Rand Fishkin
Co-founder & CEO, SparkToro. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthor@randfish ↗LinkedIn ↗sparktoro.com ↗
Rand Fishkin is the co-founder and former CEO of search marketing software company Moz and the current co-founder and CEO of SparkToro. He is the author of the startup memoir Lost and Founder and co-author of The Art of SEO.
3shows
3appearances
48statements
12resolved
9supported
1contradicted
75%fully supported
110said about them ↓ Everything Rand Fishkin said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Venture capital only profits due to 1960s tax lobbying by the wealthy
“Venture capital is essentially an asset class that only makes money because rich people in the sixties and seventies lobbied the federal government to get capital gains tax rate applied to this certain type of investing, right?”
Fishkin: Exited founders who don't compensate employees are bad people
“I think any founder who does well out of their business should make sure that all of their employees are taken care of. And if I can shame you into feeling terrible about taking your ten million dollars and being like, well, it's all mine. Like, yeah, legally …”
Investors avoiding dividend taxes are poor citizens and unwelcome at SparkToro
“If giving the government 12 to 20% of your money is unacceptable to you, first of all, I don't think you're a very good civic person. Right? Like, and second, I don't want you on my balance sheet anyway.”
Fishkin: VC incentive structures inherently harm most startups for a few winners
“Their incentive structure is such that you're going to by your very nature, right? By your, even your existence harm a lot of, Small and startup companies in exchange for a very small number of winners.”
Fishkin: Equating founder worth to raising VC and chasing unicorns is toxic
“Overall the last 25 years have definitely created an environment where Almost every founder feels like if I'm not raising lots of money and trying to become the billion dollar unicorn, then I am not as good of an entrepreneur. I'm not as impressive of a person…”
Fishkin: I would rather Moz failed completely than lose close relationships
“If we could go back in time, and Moz failed completely, like it just, you know, kind of went to zero, never sold, didn't come worth anything, but all those relationships were preserved. Like everybody had stayed on the same page, fighting the good fight togeth…”
Fishkin: Roughly 90% of venture-backed startup founders come from family wealth
“Like the whole idea behind venture capital is we are going to take a bunch of mostly already wealthy people because that's who starts venture backed startups, right? The overwhelming majority, I think something like 90% come from family wealth.”
A/B testing is harmful unless statistical significance is reached within 36 hours
“I think A-B testing and conversion rate testing in general is great when you have between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands or more visitors to a page and enough of them are converting that you can basically test in 12 to 36 hours. Anything under tha…”
TikTok organic reach will inevitably crash to near zero, mimicking Facebook
“And I think, unfortunately, a lot of these folks are going to find that the same thing that happened with Facebook seven years ago, six years ago, where that engagement rate falls from 11% to 0.09%, that will happen. That will happen to you.”
Fishkin: Mental illness is incompatible with being a startup CEO
“Mental and emotional illness are, don't make for a good match with the CEO role in a growing company. They are not what the traits that inspire people to give their best.”
Fishkin: Building a $100M startup is less likely than winning the lottery
“Even a hundred million-dollar startup should feel ridiculous to most people, because the odds of that happening are so vanishingly slim, and it's weird to me that we all talk about this thing that's less likely than most lottery wins, so, you know, I don't tot…”
Fishkin: Wrote dozens of personal checks to underwater Moz employees
“And, you know, we ended up writing Dozens of personal checks to people who'd been screwed at the company.”
Fishkin: Finding product-market fit does not get easier for serial founders
“Improving along that spectrum I think is not made easier by doing it multiple times, and that's very frustrating.”
Moz's revenue growth sank significantly after Rand Fishkin stepped down
“After I stepped down as CEO, the growth rate sank significantly. It was trending a little bit down, like, the last six months I was there, so I wouldn't put the fault entirely on folks after I left, but, you know, the last, oh my gosh, the last seven years cer…”
Fishkin: About 20% of VC investments get stuck in growth purgatory
“Out of those, you know, average hundred investments that VCs make, the stuck in the middle is a really significant percentage. It's probably like 20 of those hundred, and a lot of those end up being some combination of, like, fire sales, or for more aggressive…”
Fishkin: User behavior and brand dominate modern search ranking algorithms
“User behavior that went into it which now today dominates most algorithms, right? Brand dominates a lot of algorithms today.”
Fishkin: Moz could have reached public company scale under better leadership
“If I had been more persuasive and a sort of better CEO and remain CEO and like done a great job, I think Moz could have been in a, in that position or a similar position, right?”
Fishkin: Moz dropped from top SEO software in 2013 to third
“Certainly in 2013, for example, if you were to survey 10,000 SEOs and say, what software do you use and what do you recommend most Moz would have been number one. And by 2018, five years later, Moz was probably number three.”
Fishkin: Being overruled while company performance drops is an emotional killer
“But the combination of that feeling not listened to and poor performance Oh, that is just, you know, emotional and psychological killer.”
Fishkin: SparkToro pays $200K-$300K salaries with ~$1M net profit
“It's close. That's pretty, pretty close to accurate. Good good guessing there.”
Fishkin: Ahrefs is bootstrapped and generates over $100M in revenue
“Ahrefs is entirely bootstrapped, never
Fundraise. They're well over a hundred million in revenue as well.”
Fishkin: SparkToro raised $1.3M from 35 angels and repaid them in full
“In 2018. We raised, we sparked Toro, right? Casey and I, with essentially an idea and a piece of paper, raised 1.3 million dollars from 35 angel investors. They put in between 25 and a 100,000 dollars each. Last year, we repaid them their 1.3 million dollars.”
Fishkin: SparkToro capped founder salaries until returning $1.3M to investors
“There's, in the docs, there's a built-in thing, again, sort of protecting investors and also encouraging founders, which is that our salaries were capped to the Seattle software engineer average. Until we repaid our investors their 1.3 million, at which point …”
Fishkin: Pre-launch audience building is key startup risk mitigation
“I think it is a huge risk mitigation tactic, right? Because the process in the process of doing that, you're going to do two things. One, you're going to mitigate the risk that at launch, nobody wants the thing you've built and that the cost of customer acquis…”
The other half of the tape: Rand Fishkin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 103 times in 46 episodes across the shows. 7 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Rob Walling 42Nathan Latka 11John Warrillow 10Tracy Osborn 8Ruben Gamez 4Massimo Chieruzzi 4Guillaume Moubeche 4Vivek Khandelwal 2
Statements about Rand Fishkin, by other people (7)
Gomez: Moz failed after investing heavily to expand into a marketing suite
“Moz, their thing was like, they're, they were gonna be a marketing suite. They weren't gonna be a suite for SEO, they were going to be marketing. And this, and Rand talks about this in his book, to where he's like, that was like, you know, one of his biggest m…”
Doherty: Single Moz mention generated over $300,000 for Credo over five years
“This one mention alone has made my company over 300,000 dollars in the last five years. One mention alone, 300 plus thousand dollars.”
HubSpot's rejected $25M offer for Moz would now be worth $200M
“And I said, well, out of interest, what would that offer from Halligan now be worth given the increase in HubSpot stock? And he said it would be worth close to two hundred million dollars.”
HubSpot offered $25M to acquire Moz at $5.4M ARR
“Rand has built SEO Moz, software, SaaS business, something around five, 5.4 if memory serves million dollars in ARR, annual recurring revenue. And Halligan says, look, you know, we want to buy your business. We're going to give you an offer of twenty five mill…”
Walling: TinySeed investment terms are modeled on Rand Fishkin's structure
“The terms themselves, the core of them were they came, Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, left his venture-funded startup, came up with these terms for his next startup. So it's like, by definition, a founder came up with it for himself when he raised money. I had …”
Walling: SparkToro operates with zero employees, hiring exclusively contractors
“And the alternative is I watch folks like Rand Fishkin, who's launched SparkToro, and they're doing plenty of revenue to hire as many people as they want, and they have no employees. They only hire contractors and consultants because they don't want to deal wi…”
Walling: Dharmesh Shah, Rand Fishkin, and Patrick McKenzie are TinySeed LPs
“If you decide to invest, you'll be joining folks like Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of HubSpot, Rand Fishkin, Founder of SparkToro, Steli Efti, co-founder of Close.com, and Patrick McKenzie, who many of you know as PatioEleven on the internet.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Startups For the Rest of Us 68
Top Founders 35
2024 16 mentions in 12 episodes 1 per episode
- 3 Growth Tactics we Used to grow SEMRush to $330m ARR and Why Shares dropped 20% on IPO day
- Episode 741 | What Actually is Product Led Growth? (with Wes Bush...
- Episode 699 | How to Build Elegant, Scalable Software Products wi...
- Episode 746 | 9 Startup Predictions for 2025
- Episode 745 | Reflecting on 2024: Revisiting My Predictions, The...
- Episode 713 | Our Top 5 Takeaways from MicroConf US 2024 (with Ar...
- Episode 708 | Outsourcing Marketing, Competitive Markets, and Mor...
- Episode 707 | Once.com, Open Source to FT Income, and More (Hot T...
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 23 mentions in 5 episodes 5 per episode
- Episode 674 | SparkToro Pays Back Investors, When to Raise Fundin...
- Episode 681 | Why Launching a Second Product is Usually a Bad Ide...
- Episode 692 | Learn the Rules Like a Pro So You Can Break Them Li...
- Episode 688 | Growing Boot.dev From $6k to $110k in Monthly Reven...
- Episode 685 | 7 Things You Should Never Do (A Rob Solo Adventure)
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2021 31 mentions in 10 episodes 3 per episode
- Episode 532 | The Art of Selling Your Business with John Warrillow
- 553: Stack Overflow and Moz Acquired, Quitting Instead of Giving Up Remote Work, and More
- Episode 549 | Hiring vs. Outsourcing, E-commerce SaaS, and More Listener Questions with Jordan Gal
- Episode 562.5 | TinySeed Fall 2021 SaaS Accelerator Application Info Session
- Episode 555 | Businesses You Can Bootstrap, W2 vs. Contract, Enterprise Pricing, and More
- Google Analytics Alternative Adds $23k in MRR in 12 Months, Open sourced!
- Lemlist CEO Guillaume Moubeche: Gives Employees this bonus when 5x revenue growth target hit
- Episode 558 | Thinking Through Funding as a Bootstrapper
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2021 →
2020 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2019 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2018 2 mentions in 1 episode
2017 7 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 710: How This SaaS Company is Using $20 Million to Scale
- EP 558: 2 yr Old HotJar Passes $500k MRR Helping 10,000 Customers See What Website Visitors Are Doing with CEO David Darmanin
- 630: Mention Helping 4000 Customers With Google Alerts on Steroids, All Paying Minimum $60/mo for $240k in MRR with CEO Matthieu Vaxelaire
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 11 mentions in 7 episodes 2 per episode
- EP 400: AdEspresso Hits $20M Valuation, 4000 Customers, $400k MRR with CEO Massimo Chieruzzi
- EP 367: $94M Raised, Car Marketplace, 270 Employees with George Arison of Shift
- EP 506: Klipfolio $7.9M Raised, 7000 Customers for Smarter Business Dashboards with CEO Allan Wille
- EP 369: 22 Customers Pay $50K/Year SaaS AppZen.com with Anant Kale
- EP 332: This Agency Went form $30k to $1.3M in Annual Revenue with 14 Employees
- 4 Kids Under 8, Traveling Country, Runs 3 Businesses, How?! EP 306: Peter Awad
- He Quit Six Figure Job To Launch Agency Right As First Kid Was On Way, EP 256: John Lincoln
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Rand's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, SparkToro | 1 | 19 | 100% 3/3 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |
| STARTUPS FOR THE REST OF USLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, SparkToro | 1 | 15 | 50% 2/4 | full record on Startups For the Rest of Us → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, SparkToro | 1 | 14 | 80% 4/5 | full record on Top Founders → |