Category: Startups

Hiring Startups

Time Recovery Hacks

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Startup life has intense time requirements. In the early phases, there’s a lot of nose-to-the-grindstone need, and if the company successfully scales, the internal and external demands on your time rise dramatically. With this blog, and my commitment to staying close to the everyday issues of the marketing industry, I’ve had to build up a lot of segmentation to effectively…
Hiring Moz Startups Team

Some Thoughts on Firing Employees

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This past week, I read a terrific Quora thread on firing. The depth and breadth of answers shows the wide range of opinions and practices on the subject, and it made me think about the topic for this blog. Companies are rarely transparent about how and why they let people go, so hopefully we can be an exception here, at…
Hiring Startups Team

When Brilliant Minds Become Brilliant Jerks

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
The NYTimes Bits Blog has a worthwhile read from last week entitled “What Do You Do With the Brilliant Jerks?” I’d encourage startup founders and team members to take 8 minutes and read it thoroughly. On its face, the article didn’t strike me as especially controversial, but the comments(and some of the responses on social media) tell a different story.…
Moz Startups

IPOs, Acquisitions, and The Long Term for Moz

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Somehow, the company we started has become somewhat successful and reached some really interesting milestones. Honestly, what SEOmoz has achieved in the past 5 years is beyond what I could have hoped for. It’s exciting and it’s humbling, but it’s also a little bit scary. There are 94 incredible people at the company devoting their professional lives (and often a…
Startups Team

It’s Not Just Technical Debt; Everything Gets Painful & Slow as You Scale

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
A tremendous amount gets written about technical debt (definition) in the startup ecosystem. As you scale your product and engineering, you inevitably make sacrifices for the sake of speed that lead to pain down the road. What startups (and people who interact with them) don’t often realize is that this same problem happens across nearly every team and every form…
Marketing Startups

Growth Hackers: The Ninja Rockstar Pirates of the Marketing World

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I really enjoyed this article from Layered Thoughts: “Growth Hacking is BS. It’s All Just Marketing.” But, it did make me reflect on my adoption of other terminology over the years. In the early 2000s, I liked the term “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) over “Search Engine Placement” (which some people still use) or “Search Engine Marketing” (which now means SEO+PPC…

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