Tell me just quickly, like the, you told me how it would play out, but is there a valuation implied, or like, what's, what's the structure of that agreement? Uh, [00:36:55] S1: We used a pre-money of 4 million and a post of 5.3. So our investors own a little over 25% of the business , um, or sorry, right around 25% of the business. And , uh, we have , uh, essentially they own units in an LLC, although a friend of mine just fundraised for his business using the SparkToro docs , uh, and did it with a C Corp. So it , okay . It , it's very, it's at your option, what you want to do. Um, both by the way, qualify for QSBS, the , the qualified small business , uh, stock exemption, which means that the first $10 million of, you know, earnings that you make on a, on a sale of your units or a sale of your stock is tax free . Uh, so that's very compelling for a lot of investors too . Um, and the valuation is flexible, right? So I think that because of my reputation and network, my valuation was higher, I think. So, yeah. Um, I talked to, you know, there was a couple guys, I think they were in Atlanta, they raised using the SparkToro Docs a few years ago. Their valuation was like 2 million and they raised 600,000 or something . So, you know , you know , kind of a different, depends on who you are and where you are and what you're building, network, all that kind of stuff. But you could raise $50,000 on a $200,000 valuation [00:38:09] S0: Company. Sure . And how long did it take you to, to get profitable?
00:38:09 · Pablo Srugo, Rand Fishkin
[00:38:09] S0: Company. Sure . And how long did it take you to, to get profitable? [00:38:12] S1: We were pretty good at <laugh> . We were pretty good at that. You know, one of the things we did early on, Pablo, is while Casey was building the product for the first year, I was out there like basically building our email list people who were , who wanted the product that we were building. And so when we launched, we had maybe 15, 16,000 people on that list, possibly a little bit more. And we were profitable seven months after launch. [00:38:35] S0: That's awesome. That's [00:38:36] S1: Great. So break even profitable, right? Sure . In Casey and i's salaries were lower? We, we , there's in the docs, there's a built in thing, again, sort of protecting investors and also encouraging founders, which is that our salaries were capped to the Seattle software engineer average until we repaid our investors, their 1.3 million, at which point our salaries could be two x the Seattle software engineer average. [00:38:58] S0: Got it. Okay. That's helpful. You know, you mentioned with , um, with Moz, and it sounds like maybe with this one, like you spent quite a bit of time, let's say building an audience before, you know, launching the product building community, I think that's a skill set of yours, but is that something you would recommend, like generally to founders? Like you think that approach still works today?
00:39:16 · Rand Fishkin
[00:39:16] S1: I think it is a huge risk mitigation tactic, right? Because the process, in the process of doing that, you're gonna do two things. One, you're gonna mitigate the risk that at launch nobody wants the thing you've built and that the cost of customer acquisition is too high. And the second thing you're gonna do is you are going to acquire incredible market knowledge that will help you design and build a much better product. And so I , I cannot encourage people enough to, you know, become sort of experts in the field that they're in, build an audience through , through a variety of strategies. You know, at , at Moz it was an SEO and content flywheel with SparkToro, it was all, almost all PR and social media marketing. Um, and , uh, you know , uh, this, this friend of mine is building his strategy almost exclusively on , um, niche media in sort of in the sector that he's in and, and awareness through that. And then some content which may in the future rank and search engines, but , um, is pretty chall . That's a, that's a much more challenging task than it , than it used to be. Every author does this. My wife Geraldine just launched , uh, if You Can't Take The Heat right, that came out like a few weeks ago. And her entire strategy was based around essentially social media audience, podcasts, you know, some video interviews, some newsletters, her field. And, and it became a bestseller week one, thanks to those sources and support that she had kind of built up over years and years of audience building.
00:40:35 · Pablo Srugo, Rand Fishkin
[00:40:35] S0: Thi this is one, I'm actually just selfishly interested, what was the process like of Li of writing Lost and Founder? Like how much was it harder than you thought? It'd be easier to take you a long time and just everything around publishing a book, I mean, it's so different than, than starting a company weren't just wondering what that process was like. Yeah, [00:40:51] S1: Yeah. Um, so I did, I did, I wrote a couple other books, but they were like SEO manuals, you know, educational stuff for like O'Reilly and Wiley , which are very different than writing for the Big five publishers. So Penguin Random House , uh, ended up , uh, buying Lost and Founder, which was very exciting and the Advance was great and all that kinda stuff. But the process itself was essentially I pitched , uh, publishers in New York with an outline classic. Like if you imagine what the 1970s Woody Allen movie where you go go to New York and like, talk to all these publishers and sit around a desk with people. It's not, not that dissimilar from that. Wow . Um , and then my agent ran an auction , uh, for the book. And Penguin Random House did a, did a preempt, which means that they said, we don't want you shopping it around. We , we want you to just sign with us right away. And we liked the offer. So we did that. I loved working with my editor. [00:41:42] S0: Was that a function of just the interest in the book, or did you also have, 'cause you have obviously like a big following on, on Twitter, LinkedIn, like how much was it, you know, those two things I'm sure played in, but it was a
00:41:42 · Pablo Srugo, Rand Fishkin
[00:41:42] S0: Was that a function of just the interest in the book, or did you also have, 'cause you have obviously like a big following on, on Twitter, LinkedIn, like how much was it, you know, those two things I'm sure played in, but it was a [00:41:53] S1: Second one . I would say they played in more than the book. Okay. And unfortunately for a lot of authors right now , uh, in nonfiction in particular, fiction is a little different fiction there . It's a little more speculative, take a chance, hits driven , whatever. But nonfiction is very much how big is your audience? Um, Geraldine and I like to joke that before, before she went and pitched her book, I should have just bought her a hundred thousand more Twitter followers. <laugh> , right? Because yeah , you know, Elon lets fake followers flourish. So like why not just, why not just buy? [00:42:22] S0: Yeah , yeah . It's
00:42:22 · Pablo Srugo, Rand Fishkin
[00:42:22] S0: Yeah , yeah . It's [00:42:22] S1: Good . A bunch of fake accounts and then you look great to the publisher. So if anyone's listening and they're an author, I'd be like, yeah, just go on Fiverr and maybe bump up your social media numbers. Like it's kind of sketch and they'll, you'll probably lose 'em over the next few months. But it's helpful for those conversations. <laugh> smart . Um , and they're not, you know, they're not su super sophisticated about how they look at it, but , uh, I was gonna say, the process itself of writing was very familiar to me. 'cause I've been blogging for, you know, decades now, but the , uh, the intensity was pretty high. So it was like a lot of writing. We, I wrote the first six , six chapters of the initial version of Lost and Founder submitted them to my editor at Penguin, and she was like, this is not the right book. We gotta throw this out and start over. Wow. And I remember being extremely frustrated that we couldn't have identified that from the outline and, you know, that I had done all this work, but we ended up making what I think was a was a much better [00:43:14] S0: Oh, it was a great, yeah, it was a great book. Did you do it full time for that period or were , is it kind of on the side?