Moz & Sparktoro's Rand Fishkin on How Early-Stage Failure Bred Future Success

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Rand Fishkin

I, by my nature, am a people pleaser. I want people to like me. I want you know, I want a culture where there's a lot of mutual respect and friendship and love between people, and that is really hard to create that relationship, that type of culture. I think it might even be impossible and a culture where it is I'm telling you to go left.

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Rand Fishkin

Oh, yeah. Oh, you didn't go left. Right. We're going to find a new person who will go left. I'm sorry. From afar will recur.

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Ben Hillman

It's protect the hustle. A show about those in the trenches actually doing the work. I'm Patrick Campbell.

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Neel Desai

And I'm the oversight. And on today's show, Rand Fishkin speaks with radical.

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Ben Hillman

Transparency about the difficulties he had as a first.

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Ben Hillman

Time founder and how these lessons helped him.

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Neel Desai

Achieve future.

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Patrick Campbell

Success. Founding a company is hard. Growing a growth stage company is hard running a growth stage. Companies are working at a growth stage. Company is hard. And it's so hard because you're literally taking nothing and trying to create something from it.

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Neel Desai

But I think it's especially hard because not only do you have to acquire the customer, but you also have to monetize and retain them on an ongoing basis, right? Yeah.

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Patrick Campbell

Even if it's not a subscription company, it's one of those things where you have to get the person to come back and buy that gallon of milk every single week. And in a B2B piece of software, you got to get them to basically keep paying for that product every single month.

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Neel Desai

That's true. I love milk.

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Patrick Campbell

You love. Do you really? Yeah. I thought you don't drink milk because you're a vegan.

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Neel Desai

No, I still love milk.

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Patrick Campbell

Besides your fake veganism that I just realized. I'm so excited about today's interview because it's with Rand Fishkin, the founder of Maus, and the founder and CEO of Spark Toro, who is going to take us through a pretty wild story that he's been very, very open with, not only in this interview, but also in his book Lost and Founder, which if you listen later in the episode, you're going to find out how you can actually get the book for free.

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Patrick Campbell

But what I'm most excited about with Rand Story is that he's going to take us through why Maz failed under his tutelage and what he learned from that, not only as a founder and as an executive, but also as someone building a fast company. And with that, let's first get a little bit of background on Rand, including how he started and how a little.

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Neel Desai

Bit of a.

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Patrick Campbell

Rocky relationship with his mother when he brought Mars into fruition.

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Rand Fishkin

You know, but not everyone may know that I dropped out of college, started a company with my mom that was initially a web design company, and then became an SEO consulting business called SEO Mars. And then in 2007, we became a software company. What we launched in software. It went so well our first six months, right? With the subscription model.

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Rand Fishkin

I was using PayPal.

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Ben Hillman

And I love.

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Rand Fishkin

It right? To get access to just like a few little tools that we had built for, for SEO, for ourselves, that six months in, we were like, Oh my God, this is doing my revenue that our consulting business, we slowly started phasing out consulting at the end of the year. We raised a venture capital round and the investor said, We're really interested in this, but Rand, we want you to be CEO.

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Rand Fishkin

So I had a tough conversation with my mom and was CEO at this company which started as SEO Mars and became Mars for the next seven years. And you know, during that time it was kind of a crazy growth journey, right, as 100% year over year growth. So when I stepped down as CEO, we were doing 30, a little over $30 million in revenue annually and, you know, had tens of thousands of customers had had built this business.

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Rand Fishkin

But we were hitting this inflection point where our acquisition was not keeping up with churn. And so like a lot of subscription businesses, I think we hit it much later than most folks tend to hit it. I think most people hit it in the few million dollars of revenue and we hit it in the sort of, you know, mid tens.

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Rand Fishkin

But over the next four years, Maus, you know, grew between 20% to 9% year over year. Right? So that growth rate really kind of dropped off a cliff. And as a result, you know, business struggled in lots of different ways. And I think the leadership team and the board was like kind of searching for avenues like, hey, let's try and go broader and do all these other things.

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Rand Fishkin

Oh, that didn't work at all. Let's go refocus on SEO. Let's try And you know, we acquired this get listed company that's trying to make more local happen. We'll do a sales based, you know, enterprise sales based business. And that sort of, you know, has struggled very, very hard and been real tough. And I think that very frankly, it's a you know, it's a challenging world when you get into retention stuff, especially because Maus had always been a business that was extremely good at marketing.

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Rand Fishkin

But on the acquisition side, like getting people to know about us, getting people to love us through our content and, you know, video series like Whiteboard Friday and, you know, learning about SEO, the Beginner's Guide, all this stuff that your Maus helped a lot of people and so they liked and trusted the brand and so they were willing to give the software a shot.

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Rand Fishkin

But retention was always a strike.

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Patrick Campbell

One thing I really appreciate about Rand is that he is both so just headstrong in the right direction, meaning like he's just going to jump right in, similar to like, you know, dropping out, starting a company with his mom, all these different things, but also just so transparent. You don't get those two things often with people where some people will be very, very jump in, very, very headstrong, but they won't be transparent because they're really, really embarrassed by the failures that they made.

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Patrick Campbell

And I just can't imagine being in Rand's position, raising money, being out there, having to have that conversation with your mom, and then all of a sudden running into, you know, retention issues, which is something that's just it's so unforeseen, especially when you were building a business and, you know. SAS One point I was out of 2.0 kind of where Rand and Maus really was building no nexus.

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Neel Desai

Extremely refreshing to see him describe these challenges because you see a lot of superhero college dropout stories. Yeah. That are all successful, right? But Rand brings a fresh perspective to this and saying, listen, retention permeates your entire business and sooner or later it's going to be a challenge.

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Patrick Campbell

Totally. And that's what we talk about a lot, right? You know, people have been listening to profit. Well, you know, content for a long time are probably, you know, bored with this at this point. But, you know, subscription business and it's really easy to say this now. I don't think we really realize this in SAS 1.0 and 2.0 because it was all about, hey, just spend a ton of money to buy the market because you know, the software is hard to build.

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Patrick Campbell

You know, it's hard to build a product that crawls all these websites and, you know, give scores to them and things like that. So just go right. And then as that was happening, all of a sudden, we we reached a point where I was like, Oh, there's a lot of different competitors, a lot of different fast followers that can actually, you know, be created because the cost of building software and the cost of building products went down so substantially.

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Patrick Campbell

And now, as we've talked about a lot, it's not just about acquiring those customers, but monetizing them and retaining them. And now the beauty of the subscription model is that the relationship is built into how you make money. And when that relationship goes sour with that particular customer, all of a sudden, you know, it's really, really hard because you can't just acquire more and more customers.

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Patrick Campbell

You had to keep those customers around in the long term. You lose the advantage of the subscription if those customers leave.

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Neel Desai

I think that that makes a ton of sense. It is especially compounded by the fact that their product was built for acquisition, right? It helped other SaaS companies acquire more customers and that's what they spend all their time thinking about.

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah, absolutely. It kind of permeated the culture. But let's go a little bit deeper because Rand is about to tell us very specifically what he thinks or the reasons that they missed out in terms of retention. And I think it's a really, really good retrospective, especially since he's had some time away from Mars since he started Spark Toro.

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Patrick Campbell

Just to understand, like what went wrong with that original company.

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Rand Fishkin

Was it the biggest three things? You know, when I think about why struggle, I think, one, never building personal relationships with customers. I shouldn't say never, right? I have personal relationships with at least a few hundred, if not 2000 of our customers. But that doesn't that doesn't scale, right? You can't have the founder be like, okay, Rand, you're going to be 25,000 people.

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Rand Fishkin

I want you to befriend them all. Not possible. But I think that we slowly started to do it. You know, in the last couple of years, Maya's built this team of folks who basically helped with onboarding, right? So they'd have a 30 minute phone call, 45 minute phone call with people who joined the service. You know, after I think this is, again, a tough it doesn't work well with the free trial model, right?

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Rand Fishkin

Because there's too many people taking free trials. You just can't have calls at the mall. Some people don't want to take calls, all that kind of thing. But we found that people who were willing to have a call after their first free trial month and they'd converted to a paid subscription retention went way, way up for those folks for their entire life of the customer.

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Rand Fishkin

So failing to make that relationship, I think, is one personal relationship. I think a second one was in the later years. Maus was not well differentiated from competitors, so it feels easy and fluid and like there's no barrier to, yeah, let's quit Maus and try let's quit a trust and try ICM. Let's quit some rush and try fist tricks or any of these other ones, right?

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Rand Fishkin

In some ways it's good. I like making it easy for people to quit. I like making data portable. I don't love lock ins, but I think that there's a ton of things that we could have and should have done to differentiate the business. Everything from, you know, UPS to proprietary metrics to using the quantity of information that we had about, you know, so many businesses and how they performed in SEO and then being able to apply that to everyone else.

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Rand Fishkin

Right. And so that gives you that run away advantage of being the first mover. Totally. We really didn't do that. And then I think the third one, to be totally honest, is how we sold bots. In a lot of ways, the product work this way and it was sold this way, which is if you have SEO problems, come audit.

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Rand Fishkin

Your site will show you all the things you need to do to fix it. Then you fix them. But it's not. It's not about the ongoing value of, Oh, and now you monitor your rankings and see how your competitors are doing and compare progress over time and look at the links that you didn't get that you should be getting.

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Rand Fishkin

And you know, all these kinds of things. It was not marketed that way. And the product, while it provided that, you had to like figure out how to get all that stuff. Sure. As opposed to the, you know, the initial onboard experience was just like, okay, here's a checklist of stuff to fix. Like Patrick, all these things are broken on, you know, whatever profit welcome and fix all the stuff.

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Rand Fishkin

So then you're like, great, this is a free trial. I fix all my stuff, my ass is going up. Cancel. I'm good. Yeah. You know, and a lot of people think of SEO that way as like a one time activity or.

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Patrick Campbell

So my struggling. This in hindsight, makes perfect sense. Right? And that's that's great He's he's had the opportunity the the advantage of distance but I think this brings up a couple of really really interesting points. One thing that assumes or MAS has that is is is very, very problematic in this new wave of subscription companies is they don't have an anti active usage product or a workflow product.

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Patrick Campbell

So when you think of the spectrum of products, you have products that you're in every single day, like you know, your CRM, right, or your email, you're using them every single day. You use them to work, especially in B2B and B2C. It might be, you know, a particular product that, you know, gives you joy or automates your life or something like that.

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Patrick Campbell

And then you have these products that are like anti active usage. These are products that you don't really need to necessarily like actually actively use, sort.

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Neel Desai

Of like retain.

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Patrick Campbell

Just like retain profile, retain you plug it in, basically reduces your credit card failures and soon to be your active churn as well moms and a lot of analytics products. This is why profit is free you know and we had the benefit of hindsight in seeing you know what was happening with companies like Maus and other analytics companies, the kind of in the middle.

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Patrick Campbell

You don't absolutely need it to do your job unless you're an SEO marketer. You know, you also don't necessarily need to use it all the time if you're an SEO marketer because you're not necessarily logging into it every single day unless you're in a certain industry where SEO is the dominant category, it's all of a sudden your market sizing gets all over the place.

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Patrick Campbell

You get a lot of different people who are kind of like, Oh, I kind of need this. And going through the episodic churn that he described, which is, Thanks for telling me what's wrong, let me go figure out how to fix those things, which might take 2 to 12 months and then maybe I'll come back. But I might try out one of these other products.

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Neel Desai

Right. And that's just sort of I bet his monthly willingness to pay just plummeted, right? I mean, you try the product and then you're done.

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Patrick Campbell

But I bet it also like skyrocketed for certain folks, Right. Who got hooked on that. And that's why Mars absolutely has happy customers. You know, they've gone through these growth rates after they've learned some of these lessons and they've they've since recovered. But I think what's really kind of fascinating is that when you look at and you know, when he said this, I was like, oh, I know exactly what you're talking about because I would use SEO Marcus or Mars at the time.

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Patrick Campbell

And when you look at the onboarding and you look at all the power that they give you and then you try to go to the embarrassed or some rush and you try to log in and Sam Rush is like, Yeah, pay us to do something within seven days to see anything. It's not the same. It's just a different, a different style, right?

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Patrick Campbell

And the same style is really what works for this type of product versus something that's like giving away too much because, you know, you just end up getting way too many like leads that you're trying to service. And, you know, I would even argue that building relationships on a 1 to 1 basis or even a many to one basis just doesn't even really work as much with these types of products.

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Patrick Campbell

I'm still branding and like, you know, still have like the conferences and things like that and great, you know, content. But I don't think it necessarily works for these types of products anymore because they're they're a game of inches at this point.

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Neel Desai

Yeah, it's tricky because onboarding permeates the entire, like first time user experience, right? So from a product perspective, you want a phenomenal onboarding. Absolutely. And on one end of the spectrum, you have the superhuman style. We're going to talk to everyone, right? And then the other, you may have a completely touchless model, but I think finding that balance for a product that you're not in dailies is tricky.

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah, it's super, super tough. And I think that's why it becomes a game of numbers, because even their style, which has led as many people in as possible or was their style ultimately like makes it super difficult because you have too many onboarding. So yeah, you know, and that's when you try to solve that with a person. But if you get thousands and thousands and the lead scoring isn't as great, now they obviously have to fix some of this.

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Patrick Campbell

But I can imagine in the come up, you know, basically dealing with this and then not being able to kind of adjust is is super problematic, as I'm sure.

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Neel Desai

Yeah.

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah. But I think one thing that's gotten me and I know Randy's about to tell us about this a little bit is that this is a cultural thing. Like if you're an acquisition based company or you're a growth company or you're a balanced growth company, those are all cultural. Those stem from the top. As Randy's about to tell us, the stem from the people that you have there and those stem through even the decision making and how you make decisions at a particular company.

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Neel Desai

Interesting. It's not like they didn't have a customer success team, though.

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Patrick Campbell

No, but I think that it's not just enough to have a team, right? Like we have a product team. We team. It's not about having the actual resources, either the people or the products that you have. It's about how you use those resources in order to optimize for the right thing. So obviously Mars was coming into a certain like way into the market and basically it was like, hey, acquire customers, acquire customers, acquire customers, right?

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah. The problem is, is that they weren't necessarily retention focused and all of a sudden they were losing all these customers and then they were at a certain size where they couldn't actually solve this particular problem. And as Rand's about it, tell us, the way that they would solve problems at Mars wasn't really conducive to solving this retention problem.

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Neel Desai

That's fair.

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Patrick Campbell

I mean, everything stems from people, everything stems from culture and I'm.

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Neel Desai

Sure the inertia is just so much bigger when you're a 100% company than it's 20% nuts. We're seeing that here as we.

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Patrick Campbell

Totally, totally as we grow, it's like it gets harder to do things. Yeah. You know, when you're 80 people, a hundred people, 300 people, 500 people, then when you were like 20 people and going to be like, Hey, Neil, go figure this out. Yeah, right. Yeah. So let's learn a little bit more about this because I think this is where we have like the true nuggets of wisdom that we can figure out from reading, talking to us about the failures at Mars.

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Patrick Campbell

And when it comes from a culture perspective, which had a great culture, yeah, just not necessarily the culture to solve this problem totally. Let's go back to Rick.

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Ben Hillman

Do you think like that's in this positioning there? There's packaging there, There's who you're targeting and how you're targeting them. Yeah, all of this we're sitting here and it's like, yeah, seems perfectly intuitive, right? Like, oh, that seems that's totally right. Right. And I know that they've implemented like, you know, when you were there some of the stuff and like when you left and some of this stuff that you kind of ceded kind of finished off.

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Rand Fishkin

But fixing things is so much more difficult. Yeah, that's starting.

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Ben Hillman

So yeah. So why, why do you think, one, was it hard to see that those were the things to fix? And then to why was it so hard? Because I know, you know, you talked about the multiproduct strategy. You guys went after that and went hard after that. Right? And then you had loyal customers there, but then it just wasn't the right thing.

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Ben Hillman

And why do you think this is so hard?

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Rand Fishkin

One thing that is absolute true is we are in a relatively new world with software as a service and subscription businesses and as software is relatively new, right? It's 12 years old or 11 years old. And so there are not a lot of people who have seen this through and can tell you, you know, these are the mistakes you're going to make.

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Rand Fishkin

Here are the challenges and problems. I think this is why it's so important for folks like us who have these experiences, especially ones that go wrong, to be willing to talk about them. Right. And be willing to share them, because that is what helps the next generation of people who are building product or service or business be able to avoid those potholes and road bumps and collisions, all the things.

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Ben Hillman

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love your book. Oh, yeah. Thanks. I mean, because that you get, you go hard into some of those things which I think is like very good for a lot of folks because you see this so many times with, you know especially, you know, being a first time founder and like I talked to a lot of first time founders where we're trying to relearn the wisdom that you've already learned well.

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Rand Fishkin

And I mean, I think when you're the when you're doing it the second or third time, you've seen a lot of those mistakes. And it it makes a lot easier. I mean, you look at a lot of the companies that have done very well. Many of them have either have done one or two things right in their early scaling.

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Rand Fishkin

They brought in experienced veterans and experienced people who'd seen this journey before. I think a lot of people would point to like, oh, look at Facebook bringing in, you know, people like Sheryl Sandberg and many other executives. Oh, look at Google bringing in Eric Schmidt. Right. Early on, I was like, hey, let's get some experience on that. And that is true.

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Rand Fishkin

You know, culturally throughout those organizations of of TOPGRADING and adding people in who've seen things through HubSpot was started by veteran people who had started multiple companies in the past and built those models was started by a kid and his mom. Right, Right. And like, okay, well now, you know, you might say like, well, I hope Rand knows what he's doing with Spark Toro and like, figure that out.

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Rand Fishkin

And, you know, fingers crossed. I think I'm sure I'll make new mistakes. I hope I don't make the same exact once again and any time you are in a big transformational period and you have people early stage starting out, you're going to make a lot of mistakes.

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Ben Hillman

Yeah, as you were. Because was I mean, you weren't small, right? And as you enter, you need to grow and continue to add leadership and all these different things. You know, you still have this retention problem. When you were looking at that, you had the resources, you know, not, you know, your first time, but at that point, you know, you've been in the trenches enough that you knew it was going on.

00:20:03:12 - 00:20:22:02

Ben Hillman

What do you think was most difficult there? Because I know there's a lot of companies that they get to that 10 million or more and they push higher than that. But then it's just like hard to get that escape velocity, especially because of retention mostly. And it's it's again, not for a lack of being able to maybe look at the problem.

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Ben Hillman

It's just the lack of action or like the lack of speed. Right. Or what do you think it really came down to? Because you guys had, you know, theoretically, like not all the resources, but a lot of resources, right?

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Rand Fishkin

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's it is infuriating and frustrating and I think it takes a toll on your soul to realize how slow things move in an organization with a few hundred people. Right. And and I think that's one of the things that we did that I did very poorly at Mars is create an organization with a bias to action and and an ability to solve things as opposed to, I think Mars very much had a a culture of needing cohesion between people and being willing to sacrifice speed in exchange for making sure everyone felt comfortable with what was being changed before anyone does any work on it, and making sure that along each step

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Rand Fishkin

of the process of the change process, that there's approvals and more approvals from sort of all around, I think that culture can work quite well at a very large company. That's right, because you you create a sense of like, hey, I'm actually important. They consider my opinion. All the voices in the room are heard, but it is it can be a death knell, right?

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Rand Fishkin

A death by a thousand cuts. When you have a business with a problem and you need to make fast changes and you need to be able to iterate many times because we will make, you know, the first ten things you try to fix. The mistake will be wrong.

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Ben Hillman

Got it.

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Rand Fishkin

And you have to have a team that keeps trusting and keeps making those changes as opposed to a team that goes, okay, stop. We no longer believe in this like person or leader or whatever it is, right? And their decision making authority. And so we need to go to a more comprehensive buy in model. Yeah. Cultural.

00:22:14:21 - 00:22:47:18

Ben Hillman

Yeah. So like balance between like letting chaos reign and trying to reign in the chaos, right? Because you can't go complete anarchy because then everyone's moving in all different directions. You can't go like lockstep because then you're just like, so slow, like bureaucratic, right? And I don't know, I find, like, it's, it's, it's so emotionally taxing. Like, I don't know how you feel about this, but as a founder, like, it's so emotionally taxing because you're sitting there and you're like, just go like, just go or just go this way, not that way.

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Ben Hillman

And it's just you hit it from both sides. And then you also have to have yeah.

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Rand Fishkin

Yeah, you have to be you have to be willing to sort of say a few things like, I know I might be wrong and we're going to do it anyway. I know that this other way could be the way to do it, and we're going to try that next, or we're going to try that in three iterations. But for now, we have to do do this.

00:23:07:03 - 00:23:38:00

Rand Fishkin

And I think the can be very tough, right? I, I by my nature am a people pleaser. I want people to like me. I want you know, I want a culture where there's a lot of mutual respect and friendship and love between people and that it is really hard to create that relationship, that type of culture. I think it might even be impossible and a culture where it is I'm telling you to go left.

00:23:38:00 - 00:23:42:18

Rand Fishkin

Go left. Yeah. Oh, you didn't go left. Right. We're going to find a new person who will go left.

00:23:43:02 - 00:23:49:03

Rand Fishkin

I'm sorry. Oh.

00:23:49:11 - 00:23:50:05

Neel Desai

My heart aches.

00:23:50:05 - 00:23:54:11

Patrick Campbell

I know that That's. It's so tough, but, like, what is your heart?

00:23:54:11 - 00:24:03:01

Neel Desai

I mean, like, this is. This is a real example of you just have to go through it to build that wisdom. You just have to live in and actually build it yourself to get that.

00:24:03:04 - 00:24:25:13

Patrick Campbell

That's what's so weird about building a company is because you hear all about, you know, the mom and the son or, you know, any combination of family that made it right. You know, Qualtrics, the family company that made it. You don't hear about all the companies led by gray haired 45 year old men and women who are absolutely crushing it because it's kind of like a sexy story, right?

00:24:25:13 - 00:24:42:15

Patrick Campbell

Even though those are where the sexy numbers are coming from. And I think this kind of, you know, in the line of your thinking wisdom is something that has to be learned. It's really, really hard to teach it. So even, you know, I think what what hurts when we listen to Rand is not necessarily that, you know, we we believe or don't believe it.

00:24:42:15 - 00:24:57:18

Patrick Campbell

It's probably that we believe it because we've gone through it. Yeah. And you and I, we've definitely have gone through this. A prophet. Well, some of the things that he's talking about and learning some of these things, especially around accommodation, you know, in the early days, we, you know, especially me as a first time founder, I was like, oh, I want everyone to like me.

00:24:57:18 - 00:25:20:22

Patrick Campbell

And I got to accommodate. Like, I don't know what that opinion is, valid or not valid. And I think that consensus building, thankfully, we didn't necessarily have that. We had a very disagreeable culture in a healthy way, sometimes not as healthy between for going to and I, but we've worked on that for years. Yeah, but I think that's a really, really big thing is that if you're consensus building in a company like you're not a politician, like you're not building things out.

00:25:20:22 - 00:25:29:21

Patrick Campbell

And my heart aches because I learned that the hard way. And like fortunately, I guess for us, I learned it on smaller things rather than the whole company. Well, what's.

00:25:29:21 - 00:25:37:17

Neel Desai

The line, though, between that and creating alignment? Because I also think part of your role is is aligning the team and making sure we're all headed in the same way, right?

00:25:37:17 - 00:25:54:12

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, I think I think it comes down to you need to be disagreeable for the discussion, but there needs to be a point where it says and Rand kind of got out this, which is we're going to go this way. And I know I may be wrong, but we're going this way. You're right. We've listened to all the data.

00:25:54:12 - 00:26:10:17

Patrick Campbell

We've looked at everything. We've done as much due diligence as we can based on the value of this decision. And now we have to go and this is where disagreeing committee comes in, right? So you be disagreeable in the discussion. And then as soon as that and then, you know, in certain decisions, it's a really, really large decision.

00:26:10:23 - 00:26:40:00

Patrick Campbell

So with Facundo, we basically we have certain things in the business that we really care about that the other person is technically in charge of. And so what we've come to an understanding on, and this helped our relationship a lot, was those things we will argue until we agree. And what that means is, and that's a little bit of consensus building on like a two person level, but we will argue about something until we agree or we disagree and commit and set up a test or set up, you know, a certain environment for us to do that particular thing.

00:26:40:13 - 00:26:57:12

Patrick Campbell

And I think that's a really, really big, you know, cultural phenomenon. This is why one of our core principles, one of four, is be disagreeable. Think critically, because we shouldn't be consensus building. We should be challenging one another. It's not license to be an asshole, you know. But what it is, is basically a license to challenge everything, rethink everything.

00:26:57:15 - 00:27:15:05

Patrick Campbell

And then when decisions have been made, master the art of execution, which is another one of our principles, and basically go after that particular plan, even if you disagree with it. And at that point it's not about I told you. So if that plan blows up, it's, Hey, we know that we're all going to make decisions that aren't necessarily going to pan out probably Totally.

00:27:15:05 - 00:27:31:06

Neel Desai

And I think ultimately I've seen it work really well because we're all in it to pursue the mission here and search for the truth behind what's going to help us grow the business. Right. So even if it's uncomfortable for a period of time, ultimately it gets uncomfortable. It pushes us, you know, to try to succeed.

00:27:31:12 - 00:27:49:23

Patrick Campbell

But Rand kind of talks about this, and I know he's going to talk about it in a second, but it is all about building that muscle. Yeah, right. And this is why when people bring, you know, arguments about snacks and arguments about, you know, these other, you know, things that you or I might look at or although you do like your snacks, you and I look at and go, Oh, this is ridiculous.

00:27:49:23 - 00:28:13:10

Patrick Campbell

Why are we having this conversation? You have to be very, very careful not to, you know, say, hey, this isn't important right now. There's a point where you might have to have an individual conversation about like, hey, this is what we should be focused on. Yeah, but those conversations should be met with. All right, let's have that argument, because I'm expecting you to also disagree on these bigger things or these things that have a more consequential like impact on the whole business.

00:28:13:18 - 00:28:30:19

Patrick Campbell

And it's like building that muscle up. And I know that's really easy to say. And I think that, you know, there's there is a world where, you know, and I think this is where we can credit Facundo a lot. There's a world where left to our own devices without someone as disagreeable as fuck, you know, because he's very, very high in that spectrum.

00:28:30:19 - 00:28:50:06

Patrick Campbell

I'm close to him. But then we have Peter, who's on the opposite end of the spectrum, is that the world where we went, the miles route, where we wanted everyone to like, have consensus on decisions and things like that. And so I think it's important to have that balance amongst that experience and also that culture. That's, you know, it's not about, you know, the Friend club, it's about the mission that you're trying to go after.

00:28:50:08 - 00:28:51:02

Neel Desai

No, absolutely.

00:28:51:11 - 00:29:11:07

Patrick Campbell

That being said, this doesn't make it easy because whether you're in Rand's position, where you're trying to do consensus, build on things that he just wants to happen or you're in a very, very disagreeable culture and you probably shouldn't be like all the way on the other side of the spectrum. It's a good balance in between. It's still emotionally really, really tough to deal with.

00:29:11:15 - 00:29:16:07

Neel Desai

But you have to embrace the uncomfortableness that comes with that, right? I think especially for folks.

00:29:16:07 - 00:29:37:14

Patrick Campbell

Who are where where my heart breaks and where my heart is like, oh, when it when I'm listening and Rand is when he talks about some of these things because I you know, I just empathize so much with that could have been me or that was me in these certain situations. And what I really want to learn from Rand and he's about to tell us about this is like how you actually cope with those things inside a company, especially as things are moving.

00:29:37:14 - 00:29:40:00

Patrick Campbell

So quickly. So let's go back to Rand and learn a bit more.

00:29:40:06 - 00:29:59:11

Ben Hillman

So do you find so I know you've written a lot and I appreciate this so much, like stuff on mental health as a founder and I'm also in the people pleasing category where I'm like incredibly insecure and yeah, yeah, right. Me and you like me like I have to yell, Oh my God, there's someone.

00:29:59:11 - 00:30:03:10

Rand Fishkin

Saying something bad about me. Yeah, yeah. Infectious in complete and utter upset.

00:30:03:10 - 00:30:12:00

Ben Hillman

Let me go fix it. Right. And so how how do you how did you manage that? I mean, it's a little bit smaller now. It's you and Cassie. I think just an issue right now, right? Yes.

00:30:12:01 - 00:30:14:02

Rand Fishkin

KC has beers with him. Now you just tell me.

00:30:14:02 - 00:30:31:10

Ben Hillman

I'm just like, how? How did you cause amongst chaos, amongst struggle. And then you have all the, like, classic things with just being a founder. Sure. You have those things at once. Like what? You know, And you weren't allowed to shave your mustache until you got back to profitability. Well, that was.

00:30:31:10 - 00:30:32:06

Rand Fishkin

A self-imposed.

00:30:32:06 - 00:30:35:00

Ben Hillman

Probably a stressful once you committed to that. Yeah.

00:30:35:00 - 00:30:56:13

Rand Fishkin

Especially on humid days would just go yeah was ridiculous. I'll be totally honest I don't think I ever got to a place where I was comfortable and happy with it while I was at Mars. What I want to believe is that now being able to have some distance from that, if I get into those situations again, I will be much more comfortable with it.

00:30:56:18 - 00:31:19:12

Rand Fishkin

Right. I think that once you can see from the outside, like, God, why was I so obsessed with these people? Like I realize now that that doesn't that doesn't truly impact me. It doesn't truly impact them. It's it's fine. We can we can be okay letting people go. We're not good fits. I can be okay if people go out and complain about me.

00:31:19:17 - 00:31:40:00

Rand Fishkin

I can be okay. If not everyone on the team likes me, I can be okay with. I make the final call and it's wrong. And then the next one's wrong and the next one's wrong and the next one is wrong. And we finally get to a good place. And there's three people who are, you know, burnt out along those couple of years that are like ransomware.

00:31:40:00 - 00:31:56:14

Rand Fishkin

Work with that. Yeah, right. And being okay with that as opposed to being absolutely paralyzed by it. I don't know whether that's age that helps with that. You know, you get to a place where you're like, Oh, I'm not in my twenties anymore. I don't yeah, yeah. I don't care as much about Yeah.

00:31:56:14 - 00:31:58:08

Ben Hillman

I can choose my friends. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:31:58:09 - 00:32:11:14

Rand Fishkin

Well, yeah, I mean, I think that that's a big part of it. Too many, many cultures, many workplace cultures are also how people find their friends and their colleagues and people that they date. Right. And these kinds of things. And that's not always great either.

00:32:11:17 - 00:32:20:23

Ben Hillman

Yeah. As tough as typical. Yeah. I think like thinking about I think it's iterations, right because you have enough that things don't blow up yet.

00:32:20:23 - 00:32:35:05

Rand Fishkin

This is great for this right Because you had these conversations and then the, you know, your counselor, your therapist or your business coach or whatever was like, okay, Patrick, it sounds like you're telling me all these things. Why do you feel that way? And then you ask yourself that question, you have the like.

00:32:35:08 - 00:32:37:05

Ben Hillman

And you're like, Eureka! Oh, I shouldn't think that way.

00:32:37:08 - 00:33:03:10

Rand Fishkin

Yeah, exactly. It's it I think once you're aware of that behavior, then you can start to work on it. And then it's just a question of are you good enough at doing that work on yourself that you can apply and improve and get to a healthier place. And in the, you know, the sources of anxiety and the sources of, you know, making irrational and illogical emotional decisions, it's just humanity, like we're all human.

00:33:03:10 - 00:33:27:12

Rand Fishkin

And and you get to this. I think you you never get to the place where you do it all the time, but you work towards getting to a place where you forgive yourself and you say, it's not my fault and it's not their fault and it's and it's okay. It's okay. And that that's hard to do.

00:33:27:12 - 00:33:28:02

Neel Desai

Clearly.

00:33:28:11 - 00:33:29:21

Patrick Campbell

It's very hard. What do you think of this?

00:33:30:06 - 00:33:54:06

Neel Desai

I mean, I think first it's it's it paints a different perspective on the identity of a CEO. I think while you're going through it and then as you reflect back on it. Right. I think Rand's extremely honest about how he transitioned from a state of wanting to be like, you know, finding consensus to a state of being disagreeable and then finding that culture.

00:33:54:06 - 00:34:00:04

Neel Desai

And I think seeing that tied to the growth of the business is pretty fascinating.

00:34:00:08 - 00:34:03:16

Patrick Campbell

How do you think we do a profile with this dangerous question?

00:34:04:04 - 00:34:25:02

Neel Desai

Yeah, I mean, it's an evolution, I think. I think because it's so core to our culture, we repeat these values every other week at our own hands. Meetings is definitely top of mind as far as the culture goes right now in practice, day to day, it's not easy. And I think, you know, we can obviously get better in the execution of some of these things.

00:34:25:02 - 00:34:34:22

Neel Desai

But as far as being this disagreeable goes and trying to find the truth behind what the best way forward is, I think. I think we're decent.

00:34:35:02 - 00:34:36:20

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, I think we've lucked into it.

00:34:37:02 - 00:34:37:13

Neel Desai

You think so?

00:34:37:14 - 00:34:59:16

Patrick Campbell

Yeah. I think that just because the basis of the personalities that mix together and I think that I don't think we've been intentional about creating our team of rivals. You know, the, the whole Lincoln, you know, metaphor about putting together a cabinet of people who are the best people for the job, even though they may disagree. And actually the disagreement is what produces, you know, great results.

00:34:59:16 - 00:35:28:17

Patrick Campbell

I think that we kind of lucked into that. And I think that, you know, prior to maybe this year, you know, we I'd give us maybe a C-plus on things like, you know, letting folks go maybe weren't great fits measuring what is a great fit. Yeah, right. These types of things. And I think that where we struggled a lot and I think where, you know, we had a little bit of culture shock this year was I think we exited last year, 2019, because it's going to come out in 2020.

00:35:29:06 - 00:35:47:19

Patrick Campbell

I think we struggled a lot when it came to, you know, accepting some of these things, like we even, you know, had some of this consensus building of always thinking it was our fault, always thinking that we needed to, you know, put together some sort of plan or something like that to help either a person, which I think is the right instinct to have.

00:35:47:20 - 00:35:58:14

Patrick Campbell

Yeah. But shortening that cycle and going from a place of, you know, being okay with mediocrity, being okay with, hey, this, this, this isn't working to getting to a place of like not accepting.

00:35:58:14 - 00:35:59:06

Neel Desai

It, you know.

00:35:59:06 - 00:36:21:06

Patrick Campbell

And then putting in places to measure that so that you can not accept it quicker or get the person the right skills or the right, you know, coaching that they need. And I think it's just really hard, you know, more people, more problems. Right. And I think that a lot of us listen to, you know, the Netflix doctrines and, you know, the Patty McCord's of the world who I know we we really kind of, you know, vibe with.

00:36:21:11 - 00:36:36:23

Patrick Campbell

And they you know, they go, yeah, yeah, I want a protein. I want a protein when in reality a lot of us are running our companies like, you know, club teams, hey, everyone gets a spot, everyone gets playing time, these types of things. And you know, everyone you know, let's be friends, you know, as Ramp is talking about.

00:36:36:23 - 00:37:05:23

Patrick Campbell

And at the end of the day, this is in Friend Club. You know, this is a mission we're trying to do something that's really, really difficult and we're trying to do it with not enough resources in a short amount of time, whether you're funded, bootstrapped or whatever. And so I think that's that's the biggest thing that I would leave, you know, folks with is like, do that self-reflection, but really, really make sure that you're not only putting that team together that has an experience and has that wisdom as much as humanly possible, but you're truly aligning with what you want.

00:37:05:23 - 00:37:20:06

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, it's totally fine to have a family. It's totally the family as a company. It's totally fine to have that club team as long as you understand what the consequence of that is. And it's totally fine to have a pro team as long as you're okay with the trade offs that are going to come from that.

00:37:20:10 - 00:37:36:09

Neel Desai

I think for me it's helpful to understand and know from others that, listen, what you're signing up for, is it going to be really difficult? And these are these are the trade offs, like you said that you're signing up for. And if so, if that's not a good fit, that's completely okay. Maybe it's just not a good fit at that company.

00:37:36:09 - 00:37:40:16

Neel Desai

Right. And if it is, then lean into that and let's go kick some butt.

00:37:40:20 - 00:37:56:23

Patrick Campbell

I think also having the relationship where you can talk about these things, I think that's the really big thing that we're not really talking about here is that I don't know if Rand had the people around him that he could talk about this kind of stuff with, or maybe he could, but he didn't necessarily use it in the right direction or the direction.

00:37:56:23 - 00:38:21:07

Patrick Campbell

Right. Because it's hard Like this isn't easy. Right. And especially when your mindset is like that and you didn't have the distance or the benefit, the distance from a second company to his first company, it's one of those things that you got to have the right culture where you can talk about these things, you can talk about those failures, and you not just expected the win win win all the time because, you know, when you're trying to build something from nothing, you're going to lose almost as often, if not much more than you're actually going to win.

00:38:21:07 - 00:38:26:00

Neel Desai

Right. All right. So let's recap. What did we learn today?

00:38:26:16 - 00:38:47:09

Patrick Campbell

Don't start a company with your mom. Always ends poorly. No, I'm just kidding. No, I think we learn it's so hard to go back to some of the earlier points because I think the later points are kind of the overarching developing points of things. I think the biggest thing is being disagreeable and not consensus building is is something that's going to help your business a lot.

00:38:47:09 - 00:38:53:11

Patrick Campbell

You have to find the right balance. It's not license to be a jerk or anything like that, but like really, really finding that balance is important.

00:38:53:17 - 00:39:07:21

Neel Desai

And then I think the second thing is that retention is absolutely crucial to growing a subscription business today, right? Companies overindex on acquisition over over again. And as you grow, you just have to, you know, lean into making sure your retention is up to par.

00:39:08:02 - 00:39:32:03

Patrick Campbell

Yeah. And I think the one thing that can't be over emphasized is don't suffer in silence. Right? I think that's the biggest thing. And you might not realize that you're suffering at the time. You might not understand why things aren't working. But if you're introspective, you know, and you're really, really thinking about what you're learning or not learning, and then you also have people around you that are trying to challenge you and learn from you.

00:39:32:03 - 00:39:45:16

Patrick Campbell

And maybe even a therapist that's helping you kind of deal with these emotions. That's what makes a great founder, That's what makes a great executive, is someone who who can handle that ego, that humility in, that pain all at the same time and still keep moving forward.

00:39:46:00 - 00:39:46:15

Neel Desai

Makes total sense.

00:39:46:16 - 00:40:00:18

Patrick Campbell

Well, that's offered this week. If you want to find Rand on Twitter and thank him for imbuing this wisdom on us today, he has at Rand Fish. And if you also want a copy of his book Lost and Founder, you can find it on Amazon or if you want a free copy, we have a couple dozen copies here to give away to our listeners.

00:40:01:10 - 00:40:11:12

Patrick Campbell

Feel free to give us a five star review on iTunes and then email a screenshot of the review to Patrick at proffer. Welcome. And we will hook you up with Lost and founder for free.

00:40:15:11 - 00:40:27:10

Abby Sullivan

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