I was particularly impressed last week with the political quiz website ISideWith. If you haven’t yet taken it for a spin, I recommend doing so, not because it’s likely to change your political affiliation (we might even have a genetic predisposition there that no evidence will be strong enough to overrule), but because it’s an
It’s Not Just Technical Debt; Everything Gets Painful & Slow as You Scale
By 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
I Love You Geraldine. Happy Birthday.
By Dear Geraldine, For the last 10 years and 9 months, you’ve been the best thing in my life. We’ve been through a bunch of tough times together and some amazingly good ones, too. And for the past 3 and a half years, you’ve been writing a love letter to me (that’s turned into much more
I Hated My Blog Post From Last Night
By This morning I woke up with a lot of regret. I really don’t like my blog post from last night. To use a common SEOmoz saying, it was “TA” but not “GFEE.” I shared my thoughts transparently and I authentically don’t like the “growth hacker” terminology, but why am I writing about that? It doesn’t
Growth Hackers: The Ninja Rockstar Pirates of the Marketing World
By 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
The Help Me Help You Dinner
By Try a quick thought exercise: Grab a piece of paper and a pen and jot down at least 3 or 4 ideas of the best possible way you could help your business and/or your career with $500. I want to compare those ideas against a process that costs me ~$500 and has, historically, produced incredible returns for
My Fall Speaking Schedule: 13 events in 9 weeks
By It’s September, which means the two month season I traditionally spend mostly in Seattle (we call it “summer” even though it rarely gets to 80°) is over and my insane travel schedule’s starting up again. If you’d like to keep track of me or catch me in a particular city, I’ve created a list of
Google Search Quality is Smart to Be Messing with Link Spammers
By In case you’ve not yet read about Google’s patent on rank modifying for spamming techniques, check out SEO by the Sea and SEOptimise. It’s a clever system from the Google folks designed to dissuade spammers (particularly link spammers) from being confident of their results. The basic premise is simple – after observing rank improving behavior
Prioritizing Features & Product/Engineering Investments
By Probably the hardest job the executive team has at SEOmoz (beyond improving culture) is managing the prioritization roadmap for features. Right now, the vast majority of the Moz engineering and product teams are working on a large release that will likely be 12+ months from start to finish (which is actually something we hate –
The Uncomfortable Challenge of Topgrading Your Startup’s Team
By 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