SparkToro Blog

This past Friday I read Ben Huh’s post entitled Don’t Fear the Press. He writes: I often see very puzzling behavior from some entrepreneurs when it comes to dealing with the press and media.  Either they are desperate for it and would kill to get a press write up, or they vilify the press and hate them for whatever happened.…

Inflection points in startup life technically happen every day, but in my experience, there’s a difference between the once-a-week variety and the truly BIG decisions – to sell the company, to raise funding, to pivot on business models, to expand into a new location or new product. Sometimes these happen organically as a result of turning the flywheel, but on…

In 1997 I was just graduating from high school and started to design small business websites using Microsoft Frontpage and a variety of amateurish HTML hacks. In 2001, I dropped out of college, two classes away from graduating to work full time at a tiny web consulting business with my Mom. That didn’t go very well.   From 2001-2003, we…

We’ve gotten a lot of interest from venture capital, private equity and other types of investment firms lately at Moz. Nearly every week features a phone call or two to answer some of that inbound interest. I suspect it’s due to multiple factors, but the current, hot investment environment and  upward slope of the search marketing sector combined with some…

Students of history will almost certainly be familiar with the 7 Deadly Sins – the list of human vices that are,  purportedly, the source for much of humanity’s evil. Of these, one in particular stands out: In almost every list  Pride, or  hubris, is considered the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins, and the source of the…

From age 20-26, I was, quite possibly, the world’s worst entrepreneur. I dropped out of college two classes away from graduating. In a typically low financial risk business – consulting – I managed to rack up hundreds of thousands in debt building, well, nothing. Wracked by credit card and equipment loan debt I had no idea how to pay back,…