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The third episode of the Outfoxed podcast by Hunter.io features Rand Fishkin, cofounder and CEO of SparkToro (and former cofounder of Moz). As a longtime leader in digital marketing, Rand has spent more than two decades helping companies understand where their audiences are and how to reach them effectively. His work has shaped how marketers think about SEO, audience research, and the balance between data and creativity.
Today, Matt and Rand cut through the noise to talk about how SparkToro navigated a hard pivot off social media to clickstream data, why zero-click marketing changes how success is measured, and how founders can find their first 100 customers by focusing on channels they genuinely enjoy (including offline ones) instead of chasing trends. They also discuss the limits of AI-generated content and why judgment still matters more than automation.
This episode offers practical lessons for founders, marketers, and creators — packed with data, candor, and grounded advice from someone who’s built and rebuilt in public.
Podcast Episode Highlights:
- How SparkToro survived losing its primary data source and rebuilt from scratch
- Why your first 100 customers should come from channels you actually enjoy
- The rise of zero-click marketing and what it means for audience research
- Why AI is a useful tool but a poor substitute for human creativity
About Rand Fishkin:
Rand Fishkin is the cofounder and CEO of SparkToro, an audience research software company that helps marketers identify where their ideal customers spend time online. Known for his contrarian approach to entrepreneurship, Rand has earned a reputation for challenging Silicon Valley norms while building enduring, profitable companies.
Rand Fishkin is the cofounder and CEO of SparkToro, an audience research software company that helps marketers identify where their ideal customers spend time online. Known for his contrarian approach to entrepreneurship, Rand has earned a reputation for challenging Silicon Valley norms while building enduring, profitable companies.
A Seattle native, Rand attended the University of Washington before leaving to help rescue his mother’s struggling marketing firm from debt. That company became Moz, which he co-founded in 2004 and led as CEO from 2007 to 2014. Under his leadership, Moz grew from a seven-person blog into a global, 200+ employee SaaS company that generated over $50 million in annual revenue.
At Moz, Rand launched the Whiteboard Friday video series, co-authored “The Art of SEO,” and played a pivotal role in making SEO education accessible to millions at a time when the industry was notoriously secretive. He was named to BusinessWeek’s 30 Under 30 and became one of the most recognized educators in digital marketing, keynoting more than a hundred conferences worldwide.
After leaving Moz in 2018, Rand cofounded SparkToro, which pioneered an alternative, transparent funding model and built tools that help marketers discover where their audiences actually spend time. His 2018 book, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World,” drew widespread attention for its candid take on venture capital, founder burnout, and mental health in tech. He also cofounded Snackbar Studio, an independent game company that experiments with creative funding models.
He lives in Seattle with his wife, award-winning author and travel blogger Geraldine DeRuiter.
Learn more about Rand and SparkToro via:
Credits:
Podcast theme music by Transistor.fm.
Creators and Guests
What is Outfoxed?
The GTM podcast for founders, marketers, and builders wanting the truth about growth, not the gloss.
Producer: This is Outfoxed.
Producer: The podcast brought to you by Hunter IO, the trusted B2B lead generation platform.
Matt Tharp: Built for every professional.
Producer: Get ready for no playbooks, no posturing, and no egos.
Producer: This is the show for the builders, not theorists.
Producer: Your host today is Hunter CEO Matt Tharp and his guest, SEO, godfather and entrepreneur Rand Fishkin of Spark.
Producer: Tuoro.
Producer: Let's get into it.
Matt Tharp: Well, welcome to Outfoxed.
Matt Tharp: Excited to be here.
Matt Tharp: We got a tremendous guest with us, Rand Fishkin.
Matt Tharp: If you're listening to Outfoxed, you probably know of Rand, if not have read his book, have read many of his posts online and all the various media sources, YouTube.
Matt Tharp: I'm sure you've probably covered all the bases at this point, Rand conferences.
Matt Tharp: I feel like other than your own talk show at this point, you've probably covered it.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, thank God I don't have to do that.
Rand Fishkin: Matt, do you want to hear a crazy story?
Rand Fishkin: I was on the Oprah Winfrey show.
Rand Fishkin: Like on her talk show.
Matt Tharp: Stop.
Matt Tharp: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: With my wife back when it was in television syndication, like 2008.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: So got to meet her and be on stage and stay at her hotel in Chicago.
Rand Fishkin: It was a weird experience.
Rand Fishkin: Very weird experience.
Matt Tharp: Is that the top end celebrity experience you've had?
Rand Fishkin: Let's see, from a third party's opinion, probably.
Rand Fishkin: I was once at a wedding seated next to Alfred Molina and BJ Wong and Lupita Nyong' O, who I have a huge crush on.
Rand Fishkin: It was super embarrassing.
Rand Fishkin: I did not look at her once.
Matt Tharp: I was just like, nope, that's awesome.
Matt Tharp: So sitting next to those folks at the wedding had to probably for your own purposes, be thought the list.
Matt Tharp: That's awesome.
Rand Fishkin: It was fun.
Rand Fishkin: But to be honest, I had a much better time hanging out with my actor friends who I was actually there to see get married.
Matt Tharp: Good.
Rand Fishkin: Okay.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Matt Tharp: Of course, I assume you were not in the wedding party, but still close to the people you were there to see.
Rand Fishkin: Again, weird story.
Rand Fishkin: I made friends with a Shakespearean actor in a cereal aisle of a grocery store as you do.
Rand Fishkin: That's how Shakespearean actors, I assume, meet friends.
Matt Tharp: Shakespearean actors are obsessed with American cereal, I think.
Rand Fishkin: Can't get enough of that Cocoa crisp is the problem.
Rand Fishkin: I'm not a big celebrity person, but I do love the arts.
Rand Fishkin: I'm deeply interested in things that humans create, not for money.
Rand Fishkin: I think that's a beautiful and wonderful part of being human and I hope AI doesn't destroy that for all of us.
Rand Fishkin: But yeah, it is great to be here on the outfox show.
Matt Tharp: That was a weird journey to the beginning.
Matt Tharp: I appreciate we've first off, never asked celebrity questions and never take strange turns as we just did.
Matt Tharp: So that's a first for the opening of Outfoxed.
Rand Fishkin: I look forward to an hour more of this.
Matt Tharp: I think some total celebrity experiences.
Matt Tharp: We could probably occupy another 30 seconds, so we'll just move on.
Rand Fishkin: Okay, wait, Give me some total of your experience.
Matt Tharp: Okay.
Rand Fishkin: Okay.
Matt Tharp: The sum total of my celebrity experiences are I met Mike Tyson twice on the same ski trip at the beginning of the trip and at the end of the trip.
Matt Tharp: And this was in 1988, so this was peak Mike Tyson, and he was there with Robin Givens, but they weren't publicly an item yet.
Matt Tharp: And they were there for an mtv.
Matt Tharp: Remember when MTV did spring break?
Matt Tharp: So they were in Vail for spring break, where were there to ski.
Matt Tharp: And how old were you?
Matt Tharp: Oh, gosh.
Matt Tharp: Well, let's see.
Matt Tharp: I would have been 10 or 12 years old.
Rand Fishkin: Okay.
Rand Fishkin: Okay.
Rand Fishkin: So you probably could have taken him.
Matt Tharp: I mean, that was really kind of what were headed towards.
Matt Tharp: Clearly, I expected that I would have a shot at Robin.
Matt Tharp: And he disagreed.
Matt Tharp: No.
Matt Tharp: So I'm like 10 or 12.
Matt Tharp: So I'm old enough to know that he is somebody famous.
Matt Tharp: I'm old enough to kind of recognize him.
Matt Tharp: I know he's in the sports world.
Matt Tharp: I'm running all these things through my head.
Matt Tharp: I'm like, I'm literally going through every football player.
Matt Tharp: And Mike is not super tall.
Matt Tharp: So I.
Matt Tharp: So I'm like, okay, running backs.
Matt Tharp: I'm old enough at 10, 12 to know I've got to narrow the list to, like, running backs based on his stature.
Matt Tharp: And we're in Stapleton Airport, which back in the day is how you'd get to Colorado if you didn't fly commercial.
Matt Tharp: And we flew commercial.
Matt Tharp: It was a little puddle jumper.
Matt Tharp: When you fly from Kansas, it's essentially like, not flying commercial.
Matt Tharp: That's a whole second story.
Matt Tharp: So we get to Stapleton.
Matt Tharp: It's literally me, my parents, Mike Tyson, three of his entourage, and one horse sat working the baggage claim.
Matt Tharp: And he gets to be the guy to tell Mike Tyson they lost his luggage.
Matt Tharp: And so my dad sends me away because Mike starts to throw a fit.
Matt Tharp: He's, like, jumping up and down on the rotating thing, screaming about his luggage.
Matt Tharp: My dad's like, okay, this is going to take a turn.
Matt Tharp: Here's some quarters.
Matt Tharp: Which is also another thing that's never happened.
Matt Tharp: Here's some quarters.
Matt Tharp: Go play a game.
Matt Tharp: I'm like, kind of running because I like, I don't want him to change his mind.
Matt Tharp: So I'm going as fast as I can to play that game.
Matt Tharp: And then I overhear the guy go, wait a minute.
Matt Tharp: No, no.
Matt Tharp: You mean to tell me I have to go in there and tell the world heavyweight champion of the world we.
Rand Fishkin: Lost his effing luggage?
Matt Tharp: No.
Matt Tharp: And so I'm like, wait, boom.
Rand Fishkin: Lights go off.
Matt Tharp: I'm sprinting back.
Matt Tharp: I didn't get there in time, but apparently they had like a whole episode and they had to take him back into the back room.
Matt Tharp: And then I see him again in the Denver airport on the way home.
Matt Tharp: And the funny bit was when I go to lift up my luggage in Stapleton, I wasn't strong enough to get my parents luggage up over the thing.
Matt Tharp: And Mike come over and just like with two fingers, he made it absurd, right?
Matt Tharp: He made fun of me.
Matt Tharp: He lifts the thing, he reaches down, he squeezes my arm and he's like, you need to eat your Wheaties.
Rand Fishkin: So, celebrities and cereal.
Matt Tharp: Yep.
Matt Tharp: Look at that.
Rand Fishkin: They just go together.
Matt Tharp: They come together.
Matt Tharp: Well, let's transition over to more professional topics.
Matt Tharp: What's something going on with you right now?
Matt Tharp: That Spark Toro specific that's occupying a lot of your attention?
Rand Fishkin: Let's see.
Rand Fishkin: I'm actually, I'm about to hire someone kind of like a chief of staff slash exec assistant person.
Rand Fishkin: And we're building a new, a few new features in the product.
Rand Fishkin: Product.
Rand Fishkin: My co founder Casey and his family are coming over for dinner tonight.
Rand Fishkin: We don't, we don't get to see them too much.
Rand Fishkin: So that's kind of special and exciting.
Rand Fishkin: And we're in the process of some new research.
Rand Fishkin: That's kind of cool.
Rand Fishkin: So I have this theory, Matt, that many people believe that AI tools are taking market share away from Google in the search space.
Rand Fishkin: But my theory is that actually the AI media hype is masking the fact that TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and Pinterest are taking a larger slice of search than AI tools are.
Rand Fishkin: And so I'm going to attempt to prove that with some data from our clickstream provider, daos.
Rand Fishkin: And so we're in process on that right now to look at essentially changing growth rates and deltas and how many people are searching on each platform per month and that kind of thing.
Rand Fishkin: So that should be exciting research too.
Matt Tharp: That is going to be interesting.
Matt Tharp: I'm fascinated by the topics that people think AI like, for example, everybody wants to say, like, oh, it's going to eat all of your Google search traffic for your brand.
Matt Tharp: But actually if you're mentioned, there's no link.
Matt Tharp: So if you go to ChatGPT and you ask a question like what are the five best products for something?
Matt Tharp: It'll tell you five names.
Matt Tharp: Well, you're going to have to turn around and what most people do, they go into their Chrome bar and that turns into a search and like everybody's talking like I actually think that part of the reason Google is showing everybody that their traffic isn't going down is because of this.
Matt Tharp: I think it probably isn't.
Matt Tharp: Unless you're cited and only mentioned there's no link.
Matt Tharp: And if you're cited, the link isn't really kind of the primary object anyway.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, I think the creative destruction that's happening here is in the value of content that is not your brand or not the action that takes place on your website.
Rand Fishkin: So if you over the past 20, 25 years listen to digital marketers like this jamoke, then you would have heard me say, oh, it's really great to produce lots of blog posts on topics that your audience cares about.
Rand Fishkin: They don't have to be directly relevant to your brand or what you sell, but you can attract those interest based cohorts of individuals who will then sign up for your email newsletter or subscribe to your website and then you can slowly nudge them into your audience and then they'll eventually purchase from you.
Rand Fishkin: That is the part that's really getting destroyed.
Rand Fishkin: And the other one of course is the value of media.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: So if you're a publisher in virtually any space, it is next to impossible to drag increasing traffic out of Google search or the AI tools or any of the social networks.
Rand Fishkin: All of that has declined.
Rand Fishkin: That's what Amanda Natividad and I call the zero click world.
Rand Fishkin: And why the next generation of marketers certainly gonna have to do zero click type of marketing.
Matt Tharp: Yeah, thought perplexity was gonna get more traction once everybody figured out it was trying to do a better job at Google than Google.
Matt Tharp: And Chad GBT wasn't right.
Matt Tharp: When I think I, I, I assumed most people would go oh, that's not the mental model I'm used to.
Matt Tharp: This is.
Matt Tharp: And yet I don't know about everybody but at least for Hunter, for example, ChatGPT is something like 90 some percent of referred traffic even though mentions don't have links.
Matt Tharp: And so I find that whole thing a little mind bending right now.
Rand Fishkin: My strong theory here is that people who use AI tools very rarely want to replace Google.
Rand Fishkin: Google does an extremely good job of the thing that you're used to Google doing, which is provide me with links and quick information and Paul Rudd age, you know, right?
Rand Fishkin: If you go to an AI tool, you have to like give it sentences and paragraphs of information.
Rand Fishkin: If you go to Google, you can give it two words and it will generally spit back the thing that you want.
Rand Fishkin: Even if you didn't type it correctly, even if you said it wrong.
Rand Fishkin: They know, right?
Rand Fishkin: They figured it out from usage patterns.
Rand Fishkin: I think that Perplexity, unfortunately was trying to solve a problem that very few people have, which is like, I am frustrated by the quality, quantity, style of answers that Google provides.
Rand Fishkin: But ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude recognize that most of what you want is generative tasks.
Rand Fishkin: It's not search replacement, it's, hey, design a room in a dungeon for my D and D campaign.
Rand Fishkin: Hey, double check that this test that I wrote for my code for my new software is running properly.
Rand Fishkin: Like, hey, go tell me the kinds of variants, variables that I can put in PHP and convert from Python.
Rand Fishkin: It's all that kind of tasks.
Rand Fishkin: And those types of tasks Google is no good at.
Rand Fishkin: So of course you go somewhere else for that.
Rand Fishkin: Hence the AI tools, Claude and ChatGPT in particular, dominate time spent, dominate percentage of use.
Matt Tharp: Yeah, you know, it's interesting, like, I would imagine Chat GPT's metrics are the exact opposite.
Matt Tharp: Like as far from Google's or old core metrics as you can possibly get.
Matt Tharp: It's a really interesting comparison.
Rand Fishkin: It's just that marketers and technologists, you know, who are in your LinkedIn feed, right, and are the loudest voices, they're the ones who have some motivated reasoning behind why they say, oh, perplexity is going to replace Google.
Rand Fishkin: ChatGPT is going to replace Google.
Rand Fishkin: Things don't have to replace things, man.
Rand Fishkin: You know what?
Rand Fishkin: Facebook did not replace Google.
Rand Fishkin: I remember.
Rand Fishkin: I don't know if you remember, but like 2009, 2010, people are like, oh, Facebook is going to replace Google.
Rand Fishkin: No one's going to search on Google anymore when you can figure out what your friends are doing.
Rand Fishkin: Like, no, it was just dumb.
Rand Fishkin: I think AI is the same thing.
Matt Tharp: Also, none of us want to listen to our friends on Facebook about what we should do.
Rand Fishkin: Like, come on, let's be honest, definitely not in 2025.
Matt Tharp: It's the last place you want to get a how to video.
Rand Fishkin: Oh man, might as well ask Rock.
Rand Fishkin: I mean, geez.
Matt Tharp: Well, ooh, that's a whole other thread, isn't it?
Matt Tharp: Dangerous one at that you knew it.
Rand Fishkin: Was going to be spicy when you tuned in.
Matt Tharp: I mean, look, if we're going to go there so early, right?
Matt Tharp: It's.
Matt Tharp: Yeah.
Matt Tharp: Let's not talk about Grok though, because I don't have good things to say.
Matt Tharp: I do want to talk a little bit about something that I know you care passionately about.
Matt Tharp: We spend a lot of time focusing on it and I think it's a great place to kick off, which is your audience, your ideal customer profile.
Matt Tharp: So as most businesses do, either you started Sporktoro thinking your customer was one thing and it turned out to be something else, or it started as one thing and has evolved over time.
Matt Tharp: I'm curious, how does your this Spark Toro ideal customer or ideal audience match what you thought it was going to be when you started it?
Rand Fishkin: I would say it's not massively different to who we expected, but the use case is very different to what we thought people would do with it.
Rand Fishkin: SparkToro tends to be about, I would say 40% consultants and agencies.
Rand Fishkin: Another 30, 35% are in house marketers at brands and companies.
Rand Fishkin: They tend to be in the middle, not the most junior folks, not the CMO or vp, but like middle management or senior individual contributors in marketing universe.
Rand Fishkin: And then there's about 25% that's made up of everyone else.
Rand Fishkin: So founders and entrepreneurs, solo creators, researchers, educational use cases are quite strong.
Rand Fishkin: Some government and nonprofit, that kind of stuff.
Rand Fishkin: That's not dissimilar to who we thought maybe we expected that nonprofit government edu would be 10% and it turns out it's 15 or that's all on the margin.
Rand Fishkin: What's really different is we thought people would use Factoro for tactical marketing improvements.
Rand Fishkin: For example, I am targeting a group of interior designers in the United States with my new CAD design program, architectural design program.
Rand Fishkin: And I want to try and take them all away from the products they're using now and get my little startup off the ground.
Rand Fishkin: And so I am going to target media outlets and YouTubers and podcasts and specific search terms and content ideas, whatever.
Rand Fishkin: I'm going to build lists of those and then I'm going to go through and use the data that I got from SparkToro to do my outreach and try and pitch people, try and get in these shows, whatever that is, about 40, maybe as low as 30% of the use case.
Rand Fishkin: So not, it's not no one doing it.
Rand Fishkin: People are doing that.
Rand Fishkin: But a huge amount of our use is people, especially consultants and agencies and those managers at marketing firms at in house companies using our data, especially the top level, like high level graphs of what people are doing to pitch their boss or team or client or board on just investing in that marketing channel at all.
Matt Tharp: Makes sense.
Rand Fishkin: That's the whole use case.
Rand Fishkin: They go to SparkToro, they get the overview page, they take a screenshot of the graph, they put it in their presentation.
Rand Fishkin: Ding, ding.
Matt Tharp: Right?
Rand Fishkin: Like, that's it.
Rand Fishkin: Maybe I'll go to the specific page for like, websites or podcasts or whatever and pick out a few to put in the presentation to feature and say, like, look at that.
Rand Fishkin: You know, high audience affinity between this customer target for us and this particular publication or media outlet.
Rand Fishkin: But they don't use us to like build those tactical lists and do the specific outreach.
Rand Fishkin: That surprised us quite a bit.
Rand Fishkin: This was kind of a discovery we had last summer through Asia Aranjio, who we contracted to do some product research for us.
Rand Fishkin: And she uncovered this finding in her interviews and surveys, presented it to us, and were like, oh, crap, we should make the product way more visual.
Rand Fishkin: We should make the charts and graphs like everywhere.
Rand Fishkin: We should put the data that people are trying to screenshot front and center instead of making it export to CSV and then build it yourself in Excel or Google Sheets.
Rand Fishkin: Right?
Matt Tharp: Is that the biggest shift from when you started?
Matt Tharp: When you think about, like, the things that you've had to do with the product or with your audience or your content, is that the biggest shift?
Rand Fishkin: Probably second.
Rand Fishkin: It sits behind.
Rand Fishkin: You might remember in the early days, Matt, SparkToro was built on Twitter data.
Rand Fishkin: We had data from lots of places, but Twitter was like our primary connector network.
Rand Fishkin: And then this billionaire buys Twitter.
Rand Fishkin: I don't know if you heard about this.
Matt Tharp: No, tell me more.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah.
Rand Fishkin: And when that happened with Svartoro, basically the new owner changed a lot of how things worked on the platform in two ways.
Rand Fishkin: One was API access and data stuff.
Rand Fishkin: We could still get it, but it was more of a pain in the butt to get the data.
Rand Fishkin: More serious than that, which made us not even want to go through the hoops that we had to jump through to get it, was that the culture and usage of the network changed dramatically.
Rand Fishkin: So we monitored hundreds of millions of tweets every day, right?
Rand Fishkin: Like, we had a huge feed of all of them.
Rand Fishkin: And as an example, you might see that people who are into gardening in the UK would post on Twitter, not all of them every day, but hundreds of thousands of people who lived in the UK who were into gardening would talk about the flowers that were growing in their yard or whatever techniques for soil irrigation.
Rand Fishkin: They had all this kind of like detailed topic conversation.
Rand Fishkin: And with the new Twitter, like under new ownership, even in those first few months after Musk took over, we could see that basically that type of conversation was ending.
Rand Fishkin: People who were presumably still into gardening in the UK had stopped talking about their gardens and that hobby.
Rand Fishkin: People who were into biking, stopped talking about biking.
Rand Fishkin: People who were into painting, stop talking about painting.
Rand Fishkin: People who were into software as a service, you know, marketing, stop talking about that.
Rand Fishkin: And everything sort of shifted toward political and social issues.
Rand Fishkin: Essentially the conversation switched almost entirely to a cage match fight between political and social viewpoints.
Rand Fishkin: And that's not useful data for marketers unless you're running an election campaign.
Rand Fishkin: Like, not helpful at all.
Rand Fishkin: And so when we saw this in those first 90 days, we, Kasey and I were like, oh, we have to switch.
Rand Fishkin: Like, we can't use our primary data source anymore.
Rand Fishkin: We're going to have to go acquire new kinds of data.
Rand Fishkin: And we investigated a bunch of sources and looked at a bunch of possibilities and basically settled on clickstream data as being the foundation of the new version of the product.
Rand Fishkin: That was the biggest switch.
Rand Fishkin: It took almost a year to rebuild the product from scratch, make it useful enough to the people who had been using it that they wanted to continue using it and also appeal to a new audience of people so that we could attract them.
Rand Fishkin: Very challenging.
Rand Fishkin: Like for a few months there, we worried we wouldn't have a company, you know.
Rand Fishkin: Scary.
Matt Tharp: Yeah.
Matt Tharp: So let's talk a little bit about that time.
Matt Tharp: You've started a company, at some point you've reached an existential crisis moment, but nobody gets to really peek behind the curtain and how others handle those existential moments.
Matt Tharp: I'm interested, what did you guys do?
Matt Tharp: Did you have a process to follow?
Matt Tharp: Tell me the story.
Rand Fishkin: The story is, I remember the day we'd been sort of doing some rough analysis.
Rand Fishkin: We had some concerns.
Rand Fishkin: But I remember I. I was on vacation with some friends in O, which is southern Mexico, and I'd never been to Mexico before.
Rand Fishkin: It was the first time there.
Rand Fishkin: Beautiful.
Rand Fishkin: But we were way out in the desert.
Rand Fishkin: Like, were driving from the city center out to a mezcaleria, right where they make mezcal the beverage.
Rand Fishkin: And I had no reception, but I could see a bunch of panicked texts and emails from my co founder from Casey, that like, things were imploding, things were getting increasingly terrible.
Rand Fishkin: And, and it was because, like, some of this analysis had been completed and he was like, we're done.
Rand Fishkin: Like we're sunk in six months, this data will be useless to our customers.
Rand Fishkin: All that kind of stuff, right.
Rand Fishkin: And yeah, I remember we had a, a phone call from a, a gas station like 80 miles outside of Oaxaca in the middle of desert.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: And afterwards I was almost like a vomit inducing, yeah, existential crisis.
Rand Fishkin: Like, how are we going to do anything?
Rand Fishkin: We, you know, we couldn't come up with ideas on the fly, like on the phone call of what we could do.
Rand Fishkin: Any ideas that either of us had.
Rand Fishkin: The other one was like, no, that'll never work.
Rand Fishkin: And so it just became an iterative process over the next probably two or three months of us getting together on calls and over emails.
Rand Fishkin: And I tapped a bunch of people in my network to try and ask them about potential solutions and we ran some tests with some clickstream data.
Rand Fishkin: Eventually, after landing on that as a potential idea, we had first investigated YouTube as being like a primary connector network.
Rand Fishkin: We hoped that would work.
Rand Fishkin: It doesn't work.
Rand Fishkin: Not enough people are on YouTube and the creator system there is too top heavy.
Rand Fishkin: It didn't go down into the details of like what do hundreds of thousands and millions of people do and want?
Rand Fishkin: And yeah, I would say it was a quite unstructured process until we finally settled on, hey, we're going to try this experiment with clickstream.
Rand Fishkin: And then that started to look promising and eventually became the solution.
Rand Fishkin: But let me tell you, incredibly stressful.
Rand Fishkin: And you know, we had I think 1500 paying subscribers at the time.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: Whose data was degrading every day.
Rand Fishkin: Just awful feeling.
Matt Tharp: How much before the customers did you guys figure out that this was going to be a problem?
Matt Tharp: Was it almost simultaneous or were you guys out ahead of this by at least a month or so?
Rand Fishkin: Thank God, were out ahead of it probably by six to nine months.
Matt Tharp: That's great.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, we noticed the shift happening, but our customers continue to have essentially useful data because people's habits and interests and proclivities, especially around niche interests, hobbies, like if you're into men's fashion or you're into buying drones or you're into, you know, you're a real estate agent who sells commercial properties in California that rarely changes in the course of six months or a year.
Rand Fishkin: And so the data was still pretty darn good, maybe 80% good.
Rand Fishkin: Twelve months after the shift happened on Twitter, like it's still pretty darn useful.
Rand Fishkin: If you analyzed year old data, it didn't change all that much.
Rand Fishkin: That was the like, thank God.
Rand Fishkin: But it was degrading by the day and we knew that and you could see it in our stats.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: Like I think I want to say Musk bought Twitter in November of 2022 and by March of 23.
Rand Fishkin: March of 23 was basically our high point at SparkToro.
Rand Fishkin: Like that was the.
Rand Fishkin: We'd been growing steadily since 2020.
Rand Fishkin: When we launched, we'd hit this high point.
Rand Fishkin: Then we kind of plateaued and started to slowly decline for a year and a half.
Rand Fishkin: We release the new version, made these updates.
Rand Fishkin: Now we've had for the first time, like in the last three months, we've had like, you know, going up.
Rand Fishkin: So turned around.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, congrats.
Matt Tharp: That's a great feeling.
Matt Tharp: But, oh man, great feeling.
Rand Fishkin: Oh my goodness.
Rand Fishkin: The last hundred days have been like, woohoo.
Matt Tharp: Wow.
Matt Tharp: I'm just like putting myself in your shoes and I'm trying to think through such a massive industry shift.
Matt Tharp: Partly I'm responding to the fact that I remember very early adopter on Twitter was a very active user for a very long time.
Matt Tharp: I kept my original account for years because I was just like, honestly, I was a little proud of being an og.
Matt Tharp: I think it was there six months in, I'm like, that feels like at that time that was pretty cool.
Matt Tharp: And it's not like I was hugely active, but in those early days, I mean, especially if you're in the marketing space, like, it was like the best place.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: It could make careers.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: Like, it connected me with thousands of people who I know and like today, it built a lot of my reputation.
Rand Fishkin: It was a huge part of SparkToro's first two, three years of marketing.
Rand Fishkin: It was how I got invited to conferences and events.
Rand Fishkin: It was how I distributed my research.
Rand Fishkin: It was how I got a lot of traffic to my blog posts.
Rand Fishkin: I put videos up there, you know, like, it was huge.
Rand Fishkin: That actor friend I mentioned at the start, we first connected on Twitter.
Rand Fishkin: So like all this stuff just.
Rand Fishkin: It was a beautiful ecosystem.
Rand Fishkin: It had its problems.
Rand Fishkin: Absolutely.
Rand Fishkin: So, yeah, there was that tragedy.
Rand Fishkin: But I had like half a million followers there.
Matt Tharp: Right.
Rand Fishkin: So I lost, like, it really lost out.
Matt Tharp: Wow.
Matt Tharp: Yeah, that's a lot.
Matt Tharp: So first off, I felt the change happened much faster.
Matt Tharp: Like you were saying something like, November was when the purchase happened.
Matt Tharp: I feel like by definitely that first quarter, maybe even the end of Q1, I didn't go.
Matt Tharp: I just wouldn't go on anymore.
Rand Fishkin: No, the conversation had shifted for sure.
Rand Fishkin: That's what we saw in our data.
Rand Fishkin: And so then we knew we had like this ticking Time bomb of when will this information no longer be useful to customers?
Rand Fishkin: And we had to artificially cut it off.
Rand Fishkin: We basically were like, okay, no new data ingestion after.
Rand Fishkin: I think it was like March of.
Matt Tharp: 23 at Hunter saw the ability to transition and to have as much lead time to manage that transition as possible.
Matt Tharp: We saw something very similar because about two years ago, roughly give or take, agencies, marketing agencies, started to shift towards this new model of doing data, which was a data waterfall process.
Matt Tharp: And there were products that were coming into the market like clay that had enabled this kind of workflow where they were either using whatever they thought was the best one at the time, or they built their own tooling to kind of run a pipeline of data providers through a process to try to figure out the ultimate.
Matt Tharp: Well, that was a completely new paradigm for products to be able to offer this.
Matt Tharp: And so you can imagine marketing agencies would be a fairly sizable percentage of the customer base for Hunter, being able to identify that as early as possible.
Matt Tharp: You know, this is one of the reasons why we talk about customer base and ICP a lot on Outfoxed is that we saw that change happening.
Matt Tharp: We saw it coming.
Matt Tharp: It's not like you lose an enterprise customer when this happens, which is painful, or you miss the mark on a feature release, also painful.
Matt Tharp: But when an entire segment of your customer population completely changes the way they do what you do, or a platform that they use completely changes, that's sizable.
Matt Tharp: And that is something that if you don't have some advance notice, you may not make it.
Rand Fishkin: And also fallbacks, right?
Rand Fishkin: Like you need diversity of channels, diversity of options, diversity of data sources.
Rand Fishkin: It's so critical, especially as a independent startup with not hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, that you're able to say, oh, okay, this data source is gone.
Rand Fishkin: This customer group has changed their behavior.
Rand Fishkin: This platform where we used to get tons of marketing channel value is gone.
Rand Fishkin: What's next?
Rand Fishkin: Like, what other channels have we invested in?
Rand Fishkin: What other data sources do we have?
Rand Fishkin: What other customers could we serve with our product if it's not something you've planned for?
Rand Fishkin: Oh, man, you're just sunk.
Rand Fishkin: Today's episode is brought to you by Hunter IO.
Rand Fishkin: Finding the right email address for your.
Matt Tharp: Leads can take hours, but with Hunter, you can go from search to send in minutes.
Rand Fishkin: Get started for free with Hunter's verified data, lead management and email marketing tools by visiting www.hunter.IO.
Matt Tharp: Yeah, did you have a mechanism in place as like an early warning or an early.
Matt Tharp: Not because of this specific thing, because obviously you wouldn't have known.
Rand Fishkin: I will tell you right now.
Rand Fishkin: We think about this a lot with LinkedIn.
Rand Fishkin: LinkedIn sends 60, maybe 70% of all our leads right now.
Matt Tharp: Huge.
Matt Tharp: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: That's a huge risk vector or the business.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: If something were to happen where, you know, Amanda and I and the Sparktore account no longer get traction on LinkedIn, we get banned from it.
Rand Fishkin: LinkedIn changes how feeds work, any of those things, Right.
Rand Fishkin: That is tons of risk for how we acquire basically new customers, new free accounts, how we distribute our message.
Rand Fishkin: It's way tougher to stand out in people's inboxes now.
Rand Fishkin: It's way tougher to get a blog post to do significant traffic because of all the zero click things we talked about.
Rand Fishkin: But native content on LinkedIn performs extraordinarily well for us.
Rand Fishkin: Like that is a network that's basically replaced Twitter for Amanda and I, and oof, you know, high risk.
Matt Tharp: It is.
Matt Tharp: And you're right, though.
Matt Tharp: It feels like a lot of the business Twitterverse just shifted all of that energy onto LinkedIn and that's now, I'm sure, a major crisis for LinkedIn.
Matt Tharp: Like what a strategic problem to have that your business network gold mine.
Matt Tharp: You essentially can't integrate it with any of your business tools because as soon as you do, the focus of the platform becomes totally different.
Matt Tharp: And now it's going to cause everybody to rethink their behavior on that.
Matt Tharp: It's a funny problem to have.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, it is.
Rand Fishkin: I will say this.
Rand Fishkin: I wish it were still independent from Microsoft.
Rand Fishkin: Not that Microsoft's a terrible owner.
Rand Fishkin: As big corporations go, they're one of the more responsible, trustworthy ones with like, generally not that terrible practices, at least for their users and customers.
Rand Fishkin: I, I wouldn't want to compete with them.
Rand Fishkin: But I think that the frustrating part, and this is one of the reasons that I wish antitrust in the United States was just way more serious, right?
Rand Fishkin: Like an independent Instagram, an independent Twitter, an independent LinkedIn.
Rand Fishkin: What a difference that would make, right?
Rand Fishkin: Instead of WhatsApp, that it's not great that Facebook owns that too.
Rand Fishkin: There's just a lot of risk and frustration.
Rand Fishkin: I think Lina Khan, who was the previous director of the FTC under the Biden administration, who I think was a superb advocate for antitrust action and basically breaking up monopolies and keeping monopoly power from destroying economic opportunity in the US and around the world.
Rand Fishkin: She had a great little segment on Jon Stewart that I encourage anyone to watch.
Rand Fishkin: You'll learn a lot about basically practices that big companies engage in to stifle competition and how it harms almost every business.
Rand Fishkin: Like, if you're listening to this podcast, you are probably being hurt by monopoly power, even if you don't realize it.
Rand Fishkin: And it's not a great thing.
Rand Fishkin: Right?
Rand Fishkin: True.
Matt Tharp: In the AI world too, you're talking about topics.
Matt Tharp: What it means is that I'm not the only one sitting around constantly crunching these thoughts.
Rand Fishkin: Absolutely not.
Rand Fishkin: No.
Matt Tharp: Like, we have fewer and fewer marketing channels as businesses.
Matt Tharp: If you go B2B, like, B2B has fewer and fewer channels.
Matt Tharp: LinkedIn is now a choke point for a lot of people in, you know, especially given what we've seen happen in social media.
Matt Tharp: Everybody wants to wall those gardens off, which means the data is, you know, attribution gets harder to do.
Matt Tharp: So I'm constantly thinking about the fact that, like, you got to assume at this point there's not a lot of growth of new channels.
Matt Tharp: Although maybe, but we haven't seen it.
Matt Tharp: All we saw out of the social move was essentially consolidation.
Matt Tharp: And so you think about this when it comes to entrepreneurship, the way you've experienced it, the way I've experienced it's changing, right?
Matt Tharp: The idea of how I get my first customer, how I get my first hundred customers, in a lot of ways, is getting harder.
Matt Tharp: It's not as if tomorrow this is an impossible problem.
Matt Tharp: It's that tomorrow it's completely different problem.
Matt Tharp: And I find that's the interesting thing.
Matt Tharp: And I constantly am chewing on this because I'm like, how do you diversify channels?
Matt Tharp: Let's say you're one of the businesses.
Matt Tharp: This will be near and dear to.
Rand Fishkin: Both of our hearts.
Matt Tharp: Who's trying to use SEO as a way to grow their business or their.
Matt Tharp: Or that's the playbook they're used to or familiar with.
Matt Tharp: Right.
Matt Tharp: Right now to the next 12 months, this is going to be something that they're going to have to reckon with.
Matt Tharp: And I'm wondering, like, how did you get your first customer?
Matt Tharp: Like, actually just talk to the audience a little bit.
Matt Tharp: If you are thinking about that first customer or that first ten or a hundred, what advice would you give people now with so much channel consolidation happening?
Rand Fishkin: I think that the big piece of advice that's different from, let's say 10 years ago, maybe even five, but really 10, is you need to be thoughtfully aware of how these platforms have changed.
Rand Fishkin: So if you grew up in the era of Google, sends a ton of traffic out, you can post tweets and get people to pay attention to you.
Rand Fishkin: That way you can relatively easily build a successful YouTube channel, you can quickly get traction on a Reddit or a LinkedIn or those kinds of places.
Rand Fishkin: Competition in all those places has gotten way more difficult.
Rand Fishkin: And all of those platforms have new preferences, new algorithmic systems that bias against linking out.
Rand Fishkin: And so if you want to attract customers in those places, which is still very possible, you need to treat them the way advertising agencies in 1965 treated billboards on the highway.
Rand Fishkin: I'm 100% serious, right?
Rand Fishkin: Like they know when you drive, you drive by a billboard and you see a sign that says, you know, drink Coca Cola Classic.
Rand Fishkin: What you did not do was have like, I don't know, some guy on a motorcycle follow that vehicle back to its house.
Rand Fishkin: You know, write down the address, camp outside the house and then wait for them to buy Coke and see how much, and then attribute that to the billboard like that.
Rand Fishkin: That's not what happened, right?
Rand Fishkin: And so the way you do attribution and the way you do measurement, you got to throw that out the window because that has fully changed.
Rand Fishkin: And you have to recognize that the new way to measure, because measuring is still important.
Rand Fishkin: I'm not saying throw out measurement, but you have to do the way Ogilvie and Mather did it in 65, which was what happened with same store sales in a 30 mile radius around the billboard and what happened in, you know, the next city over with the billboard we put up there and what happened in the city where we put up no billboard and what happened in the city where we put up 10 billboards and like, then you test and you're like, aha.
Rand Fishkin: This density of billboards with this message for this audience in these regions works this well and results in this much lift over the statistical model that we would have predicted with seasonality included.
Rand Fishkin: Ta da.
Rand Fishkin: Measurement based on lift, not attribution.
Rand Fishkin: We're throwing out this whole concept of attribution.
Rand Fishkin: And that means that when you choose your channels and your tactics and what you're going to invest in, I would recommend, especially if you're small and you're starting up and you're trying to get those first, a hundred customers, you should focus on things that you are personally passionate about and interested in.
Rand Fishkin: Channels and tactics that like, resonate with you, the human being.
Rand Fishkin: Here's something I've never heard, Matt, not in my whole life.
Rand Fishkin: Ugh, I'm so good at Instagram, but I really hate it.
Rand Fishkin: Nope, nope, doesn't happen.
Rand Fishkin: If you hate Instagram, don't use it for marketing.
Rand Fishkin: Like you're going to Suck a bunch of time.
Rand Fishkin: Even if you think it's a good potential channel eventually for you, I don't care.
Rand Fishkin: Like don't do it.
Rand Fishkin: Are you really good at one to one emails?
Rand Fishkin: Are you great at conferences and events?
Rand Fishkin: Are you good at offline branding and like physical sandwich boards, you know, in neighborhoods and like, I don't know, guerrilla campaigns where you like tack up posters against telephone poles in densely populated cities?
Rand Fishkin: Like hell, go for it, man.
Rand Fishkin: Like do the thing that you're good at.
Rand Fishkin: A hundred customers is so small in the massive economies that we live in.
Rand Fishkin: It's such a tiny number.
Rand Fishkin: Focus on the thing that you are really good at and then just make sure that it fits these other parameters, which is that your audience actually pays attention to those places.
Rand Fishkin: So if you're great at tacking up billboards on or posters on telephone poles, but none of your customers live in that neighborhood, you're going to have a bad time.
Matt Tharp: Right?
Rand Fishkin: And in the digital world, if you're like, oh, I'm so good at Reddit, but there's no communities on Reddit where your audience is paying attention to that topic.
Rand Fishkin: It's not going to work.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: You need to transition.
Rand Fishkin: Like, oh, maybe there's Reddit, like communities on LinkedIn or Discord or you know, whatever it is, you need to be in those places.
Rand Fishkin: So your audience is there, you're passionate about it, and you gotta be able to do something unique.
Rand Fishkin: You have to find some way that you stand out from the rest of your competitors who are also good at that network and doing things there.
Rand Fishkin: That could be that your video content is way more expressive and creative and artistic.
Rand Fishkin: It could be that your messaging is just way better.
Rand Fishkin: It could be that you're amazing at telling stories with data or maybe you're fantastic at, I don't know, comic style illustrations that people love to copy and paste.
Rand Fishkin: Like whatever it is, you got to have something unique to stand out from the crowd.
Rand Fishkin: You got to have your audience actually be on the platform and you need to be personally passionate and interested in it.
Rand Fishkin: Those are the three.
Matt Tharp: I love it.
Matt Tharp: It's a bunch of really good explanations for why you should go back and blow the dust off of your Ogilvie on advertising book.
Matt Tharp: It's true.
Matt Tharp: A lot of what you said first off was physical.
Matt Tharp: A lot of the things that you commented on were more like non digital.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Because the analogy works in the digital era too.
Rand Fishkin: And also it's never been easier to stand out in the offline world.
Rand Fishkin: It's Weird to say, but the offline world is almost carte blanche compared to digital, which is so overcrowded with every kind of marketer and campaign.
Rand Fishkin: And just the dollars in digital advertising is crazy.
Rand Fishkin: If you can be creative in the real world and your customers are there, that's a huge win.
Matt Tharp: It's great advice.
Matt Tharp: I mean, I really hope people listen to that and think about it more.
Matt Tharp: Is not being so beholden to attribution something I'll take away from this conversation?
Matt Tharp: Because I think it's a really important reminder to, like, not get so hooked on performance marketing techniques that you can't take a step back and rethink about, like, brand and just like being different and remembering what are the essence of the things that make you unique and make you stand out in the market.
Matt Tharp: And I love it.
Matt Tharp: And finding a place where you can generate the least amount of noise for the most amount of attention, that's a constantly moving target.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, that ratio.
Rand Fishkin: That ratio is so important.
Rand Fishkin: Absolutely.
Matt Tharp: Yeah.
Matt Tharp: Yeah.
Matt Tharp: That's the thing you're trying to optimize for.
Matt Tharp: I love that.
Matt Tharp: I think that's good advice, especially because you're right.
Matt Tharp: Zero to a hundred.
Matt Tharp: I actually think, and this is partly the reason I keyed in on this, is this has been in the back of my mind.
Matt Tharp: But I think as AI demonstrates, it's so easy to fake so much.
Matt Tharp: It's a pendulum.
Matt Tharp: It always swings back.
Matt Tharp: If we've decided that Gen AI is the end of the pendulum swing in one direction, this is an inevitability for it to come back and people to respond and say, well, I'm a human.
Matt Tharp: I want to talk to another human to make sure I'm making a good decision.
Matt Tharp: I don't think that's going to.
Matt Tharp: To decrease.
Matt Tharp: I think if anything, that's a better opportunity for the next few years to, like, get some attention.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, I completely agree.
Rand Fishkin: I think that AI will help clever people do more clever things with their marketing and their content and their ideation and their brainstorming and all that kind of stuff.
Rand Fishkin: And some unfortunately misled people will think that they're supposed to use it to create content that they should publish and create emails that they should send and create video interviews that they should post on YouTube.
Rand Fishkin: And those people are all going to have a bad time, right?
Rand Fishkin: There's going to be one story out of a hundred thousand of like, oh my God, look at this virtual influencer who built this, you know, incredible campaign.
Rand Fishkin: It's all using AI.
Rand Fishkin: And then you're going to look for like, the second example, and you never find it.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: And.
Rand Fishkin: But everybody points to the one and they're like, see, AI is going to take over.
Rand Fishkin: We've been here before, friends.
Rand Fishkin: Like, do you remember how Web3 was going to be the future of all technology?
Rand Fishkin: Yes.
Rand Fishkin: We're supposed to be having this conversation on the blockchain right now.
Matt Tharp: That's right, yeah.
Matt Tharp: Every word is saved to its own specific place on the chain.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Instance.
Rand Fishkin: Exactly.
Rand Fishkin: And you can only connect them up if you got the key.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Anyway, also, this is supposed to be unavailable on the desktop web, and we're supposed to have a mobile app, which is the only exclusive place where you can access this conversation.
Rand Fishkin: That would be the 2009 version of this advice.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Matt Tharp: You're leaning more towards the optimistic sentiment than it sounds like when it comes to AI, because the examples that you've just portrayed in this conversation are at least three moments in the last 10 years where supposedly the thing that happened was going to end.
Matt Tharp: All the other things that happened, and it's never really come.
Rand Fishkin: Virtual reality is the other one.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: Virtual and augmented reality is the sort of the fourth example of that, you know, never appeared.
Rand Fishkin: So, anyway, anytime these hype cycles come, and I'm not saying AI is all hype.
Rand Fishkin: It's a useful technology.
Rand Fishkin: Absolutely it is.
Rand Fishkin: Is it as transformational as the inv.
Rand Fishkin: Invention of the computer or the Internet as a whole?
Rand Fishkin: I don't think so.
Rand Fishkin: Is it third in line behind those?
Rand Fishkin: Maybe.
Rand Fishkin: Maybe mobile's even bigger.
Rand Fishkin: But what I would say is just be cautious in assuming that everything is going to change overnight and that AI is going to take everyone's jobs.
Rand Fishkin: Like, it's just not.
Rand Fishkin: It's not realistic.
Rand Fishkin: And very frankly, I will say this one thing about AI, which is if you are trying to get budget to do something, you should probably put AI in your pitch because there's a lot of.
Rand Fishkin: I don't want to use a pejorative term.
Rand Fishkin: There are many human beings who are in various positions of management whose executive teams basically have said, no more spending on anything unless it's AI.
Rand Fishkin: And so I was talking to a friend.
Rand Fishkin: I'm not going to name which of the big tech companies here in Seattle they're at, but I was like, I know you went through a reorg recently.
Rand Fishkin: And he was like, well, I'm doing exactly the same job that I was before.
Rand Fishkin: My manager just didn't want any of us getting fired, so they renamed our team AI, and now we can do our jobs in peace.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: And I was like to.
Rand Fishkin: Oh yeah, like everybody else, right?
Rand Fishkin: And I was with a, a second person from a different big tech company in Seattle who was like, that just happened to me.
Matt Tharp: So I read today 2% of GDP is currently committed to AI projects.
Matt Tharp: And the article, I forget, I'd love to quote it and I'm doing a terrible job, but it basically said if.
Rand Fishkin: I read the same one, okay, where.
Matt Tharp: They'Re like, look, we're make.
Matt Tharp: Everybody's made a big bet on AGI.
Matt Tharp: So if it doesn't happen now, there's a huge recession coming.
Matt Tharp: It's going to kill 2% of GDP right there at a minimum, and it's actually going to be a lot higher than that.
Matt Tharp: It was a really fascinating idea that if AGI doesn't get here in the next 12 months, there's a different kind of deep shit we're all going to be in.
Rand Fishkin: I would point folks to the dot com crash, right?
Rand Fishkin: Which was almost exactly this flavor of hype cycle and media attention.
Rand Fishkin: The Internet took off, right?
Rand Fishkin: Dot coms eventually took off, but the hype was so crazy.
Rand Fishkin: Between 1995 and 2000, as it has been from 2021 today, the hype was so crazy, there were expectations so high, the stock price is so high, like all these kinds of things.
Rand Fishkin: When that dot com collapse and recession happened, the interesting part was that it really hit this one sector of the economy really hard.
Rand Fishkin: And then a lot of other sectors kind of grew and matured and adopted the technology over the next few years.
Rand Fishkin: I would just encourage anyone who's thinking my whole life, personally and professionally, is that I'm an AI expert.
Rand Fishkin: Maybe just diversify a little bit to protect yourself, be good at anything else.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: In addition to AI, I have one.
Matt Tharp: More question or a line of questions.
Matt Tharp: I want to hear your answer.
Matt Tharp: Do you consider yourself a salesperson?
Rand Fishkin: Oh, gosh, definitely not.
Rand Fishkin: I don't know, Matt, if you've ever.
Rand Fishkin: You probably have never done this, but if you email SparkToro support and you ask for a demo or to talk to a salesperson or an account manager or whatever, the reply that myself or Amanda will send is, sorry, we don't have those people.
Rand Fishkin: We're just a tiny team of three.
Rand Fishkin: We don't do sales, we will not do SOC 2 compliance, we will not sign a contract with you.
Rand Fishkin: If you have a credit card, feel free to sign up for a free account and then like try it out and pay for the version online.
Rand Fishkin: But we don't do anything else.
Rand Fishkin: And, and I was the same way at Moz, My first startup, I don't think I am good at sales at least one one.
Rand Fishkin: I'll tell you a very embarrassing story.
Rand Fishkin: I know we love stories.
Rand Fishkin: First six months after SparkToro launched Kasey and I thought, hey, you know what?
Rand Fishkin: Sometimes you gotta bite the bullet and do sales, right?
Rand Fishkin: It's early days.
Rand Fishkin: We gotta get this startup off the ground.
Rand Fishkin: So when people would write in, I would give them demos.
Rand Fishkin: You know, you might write in, we'd schedule something, we'd hop on a call.
Rand Fishkin: I'd be showing you SparkToro over in this cor here, like presenting it, you know, running through your audiences, typing things up, talking to your team.
Rand Fishkin: I always had very engaging chats.
Rand Fishkin: I felt like I learned things about companies and people and agencies and it wasn't bad.
Rand Fishkin: There was nothing wrong with it.
Rand Fishkin: But my conversion rate from the first 130 demos that I did over the course of maybe nine, eight, nine months was two signups.
Matt Tharp: Wow.
Rand Fishkin: Two people who I had talked to on those calls signed up for SparkToro, maybe more, but we couldn't tell because they didn't use the same email.
Rand Fishkin: I don't know.
Rand Fishkin: But every day five or six people signed up out talking to me.
Rand Fishkin: Why?
Rand Fishkin: Why was I doing this?
Rand Fishkin: Like what?
Rand Fishkin: One of two things is happening, right?
Rand Fishkin: One, which this is possible, Totally possible.
Rand Fishkin: Rand is the world's worst salesperson.
Rand Fishkin: Like he is actually turning you off.
Rand Fishkin: As soon as you start talking to him about sparktor, you're like, well, I was excited about this product, but then the founder talked to me about what they made and I just.
Rand Fishkin: Or the people who wanted demos.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: Matches for the product.
Rand Fishkin: I think it was this one.
Rand Fishkin: That's what I hope anyway.
Rand Fishkin: I tell myself, so I can sleep well at night and not cry myself intro corner.
Rand Fishkin: I think that if you need that sales process, you're probably not a good match for SparkToro.
Rand Fishkin: And so maybe if I were a better salesperson, I'd be over here.
Rand Fishkin: But this is something I would tell founders.
Rand Fishkin: So like if you are listening to this and you're a founder or you're an early stage company, you're joining one, build your company to optimize for the things that you're great and not need the things that you suck at.
Rand Fishkin: I know a lot of the advice out there is like find a co founder who you know will take care of the things that you suck at that you're not good at.
Rand Fishkin: I sort of disagree.
Rand Fishkin: Can you design a business that doesn't need that thing?
Rand Fishkin: You're no good at or that you don't enjoy.
Rand Fishkin: You can, you can design a company to not need your weaknesses and when.
Matt Tharp: The company gets so big that's the thing that you have to fill.
Matt Tharp: Right.
Matt Tharp: Then you can hire people.
Matt Tharp: Yeah, a hundred percent.
Rand Fishkin: Now you have a high quality problem that can be fixed with money.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Matt Tharp: Yeah.
Matt Tharp: I love that though.
Matt Tharp: That's, it's great advice.
Matt Tharp: I think it's really hard to follow because especially when you're early days, a customer calls.
Matt Tharp: Yeah.
Matt Tharp: The instinct kicks in and you're like, I should talk to them.
Matt Tharp: That's the right answer.
Matt Tharp: I need to be good at this.
Matt Tharp: The founder should be the best salesperson.
Matt Tharp: Doesn't always work out, but I think reminding you that you need to optimize for your strengths I think is really key.
Matt Tharp: I think, look, the hunter audience, I think there are a lot of people in the hunter customer base but even in the audience that don't think of themselves as salespeople and yet are going to have to do sales like activities, sending an outbound campaign actually doing, you know, some face to face conversations like getting out and kind of being the boots on the ground from time to time.
Rand Fishkin: I do a ton of that.
Rand Fishkin: Oh absolutely, right.
Rand Fishkin: Sales like activities where you know, for example, hey, this whatever person in the media covered this report, you know what, I need to go find their email and reach out to them and like have a conversation and be like, hey, you know when the Wall Street Journal wrote about this, what you didn't consider was this point I wish that had been included.
Rand Fishkin: Or like, hey, when you wrote about us, you called us a market research firm.
Rand Fishkin: That's not what we do.
Rand Fishkin: Would you mind fixing that?
Rand Fishkin: Very important.
Rand Fishkin: In the age of AI where you know, ChatGPT is going to call you the thing that the Wall Street Journal called you.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: And so I do a ton of these for events, right.
Rand Fishkin: Where I'm like reaching out to people and trying to pitch them on coming to our events or joining something.
Rand Fishkin: I do tons of sales like activities when I am networking with people around a million different topics.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: I had to do lots of sales like activity to raise money for Snack Bar Studio and for SparkToro before it.
Rand Fishkin: So absolutely, yeah.
Matt Tharp: This is I think a common theme.
Matt Tharp: Some of the things that actually keep people out of entrepreneurism is a fear of the selling piece.
Matt Tharp: And that's why I really like the advice.
Matt Tharp: Build a business that doesn't need you to be good at something you're not good at.
Matt Tharp: I think it's great.
Rand Fishkin: But you or your team has to be good at either marketing or sales.
Rand Fishkin: You can't be bad at both of them.
Rand Fishkin: Otherwise, there's no customer acquisition.
Rand Fishkin: And I don't know if you've heard, businesses tend to need customers.
Matt Tharp: At least a couple of them.
Matt Tharp: Exactly.
Matt Tharp: We'll play a little word game.
Matt Tharp: Since your person who's built businesses is good at marketing does not consider yourself a salesperson, what would you call, like, if you said to a colleague, let's send a cold email campaign, would you call it cold email or would you call it something else?
Rand Fishkin: Ooh, I've rarely recommended it, but we have done some direct email outreach.
Rand Fishkin: I don't know if it counts as cold because we always would have the email.
Rand Fishkin: Like, we'd already have that person's email or we'd, like, have a connection to them in some way.
Matt Tharp: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Journalist outreach would be the exception.
Rand Fishkin: When I've done journalist and creator outreach, that's like a cold campaign, but it's one to one.
Matt Tharp: But you wouldn't refer to it as a cold campaign.
Matt Tharp: You would just consider it outreach.
Rand Fishkin: You're right.
Rand Fishkin: I'd call it media pitching or direct outreach.
Rand Fishkin: Or Creator outreach.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, YouTuber outreach.
Rand Fishkin: Exactly.
Matt Tharp: The reason we ask these questions is.
Matt Tharp: I'll tell you this in a second.
Matt Tharp: So ideal customer profile in icp.
Matt Tharp: Is that what you would call it?
Rand Fishkin: My formal language in business world is pretty bad because I kind of stumbled into everything.
Rand Fishkin: I think that's a great term.
Rand Fishkin: I like it.
Rand Fishkin: I know many people who use it.
Rand Fishkin: I will often say our core customer, our key customer are like our best customers are.
Rand Fishkin: But ICP works great.
Matt Tharp: Okay, there's a bunch of these.
Matt Tharp: But I think one of the challenges that James and I have had as we've analyzed our customers and really tried to understand our audience as well as we can, we have a bit of a horizontal business.
Matt Tharp: Right.
Matt Tharp: Just about anybody who's B2B needs what we do at some point, which is an amazing product to have.
Rand Fishkin: Amazing, amazing place to be in.
Rand Fishkin: Yes.
Matt Tharp: However, if you talk to somebody who's a recruiter, they might not call it cold email.
Matt Tharp: They might not refer to it as an icp.
Matt Tharp: And actually, if you said ICP and you didn't say the whole word, they might look at you funny.
Rand Fishkin: The International center for Photography on Fifth Avenue, New York.
Rand Fishkin: What does that have to do with anything?
Matt Tharp: We had a photographer, photojournalist, who, it turns out, not only was he an active user, I met him, by the way, in a side conversation.
Matt Tharp: I reached out to him about his photography I was like, hey, I'd love some advice.
Matt Tharp: We started chatting.
Matt Tharp: I said, by the way, what my day job is.
Matt Tharp: And he was like, you're kidding.
Matt Tharp: I'm like, no.
Matt Tharp: He's like, I'm a customer.
Matt Tharp: I'm like, this is great.
Matt Tharp: Let's talk.
Matt Tharp: But would have never used the words cold email or cold outreach.
Matt Tharp: It was a pitch.
Matt Tharp: And we discovered this is one of the funny things, is that if you come from our industry, you would think everybody uses like four work keywords.
Matt Tharp: And it turns out the vast majority of people I've spoken to verbally who are customers or Hunter users don't use any of those terms.
Matt Tharp: And we find it fascinating that a product like ours continues to grow and exist and reach people and create value.
Matt Tharp: Sorry, I now I'm sound like I'm selling Hunter that I get excited about what we do for this reason.
Rand Fishkin: I mean, we're, you know, SparkToro is a customer.
Rand Fishkin: We use you guys.
Rand Fishkin: We have an indirect integration.
Rand Fishkin: Hundreds of our customers use Hunter through SparkToro.
Rand Fishkin: Right?
Rand Fishkin: So, like, I'm a fan.
Rand Fishkin: I totally get it.
Rand Fishkin: Let me give you the one challenge, level up from your challenge.
Matt Tharp: Please, please.
Rand Fishkin: People don't know what audience research is.
Rand Fishkin: And when we tell them, like, well, how do you figure out if, for example, your ICP or your customers or your audience are using AI tools more than they're using traditional search, or that they're listening to this media publication more than that one, or which YouTube channels they follow or what podcasts they listen to?
Rand Fishkin: What most of our customers and audience tell us is, I have no word for that.
Rand Fishkin: It's no one's job.
Rand Fishkin: My manager probably should care about it, but doesn't.
Rand Fishkin: And that has, I think, more than anything else that we do that severely impacts, like, the limitation of, you know, what we're doing.
Rand Fishkin: However, I have faced the same challenge before.
Rand Fishkin: When I started doing SEO in 2003, if I told someone I did SEO, they were either like, what the hell is that?
Rand Fishkin: That?
Rand Fishkin: Or they were like, that's spam.
Rand Fishkin: Like, you're a spammer, right?
Rand Fishkin: Which I'm sure you guys have heard too.
Rand Fishkin: And it took me 15 years to, like, you know, not me alone, right?
Rand Fishkin: But, like, me plus thousands of other people in the SEO industry to, like, nudge the whole marketing universe and every company to be like, oh, SEO is just a standard practice we should all engage in because Google is going to dominate how people find information in the world.
Rand Fishkin: Aha.
Rand Fishkin: I should be present in that place where my audience pays attention.
Rand Fishkin: And now I'm trying to be like, well, what if your audience does not exclusively pay attention to Google?
Rand Fishkin: What if there are other places they pay attention to other channels and platforms?
Rand Fishkin: How do you figure that out and how do you know which ones?
Rand Fishkin: That's what audience research is.
Rand Fishkin: Someone should do that.
Rand Fishkin: The nice part is SparkToro, to my knowledge, has no competitors.
Rand Fishkin: So like, you know, oh, that's nice.
Matt Tharp: We should talk separate from this because I do think it would be great to see if there's some way we can and partner together for data information.
Matt Tharp: Like, there's clearly some interesting things that.
Rand Fishkin: We should explore here and I would love that.
Rand Fishkin: I mean, I've been a big fan of you guys forever, recommended you for years.
Rand Fishkin: So yeah, absolutely.
Rand Fishkin: Happy to chat.
Rand Fishkin: And then, you know, the other thing that I would say is, you know, if you're a founder again, like, or you're early stage and you are looking for a relatively easy path to get those first hundred customers, it's not a bad idea to choose a sector that almost nobody else is in.
Rand Fishkin: Competition is very low.
Rand Fishkin: It's easier to get traction, especially if the message resonates.
Rand Fishkin: What gets harder is when you want to grow past, you know, a few million or, you know, $10 million of revenue in that space in a space like ours.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: Audience research, where people don't have a word for it and they don't know to do it.
Rand Fishkin: That's where, like, you really bump up against that difficulty of getting over the chasm.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Rand Fishkin: To use the Clay Christensen term.
Rand Fishkin: And if instead you're like, I'm an old pro at this, I'm an expert.
Rand Fishkin: I can crush any early stage startup up.
Rand Fishkin: Great, my friend.
Rand Fishkin: Like, pick a category that's big and go head to head with the competitors.
Rand Fishkin: So one of my other companies, AlertMouse, is doing that going into the email alert space, which is essentially dominated by people like Mention and Talk Walker and BuzzSumo and Google Alerts.
Rand Fishkin: Right?
Rand Fishkin: And like all these players and we're like, hey, let's go head to head with those guys.
Rand Fishkin: And everybody knows what an email alert does.
Rand Fishkin: Everybody needs it.
Rand Fishkin: So it's sort of fascinating to like get to play both of these games as an entrepreneur, right?
Matt Tharp: Yes, a hundred percent.
Matt Tharp: You know, what I was realizing is there's probably a few folks listening who may not be as good at marketing.
Matt Tharp: And in that case, I probably wouldn't suggest market where there's no competitors.
Rand Fishkin: You have to be able to make noise and have people pay attention.
Matt Tharp: You have to that's the key.
Matt Tharp: You don't have to define a category, but you kind of are.
Rand Fishkin: Absolutely.
Rand Fishkin: Absolutely.
Rand Fishkin: This goes back for time a long.
Rand Fishkin: Like, choose companies that leverage your strengths and ignore your weaknesses.
Matt Tharp: Yeah, exactly.
Matt Tharp: Hounding advice people.
Matt Tharp: You gotta put it all together if it's gonna work.
Matt Tharp: This has been really been wonderful.
Matt Tharp: Great conversation.
Matt Tharp: We didn't get to everything, but honestly, we probably would have taken two hours to do that, and it would've been great.
Matt Tharp: It's great to see you.
Matt Tharp: I hope we get a chance to do it again.
Matt Tharp: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: A real pleasure, Matt.
Rand Fishkin: If you find yourself in Seattle, Washington, you should definitely drop me a line.
Rand Fishkin: And I hope we get to do this again sometime soon.
Rand Fishkin: It's really been a pleasure.
Rand Fishkin: Pleasure.
Rand Fishkin: Let's do it.
Matt Tharp: I appreciate it.
Rand Fishkin: Thanks, again.
Rand Fishkin: Take care.
Producer: Once again, thank you to Rand for joining today's episode of Outfoxed.
Producer: If you like what you heard, please, like, subscribe and explore even more of the Outfoxed community by visiting www.
Producer: Outfoxed Hunter IO he was Rand Fishkin.
Producer: That was Matt Tharp.
Producer: And we're out of time.