Rand Fishkin, Moz

How Moz Built a Content Marketing Flywheel

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Episode Summary

Moz spent $0 on paid acquisition for its first six years. Rand Fishkin built a SaaS content marketing flywheel that drove the company's customer acquisition cost down to just $101 - while the average customer was paying $109 per month. That is a payback period of less than one month.

In this episode, Rand explains exactly how the inbound marketing flywheel works, why he would bet on visual content and free tools instead of traditional blogging if starting over today, and the social media mistake most SaaS companies keep making.

Rand Fishkin co-founded Moz in 2004 as a consulting firm before shifting to SaaS in 2008. The company built an online community of over one million digital marketers and raised just under $20 million in funding.

What makes Moz's growth story remarkable is how they did it. For the first six years, Moz never spent a dime on paid customer acquisition. Their entire SaaS content marketing engine ran on earned media - blog posts, SEO guides, community content, and social sharing. The result was a customer acquisition cost of about $101, with customers spending $109 per month on average.

In this conversation, Rand breaks down the inbound marketing flywheel that powered Moz's growth. He explains why traditional blog content is now too saturated for new entrants and shares two alternative strategies he would pursue if launching a SaaS company today: building free interactive tools and creating visually driven content that spreads on social platforms.

Rand also dives into his updated SEO approach for SaaS content marketing, including targeting 50 to 100 keyword phrases with intent-driven content and creating brand-defining pieces that earn links for years. He covers social media strategy, the biggest mistake companies make on social, and why promoting other people's content builds a reciprocity engine that pays dividends.

Topics: Content & Inbound Marketing|Product-Led Growth

Key Insight

Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin built an inbound marketing flywheel that kept customer acquisition cost at $101 while customers paid $109 per month, achieving sub-one-month payback with zero paid spend for the company's first six years.

Key Ideas

Moz's customer acquisition cost was $101 against $109 average monthly revenue per customer - a payback period under one month
Moz spent nothing on paid marketing for its first six years, relying entirely on content, SEO, and community
Rand Fishkin recommends free tools or visual-driven content over traditional blogging for new SaaS entrants in saturated markets
Target 50 to 100 keyword phrases and produce uniquely valuable content for each to earn organic rankings
Promote other people's content on social media to build reciprocity that amplifies your own reach

Key Lessons

🚀 Build a SaaS content marketing flywheel for compounding growth: Moz combined SEO, social media, email outreach, and community content into a flywheel where each published piece earned links and signals that made the next piece rank better over time.
💰 Cut acquisition costs by investing in earned media instead of paid channels: Moz spent zero dollars on paid marketing for six years and still achieved a $101 customer acquisition cost against $109 monthly revenue per customer, proving inbound can outperform paid.
🛠️ Use free tools to attract customers in saturated SaaS content marketing spaces: When traditional blog content becomes too competitive, Rand recommends building free interactive tools that demonstrate product value and upsell users naturally into paid plans.
🎯 Create visual content that spreads instead of text-heavy blog posts: Authentically amateur visuals like those on Wait But Why and XKCD get shared in presentations and on social networks, generating far more amplification than conventional written content.
🔄 Target 50 to 100 keyword phrases with uniquely valuable content for SEO: Do not copy what competitors publish. Identify the phrases you want to rank for and create something nobody else has produced so you earn attention and traction as a new site.
🤝 Promote others' content on social media to build reciprocity: Sharing other people's work earns their respect and creates a natural amplification loop where they share your content in return, expanding your reach without paid spend.
🧠 Create brand-defining content that earns links for years: Resources like Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO and biennial industry surveys get referenced repeatedly, building lasting domain authority that transient blog posts and clickbait never achieve.

Chapters

00:00Introduction

01:28What is inbound marketing

03:15The inbound marketing flywheel explained

04:30Moz's $101 customer acquisition cost

05:25Starting Moz over in 2015

05:48Free tools vs visual content strategy

07:19Visual content examples and authenticity

08:27Why amateur visuals spread faster

09:29SEO strategy for new SaaS companies

09:50Intent-driven SEO and keyword targeting

11:30Brand-defining content vs clickbait

13:28Blogging frequency and visual practice

14:41Social media strategy for SaaS

15:30Curating content for your audience

16:59The biggest social media mistake

18:09Lightning round

19:23Book recommendation

21:33Starting over in SaaS

23:40Where to find Rand Fishkin

Episode Q&A

How did Moz keep SaaS content marketing costs so low while growing?

Moz built an inbound flywheel combining SEO, social media, and community content. Each piece of content earned links and ranking signals that made the next piece rank better. This compounding effect drove customer acquisition cost down to $101 with zero paid spend for six years.

What SaaS content marketing strategy would Rand Fishkin use if starting Moz over today?

Rand would either build free interactive tools to attract and upsell users, or create a visually focused content system with graphics that spread on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook. He believes traditional blog content is too saturated for new entrants.

How did Moz achieve a sub-one-month customer payback period?

Moz's customer acquisition cost averaged $101 while customers spent about $109 per month. Because the entire growth engine ran on earned media rather than paid channels, the economics allowed nearly instant payback on every new customer.

Why does Rand Fishkin recommend visual content over blogging for SaaS companies?

Rand points to sites like Wait But Why and XKCD as proof that authentically amateur visuals spread faster and stick in people's minds longer than text-heavy blog posts. These visuals get shared in presentations and on social networks, creating amplification that traditional articles rarely achieve.

What SEO strategy does Rand Fishkin recommend for new SaaS companies?

Identify 50 to 100 keyword phrases you want to rank for, then produce something uniquely valuable for each one that nobody else has created. Combine this with brand-defining content pieces like guides and industry surveys that earn links and referrals for years.

What is the biggest social media mistake SaaS companies make according to Rand Fishkin?

Most companies are boring on social media because they lack empathy. They assume subscribers want to see everything they post, when in reality those followers see hundreds of updates daily from other sources. The fix is figuring out how to be signal rather than noise.

How did Moz's SaaS content marketing flywheel compound over time?

Each piece of content Moz published earned links and ranking signals. Those signals boosted domain authority, which made every subsequent piece rank more easily. After the first difficult turns of the flywheel, Moz could hit publish and watch organic traffic roll in.

What does Rand Fishkin mean by brand-defining content for SaaS companies?

Brand-defining content consists of resources people reference repeatedly over months and years, like Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO, their biennial industry survey, and their ranking factors study. Unlike transient clickbait, these pieces build lasting authority and ongoing links.

Why does Rand Fishkin say promoting others' content helps SaaS content marketing?

Sharing other people's work on social media creates a reciprocity loop. The people you promote come to know and respect your brand, and they naturally amplify your content in return. This earned amplification is far more effective than only promoting your own material.

Book Recommendations

The Billionaire Who Wasn't

by Conor O'Clery

Links

Moz: Website
Rand Fishkin: Website | X
Omer Khan: LinkedIn | X

Full Transcript

Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Okay.
Today's episode is part two of the interview with Rand Fishkin.
Rand is the co founder of Moz, a Seattle based SaaS company that sells inbound marketing and marketing analytics software.
The company was founded in 2004 as a consulting firm and shifted to software development in 2008.
The Moz website has an online community of more than a million digital marketers and to date, the company has raised just under $20 million in funding.
In this episode, Rand talks about inbound marketing, some of the common mistakes that startups make, and what he'd do differently if he was launching a new company today.
So with that, let's get back to the interview.
All right, let's talk about inbound marketing and hopefully what lessons that we can learn from your experiences.
Just for folks who aren't familiar, can you just take a second and just explain how you define inbound marketing?

Guest (01:28.120)
Yeah, for me, inbound marketing is simply a phrase that I guess collects all of the channels, tactics, processes that you use to drive non paid earned media traffic to a website, right?
So this is everything from and through a funnel.
So everything from email marketing, which can be a wholly earned channel, assuming you're not buying lists, to organic search, the non paid side of search results, social media, content creation and marketing, community building, conversion, rate optimization, and a whole host of others.
Essentially, these tactics and channels work best when they're combined with one another.
You sort of get that one plus one equals three effect when you combine these.
And that's just because there's a very beautiful flywheel that a lot of people have built with inbound marketing.
And that flywheel functions fairly logically, right?
So I produce some piece of content, and that content could be my actual product or my Kickstarter page, or my beginner's guide to SEO or a new blog post or whatever it is.
And that piece of content is on my website.
I promote it through social media, through email outreach, through my contacts and my network.
They help amplify it.
That means that it earns hopefully some links and some other kinds of ranking signals for Google.
And it also earns me brand awareness and attention and interest.
And then the next time, well, and then that piece of content, now that it has those ranking signals, has the ability to rank in search engines, which sends kind of an ongoing Long tail of search traffic.
And if I keep doing this process over and over again, I slowly, over time, build up my social network, I build up my brand, I build up my ability to rank for content.
My domain gains authority, and that means every piece of content that I put out there has a little better chance to rank well.
And so you build a flywheel.
It's very hard to get those first few dozen turns of the flywheel going, but after a while, it's a really smooth process.
Suddenly you can hit publish, you can share on your social channels and sit back and watch all the good stuff roll in.
And that.
That's a very exciting opportunity.
It's particularly exciting for entrepreneurs, I think, in the software field, because cost of customer acquisition is such a big challenge.
If you're spending $500 to acquire a new customer and their lifetime value on average is $2,000, that's 25% of the lifetime value of the customer that you spent just to acquire them.
Nevermind whatever your margins are on serving them and providing that software and then your overhead for paying your engineers and that kind of stuff.
At Moz, because we've built such a great flywheel with inbound, our cost to acquire a customer, I think right now is about $101.
And the average customer is spending about $109 with US per month.
So we basically have a customer payback period of less than one month.
Wow.
Which means our growth engine, especially for our first six years, was just easy.
We never even paid Until, I think 2010 was when we hired our first paid media marketer.
And before that, we'd never spent a dime to acquire a customer.

Omer (05:25.710)
So let's say, let's go a hypothetical situation.
You're starting Moz in 2015, it's a new company.
How would you go about in 2015 tackling inbound marketing?
I presume the first thing would be, as you've said, is around content marketing and starting to blog.

Guest (05:48.560)
You know, I think if I were going to do it again today, because the field has become much more saturated and there's just a ton of competition, specifically in our sector, there's so many people producing content, specifically blog posts and guides and that kind of stuff, I think I would go one of two routes.
I'd probably go either we build lots of free tools, free kind of interactive tools to help people, and then kind of upsell you from there, or I think I would go with a very visually focused blog or content system.
I think, you know, the kinds of stuff where you could crop all the visuals we make and put them on Instagram or Pinterest and they would do really, really well.
Or Facebook, because I think that that kind of old school blog content, which we still do a lot of and I think because we're leaders in the field already and it works great for us, but I think it would be tough to start out new and try and compete.
And so I think that's a piece of advice that I'd give for any entrepreneur in any field is if you see that your field is already saturated in the content world with type of content X, don't just try and copy everyone else and do type of content X.
You'll probably have a much better shot if you build something unique and different.

Omer (07:19.320)
So you had a great Whiteboard Friday video talking about unique content.
I'll include that in the show notes because I think there's some really valuable information in there for folks.
But one of the websites that you gave as an example, I'd never heard of.
Wait, but why dot com, that's great.
I just love that site.
There's a great post there about procrastinators and, and what to do about it.
And that's definitely me.
But what I loved about it in, in addition to all the great information, there was those really kind of, you know, amateurish pictures that they'd included in there with, you know, what.
What's going on inside your brain.
And there's this little monkey that's basically, you know, pulling you away from doing the things that you really want to do.
And.
And yeah, sure.
I think I could probably find tons of great blog posts out there telling me about how I can stop procrastinating.
But I think it was those visuals, just like you said, that I think really stuck in my mind.

Guest (08:27.380)
Absolutely.
And they can spread like wildfire.
Right.
People put them in their presentations and reference back to it.
They post them on social networks and visuals are really likely to get a lot more amplification on those.
And so I think there's true power in that stuff.
What's interesting about Wait, but why they do something that I also love to do, which is make graphics that are amateur Y but authentic.
Right.
So there's kind of a, like there's a difference between amateur graphics that are stock images or crappy photoshopping and amateur images that are.
Well, this person can't really draw, but the stick figures have kind of an authentic quality to them.
XKCD being the prime example in the technology field.
Right.
People just love those little stick figures with word bubbles and they really resonate.
So I think there's something powerful about authentically amateur visuals.

Omer (09:29.740)
Okay, so you're starting out Mars again.
So you're going to either focus on some kind of free tools or a visually focused blog.
Let's talk about SEO.
What would you do differently with SEO in 2015?

Guest (09:50.140)
I think there's a.
The strategy we've been following at Moz for the last six or seven years is actually kind of where Google has gotten to today.
I always thought, even in 2004, I thought that form of search of SEO was only a year or two away, and it ended up taking probably more like five or 10.
But they've been directionally going this path for a long time, and that is to be able to include more so than just raw links and, you know, the number of unique linking root domains that point to you and the diversity of those.
Those things are still important, and it's still somewhat important that you use the right keywords and phrases.
But Google is getting much more sophisticated about their natural language processing and about being intent driven with the results that they return.
Essentially saying, what did this person mean when they entered this query?
What?
What is the answer they're looking for?
What is the question they're asking?
This page serves up the best results.
Not necessarily this page keyword matches the keywords they entered the best.
There's still a little bit of that, and that's still an SEO best practice.
I think it probably will be for a long time.
If you enter some words, you actually want to see that the person, the title tag of the page that you're clicking on has those words in it, because that tells you as a searcher that it's relevant too.
But for those reasons, I think I would begin by saying, what are the 50 to 100 phrases that when someone searches for them, we really want to come up, we want to be in those top three spots for these phrases.
And then I would say, okay, now which among those could we produce something that no one else has produced, provide really unique value that no one else has given, and as a result earn a lot of traction and attention to that piece?
Because if you can't answer all three of those, I don't think you can have success, especially as a new website.
It's just really tough to break out of there.
I'd probably also, in addition to that more hardcore SEO process that's keyword and rankings driven, I'd probably also try and do some content marketing that is designed purely to earn me links and ranking signals and Attention.
So the kinds of things that are going to get.
It's not clickbait because clickbait is not good enough.
Clickbait is very transient, right.
I don't think anyone cares whether they go to Yahoo News or to BuzzFeed or to Upworthy for the latest piece of clickbait.
But I think there are ways that you can build brand with, you know, what I'd call sort of maybe like brand defining content.
And I would try and come up with some of those brand defining pieces of content that I feel like people would refer to over and over again.
So at Moz, a few of those today are things like our beginner's guide to SEO to link building to social.
Our industry survey every two years is very popular.
Our ranking factors every two years is very popular.
We sort of alternate those year to year.
We've had a number of quizzes over the years that have been really popular.
We just launched a local SEO quiz that was really popular.
So I think those kinds of brand defining pieces are something I do too.

Omer (13:28.240)
Would you blog a lot less frequently than you were doing in the early days of Moz?
I mean, would you focus just on blog less frequently but create bigger and more higher value unique content?

Guest (13:44.020)
I think, I think if I had the staff to do it, I would probably myself personally try and blog every night.
But I would do that visual blogging thing, right?
The XKCD or the wait, but why kind of style.
You know, I try and learn how to, how to actually make some, some visuals.
And the reason that I would do that is because it would take me a year or two, but a year or two in, I bet I'd be really good at it.
Like I bet I could, I could start being able to crank out a piece of visual content that would really sail across the web after a couple years of trying three or four nights a week.
And that practice makes perfect is why I invested it.
Not necessarily because I thought that was going to have a huge content marketing or SEO or social like smash success from day one.

Omer (14:41.310)
Okay, let's move on to social media.
So how would you use social media in 2015 with the All New Moz Company?

Guest (14:51.550)
So we talked about the visuals thing, but you know, I'll mention that again.
I think that's a great way to go.
Another thing I think I would do is I would, I think I would probably try and build up or be intentional about what my social accounts were producing rather than just so.
I think for example, today Moz's social accounts primarily promote Moz stuff, right?
Like Moz events.
They promote content that we produced.
They keep in touch with our customers and provide some forms of customer service and support over.
Over social media.
I might still do some of that, but I would also, I'm not exactly sure, you know, I might, I might have the, you know, this is a silly example maybe, but I might do like the Moz graph of the morning and graph of the afternoon.
And, you know, I stay subscribed to a lot of places like eMarketer and MarketingCharts.com and, you know, all of the stuff that like Andreessen Horowitz puts out about the tech sector.
And, you know, I just have a.
What is it?
Comscore puts stuff out, Nielsen put stuff out.
Pew Internet and American Life Project put stuff out.
And I think I would aggregate all that stuff and say, okay, what's interesting to my audience?
I'm going to have two graphs every day that we share.
And so, you know, if you subscribe to, you know, Moz's Twitter channel every morning, every afternoon there'll be a graph of the morning, graph of the afternoon.
I'm not sure that would be the one, but I'd have something like that that I came to be associated with our channel.
And I think promoting other people's content is something I would invest heavily in over social because when you promote the work of others, they come to know and respect you and they want to promote you as well.
So there's like a beautiful reciprocity that happens.

Omer (16:59.730)
What's a common mistake that you see many companies making with social media these days?

Guest (17:09.010)
I think a lot of them are really boring.
People are just, you know, they share on social media thinking, not being empathetic, right?
Not thinking everyone out there is subscribed to, you know, somewhere between 100 and 1,000 people on Twitter or they're following, you know, 50 fan pages on Facebook or they're, you know, they follow 20 companies on LinkedIn, but then they see, you know, 500 things from their contacts every day.
Why would they give two craps about what I am producing?
And I think a lot of them don't.
They think that people who subscribe to them are special and unique and like, well, if they click subscribe, they must love us.
They must want to see everything we ever do.
I don't think that's the case.
So I think the biggest mistake that folks make on social media is not having empathy and not figuring out how to be signal rather than noise to their audience.

Omer (18:09.440)
That's great advice.
Okay, Ryan, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them.

Guest (18:17.820)
CRACKLING EFFECTS IN THE BACKGROUND can you add that in post production?

Omer (18:25.260)
All right, are you ready?

Guest (18:26.380)
Ready.

Omer (18:27.260)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?

Guest (18:32.540)
I think it was from Dharmash Shah and he's given me a bunch of really good pieces of advice, but several of the best.
He told us not to, well, to use a different payment platform provider than what we used in 2009 or 10.
We went with Infusionsoft and he said we should have gone with Salesforce and we should have.
He told us.
He also told us that we shouldn't try and raise money in 2009.
So it was just a really bad time.
It's right after the market crash and he was totally right about that.
I think I wasted six months, maybe nine months trying to fundraise and it didn't work.
So he's been great source of information over the years.
If only I paid attention to him.

Omer (19:17.470)
Yeah, exactly.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Guest (19:23.150)
I really like a book called the Billionaire who Wasn't.
It's about Chuck Feeney, who started the Duty Free series of stores.
You know, you see him in airports all over the world now and made billions and billions of dollars and then ended up giving it all away.
And it's a fascinating read from every perspective, from an entrepreneurial angle, from a philanthropy angle, from a human being angle.
I really liked it.

Omer (19:53.560)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?

Guest (20:02.040)
I'm going to come back to kindness.
I think that entrepreneurs who are kind are far more successful than the ones who sold their company for more dollars.
And I think, yeah, hopefully history and humanity will remember that in time.

Omer (20:25.110)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Guest (20:31.040)
It's actually email.
I know that's going to sound crazy because everyone's talking about how email is so unproductive these days, but I love having every single thing in my life come through email.
If it's not in my email or not on my calendar, it doesn't exist.
And that means that everything from messages that I receive via Facebook, I completely ignore them.
I have never checked my Facebook messages, haven't checked LinkedIn, but all my profiles have my email address in there.
And they say to email me my voice message.
If you call my phone, it will say, don't leave a message, email me, because I'll never check these messages.
And having everything Go through that one channel means that I can be very focused.
And I know that when my inbox is clean and my calendar is open, I have time to work.
And when there's stuff to address, there's stuff to address.
That's been.
It's been sort of a superpower for me.
I think one of the things is I'm very fast on email, and I like it a lot.

Omer (21:33.900)
If you had to start over tomorrow, what type of business would you go and build?

Guest (21:45.420)
I think I'm addicted at this point to software subscription businesses, software, because I actually know the challenges.
I think starting over a new type of business like hardware or E commerce or retail or something like that, food service, I just don't know those worlds.
I'd have to learn all the challenges.
Again, I'd rather.
Have you ever played a video game and then you play it halfway through and you're like, you know what?
I'm just going to start over with an entirely new character, because if I do, I bet I can kick this game's ass because I know all the hard spots and where to look around the corner to the left and there's a bad guy.
And I feel like that with software subscription.
So I think that's.
I would stick with this business.
I think my second character could be even better.

Omer (22:36.870)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Guest (22:41.750)
Most people don't know.
I don't know if it's interesting, but maybe fun.
My first name is actually not random.
My first name is.
Well, I don't know what it is.
On my birth certificate, there's an S before Rand.
So it's like s. Space Rand.
Space Mitchell.
My middle name, Space Fishkin.
So there's like an S sitting in the front of my name.
And occasionally, if, you know, if someone sees me sign a document, they're like, wait, what's that?
I don't know where it came from.
Well, actually, I do know where it came from, but.
Yeah, well, it is not a lightning round where it came from.

Omer (23:22.930)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Guest (23:28.370)
Definitely my marriage.
I mean, yeah, I'm crazy about Geraldine.
I think if you read her blog, you can see why anyone would be crazy about her.
Yep, that's me.

Omer (23:40.770)
Great answers.
Okay, Ryan, I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experiences and insights with our audience.
And thank you for letting us get to know you better personally as well.
Now, if folks want to find out more about Moz, they can go to moz.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Guest (23:59.340)
Well, if you want to see the stuff that I'm sharing online, most of my sharing is done over Twitter, so that's Randfish.
I also run a personal blog on Moz's website that's@moz.com rand.
And then if you want to get in touch for any reason, my email address is Rand.

Omer (24:18.590)
Awesome, Rand.
Thanks again and it's been an absolute pleasure.

Guest (24:22.270)
My pleasure, Omer.
Thanks for having me.
Cheers.

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Dominik Angerer, Storyblok

How SaaS Content Marketing Built an 8-Figure Business

Dominik Angerer is the co-founder and CEO of Storyblok, a headless content management system that helps developers and marketers create better content experiences. In 2017, Dominik and Alexander discovered the limitations of traditional CMS platforms while working at an agency. They needed a CMS that could be customized for client projects, but nothing on the market combined the flexibility of headless architecture with the visual editing experience marketers needed. So they built a prototype. That prototype grew in popularity. Brands like Adidas and Silhouette started using it. The two founders quit their agency jobs and launched Storyblok as its own company. Their SaaS content marketing strategy was unconventional. Instead of chasing high-volume keywords, Dominik and Alexander wrote long-tail technical tutorials - how to use Storyblok with PHP, React, Angular, Python, and every framework they could think of. Every article answered a question someone had already asked in their live chat. The result: they ranked #1 for "headless CMS explained" and hit 3,000 users within four months of launching the website. They bootstrapped for two and a half years, reaching $1M ARR with just the two of them. The entire customer base of 25,000 users came from SaaS content marketing and inbound. They only started outbound sales in mid-2022 - five years after founding. But it was not all smooth sailing. Enterprise prospects loved the product but walked away when they discovered it was a two-person company. The founders wasted three months building e-commerce and search tools instead of focusing on the CMS. And a missing letter in their domain name still costs Storyblok roughly $500,000 per year in paid ads to capture misspellings. Today, Storyblok is an eight-figure ARR business with 235 employees across 47 countries. They have raised $58 million in funding, earned Gartner Customer's Choice recognition, and Forrester calculated a 582% ROI for their customers. 70% of revenue comes from enterprise clients, with just 3% enterprise churn.

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