Howdy all! I'm Rand Fishkin, cofounder & CEO of SparkToro, previously cofounder & CEO at Moz. A few things about me/my background: • I wrote a book -- Lost & Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World (published by Penguin/Random House, it's sold ~26K copies, so not a bestseller, but it's done decently) • I've been in digital marketing for 21 years now! Feeling a little old 🙂 • I'm a college dropout (from the Univ. of WA), who left just 2 classes away from graduating • I do a lot of public speaking, podcasts, interviews, all that stuff, mostly focused on marketing and entrepreneurship topics • I'm also the cofounder and creative director for a new video game (not yet announced), which has been a fascinating experience • I'm married to Geraldine DeRuiter, the James-Beard-award-winning author and blogger (she's also fairly Twitter famous for several viral posts about Mario Batali's sexual harassment, a terrible meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Italy, and most recently, a taste test of every flavor of Mountain Dew) I'm happy to answer questions on any and all topics, including: 1. Marketing strategy, channels, and tactics 2. Entrepreneurship and starting companies (everything from funding to find cofounders to building product, etc) 3. SparkToro and the audience research that we provide 4. Favorite TV shows, comics, books, movies, meals to cook, cocktails, restaurants in Seattle, Halloween costumes, whatever! Only thing I'm not so great on anymore is SEO - I haven't been in that world for a long time (almost 5 years!), so while I have some lingering knowledge, I'll probably answer with "you should talk to a professional SEO" Let's kick this thing off!

Ask question here guys

Hi Rand: 2 parter, 1. favorite Mountain Dew Flavor? and 2. How do you keep “evergreen” content exciting? For example, I publish the “new hire” announcement each week, but besides the names/profiles changing, it feels very static and uninspiring. Any tips?

Hi Rand - competing for organic rankings and/or paid advertising is increasingly the domain of well -funded companies, what strategies would you recommend for bootstrapped companies to compete? Thanks, Neil

Hey Rand! What do you think are the best channels to start selling a B2B SaaS product? I have a solid flow for inbound traffic but am feeling a little lost when it comes to lead generation and finding channels to pursue. Thanks for taking some time with us!

1. I want to know how PPC marketing and paid marketing can help my team. This is our Linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/40723697/admin/ 2. Also, we started doing cold emailing but the emails started getting spammed. What can we do to come out of this problem?

Great questions @Jordan Summers 1. I agree with Geraldine's post about MTN Dew https://www.everywhereist.com/2022/07/i-tried-21-flavors-of-mountain-dew-for-some-reason/ that "White Out" is the most tolerable of the flavors. 2. I think the evergreen content itself has to be designed to elicit emotional responses, e.g. surprise, ego-related interest, anger, connection, etc. Announcing new hires each week is probably most exciting/interesting to the person being hired and the people who work directly with them, so I'd likely target it to those folks, and learn what they want, and what makes them react.

mm emotional response, that is great insight thank you! Agreed on white out too. Thanks Rand!

Hi @Rand Fishkin Love Sparktoro. Amazing product.

@Neil Hartley Yeah, I agree. I don't really love most search marketing unless you've got a big budget and a lot of time to build up strength/authority in those fields. For early stage companies (like SparkToro) my favorite marketing tactic is marketing through your audience/customers' sources of influence, i.e. finding the podcasts, YouTube channels, email newsletters, websites, social accounts, Slack communities, etc. that they read/watch/follow/subscribe-to, then being present in those places with messages that build brand affinity, trust, and eventually conversion. This tweet thread is probably the shortest explanation of that process: https://twitter.com/randfish/status/1428441356104441860 @Paul Van Zandt - I think this answer also encompasses your question! The rough answer is: it's different in every different field and for every different business, but every group of people has a set of influencing sources they pay attention to.

Hi Rand! Glad you're answering our questions here tonight! I've a question regarding feedback. How do you ask for user feedback in the most easy & approperiate way so that the user shares his/her honest experience? And when is the best way to do so, like a few hours or a day after a user registers, or after a while?

Hello, Rand! What is the best piece of advice you have for an early-stage (pre-seed and counting every penny) startup that needs traction?

Thanks Rand! And thanks for producing a solution that enables me to find who those influencers are 🙂 I'll check it out tomorrow.

@Niti S - To be honest, I'm not a PPC expert, and I'd probably suggest talking to someone with a lot of deep experience in that field about how (or whether!) you can/should be focusing on PPC as a channel. As far as cold outreach goes, I highly recommend against it. Folks will start to mark your emails as spam, and eventually your domain will be associated with so many spam reports from the ISPs / email processors that your messages are undeliverable or go directly into the spam box. That outcome isn't surprising at all. My suggestion would be to invest in doing things that organically earn your audience's attention, and the attention of sources that can amplify your brand message. A ton of the "right channels" and "right tactics" question depends on what you're doing/building/selling, but there's almost always a group of sources (as I wrote above) that can help you reach the right audiences.

Thanks for such a great piece of advice @Rand Fishkin Can you please share the best way to reach you? Your Linkedin ID, email or any other platform link where I can connect with you?

@Rand Fishkin Hi Rand! Thanks for doing this, we all really appreciate this. 🙏 Do you have any opinion on government tender contracts for Digital Agencies? Does Government make a good customer?

@Ayoub - I like asking folks after we've seen enough activity in their account to validate that they're actually using the product. I also like checking the details of who they are, and whether they match up against our intended customer profile. Sometimes, the loudest feedback comes from folks who aren't actually the right kinds of customers for your product -- they're not who you built it for. Validating that you're asking right customer profiles, and asking in a way that gets a response (usually personal email, direct 1:1 from my personal account vs. Mailchimp/Mailgun) is best. I think it helps to be the founder or creator of the product, as folks are often more interested in talking to those team members vs. a "user feedback researcher" (especially at SMB sized companies).

Hello, Rand. Huge fan here. Do you have any tips on how to start to bridge SEO and audience research in a way that convinces agency stakeholders to integrate it into their service offering?

@Deedee Olsen Before you build your product, before you even start your company, build deep expertise and a great network among the group of customers you want to reach. The startup world has been calling this "founder:market fit" which I think is a pretty solid naming convention. If you have an audience of people who know, like, and trust you before you have a product to sell them, every part of traction and marketing gets easier.

@Rand Fishkin any tips on how to gain your first or first few enterprise customers for a SaaS? So high volume customers who (maybe) require custom solutions? And for seo, how well do you value linkbuilding? Compared to other SEO solutions?

Thanks for the insights @Rand Fishkin! I will keep that in mind!

Hi, @Rand Fishkin. How do you think SEO will change in functional terms on the new more decentralized “web3” web, particularly as more platforms create or evolve toward being (pay)walled gardens?

hi @Rand Fishkin where do you see the whitespace in the SEO Saas space? Still seems like the holy grail doesn't exist yet...

@Jason Atakhanov - fascinating question... To be honest, I've not spoken to many agencies that have done government contracts, but from what I've heard, it depends A LOT on the government. Cities are different than states, which are different than federal govt, and the US will be quite different from Germany, Italy, Canada, or New Zealand. I'd probably recommend talking to some agency owners or consultants who've done projects with the region/country you're thinking about pitching.

Thank you @Rand Fishkin! 🙌

Hey @Rand Fishkin thanks for doing this. What’s your favorite book? Fiction preferably and Why? 🍻

Two part: Are you looking to incorporate AI-generated content in your own strategy? Do you think AI-content will further saturate an already crowded SEO space OR make it easy to create unique / evergreen content?

Hey @Rand Fishkin! The content marketing space has changed in the last 10 years. It looks like it’s going closer to its origins than it’s ever been in the past few years or so — and the whole concept of zero-click content is taking off (finally!), as more people understand buyers’ journeys are not linear, but weebly-woobly-ish. In this context, my question is the following: how can content people measure growth if we’re not taking the “traditional” funnel approach — e.g. people land on site, sign up for some sort of freebie, get nurtured, then converted, etc. This old-school way got buy-in on leadership, because, well, numbers. How, more exactly, can we get the same amount of buy-in on the new approach — in your opinion at least? I feel like however much I research, I keep missing on more information about this specific gap between old-school content metrics and the fresher approach. I hope the question makes sense 😅

Hello Rand 👋. Are you aware of any investor/market interest in civic tech startups? What advice would you share with a sole developer who is interested in starting their first venture? Is having a partner a requirement for most investors?

@Ime (Israel Medina) "Tips on how to bridge SEO and audience research in a way that convinces agency stakeholders to integrate it into their service offering" great question! • I think it needs to be clear that SEO and audience research don't overlap all that much • The biggest overlap is in identifying audiences that you want to reach (because a substantial group of them is likely to either A) buy your product/service or B) become fans/amplifiers of your brand to folks who will buy), and then determining what they search for in Google. • Sadly, this isn't possible in SparkToro (or any audience research tool I'm aware of), because these kinds of data tend not to be married up. However, it is something we're thinking about for the future (especially after my noncompete with my old company expires) • Instead, I might be thinking about pitching audience research as a way to expand the group of people you can reach outside of Google search. If, for example, there's 1,000 people a month searching for the product(s) your client sells, there's probably 10M people who might buy the product but aren't searching for it (or anything relevant in Google). Reaching that crowd is what audience research is all about. • If the clients want that service, the pitch to agency owners/leadership is usually easy -- it's "we're going to blow this client away by showing them opportunities to reach audiences beyond what any other agency can do." • Agencies are actually SparkToro's biggest/heaviest users, and a ton of that is for client pitches and then the monthly reports on how they're helping the client reach their target audience/customer.

Hey Rand! Really enjoyed Lost and Founder! Also a SparkToro customer. One question regarding capital for an 8-year old bootstrapped SaaS company. We get 5+ unsolicited private equity inquiries each week, but our revenue doesn't meet their ARR requirements ($2M-$4M/yr minimum). Our annual 409A has our valuation approaching $20M based on cost to reproduce. So we seem to be stuck between Angel / VC territory or Seed/Series A, and have an incredible product. Are there any words of wisdom you might share, if you were in similar shoes, after bootstrapping it for 8 years?

@Rand Fishkin thank you very much, for question 2 you have to agree that most companies (especially the smaller ones) need to rely on proper seo and enhance it with link building? And for a SaaS I have which is doing quite fine we would love to onboard some bigger clients if possible but not really sure how to reach new ones. We started with a small group that used the product and gained almost 7k+ users, most are quite small. Nothing wrong with that btw, just trying to expand our reach.

@Ivan Favorite fiction book is so hard! There's a ludicrous amount of great stuff out there. How about my favorite fiction book that I've read recently, which might be Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being.

Rand, you've pivoted from SEO to PR & Social with SparkToro. Unlike SEO where you can create keyword rich blog content, or technical SEO fixes for page load speed which can be approached by an individual or small team with a straightforward formula, these channels are more challenging to tap. How would you advise marketing professionals and agencies who are looking to take advantage of these channels in a consistent and predictable way?

@Octavia Drexler Great question! I actually just published a detailed post about this exact topic of measurement in a zero-click content and hidden referral string world: https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-measure-hard-to-measure-marketing-channels/

Thanks Rand! Very much appreciated! A different question for ya. Do you have an opinion or view on PLG vs SLG sales efforts in the SaaS space? Do you see one approach working better than the other?

Thank you very much, Rand, this is gold! 🙏

Thanks @Rand Fishkin ! If you have time for a second question from a person you've already answered: My audience is somewhat niched - specifically for podcasters. Finding them and getting in front of them is a challenge, as you can imagine. Can SparkToro segment by a parameter like 'Has a podcast' ? Or do you have another suggestion how your product could work for a pretty specific audience like mine?

Ps. I just had an eye opener that your wife is the writer of the story about the worst Michelin star restaurant ever haha.. (even though you wrote it in the starter post, and the story has picture with you in it). Really cool!!

@John Turnham No surprise that I like PLG > SLG, but I think reasonable people can have differing opinions, and there's plenty examples of both working.

Thank you!

Hey Rand, I presume that you're contacted often with offers to join the advisory board for many startups. Is this a role that you consider, accept or enjoy? If so, are you currently advising any companies that provide tools or products which might be a fit for this audience? Any interesting new products you'd like to share or mention?