Rand Fishkin Has Now Left Moz, Starts SparkToro

1. The best skill I’ve developed and the one that’s served me best as a founder, a CEO, and a marketer is empathy. Being able to put myself in the shoes of other people and imagine their pain, their problems, their workflows and speed bumps has been invaluable both on the product side and in creating content. Side note: this does not come naturally (or at least, doesn’t *only* come naturally). Spending lots of time with people I want to learn about, getting to know them personally, and asking questions, listening, and watching has been huge, too.
2. My number one tip for marketers seeking to grow their career opportunities is this: specialize. Specialize deeply. I don’t mean “SEO” or “Email marketing,” I mean specialization like “I’m the best link-focused SEO for the mobile gaming world.” Expanding from a specialization (if you so choose) is vastly easier, in my experience, than becoming known for a broad practice. This is equally true for companies as for individuals.
3. Video served as a dramatic accelerant for my personal brand, vastly more than I ever expected. Whiteboard Friday begat more conference invitations and interviews and awareness than even my most successful blog posts. I think the branding and stickiness value of video means that every viewer is worth (in the marketing sense) 10X more than a reader of text content (maybe more).
4. At Moz, weighting powerful, important, high-profile people’s opinions higher than our customers opinions inevitably led to doom. That was usually me putting more stock in what a handful of VCs who turned me down for investment thought over what hundreds of customers and potential customers were telling me they wanted. Granted, when you’re a VC-backed company, paying attention to investors matters because your next round is crucial (unless you’re profitable, in which case you don’t necessarily need to raise more, even though the startup culture will convince you it’s the only way). But, I also over-indexed on what highly influential authors and bloggers thought, and what I heard from a few folks I hoped might be potential acquirers. Dumb. When building a company, customers (and potential customers) > almost everyone else.
5. Tricks, hacks, and individual point solutions never made a big impact for us (and honestly, they’ve never made a big impact for any other company I’ve worked with or advised, either). Coming from the SEO world (and being bombarded by the emergent culture of “growth hacking”), this hit hard. For years I thought that the one right move would accelerate growth or the one right feature would make everyone love our product. But in fact, it’s when the whole became better than the sum of its parts that magic happened. That proved true in marketing, in product, in internal culture, even in recruiting. Crafting holistic, consistent, high quality experiences always beat out that “one magic trick” for improving… whatever. I think this is equally applicable in one’s personal life. The house, the car, the boyfriend, the vacation — none can, alone, produce the “and now I’m finally happy!” result.

The Curator said:

Why would Rand need to rank for any keywords when he's clearly got a recognizable brand along with plenty of connections? He'll be making bank no matter what.

#3 is the best advice imo, from Krafty's summary above...

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jimbobo2779 said:

Jesus this thread already ranks 13th for that phrase and his site is nowhere to be seen, even with links from some fairly major sites.

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kanamon said:

"On a scale of 0-10, where 0 is “fired and escorted out of the building by security” and 10 is “left entirely of his own accord on wonderful terms,” my departure is around a 4. That makes today a hard one, cognitively and emotionally. I have a lot of sadness, a heap of regrets, and a smattering of resentment too."
That's weird

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jimbobo2779 said:

That means he did not go willingly yet moved his own feet to leave the building instead of getting dragged off kicking and screaming (would be my guess what that means).

The vague text on the sparktoro website suggests to me that he threw it together without a real mission goal.

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Xr0x said:

Is he Ste Fishking lost brother?

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jimbobo2779 said:

That mufucka may want to build some backlinks as sparktoro.com doesn't even rank for the keyword sparktoro.

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Asif WILSON Khan said:

He does make it sound like it wasn't 100% his decision to go and was forced out. Wonder if we will get the full story at some point.
Mozz got rid of Followerwonk and cut staff in 2016, so some form of restructuring is ongoing.

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kanamon said:

I know but he is the founder and CEO of MOZ . I dont understand how he losts control of his own project

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