Rand Fishkin, Moz
How Blogging 5 Nights a Week Built a $29M SaaS
Rand Fishkin co-founded Moz (originally SEOmoz) in 2004 as a consulting firm he ran with his mother. At the time, the company was drowning in $500,000 of credit card debt, all in Rand's name so his father wouldn't find out. The turning point was SaaS content marketing. Rand forced himself to write blog posts five nights a week, often from 10pm to 2am, for five straight years. The content demystified how Google's search algorithm worked and attracted a massive audience of digital marketers who trusted him. When a developer named Matt Inman (who later created The Oatmeal) built some hacky internal SEO tools, they put them online with a PayPal button. No business plan, no scalability testing, no customer personas. The tools broke every couple of weeks and could only handle a few hundred users. But the audience was already there. The community of marketers who had been reading Rand's content for three years became instant customers. Moz doubled revenue every year for six years, reaching $29M in 2013. They raised $1.1M in 2007 and $18M in 2012 from Ignition Partners and Curious Office. Then growth stalled. Revenue growth dropped from 100% to 50% to just 6%. Rand was dealing with depression and openly admits he would spend five minutes convincing anyone who complimented Moz that their product was terrible. He stepped down as CEO, handing the role to Sarah Bird, because he recognized he was dragging the company down during a period when they needed an optimist at the helm.
