Category: Startups

Startups

Why We’re Putting A Bunch of Our Savings into TinySeed

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Geraldine and I have a pretty good financial situation going. We’re in our late thirties (which, according to this ridiculous TV graphic, means we’re in a non-existent generation). We’re somewhere between the 80th-90th percentile in savings for American families (source). And we have several sources of income — our books, my startup, Geraldine’s writing+blog content licensing, some investments, speaking, and…
Marketing Startups

Can You Still Blog Your Way to Visibility & Credibility?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In the last handful of years, I’ve had a creeping sense that blog readership is dropping across the web, even as the quantity of organizations and people producing posts has grown. Stats, unfortunately, are hard to come by. Most all of the readership data is from blogging’s golden era — 2001-2012 (or so) — when several reputable organizations regularly published…
Startups

The Powerhouses of the Internet Are Turning Hostile to Websites

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Perhaps this was inevitable. In a system that encourages monopolies, and demands those monopolies increase growth rate and extract ever more revenue (sans caveats or exceptions), we probably shouldn’t be surprised. But, we should be prepared. Google is referring less outgoing traffic to websites for the first time in its 17 year history (at least in the US, where its…
Events Startups

My Presentation from INBOUND 2018 Might Make You a Better Entrepreneur

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Last week, I spoke at Hubspot’s INBOUND conference for the eighth year. For the first time, it was not under the auspices of my old company, Moz, nor was it centrally about web marketing. Instead, I focused on my experiences building a company and helping other entrepreneurs build their companies…. And I think, this was one of the best received…
Startups

A New, Free Tool to Determine the True Influence of a Twitter Account

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Number of followers is a crap metric. And yet, as I’ve been watching and learning from folks who do content marketing, PR-focused outreach, social media marketing, and influencer campaigns, I’ve found that more than 90% of the time… that’s *exactly* what people use. They’ll nod their heads and say “yeah, I know it can be gamed,” or “yeah, some people…
SparkToro Startups

SparkToro Raised a Very Unusual Round of Funding & We’re Open-Sourcing Our Docs

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
The Short Version Our new company, SparkToro, LLC has just completed a $1.3mm angel financing. And, because we think our structure might be right for many other businesses, we’re making our documents open-source for anyone to use. The Story SparkToro is, obviously, a product of my and my cofounder, Casey‘s, experiences in the mostly venture-backed worlds of software startups. The…
Book Startups

I Wrote a Weird Kind of Business Book

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
For the last two years, I’ve been working on a book about what it’s like to build a tech startup and how Silicon Valley’s startup culture biases founders and companies to make a lot of poor decisions. That book, Lost and Founder, comes out in 14 days… I’m the usual mix of excitement and nervousness, elation and fear. The face…

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