I'm Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro. Ask me anything!

It would likely be very similar -- I'd spend a lot of the first 1-2 years building up an audience and platform, then launch. Because I left Moz with a sizeable audience, that was obviously made much easier, but SparkToro is a brand new site -- we had to build up our email list, our blog subscribers, our ability to rank in Google (which is still pretty weak), our press mentions, our brand awareness (very few people, relatively speaking, know "SparkToro" still).

This also works well for Casey and my skillsets -- he's building 99% of the tech, I'm doing 99% of the marketing and audience building. Being able to lean on each other's skills is a great thing.

Finding investors for my new company was massively easier than it had been at Moz. I think that's because I'd had 17 years of relationship-building and helping people and a lot of goodwill built up. Just have to make sure I don't ruin that!

Also much easier was designing and building the product - I can't say for certain that it'll work amazingly well for everyone on day one, but it's among the best products I've built (I say "I" but really it's Casey who did all the work, I'm just the nitpicky product manager/CEO) in my career. I think that felt "easier" because Casey and I have a strong working relationship, we see eye to eye on things, we've both built many successful and failed products before, and we've learned a ton of lessons from that.

Difficult... The biggest one so far has been validating whether we're building the right thing. I think that's because unlike Moz, we're not going into an established, clear space. We're solving a problem many people have never used a tool to help with before. In fact, almost no two people we've talked to even call this problem-space the same thing!

(for reference: SparkToro is helping founders and marketers learn more about their audiences with a simple search. You want to know more about people who talk about "commercial fishing" online, you can use SparkToro to get instant market research like: what social accounts they follow, what websites they visit+share, what podcasts they listen to, where they're geographically concentrated, what hashtags they use, what words they use to describe themselves, what they talk about online, etc.)

Broadly speaking, SparkToro's startup process has been WAY easier than Moz's. It's like a second playthrough of a video game. You just feel vastly more confident. The challenges, though different, have a familiarity to them, and so too do the solutions. Fingers crossed it stays that way as we launch and try to grow revenue!

Starting with the easy questions, eh? ;-)

I think three general trends will dominate web marketing for the next few years:

1. The biggest players in web traffic and web/app usage (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Reddit, etc) will keep doing more and more to keep people on their platforms rather than sending traffic out to the web. This will make a lot of web marketing more difficult to do (especially if you focus on attempting to drive traffic through links + shares), but also more difficult to track (because you can't measure how many people read about your brand on someone else's site/platform).

The winners will be those marketers and brands who understand this trend and play to it -- leveraging the hunger those platforms have for traffic and creating the content and interactions that yield engagement and addiction. On Google, that means answering questions right in the SERPs (which siphons away traffic, but can get your message to vastly more people). On social it means creating and amplifying things that drive engagement (often controversy, humor, and emotion).

2. We are historically overdue for a significant economic slowdown or recession, and those almost always result in massive turnover, shakeup, and strategic shifts in how marketing is done. My guess is that this time it'll result in a lot of hard-to-prove channels and tactics losing investment as brand hunker down. They've gotten used to high levels of trackability in their marketing dollars, and that's actually fading with new laws, regulations, privacy controls, and changes from the browsers and hardware makers (Apple, Google, Firefox, etc).

When that happens, the brands that win at marketing are going to be those who either figure out how to connect hard-to-measure data sources, or those that are willing to do more creative, more high-ROI investments that simply aren't measurable and "take it on faith" (i.e. measure brand lift geographically or with time series and tie those to efforts).

3. Wealth concentration and the growing power of monopolies to influence governments and populations might seem like more a socio-economic/political trend, but I think it'll also have a huge impact on web marketing and how we use the Internet. China is a superb example of how government impacts every level of web use and every way marketing can and can't be done. But that's more authoritarian, whereas in the US/Europe I think we'll see big companies and wealthy individuals control much more of the policy to benefit their pockets. GDPR is an excellent example of this. Articles 11 and 13 in the EU too. And in the US, Ajit Pai's FCC has made Comcast into a nearly-unchangeable monopoly in broadband and they in turn reward him with wealth and accolades. Sadly, that means the US is falling way behind in Internet connectivity speeds and longer term, will probably spell the end of the ability for many people to access "all" of the web (you'll get a bifurcated model where higher-paying customers get all websites, and lower paying customers get only certain sites and services, which have to pay the ISPs to be accessible). As you can imagine, that'll make starting up something new vastly harder and more expensive. Sucks for Indiehackers like us.

The flipside of this is the potential for political pushback. If American voters (and/or EU voters) decide, en masse, that these issues are important and that wealth concentration and monopoly power is bad, they could vote for politicians who'll do something about it. Then the question becomes how they do those things and whether the cure is worse than the disease. I'm hopeful about government action, but I also recognize its potential to cause crappy externalities.

Hope that's useful! I realize it's pretty big picture :-)

I barely, barely know how to code. Seriously. HTML and maybe a tiny touch of PHP from my early days. That's it.

How did I start Moz and Inbound.org and SparkToro? With help! The trouble is, a lot of folks who want to start businesses don't have a compelling way to answer the question any talented engineer/developer who might work alongside you will ask: "Why is working with you the best investment for my career?"

That's the question you have to nail. Ideally, you want it to be so obvious and so well known that folks are knocking on your door rather than the other way around. I hate trying to convince someone they should work with me or help me. I LOVE doing things to help others, to amplify my work, and to create a reputation that attracts people who WANT to work alongside me.

Thus, your two choices are: 1) Learn how to be a great engineer yourself 2) Invest in your other skills, your core values, and your unique value proposition, and amplify them in such a way that people want to come work with you.

1. Start a series of content using the platforms, networks, and systems that I'm passionate about and that resonate with my audience. That is, if I were huge into visual content, I'd try to see if Instagram+Pinterest+a visually-focused blog would resonate with my audience. If so, I'd build out my marketing there.

2. I would NOT create content and marketing designed to promote my product. I'd create things designed to attract the interest, attention, and amplification of the most influential people and publications in the field I'm targeting. Most marketing projects aren't focused on that, and IMO, that's why they fall so flat. Creating things that are not necessarily commercial or directly connected to your product, but that tap into what the most-heavily-followed amplifiers care about is a cheat code to get ahead.

3. I'd do a lot of in-person connecting. If I had no budget, that'd be all in my local area. If I had some travel spend, I'd go to conferences and events further afield and do my best to meet as many people as possible, form friendships, help them in whatever they're working on, and rely on the power of reciprocation for that karma to come back to us.

Absolutely! All the time. When we were at 10 people, I felt totally out of my depth. When we hit 40, I did again. At 75 and 100 and 150 I definitely felt it, too. Eventually, I felt so overwhelmed that I stepped down from my CEO role and promoted my COO to the Chief Exec position.

I'm not sure "overcoming" is how I'd put in. For me it was always a process of muddling through -- finding a pain point, digging into why it existed, talking to others who'd been through that experience, arriving at a potential solution, experimenting, failing, trying again, and eventually either succeeding or realizing that I simply had to build a business structure that avoided that issue entirely (e.g. I never got or got good at "sales" and I never want to --- instead I'll just build businesses that don't need a sales team or salespeople).

That's basically exactly how we spent the first 6-9 months of the company. I interviewed (formally and informally) a ton of marketers (probably 2-300, maybe more) about how they researched their audiences: where they engaged, which publications and people they followed, how they described themselves, what they talked about and shared, etc.

From that research, we found that a lot of marketers, both at agencies and in-house, used surveys, paid market research firms veritable fortunes, and did a ton of manual Googling and social stalking to uncover this information, and none of them felt all that confident in the results.

That said, what we can't really validate until we launch the product is whether people are willing to pay for it! Maybe this data is "nice to have" but not "absolutely essential". Maybe it's something people say they need for their work, but in reality, marketers are willing to guess and be wrong rather than pay money to be right. We'll find out when we get the product out there.

For that reason, we raised a lot more money than we needed to get to our first launch so we can course-correct if our initial assumptions and market research don't create a sustainable, grow-able business.

"Are there any fears that your ideas may not 'catch on' with your target market?"

OH MY GOD YES. That is exactly what keeps me up at night.

That said, it's disconnected from the loss in organic opportunity (across search + social) and Google's cannibalization of so much search traffic the last few years. That's mostly because with SparkToro, I had that fear at the forefront of my brain going into the formation of the company, and wanted to build something that didn't rely on those big players continuing to send traffic.

In fact, a core theory we had with SparkToro is that engagement on the web is going to become less fragmented and more concentrated in a few sites + platforms (Google, FB, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc dominating time spent online). The challenge for marketers is then to say -- which publications and people across those platforms are attracting my audience and how can I best reach them. That's what our product is trying to answer.

I think that long term, we'll have to accept that organic traffic opportunity is declining (though so far, that decline has been slight, not steep), and that finding alternative ways to market our products, content, messages, answers, etc. will be crucial to survival. On-SERP SEO (where you optimize what shows in the results, rather than focusing exclusively on drawing the click), on-platform social media marketing, and partnerships, guest contributions, and piggybacking of all kinds are going to rise in importance.

At least, that's what SparkToro's counting on :-)

$1,000 no SEO allowed... Huh... That's a tough one!

Depends on the sector, the audience, and the product, but I'd probably invest in one of the following:

• Visuals for promotion on Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and FB (organic)
• A podcast or sponsorship/partnerships with existing podcasts that reach my audience
• Event marketing at the events that my audience is attending/engaging with
• Influencer marketing (but only if the product is in a very specific set of niches like travel, fashion, entertainment, etc)

"Baffling drama goblins," is my new favorite expression. I might have to steal that!

Best policy I can share is:

1. Ignore obvious trolls, and if there's a hint of maliciousness or bias (racism, sexism, bigotry, etc), block + report.
2. Be open-minded and responsive about non-malicious, critical feedback. Many times there's something to be learned and a fan to be gained from having a lean-into-kindness type conversation.
3. Hate is a surprisingly good measure of impact. If you're attracting hate, especially in a ratio of 1:10 or better (i.e. 1 hateful comment for every 10 supportive ones), it likely means you're doing something that really matters and has traction.

As for things I would have done differently... The list is so long it would be impossible for me to detail it here. The best I can say is that Lost and Founder, the book I wrote, is mostly just that -- a narrative list of things I should have done differently.

Ooph. That's really hard. I think the best ways to stand out are:

1. Focus on a very specific market who has different needs to the standard ones out there.
2. Be values and culture driven in ways that make certain people want to support you over others (I hate to say it, but social values signaling is a powerful tool for this).
3. Help people -- help them at scale, help them individually, help them in ways they remember and feel gratitude for, help them without any thought of returning the favor, just because it's the right thing to do. I promise that karma will come back to you in awesome ways.

Probably not a lot. I much prefer interviews and surveys. That said, depends on the project/product -- if it's very consumer focused and has high online conversion rates via ads (and folks aren't very brand sensitive or brand aware in the space), I might try it.

It's right in the blog post + docs! https://sparktoro.com/blog/raised-a-very-unusual-round-of-funding-were-open-sourcing-our-docs/

We raised $1.3mm on a $4mm pre, so $5.3mm post, meaning our investors hold ~26% of the company.

Such a kind offer! I'm a big D&D fan, but sadly, my schedule is overwhelming for the next few months (and also I enjoy the game vastly more in person).

Yeah - I generally agree with that. Thinking about SEO as something you invest in for 6-18 months and see benefits of only thereafter is probably wise. You'll likely get some traffic in the meantime, but it's absolutely a long game -- you need the reputation with Google, meaning the ranking signals from publication mentions, links, branded search volume, traffic, etc -- to compete.

Empathy.

Learning what they do, what they care about, how they work, how and why they share and amplify, and optimizing marketing (of all kinds) to fit with those traits.

The challenge is learning those things and applying them. It's hard to learn unless you open yourself to listening well and can form bonds with a sizeable enough population of people to get a good sample set. And it's hard to apply that learning unless you have a vast store of empathy and can put yourself in your audience's shoes.

You'll also need patience. This is a long game!

Absolutely. Some audiences are primed to pay attention, consume content, engage in conversation, amplify, and others are the opposite. This is true both demographically and by field/interest. I'd definitely advise anyone doing marketing to adjust your strategy on content and brand building to focus on audiences likely to help amplify your work and brand.