Category: Startups

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…
Hiring Startups Team

The Uncomfortable Challenge of Topgrading Your Startup’s Team

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
If things go well at your startup, there will inevitably be a point where the business is growing ahead of the team’s abilities. Engineers will find themselves facing architectural, scaling, and complexity issues they’ve never dealt with before. Marketers will discover their historical strengths dwarfed by the quantity and complexity of different customer acquisition channels and the huge challenges of…
Marketing Startups

Manufacturing Serendipity

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I’m on the road ~100 days each year. When I’m in Seattle, I have at least 30% of my days filled with coffees, calls, and communication to folks outside the company from whom I’m seeking absolutely nothing and where my goal is merely to be helpful. I do most of this in the name of a process I now call…
Moz Startups

Our First Acquisition

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
You’ve likely seen the news today that Moz made its first major acquisition. It was an exciting, rewarding day at the office and an invigorating one for our team, particularly the Followerwonk folks. We’re still a very young company and so this is a bit of a test for us across the board. Acquisitions are notorious for having challenges around…
Marketing Startups

Exceptional Upgrade Path UX from WPEngine

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I’m fascinated by the mechanics of startup marketing, customer acquisition, and revenue generation. So when I received this email for my WPEngine WordPress Hosting account (on which Dharmesh and I host inbound.org), I couldn’t help but get curious: It’s hard to list all the ways this email is a work of marketing art, but I’ll start with a few of…
Moz Startups Team

What’s the Right Team Structure?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
As I often note on this blog, I’m a rookie CEO who’s gotten very lucky. Much of the time, I wish I had more experience in other corporate and startup environments, so I’d better know what works and what doesn’t. I rely on other team members and a lot of outside advice for that, and I’ve been thinking that maybe,…

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