Rand Fishkin – Don’t Be Afraid to Stand up Against the Growth-at-All-Cost Venture Capital Model

Rand Fishkin is CEO & co-founder of SparkToro, author of Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World, and previously co-founded and ran Moz. Since publishing his book in 2018, he has earned 4.7 stars out of 5 from 170 reviews, a remarkable achievement!   “Find something you’re passionate about, where you can add unique value, and where your audience wants to pay attention. Nail those three, and you’ll do great marketing.” Rand Fishkin   Worst investment ever Time to grow business funds Rand’s worst investment ever happened when he was the CEO of Moz. In 2011, the company turned down an acquisition offer from HubSpot, a very well known marketing platform. At the time, Moz had been growing at 100% year-on-year for about six years in a row and producing about $11 million in revenue. In 2012, Moz sought to increase funding and got $18 million, of which $15 million came from a new investor, Foundry group, and $3 million of it came from a previous investor Ignition Partners. Venturing into more forms of marketing Rand’s company used the Venture Capital (VC) funding ostensibly to grow the business from just providing search engine optimization tools and software to providing different aspects of web marketing, email marketing, content marketing, PR, and social media marketing. Essentially, all of the new forms of marketing that Moz had not served previously. Cutting off what was working Over the next few years, the company cut off all growth of its software platform. As a result, existing products stopped improving and staggered. While their competitors kept making investments, Rand was pouring all of his new money into hiring a huge team, trying to figure out the new management structures, growing his offices, and acquiring other companies. Rand thought that by putting on hold what was previously working and putting all his energy into launching his new idea, the new venture would propel Moz into superstardom with this exciting and incredibly broad software suite. The horrific failure The new venture fell flat on Rand’s face. Moz’s growth rate fell from 100% year-on-year to 50% and then from 50% to 25%. Over the years, Moz continued to plateau in terms of growth and was surpassed by two direct competitors – SEMrush and Ahrefs. Over the last few years, Moz has...