Staying Scrappy as You Scale with Rand Fishkin

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster and with me today is Rand Fishkin. Rand is the co- founder and CEO of SparkToro and I had the privilege of being on Rand's board of his last company, Moz, for four or five years, so got to know him a bit then. Rand, it's good to see you. Welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, lovely to be here, Matt. Thanks for having me.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, so tell us real quickly about SparkToro

Rand Fishkin: Sure. So we're a very unique kind of startup that did not raise any venture capital and we have a very unique funding model which we've open sourced our docks so if any of you founders want to go check out ways to raise money that potentially are not VC heavy and focused on making profits and staying alive instead of growth at all costs, you can do that. SparkToro, what we provide, we're a software as a service similar to my last company, Moz, and we help primarily marketers, a lot of entrepreneurs and founders, a lot of business development folks and market researchers to deeply understand an online audience. So if you want to know what podcasts are popular with interior designers in Canada, or what do chemical engineers watch on YouTube, or which hashtags could I use to reach players of Dungeons and Dragons, SparkToro can tell you that you sort of search for an audience and we tell you all sorts of data about them that we collect from public, social and web profiles.

Matt Blumberg: Awesome. It's probably something that we need to be using. I think we use it a little bit, but we probably need to use it more.

Rand Fishkin: I think definitely when you take this video and you put it up on Twitter and LinkedIn and all that kind of stuff, you should check out the hashtags that founders are using and you should post with those hashtags. That's the teeniest tiniest tip.

Matt Blumberg: That's the tip. Okay.

Rand Fishkin: But there's loads more.

Matt Blumberg: Great. All right, so Rand, question for today is three tips for the founders watching of how to stay scrappy as they scale their businesses. And it is one of the things that I really admired about you at Moz, is you built a pretty substantial business with a couple hundred employees at Moz, but you still had that vibe and the company still had that vibe of the hungry startup, so would love to share a few tricks for that.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Okay. So the first one is I want to ruthlessly interrogate the goal of the question, and I think you should too, and I think that should be actually something that every founder does with every big question they're asked like this. Why do you want to stay scrappy? What is your goal in that? Is it because you want to save money? Is it because you want to keep your team working at a very high pace because you believe that working at a very high pace is how you produce the most value? Why are you trying to produce the most value? I think that ruthless interrogation process of asking why over and over is incredibly valuable. So this is my first tip. It's a little bit orthogonal to the question, but I would highly encourage founders to do that. Okay-

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, for sure because your answer to that is going to point you in some different directions.

Rand Fishkin: Yes, absolutely. You could even find that what you actually want to do is be maximalist here and scrappier over here and that's a fine discovery as well.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah.

Rand Fishkin: The second thing I'd say is if you find that what you want to do is stay scrappy, meaning you have an early stage sort of mindset where you try not to spend too much money or too much time chasing any one thing, and you attempt to do a lot of cheap experimentation before you pursue any paths, which I think can be a good side of being scrappy, if you decide to do that one of my best pieces of advice is go a little bit slower than you think and be more strategic before you start doing any of your experiments. And my top suggestion on this is talk to lots of people who faced this problem before. I know sometimes we founders, especially the engineering side of us, want to dive right into the problem and start getting going with solutions, but that's the opposite of creativity. In fact, anyone who's ever studied creativity, you can watch lots of videos on YouTube, you can read lots of research about it will tell you that in order to be creative you need to slow down. You have to give your brain time to come up with things. And one of the best ways to do that is schedule a bunch of chats with people like Matt and the Bolster team, and you will hear lots of different perspectives from people who face that similar problem. Okay.

Matt Blumberg: Yep, for sure.

Rand Fishkin: Third and last one that I've got for you is when you are attempting to stay scrappy, there are, I think there's a competing pressure from many, many founders sort of mindsets to the need for scale quickly and my advice would be that there's the classic startup advice of do things that don't scale, which I think founders struggle with a lot because they're constantly thinking about how do I make this thing bigger? One thing that I would say is if you feel relatively confident that eventually the problem you're solving is going to be a big problem for some particular set of the market, you can go ahead and target the tiny slice that doesn't scale well. The tiny slice of the market who has the problem most perniciously right now, and you can serve them well and then in the future you can scale to the next group of people. There are lots of examples of startups that did it this way, but for some reason stories don't get told and the story of hypergrowth and very rapid scaling, blitz scaling that Reed Hastings used that, I don't know why that's taken off, but I would advise you to go back the other way and sort of go slice by slice by slice, you can carve these problems into much smaller problems that will make your scrappy efforts just way easier.

Matt Blumberg: For sure. I'm a huge believer in most of what Jeffrey Moore wrote over the years and Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado. That's what that's all about. You have to get it down for the visionaries, then the early adopters, then you figure out how to deal with Main Street.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, and it could even be that you might say, " Hey, we're providing this," I don't know, " amazing database software, but we think that the only people who need it right now is this small group of a few hundred investment bankers." That's not a big enough market. Don't worry. You solve it for them. You'll often find an adjacent market that also needs a modified version of that thing, and then you can go to market two and market three. So I don't even know that it's necessarily early adopters and visionaries and those kinds of things and late adopters. It's really going slice by slice in a market or geographically. Like oh, only New Zealand needs this thing right now. That's fine. Start with them.

Matt Blumberg: If it works for 11 million sheep, it could work for you. Rand Fishkin from SparkToro, thank you for being with us.

Rand Fishkin: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Matt.