Opening (00:01) Welcome to Work Mappers, where we believe in forging new paths but drawing a map for others. We’ll talk to people who have carved out unexpected careers, built different types of businesses, or have gone against the grain within the workplace, all in an effort to create something better than what’s come before. I’m your host, Lydia Frank, and I’ll act as a bit of a workplace and career cartographer, helping our guests sketch a map of their journey so the road ahead becomes a bit clearer for the rest of us. Lydia Frank (00:37) Today I have with me two guests instead of one. I have Rand Fishkin and Geraldine DeRuiter. Rand Fishkin is a leading expert in SEO and audience intelligence. He is CEO and co-founder of three companies SparkToro, Alert Mouse, and Snack Bar Studio. He’s the co-author with Amanda Natividad of the upcoming Zero Click Marketing and 2018’s Lost and Founder, Geraldine DeRuiter, is the creator and voice behind the James Beard Award-winning blog The Everywhereist and author of If You Can’t Take the Heat, Tales of Food, Feminism and Fury, and All Over the Place, Adventures and Travel, True Love and Petty Theft. They also happen to be married and regularly extol one another’s virtues and supervillain qualities online. Rand and Geraldine, thank you so much for joining me today. Rand & Geraldine (01:37) Well thanks for having us. Yeah, great to be here. Lydia Frank (01:39) Rand, I’m gonna start with you. So many people first came to know you through your first startup, Moz, which initially started as a marketing consulting business. Can you kind of talk about how that business began and what kept you focused on that path even when it got challenging? Rand Fishkin (01:59) We didn’t stay focused, which was probably a good thing. I dropped out of college and started doing web design for my mom’s Jillians, my my co-founder at Moz small marketing consultancy. And we were terrible at web design and couldn’t make any money. And then we sort of fell back on a lot of like classic marketing stuff. That wasn’t going so well. And then we found this SEO thing. That’s what that’s what took off. So the early years were sticking to trying to make something work, but not sticking to any one path. Lydia Frank (02:32) What really let you know that SEO was the the thing that you should double down on, I guess? Rand Fishkin (02:39) Well it had a very clear win condition, right? So if you if you rank at the top of at the time Google and Yahoo and MSN search, you were good at it, right? That meant that meant you were good at it. And so it was very easy to prove to clients that we were good at it. Rand Fishkin (02:54) And it was very easy to find people who were willing to pay for that at the time. Lydia Frank (02:58) I’ve seen you speak in some other interviews, podcasts and various things about the beginnings of Moz. And I know there were a lot of ups and downs there. what what kept you doing that versus kind of throwing your hands up and going and getting a regular job? Rand Fishkin (03:16) Huh. I didn’t really have a choice. So yeah, Geraldine knows the whole sordid story. But my mom and I basically had gone deep into debt because of these failed machinations attempting to build the business, and we did not tell my dad, to whom my mom was still married at the time that we were in this debt and we we both feared that if he found out the consequences would be dire. So, I couldn’t really leave I felt like if I left and found a regular job, I would be abandoning my parents’ marriage to who knows what horrible things. Lydia Frank (03:51) Complicated. With Moz, once you found your footing there and and it moved from a consultancy into a tech company, you were pretty intentional about how you built the culture. what was TAGFEE? And are those still values you ascribe to today? dive into that a little bit for us. Rand Fishkin (04:13) Sure, so TAGFEE’s an acronym. It was created by Geraldine. Geraldine DeRuiter Thank you for not using those letters in a different order. We really appreciate that. Rand Fishkin Yeah, basically so I think you sort of ran this process, even though she was not paid to do it. Rand & Geraldine I think I was. I wasn’t paid a lot, but I think you did pay me some. good. Yeah. Well that’s great. Yeah. because it was after venture funding. Yeah. It was I was still drastically underpaid. I think I made $18 an hour for this project. Lydia Frank (04:45) But it was something, yeah. Rand & Geraldine (04:47) Yeah, above the fifteen dollar minimum wage. Absolutely. Yeah, so we basically ran this exercise where, you know, Geraldine had a survey that we sent out to everyone on the team and then I think you sat and interviewed everybody, right? Yeah, I talked to I think I primarily it was a much smaller team. It was like five of us, six of us. Yeah. And I talked to you guys about what you valued in the company. What were the things that you really cared about. And a lot of similar concepts came up. Everybody was saying kind of the same thing. And I just put a title on that. I was like, All right, everyone is saying authenticity. Everyone is saying that they want to be kind of the industry sort of exception, the one who does things a little bit differently. I’m now realizing I don’t remember any of the things that that TAGFEE stands for You got two of ‘em. Transparency. Lydia Frank (05:41) I think it’s yeah. Rand Fishkin (05:42) Yeah. Authenticity, generosity, fun, empathy, and the exception. And those yeah, those six sort of stayed with us for I think the entirety of my CEO tenure. And then when the new CEO took over, I encouraged her to to change the values, which took a couple of years, but eventually eventually they just got rid of them and didn’t I I don’t think they created new ones. But to the to the second part of your question, in a way, yes, those things are still important to me. Certainly empathy is still very important to me. professionally, fun too. Transparency less so. I don’t feel the same visceral pull to sort of build in public and like have to show everyone our books all the time and tell everyone all the time what’s going on internally. It just it seems less meaningful now. The culture around it has changed. Yeah. Yeah yeah I think that’s I think that’s probably true. And it I don’t know, there’s something around like, hey, we’re a tech software company founded by, you know, two white dudes. Let’s show everyone how great we’re doing. who cares? You know like, “Shut up.” Lydia Frank (06:55) Gotcha. What would you say is your most important values at this point for for your current companies? Rand Fishkin (07:02) Yeah, we have different ones. We use the same structure that we did with Geraldine back in the day for Spark Toro, but you can read about it online. It’s it’s BELUX. B-E-L-U-X. Rand Fishkin (07:12) If you search for that you’ll you’ll find those. I think the most important one for us is boundaried, which is what the the B stands for. Very different, right? Moz was no boundaries. Moz was, you know, work consumes all. It would, you know, it had that that sort of early tech startup culture of like life is work and like we’re a family, you know, that kind of thing. lots of problems there and plenty of regrets. But SparkToro is very boundaried. Amanda’s does not work weekends. Does doesn’t matter what’s going on. She nope, weekends, that’s family time, right? I I almost never work more than six hours in a day. Just doesn’t happen. And many days are three, four hours. Geraldine and I do a lot of travel. We we have another company together, right? That takes a lot of priority and takes a lot of time. We have friends and family stuff. last week my grandfather was in the hospital. We I think we went to see him four times, right? ‘Cause we’re yeah, like we’re just not Geraldine DeRuiter (08:08) I work about 45 minutes a day. Very productive. Extremely productive. Super productive 45 minutes, but no more than that. Lydia Frank (08:17) Time box, yeah. Geraldine DeRuiter (08:18) Makes even less than eighteen dollars an hour now. Also, for the record, I wanted BELUX to I wanted the acronym to be XLUBE, but I got completely got completely booted. But no, the problem was Elon had already taken that for his company. Lydia Frank (08:30) I like it. I like it. Lydia Frank (08:36) So the boundaried that’s so interesting because it’s so different than most startups, that you hear about. Do you think that’s stage of life or do you think that is just do you wish that had always been the case? Like if you were going back to your younger self, would you say this is how you should be thinking about building a business? Rand Fishkin (08:58) Yeah, I I think there is a component that’s stage of life. I think there’s you know, it’s absolutely true that when you’re in your 20s and early 30s you you have far fewer obligations and life complexities and health issues and ailing parents, so all all that kind of stuff. so yes, it is far easier to be unboundaried. I I think that You know, Amanda is a good bit younger than I am. Casey’s a little bit younger than I am, and and both of them are still very boundaried people, and I think that that’s a wonderful thing to be. I wish more people in the professional world were that way. We’ve started valuing it more. Like it’s been a big shift that we value it more as a culture. That that is also true, yes. I think it’s you know, it’s a twenty twenties era thing where it was rarely a 2000s or a 2010s era thing. Lydia Frank (09:53) Yeah, definitely. Geraldine, let’s talk about the early days of The Everywhereist. I know you’ve talked about the fact that your award winning blog, The Everywhereist, started after a layoff. Can you talk about those early days and kind of what led you to launch your blog initially? Geraldine DeRuiter
