Lessons Learned Growing Moz

by Rand Fishkin

Download: http://bit.ly/growingmoz

Moz has had both great success and frustrating failure over the last 10 years.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can examine those experiences and extract

learnings to help avoid the mistakes and repeat what worked.

Let’s Start

With a Story

2001: Rand Drops Out of UW,

Two Classes Away from Graduating.

Rand in 2001... Thank god for beards.

2005: After 4 Years of Hard Work,

Rand & His Mom Have Built…

$450,000 in personal debt

2007: The Blog Rand Started to Learn More About

SEO Helps Moz Pay Off Its Debt!

The original SEOmoz

site, coded by Rand in

PHP (meaning it barely

worked).

Nov. 2007: Moz Raises $1.1mm from Ignition &

Curious Office to Focus on Software

7 employees and

$80K in the bank!

Original Post Here

Oct. 2008: We Release Our First Link Index

The launch and ensuing

customer signups helped us

regain profitability

http://moz.com/blog/announcing-seomozs-index-of-the-web-and-the-launch-of-our-linkscape-tool

2009, 2010, & 2011: We Try to Raise Money Three

More Times… All End in Failure

Email from an investor telling me not to worry, just days

before they pulled out of our signed term sheet

http://moz.com/rand/misadventures-venture-capital-funding/ and http://moz.com/blog/seomozs-

venture-capital-process

2012: Thankfully, We’d Stayed Profitable!

From our pitch deck to VCs in 2011:

http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/seom

oz-pitch-deck-july-2011

April 2012: We Meet Brad Feld; He’s Dreamy

Brad wrote about TAGFEE: http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2012/05/seomoz-tagfee-and-me.html

We Raise $18mm w/ Foundry & Ignition

http://moz.com/blog/mozs-18-million-venture-financing-our-story-metrics-and-future

2012-2013: Moz Grows a Lot

Details from our 2013 year in review blog post:

http://moz.com/blog/mozs-2013-year-in-review

Past 18 Months: We Hit Some Rough Patches

More about this: http://moz.com/rand/cant-sleep-caught-in-the-loop/

After 7 years of 100% YoY

growth, Moz grew ~50% in

2013 and >15% in 2014

Cause or Effect? Rand Suffers from Depression

http://moz.com/rand/long-ugly-year-depression-thats-finally-fading/

Jan. 2014: Rand Steps Down as CEO

http://moz.com/blog/final-post-as-ceo-sarah-bird-has-the-conn

Q1 2015: Growth Rate Turns a Corner

https://plus.google.com/u/1/+RandFishkin/posts/huXkGBpK9Rm

Lessons

Learned

#1 People & Hiring Matter(but not in the ways you might expect)

http://moz.com/rand/what-company-culture-is-and-is-not/

Most companies

incorrectly reverse

these two.

Via: http://moz.com/rand/what-company-culture-is-and-is-not/

What Does “Culture Fit” Mean?

What Culture Is Not

• Whether you rock climb/surf/

hike/watch NFL/etc

• What kind of movies you like

• Bean bag chairs

• Nerf gun fights

• Catered lunches

• Mashed potato sculpting contests

judged by your auditors at Deloitte (yes,

we really did this at Moz, and it was

totally fun)

What Culture Is

Shared Values

Shared Priorities

Stylistic Cohesion

ValuesMission & Vision

Hiring, Firing, & Promotion Criteria

Cultural Fit =

Via: http://moz.com/rand/what-company-culture-is-and-is-not/

Common Advice:

Hire slow. Fire fast.- Every management book & guru

Less Catchy, Better Advice:

Hire slow. If you have to fire, do it with

a consistent, empathetic process.- Moz

Why? Because consistency in evaluating people and giving them time to improve is essential

to maintaining your reputation internally & externally. When firing happens fast, you create an

environment of fear, uncertainty, & mistrust.

#2 Humility is the Most Underrated

Predictor of Success

Those who think highly of

themselves are very hard to

work with, and those who

don’t think about themselves

lack

self-awareness.

In my experience, both

confidence & arrogance are

correlated w/ poor results, while

self-deprecation is often

correlated w/ the right kinds of

humility.

#4 If Management is the Only Way

Up, We’re All F***’d

#5 Core Values Are Hard(not having or living up to core values is harder)

Moz’s Core Values: TAGFEE

Transparent

Authentic

Generous

Fun

Empathetic

The Exception

We share what we do, what we learn, and where we struggle

openly and honestly.

We will be our true selves, never masking our beliefs for

commercial gain.

We seek to give without thought of return.

Work is only work if you make it so.

Our most important value – we strive to infuse our work with

respect for the emotions & experiences of others.

We strive to be the exception to the rule, and to take the path

less traveled.

http://moz.com/rand/diving-deep-on-tagfee/

Moz’s Core Values: TAGFEE

Transparent

Authentic

Generous

Fun

Empathetic

The Exception

Real values come

from a deep,

personal place in the

founders’/ team’s

past/beliefs.

Real values are

disconnected from

opinions about what

will make the

business succeed.

When things go well, values are easy.

When things get rough, values are important.

“The core values embodied in our credo might be a competitive

advantage, but that is not why we have them. We have them

because they define for us what we stand for, and we would hold

them even if they became a competitive disadvantage.”

- Ralph S. Larsen, CEO of Johnson & Johnson

http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-great.html

Core Values Are the Glue that Holds Vision, Strategy,

Team, & Everything Else Together.

http://moz.com/rand/vision-based-framework/

#6 Our Best Marketing Never Feels Like

Marketing

We Start Our Values & Our Mission

Empathy: feel the pain and struggles of our customers; make

things we ourselves need when doing SEO

Moz’s Mission: help people do better marketing

Helping Marketers Across Many Mediums

The Path to Conversion is Long & Winding

It Might Start by Exposure through Media

The Path to Conversion is Long & Winding

Which Triggers an Informational Query

The Path to Conversion is Long & Winding

That Leads to a Follow on a Social Media

The Path to Conversion is Long & Winding

And Consumption of Content from the Brand

The Path to Conversion is Long & Winding

Then You Check Out Some Free Tools

The Path to Conversion is Long & Winding

And Finally Decide to Give the Product a Spin

We Seek to Be Relevant at Every Stage

Different Tactics to Reach Different Stages

We Bias Against “Pushy” Marketing

Sigh… This does not make me love your brand.

When We Help People, They Help Amplify

#7 Our Greatest Wins Have All Come

from Serendipity(despite being a very analytics-focused company)

We Know We Can’t Measure Some Things

http://moz.com/rand/the-paradox-of-easy-vs-hard-to-measure-marketing-channels/

But We’ve Seen the Positive Impact of Serendipity

http://moz.com/rand/manufacturing-serendipity/

We Have a Rule On Our Marketing Team

Invest 20% into non-measurable, serendipitous

forms of marketing.

#8 Building Moz Has Never Felt Like a

Steady Climb, But Rather a Cycle of Failure

and Learning

http://buttersafe.com/2008/10/23/the-detour/

A lot of days feel like this:

We compare ourselves and our success to outliers rather than norms, and

this brings great unhappiness.

We Imagine Entrepreneurship Looks Like This:

In Reality, It Looks More Like This:

Geraldine’s Travel Blog: http://everywhereist.com

Geraldine started her blog in 2009

In Reality, It Looks More Like This:

In Reality, It Looks More Like This:

For 2 years, she never broke 100 visits/day.

In Reality, It Looks More Like This:

This is where most people give up.

In Reality, It Looks More Like This:

These days, she gets 100,000+ visits each month

Every first-time founder I’ve ever talked to shares a

story that looks a lot like this one.

You are not alone.

In Reality, It Looks More Like This:

The Price of Success is

Failure after Failure after

Failure*

* Hopefully, each of those failures provides an opportunity to learn.

1) Moz is by no means perfect.

Critical Caveats:

2) Getting this stuff right in no guarantee of success.

3) These lessons may not apply to every company. I share

them only in the hopes that you won’t have to learn them

with the same pain we did.

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