Category: Product

Marketing Product SparkToro

How to Use Your First Ten SparkToro Searches

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Before SparkToro existed, the process of researching a brand’s audience was a frustrating one. I know, because I helped a lot of friends, especially those pursuing early stage ideas or launching new products. It took forever — usually months, sometimes 6+. The data was always self-reported (which meant it was often wrong). And scale was simply unobtainable. We could survey…
Marketing Product SparkToro Team

SparkToro’s Finally Here

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Almost two years ago, Casey Henry and I joined forces on SparkToro in the hopes of solving a thorny, expensive, long-standing problem in the market research world: How to discover the publications & people that influence any group of people online. Though we’re launching at a very scary time in the world, we’re excited to finally share that product with…
Data Marketing Product SparkToro

SparkToro’s New Tool to Uncover Real vs. Fake Followers on Twitter

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
On our journey to creating a great search tool for audience intelligence, we realized that the data we use to measure influence is fatally flawed in a number of ways. Our SparkScore tool was built to help measure true engagement+reach (as opposed to mere following). But the other big problem is fake followers — accounts that exist on Twitter, technically…
Product Startups Team

Launching Adventure Teams at Moz

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Like many software companies moving from the early to growth stage, we’ve experienced our fair share of challenges and pains. At the start of 2012, there were ~50 Mozzers, a very flat management structure, and things like process, communication, and planning were fairly simple. But over the next 12 months, we more than doubled to nearly 120 (today 130+) and…
Personal Product Psychology

Where Does Creativity Come From?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I love discovering that long-held wisdom or cultural beliefs are mythology. Ideas are so often what hold people back from achieving greater potential – and freedom from the prison of those ideas can create revolutions that make us all better, stronger, and wiser. This weekend I watched some videos on the site Everything Is A Remix that changed my preconceptions…
Moz Product Startups

Why Does a Big Funding Round Slow Down Your Pace of Innovation?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
“Why can’t we build it faster?!” I’ve never met an entrepreneur in the software field who doesn’t ask themselves that question daily. For a lot of the past few years, I had an excuse: the constraint of capital. But, since April (when we raised $18mm), that argument’s invalidated. There’s an excess of cash on the balance sheet, and yet, from…
Data Marketing Product

We Can Do Better Than Bit.ly

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Of all the tools I use each day on the web, perhaps none frustrates me more than bit.ly. I like being able to track all the sharing I do across networks with a single URL shortener, but the site’s frustrating from numerous levels. Historic data and habit are most of what keeps me from moving to other services (along with…
Product

App Store SEO: Why I’m Still a Skeptic

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I love how the field of SEO has branched out to include a lot of tasks and channels greater than just the search engines. That said, although I hear a lot about SEO for the app stores (mostly Android’s “Play Store” and iPhone’s “app store”), I have a lot of skepticism about making big investments there for a few reasons:…

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