Category: Startups

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,…
Hiring Startups

Why Cash Bonuses Make No Sense in Startups

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s tough competing for candidates with the likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. In the past 6 months, we’ve lost bids for half a dozen or so engineers to these companies, and more than a few mentioned the additional cash bonuses as one of the reasons they were motivated to choose these companies over us. Despite this, I’m holding…
Startups

My Favorite Board Meetings

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
When we first raised an investment round in 2007, SEOmoz’s board of directors (consisting of Michelle Goldberg from Ignition, Gillian & myself from Moz, Kelly Smith from Curious Office and Sarah Bird as secretary/counsel) would meet nearly every month. Over time, that became every 2-3 months and now it’s quarterly. Unlike some CEOs, I’ve (almost) never dreaded or stressed for…
Startups

One Bad, “Policy Change” Email Can Kill Company Culture

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
We’ve all received a work email that made us cringe – the ones that sound formal and threatening or vaguely like a punishment for something we’re pretty sure someone else did. They often have titles like “New Travel Policy” or “Changes to Benefits Package” or even “Office Happiness Update.” These subject lines sounds innocent enough, but in the modern professional…

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