Recently, I had a series of epiphanies about my experiences as a founder. Please forgive the length of the post, and stick with me, I’ll do my best to make the journey worthwhile. I was eleven years old, maybe twelve, and my family lived way out in the middle of nowhere, in unincorporated King County.…
A Welcome to SparkToro’s Cofounder: Casey Henry
In 2011, in one of my favorite hiring stories, a longtime SEOmoz community member joined our team. He’d been contributing to the blog for years, commenting and emailing with us, even building some SEOmoz-related side projects. He was young (as was I), but had the temperament and demeanor of a much older soul. Geraldine even…
Buy Lost And Founder and PRH Will Send You This Zelda-Style Startup Map
It’s been a whirlwind of a few weeks, launching a new book, launching a big piece of software for Moz (my final project with the team there), and launching this new company… As I shared on Twitter: Feels like for two years, I had nothing to launch. The occasional blog post or WB Friday notwithstanding.…
New Data: How Google’s Organic & Paid CTRs Have Changed 2015-2018
There’s good news for SEOs — the number of searches on Google keeps growing, interest in SEO remains massively higher than other forms of web marketing, and the field is far less distrusted than even a few years ago (source). But, there’s bad news, too. Thanks to the kind folks at Jumpshot (whose clickstream data…
I Wrote a Weird Kind of Business Book
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,…
New Jumpshot 2018 Data: Where Searches Happen on the Web (Google, Amazon, Facebook, & Beyond)
Over the last few years, I’ve been incredibly frustrated with inaccurate, unrepresentative data sources about how traffic flows on the web and where web searches take place. Some of these are well-intentioned mistakes (e.g.), while others feel like they’ve got a specific motivation. But one source that’s been consistently excellent is Jumpshot, a collector and…
Why Web Marketers Should Invest in Demand Creation
Every month, hundreds of thousands of people search on Google for “upcoming movies.” And in the SEO and web marketing worlds, there are a lot of practitioners who’d argue that movie studios should be investing more effort into ranking in the lists, news items, and search results that show for those queries. After all, according…
Contrarian Take: Don’t Start Your Content Marketing with “What Do My Customers Want?”
If you’re in the business of content marketing, I know you’ve seen advice like this: “Start with your customer personas.” “Create content that will resonate with your customers.” “Great content is content that your customers actually want to consume.” It sounds compelling. But in my experience, it’s wrong. Or at least, incomplete. Why?…
How to Choose a Startup Name that Reduces Marketing Friction
A few months ago, I settled on a name for my new company. Since the launch two weeks ago, I’ve received the question, “why SparkToro?” a few dozen times. Unlike my prior entrepreneurial venture (in which I started with the very awkward SEOmoz.org, and later rebranded to Moz.com), I was far more thoughtful and intentional…
Why Elon Musk’s “People as Vectors” Analogy Resonates
In his keynote at INBOUND last year, Dharmesh Shah (Hubspot’s cofounder) shared a personal story of meeting Elon Musk and their short but powerful conversation about aligning people on a team as you would vectors in an equation. Unlike many folks in the startup world, I’m not a die-hard Musk fan. I appreciate his creativity…