Rand Fishkin Quotes

Great Founders Don’t Do What They Love; They Enable a Vision

if possible, build your expertise before you build your network, and build your network before you build your company.

Managing Is a Skill, Not a Prize

Take Maya Angelou’s advice: when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

The problem with MVPs, and with the “something > nothing” model, is that if you launch to a large customer base or a broad community, you build brand association with that first version.

Emotional comfort with one’s colleagues was a better predictor than IQ, than years of experience, than the strength of previous work, than literally any and everything else researchers had hypothesized about.

Of the most successful startups, nearly everyone has a clearly identifiable marketing flywheel that brought awareness and traffic from the right audiences and helped those people convert to a sale or a signup at the right time.

Bing’s gotten much better since then, and is now as good as or better than Google on most queries, but that MVP hangover has stuck with the brand for years and, in my opinion, continues to dampen the prospects of what should be a very decent option for web searchers.

Or it might be to eradicate student loan debt and class stratification worldwide by building an affordable educational platform with the rigor and brand respect of Harvard at

Some lead by example, like Rand Fishkin of Moz (formerly SEOmoz), who says his goal is to create a hundred new millionaires — then issued additional stock grants for every Moz employee as a part of the Series B funding, directly out of his personal holdings, to ensure that a financing round wouldn’t be dilutive.

Great ideas and products are often born from mediocre ones. The keys are time (enough to iterate and evolve into something remarkable), humility (enough to see what’s wrong and admit a failure so you can move forward), and survival (a profitable services business can be a godsend here).

People judge by first impressions. When those 26,832 people visited the page announcing Moz Analytics and showing off what it could do, most of them disappeared, never to return. Many who tried the product came away unimpressed. The “word on the street” (or in our case, the web forums, conference halls, and social media discussions) said Moz had a crappy new product that wasn’t worth the money. That reputation dogged us for three, long, growth-stunted years.

website. In those first two years, I was lucky if anything I created received more than a few dozen visits.

Private companies, especially startups, are very risky investments. The 90 percent failure rate keeps most types of investors away from the field.

Consulting is limited entirely by time and people.

We also forget that startups take a long time to exit.

The Best Leaders Know When to Lead—and When Not To

Clearly, the answer to the product versus services debate is “it depends.

Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.

Execution Is More Malleable Than Market, Model, and Idea

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. —Steve Jobs, 2011

Unless what you love is managing people, handling crises, delegating, holding people responsible, recruiting, setting, then constantly amplifying and repeating the company’s mission, vision, strategy, and values, being a startup CEO may not provide you with the work you love to do.

This is the work entrepreneurs do in growing organizations: digging into problems, untangling conflict, freeing people from the mind-sets or structures that hold them back, crafting (and refining, over and over) the pillars and policies of how the company functions.

That’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned about startups: it’s dangerous to go alone.

Even Successful Startup Founders Don’t Get Rich (Quick)

The best way to ensure that your CTO is going to make you a better CEO is to hire a CTO who likes to teach.

Tragically, most of us have a poor understanding of our own strengths and weaknesses.

If you’re a founder, make a list of the previous successes and failures you’ve had in your career, and of the elements of running a business with which you’re familiar and comfortable. Chances are high that your weaknesses will be the items not on that list.

Don’t Raise Money for the Wrong Reasons or from the Wrong People

The best entrepreneurs … know how to tell an amazing story that will convince talent and investors to join in on the journey.

Startup investing follows the Pareto principle: 20 percent of the investments return 80 percent of the fund.

Their goal is to improve upon the rate of return that would have been achieved through putting the money into public stocks, bonds, or other investment vehicles. The target is 12 percent annual growth, which, over the life of a ten-year fund, means returning three times the fund size (e.g., $300 million on a $100 million fund).

National Venture Capital Association data showed that the average time from funding to exit (via an acquisition or an IPO) increased dramatically from 3.1 years in 2001 to 6.8 years by 2014.

The people who multitask the most tend to be impulsive, sensation-seeking, overconfident of their multitasking abilities, and they tend to be less capable of multitasking.

Fewer people, more focused on just a few things, could do more than a much larger team pulled in myriad directions.

People LOVE change (when it’s about changing others). People HATE change (when it’s about changing themselves).

The benefits of focus are too great to ignore, hidden only by the resolve needed to stay on target.

identify and reduce waste (of time, materials, people, or investments) fast, because it’s easier to see said waste when you have less to concentrate on;

If you haven’t already read Eric Ries’s book The Lean Startup, go do that now. Then pick up Sprint by Jake Knapp and the Google Ventures team.

We build up tolerances to criticism, acceptance of faults, appreciation for idiosyncrasies.

It’s hard to make logical connections between these personal, emotional experiences and the output or quality of work at the company.

We grew fast. And it was my first time doing anything (and everything) a CEO has to do.

The myth of “founding a startup so you can do what you love” is at least as enshrined in the tech world’s popular culture as the myth of getting rich.

When your startup is growing, the tasks and competencies change every six months.

The Switching Costs Can Kill You

the median startup founder, who owns only about 11 percent of his or her company’s shares at exit.

Consulting) is dancing with the devil as you pursue your dreams and try to pay the bills.

CEO Is a Real (Shitty) Job

The experts in the startup world will tell you that services and consulting are a waste of time.

Simultaneously two competitors in the market—one, a secretive operation based in the Ukraine and Singapore called “Ahrefs” (pronounced “A. H. Refs”), and the other, a British firm founded by a passionate Russian engineer whose initial goal had been to build an alternative to Google’s search engine called “Majestic”—grew to market dominance. After years of leading the industry, Moz became an also-ran in the field of link data.

Every founder (or set of founders) has a different take on the hardest parts of building a company.

startup culture is about one thing: growth. As fast as you can.

But as a founder, it’s critical to keep in mind your motivations and how they align with those of your investors.

When we’re freed from the mythology that we control outcomes and asked instead to concentrate on behaviors, we have a powerful tool to fight against negativity and anxiety.

We have the power to change the ways we react and the way things make us feel.

Percentage rate of growth, not raw dollars added, is the metric by which venture-backed startups measure themselves and are, from the outside, judged. Growing at 30 percent year-over-year at our stage is considered the minimum level for an “interesting” business in the venture world

other issues can inhibit growth as well, most commonly market size, cost of customer acquisition, and product scalability.

When you’re an early-stage startup founder, your job is clear—find “product:market fit

Establishing a vision for the foreseeable future and a company mission for the long term, even if they need refinement over time, will better enable focus

No matter what stage of life your organization is in today, my advice is to have a written, transparent road map. Plans change. The value of a team with a shared plan doesn’t.

One of the biggest causes of early-stage business failure is lack of real buyers hungry for your solution.

You can, sometimes, teach a cat to walk on its hind legs. You might even be able to teach it to bark. But that doesn’t make it a dog.

social sensitivity, “the ability to perceive, understand, and respect the feelings and viewpoints of others,” was strongly correlated with high-performing teams.

being great at the work yourself and being a great manager of the people doing that work is largely disconnected.

We are the arbiters of our own future:

A team with shared culture and shared values will, almost always, outperform a team without these elements.

they’re not core values if you’re willing to sacrifice them in exchange for money.

First Who … Then What,” posits that great organizations are made up of people who share fundamental core values and use these as their guiding light for decisions big and small.

Real values are truths you hold to be more important than making money.

Today, this tactic of including influencers in the creation of content (often called “roundups”) is a staple of the content marketing practice.

Growth hacks alone can’t solve all your marketing problems, but the right ones may add immense value to an already humming marketing flywheel.

People judge by first impressions.

Instead of spending time with my customers and potential customers, I spent it with my product designers and engineers, dreaming up wild new things we could build.

The subscribers who signed up via the $1 offer had a much lower retention rate than subscribers who’d signed up via a non-promotional offer.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. —Reid Hoffman, March 2011

startup founders, investors, and pundits as evidence that finding the right, innovative “hack” has replaced classic marketing practices as the way new companies can and should achieve sky-high growth rates.

Some growth hacks do work. Most don’t.

Growing your startup’s brand, customer reach, conversion rate, retention, engagement, and virality can include finding that one great hack, but to do that, you need a broader understanding of the problem you’re working to solve.

Investors. Media. Employees. Fellow entrepreneurs. Startup enclaves. They push us to “go big or go home.

A great way to build software is to start out by solving your own problems. You’ll be the target audience and you’ll know what’s important and what’s not. That gives you a great head start on delivering a breakout product.

Dropbox’s hack was a double-referral system wherein, when a Dropbox user referred someone else to the service, both the referrer and the receiver of the referral got upgraded account benefits.