Beyond Venture Capital: The Bootstrapper’s Blueprint | The Pair Program Ep38

Tim Winkler: 00:00:05

Welcome to The Pair Program from hatchpad, the podcast that gives you a front row seat to candid conversations with tech leaders from the startup world. I'm your host, Tim Winkler, the creator of hatchpad. And I'm your other

Mike Gruen: 00:00:15

host, Mike

Tim Winkler: 00:00:16

Ruin. Join us each episode as we bring together two guests to dissect topics at the intersection of technology, startups, and career growth. Welcome back to The Pair Program. Tim Winkler here. Mike Gruen joining me per usual, Mike, it finally happened. Um, I caught, I caught the COVID. I dodged it for three and a half years and, uh, sure enough, like a disc golf retreat with 15 guys in a bunk room. We'll, uh, we'll do the trick. So

Mike Gruen: 00:00:54

congratulations. I don't know if that's the right thing to

Tim Winkler: 00:00:56

say, but thank you so much. I had a speech planned and everything, but, uh, it's been a rough ride. I'm not going to downplay it. It was pretty brutal, but we're, we're back. We're back in action. Um, all right, let's talk about today's episode. So, uh, it's, it's, it's an episode that I've been itching to do. Um, you know, the state of venture capital right now kind of feels like high stake, high stakes gamble, um, capital access, tightening up. Uh, you know, bootstrapping is becoming a, a more common scenario. It's something that I've done. I know it's, it's something that our, our guests have done here. We're gonna, we're gonna dissect a few things here around bootstrapping. Uh, talk about some strategies for kind of sass versus services business. Um, user user growth hacks for like lean operations. We're gonna discuss, you know, how you might be able to leverage community and social media to amplify your brand as a bootstrap venture. Uh, and so to unpack all of this, we've got some excellent guests with us who have scaled businesses, uh, Past the multi million and ARR mark with, without outside funding. And I've also seen the other side of the coin as well and taking some funding at a certain point. So it's, it's great perspectives on the topic all around. Uh, so joining us, we've got, uh, Rand Fishkin, uh, co founder and CEO of SparkToro. An audio audience research software company, uh, prior to Sparturo, ran was the founder and CEO of Moz marketing analytics company for SEO. And he's the author of lost and founder, uh, painfully honest field guide to the startup world. I see it right back there. Uh, and we've got, uh, Liam Martin, uh, co founder of time doctor, uh, software company, helping remote teams with time tracking and the co organizer of the running remote conference, which I was. Researching pretty interesting, largest conference on building and scaling remote teams. And Liam is the author of the book running remote. Um, so guys, we'll have you here on The Pair Program with us.

Rand Fishkin: 00:02:56

Yeah. Thrilled to join you, Tim. Thanks for having us. Yeah,

Liam Martin: 00:03:00

very exciting to be able to jump into all of this stuff, particularly when I want to kind of jump off with like, I get a one sheeter whenever I'm going to be on a podcast with somebody that my assistant puts together and she just had an all caps need to read this blog post. And we sent the email back and forth, and it was your blog post that you just written recently about your experience with, um, and. And the drama that just happened during that time and I realized I was like, this is why I have a bootstrapped business to be able to pull leverage, like, to be able to pull that money off the table. Right? If you're, if you're doing really well, it's like, there are certain times when you should leave the casino or at least put something in the bag. And I just. It was a really great piece of writing and I don't know if you guys can put it up in the show notes, but everyone should listen to it, particularly if you're a founder, that's, you know, got more than a couple million dollars in your pocket. Yeah, no

Tim Winkler: 00:03:58

doubt it was the final chapter of my 1st startup. Is that the title of the blog? Yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah, well, it resonated with me. It's a great piece. Um, it'll, it'll certainly probably make its way into the conversation here as well. Um, but, uh, yeah, again, thanks guys for, for taking time out and, uh, and spending, uh, uh, an hour with us. So.

Rand Fishkin: 00:04:21

Thank you. And also to your assistant. Wow. That that is amazing to get that one sheet and have that research done for you. What a gift. That is a gift.

Liam Martin: 00:04:31

It's amazing. I have to tell you, we implemented that about 4 years ago where I get like a little 1 page document on everyone that I'm going to meet 5 minutes beforehand. I go through the document. I'm like, oh, okay. Like, I'm just picking up on all these little things. You used to be a competitive figure skater 10 years ago. And You know, you really like zebras or your daughter likes Elsa the princess. It's all those kind of little details that you can pick up on. It's like this human CRM that, uh, has totally made my job 10 times easier.

Rand Fishkin: 00:05:01

I mean, this is, this is a tactic of, uh, of presidents and, and candidates as my understanding, right. Is that they like, they really know people and they connect with them. And you know, that, and part of that is just being curious, right. Like caring deeply about people. Um, I think is a, is a wonderful thing, right? And when, when it shows, man, it builds relationships like

Tim Winkler: 00:05:23

that. Yeah, it's a, it's a, Mike, take some notes, man. Like, can you team me up with these snapshots next time we're Yeah. Um, before we, before we dive into the, the, the heart of the topic, we're going to go around the room with a fun segment called pair me up. We're going to kick it off with Mike. You lead us off brother. What you got?

Mike Gruen: 00:05:48

So, uh, just took a trip to Las Vegas, uh, with my wife. Um, For our anniversary, we both gamble. Uh, that's how we met. Um, so my pairing, uh, it's funny cause it's almost, I mean, you mentioned it, Liam, uh, money management and gambling. Like you sit down and it's being disciplined and knowing, like, if I'm up a certain percentage, it's time to leave the table. If I'm down a certain percentage, I leave the table. Like, it's not, I'm never like betting my last nickel or going to the ATM, um, or like, oh man, you know, and I'm also never like up 5, 000%, but, um, at the same time, exactly. You're never going to get there. So, uh, if you want to lose, if you just want to give it all back by all means, keep playing. Um, so yeah, so that's my, uh, so that's my pairing is money management and gambling. Um, so there you

undefined: 00:06:40

go.

Tim Winkler: 00:06:41

Yeah. Now we got to kind of hear the back story on how, how you guys met at a casino. That sounds like a fast

Mike Gruen: 00:06:47

casino. We just met at my regular home poker game. Uh,

Tim Winkler: 00:06:50

I thought

Liam Martin: 00:06:51

it was a gambler's anonymous meeting.

Mike Gruen: 00:06:55

But, but I mean, like the, the, the other part of it was shortly after we met, we took, uh, a few of us went on a trip to Atlantic city. Uh, she and I both, uh, it was a bad blackjack shoe and like tore through a hundred dollars. Like it was just like loss, loss, loss. And so we're like, Hey, let's go get lunch. And so then we hung out and talked and that's how we got to know each other. Um, cause she was like a friend of a friend type of thing. So

Tim Winkler: 00:07:19

that's how it all happened. Very good. Pairing gambling and money management. Can't agree more. Well, I'll jump in real quick here. So for me, it's going to be a crawling and baby proofing. Uh, so my daughter is about to turn one. Uh, her latest party trick is crawling. Uh, we were lucky enough to kind of capture it on video actually. And then the video, it's pretty funny because my voice goes from this high pitch, excited tone into this, Oh shit, it's baby proofing time moment. So if I have to leave this recording mid, uh, midway, it's because I've got a little Explorer on, on the, on the go right now, but that's my, uh, that's my pairing, you know, we're, we're busting out all of the. Everything from the little corners to the baby gates is, you know, everything in between. It's my life right now. So other than forks

Mike Gruen: 00:08:09

and outlets, which would be if you're not doing the baby proofing.

Rand Fishkin: 00:08:12

Yes.

Tim Winkler: 00:08:13

Which is why we baby proof. Um, all right, cool. Let's pass it around. Uh, ran. How about a quick intro and, uh, your parent for the day?

Rand Fishkin: 00:08:21

Sure. Uh, let's see. So quick intro that you already mentioned, Tim, that I, uh, I started maws and, and I wrote this book, lost and founder. I do lots of speaking at events and podcasts, webinars and all that kind of stuff. Um, my, my favorite thing pairing wise right now is I love working with. Uh, people who are trying to build small, profitable stuff and helping them do that. Um, I don't, I don't know what it is. I, I feel this deep sense of both obligation and gratitude to giving back, you know, for folks who, who read that blog post that, uh, Liam, that you kind of kindly mentioned, you know, Geraldine and I sort of had a, had a lottery winning amount of money, um, come to us a couple of years ago. And, uh, I've been suitably, I think, irresponsible with that money, just trying to spread it around. Um, and I, I, I kind of love that. So forget money management. I mean, look, I think there's, there's 2 ways to be in this world, right? If you, if you have success in a field, in a sector, in your life. Um, professionally, whatever you can try and pull the ladder up after you, right? And that's that's how a lot of big businesses are built their, their monopoly power. They build moats around them. So no competitors can come in and they, you know, uh, use leverage their monopoly power in 1 sector to enter new sectors, find new revenue streams and block out everybody else. You know, Google's a classic example of this. Amazon, of course, Facebook, right. Apple. And then there's people who are like, how do I build an escalator? Right. I had success here. I did well. I want to see a hundred people, a thousand people, ten thousand people build awesome businesses in this sector, spread that wealth and money around. And uh, I'm pretty sure the definition of evil is doing things, uh, that hurt other people so that you get money. So Let's be the opposite of that.

Tim Winkler: 00:10:29

That's my favorite. Oh, that's awesome. Good for you, man. Um, I love it. Liam, let's, let's quickly jump to you, uh, intro and your pairing.

Liam Martin: 00:10:38

Sure. So as you already said, co founder of time doctor. com, which is time tracking for remote teams. And then also co organizer of running remote, which is the largest conference on remote work of which where I wrote this book, which is a bit of a funny story. Uh, I wanted to actually call it async. It's about asynchronous management, but HarperCollins said, we sold a book on remote work. We have to have remote in the title, which is incredibly infuriating. I'm already like half a drink in, so I might say something that's inappropriate, but that's fine. We can

Rand Fishkin: 00:11:10

edit it out. I think Harper Collins made the right choice. I think running remote is a great fricking title.

Liam Martin: 00:11:19

Oh, I mean, it was a great title for the conference, but the philosophy that our entire community is focused on is there was a methodology before COVID. Of these remote 1st companies that were implementing what I call asynchronous management, and that's basically the entire book. So I wrote the book about that subject anyways, but you're right. It is 1 of those things that when we, when I wrote down async as a title, you know, like, these companies have, like, uh, Yeah. Groups that they send all of these book titles to for people to be able to pick up and async was five out of five It was the worst one Out of all of that group, but then when we actually spoke to our core customer our thousand true fans type of demographic They were like async. Why didn't you call it that that we should have called it that thing. Anyways, that was uh spilt milk but herrings I thought lagavulin Podcasts because it's 4:00 PM where I'm at. Uh, I don't know what time it is for you guys, but it's, uh, it's drink o'clock for me, so it's Friday evening. I'm very excited to be here. And the more that I drink, hopefully the more truth that'll come up

Tim Winkler: 00:12:28

And that's really why we do these at 4:00 PM on a Friday because we wanna see how intoxicated all of our guests can get and still makes sense by the end

Rand Fishkin: 00:12:34

of it. So it's, it's only, it's only 1:19 PM here. I still have other meetings. Okay. So you all knock yourselves out. Uh, Liam, I heard, I heard that, um, Lagavulin is the 16, I assume, or is it, yeah. So, uh. It is the 16. Yeah. So the, uh,

Liam Martin: 00:12:54

the 12 is better and like, that's the thing that's a little bit of a third rail of, uh, in the Scotch drinking world, but the 12 is better. Yeah. And I only have the 16 with me today.

Rand Fishkin: 00:13:08

Yeah. I mean, the, I, I heard that basically after Diageo bought them, things were not down. It is awesome.

Liam Martin: 00:13:17

Oh, okay. Yes. The PDs. That's the thing that just really kind of, you sit down and you drink a glass of Lagavulin and you can't drink it like you can sip it because it's just, it blows up in your mouth and just, it's very, very nice for. Scottish ish people, which one side of my family is, uh, we love it, but yeah, I mean, I think that, uh, podcasts and scotch are great. I do about eight or nine of these per week. And so for me, you know, the ability to be able to actually just kind of relax and have a drink or two on a Friday afternoon. I find that those are historically my best podcasts that I do. Awesome.

Rand Fishkin: 00:13:55

I can't wait. I can't wait. We'll get us into it, Tim.

Tim Winkler: 00:13:58

Yeah, let's, let's transition into it guys. Um, So I'm gonna, I'm gonna start with a little bit of a, you know, I did a little prep, but didn't have, didn't have the assistant to, uh, to feed me the show notes. So I went and did it, um, did a little research on bootstrapping firsthand. And, um, you know, there's a, uh, a couple of different, uh, I guess, origins of the term, but one, one that I pulled was a 19th century saying it goes. Pulling oneself over a fence by one's bootstraps, which implies it's pretty much an impossible action. So a more modern definition that we'll tune into is, um, a process whereby an entrepreneur starts a self sustaining business, launches with minimal resources. With either no venture capital or, or hefty angel investment. Um, and so then, you know, the next question I asked myself was, so why, why go this route? Um, and in the words of, of Mark Cuban, uh, raising money isn't an accomplishment, but it's an obligation. So you gotta love the shark tank irony that, that comes from that statement. But for me, anyways, it's, it truly means full financial control, um, you know, minimal debt liability. No pressure from investors and the freedom to steer your business your way. But I don't want to sugar coat this either, just because it's extremely difficult, um, it's a path that I know, uh, well, personally, it's filled with stress, uh, potential for depression, uh, constrained. Personal relationships. Um, and it, it demands confidence. It demands risk tolerance, self discipline. Um, it, it demands determination and competitiveness. So these are all traits that I'm certain that, you know, our guests today have in spades, uh, along with some insight. So I do want to, uh, I do want to jump into it, Rand. Let's kick it off with you. Um, I'm, I'm very interested in that Ma's story. If you could. Just walk us through what sparked the bootstrap approach and, and maybe provide a little bit of context in terms of like, did it start as a services business, a product company, and then we'll jump to you, Liam.

Rand Fishkin: 00:16:03

Uh, sure. So yes, small started as a services business. Um, and, and I guess technically bootstrapped, um, or maybe debt financed, we took out a bunch of credit card debt and bank loans. Um, which went very poorly. I don't recommend that to anybody. Uh, we found ourselves very deep in debt after making lots of early missteps. Um, you know, I was super young, right? I started this on 21. Uh, and just, just a bunch of foolishness. Those first four or five years got us into a lot of trouble and then eventually started digging ourselves out as we, you know, got better and better at, at the services side. It was, it was an SEO consulting business. Um, at least at that point it had been a web design business. And then. We accidentally built some software to sort of make ourselves more efficient. And then I insisted that I wanted to share with people and our developer was like, we can't, it's too expensive. And I was like, fine, put up a PayPal paywall. And he's like, fine, I'll put up a PayPal paywall. And so you had to pay palace like 29 bucks a month. And 6 months after we launched that, that software for SEO, I was doing more revenue than the services business. And we were like, oh, crap, what's going on? Um, and, and, you know, we caught a bunch of waves, right? So this was during a time when 2 things were true. 1 google was growing at a tremendous rate. Of course, the Internet was growing at a tremendous rate. So web adoption. So we were riding like a bunch of waves. And people in marketing and tech and investments and startups and just every field hated SEO. They thought it was a scam. They thought it was spam. They thought it was, um, an evil, bad thing to do that Google would penalize you for it. And so we, we were one of the only platforms out there. There were probably less than 10 or 12 websites that you could go to that weren't sketchy, that had reliable information about SEO. And we were one of the only people providing any kind of software. So there was just no competition. I don't think we succeeded because we were great. I think we succeeded because we were very lucky. And then eventually we got smart about some things thanks to our luck compounding. Uh, but yeah, I don't, I don't have a, you know, a huge, um, love for pure bootstrapping. We did end up raising venture capital sort of after the, after the business was taking off. We, we raised, uh, 1. 1 million in 2007 and another 18 million in 2012 and another 10 million in 2015, 15 or 16. Um, and, uh, I, um, had all the roller coasters you described, right? So. Anxiety and depression and just lots of terrible experiences, um, uh, and an inordinate amount of stress, right? Once you raise that kind of money, then you're, you're trying to build a billion dollar company. Um, Moz basically plateaued at about 50 million ARR. Uh, so really, you know, disappointed me. It's investors employ stock options. The company was sold, uh, in 2021. I had stepped down years before left the company in 2018, but the company was sold a few years after I left. Um, Not a great deal. Nobody, nobody did well from that except, except for me and Geraldine. Right. Kind of. Cause we, we still owned about 20 percent of the company. And, um, even that, you know, we did not get 20 percent of the sale because of how, you know, investor rights and preferences work, but it doesn't matter. Right. Like it was just, um, yep.

Tim Winkler: 00:19:45

So you were 21 when, 21, when you started this, this

Rand Fishkin: 00:19:47

business. Yeah. I was there for 17 years. Long, long ago that, so Spark Toro, right? Eighties

Mike Gruen: 00:19:56

Sorry, nothing. Bad joke. Uh, this should be cut out 'cause I did my math wrong. Go on No. Uh,

Rand Fishkin: 00:20:02

interestingly, Mike, you may have done your math wrong, but you're technically accurate. My mom, Jillian, who is my co-founder at Moz, started the business that turned into the web design and then the SEO consulting and then software business in 1981. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's impressive. Very the weirdest startup you can possibly imagine, right? It's like basically 25, six years old when it was first funded. And then, uh, essentially a mom and son consulting business turned into software, very unusual. So anyway, we can talk about SparkToro in a bit, but, um, I essentially did the complete opposite in every way with.

Tim Winkler: 00:20:45

Um, I got questions to follow up on that, but I'm going to quickly pick, pick over to Liam here. So Liam, tell us a little bit about your, your startup journey and how did that form in terms of bootstrapping or how you were.

Liam Martin: 00:20:57

So, and, and to be completely honest, uh, with you in comparison to Rand story, it's nowhere near, uh, crazy of a rollercoaster, but I actually think based off of the blog posts that I. Part of that is probably due to venture that extra stress is just like, so frustrating and just the ability to be able to do what you want to do when you want to do it. That's bootstrapping to me. So we started the business back in 2011, 2012. So, um, Me and my, my co founder, I had built some previous business businesses before that, and one exited for a very small amount of money. So we both had a small amount of capital to be able to invest. And that's why I want to disclose that it's not bootstrapped from zero dollars, right? It's bootstrapped from, we had about 150, 200 K to be able to start the business. And from that point forward, I essentially, um, didn't take a salary for three years. lived on very little money. A lot of my other friends were like, you're so stupid to raise a series a for like, you know, 5 million and, and they're living in nice condos and, you know, they're living the best life. Fast forward to today. I have way more money than they do, to be completely honest with you. And I'm doing way better because they weren't actually able to sell their business. When you look at venture, it's really built on the presumption of the Ponzi scheme of acquisition. Really, that's the end point that all of these companies are really trying to go for and it's like you're rearranging the chairs in the Titanic. I know that that's very kind of. It's a long winded perspective and a very forward thinking perspective, but if all of these companies are getting acquired for like 10 X revenue, eventually the value of these companies is going to catch up with them. And I even during COVID we exploded. So we were doing maybe like 5, 000 leads a month inside of our time tracking tool for remote teams, time doctor. And we went to 35, 000 within a month. Like it was just absolutely. Oh my God, I felt like I was in one of those tubes on game shows where they like spin you around with hundred dollar bills and you're trying to grab as many as you can and stuff them down your bra. I was working sixteen hour days every day for six months at least. And we've now hired four people that did my one job pre COVID. So it was like a lot of things that ended up happening. And we went into a stage of hyper growth inside of the company, but we had some offers for acquisition at that point. And some of these offers were absolutely insane. We're talking like, you know, 10 X revenue. And it's just like, I remember talking to my co founder and I was like, do you really believe that we're worth that much money? Um, this just, it doesn't make any sense. Now, a lot of those deals actually didn't end up shaking out. And we basically made the decision to say. We're going to keep going with this because we also run about at that point, actually during the height of COVID, we were running at about 40 percent EBITDA. So essentially we were able to pull 40 percent of our revenue off the table and it would be handed to the shareholders, which because we're a bootstrap company was us, right, which was great. So we made enough money. To never have to work a day in our lives right from that point, but we still run today about 15 percent EBITDA, which is really kind of where I would suggest that a lot of bootstrap companies sit because, and I thought this for a really long time, pulling that risk off the table. My financial advisor gave me a really good piece of advice in 2020. He said, so 98 percent of your wealth is tied into a private company that you can't sell. You need to think about how to pull some of that risk off the table. You're sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of theoretical company value. Yes. However, let's pull some of that risk off the table now so that if that company disappears in a year, you'll be happy. Right. And that was one of the things that really jumped out to me ran when I read your blog post, which was. And if I remember correctly, it was around 300, 000 out the other end of, um, 2018 or 2019 that you came, that you came off of working inside of and I just, when I read that, I thought, thank God I paid attention to my financial advisor and a lot of my other friends, because I realized. That type of opportunity, particularly for bootstrap companies, because we have the autonomy to be able to actually make those decisions. We're not answerable to a board necessarily, unless you really want to be, but I don't think you should. Um, it allowed us to be able to go in different directions and utilize that capital to be able to not only create the company that we wanted, but then also the security that the founders needed in order to be able to really go for those like. Huge moves that would hopefully turn us into a multi billion dollar company long term.

Tim Winkler: 00:26:02

Ran, did you pay yourself a salary in those early state, early days?

Rand Fishkin: 00:26:06

Uh, sort of, I mean, what my mom paid me, right? Uh, my, my mom occasionally, like, you know, we'd get together. We'd look at the finances. It was always terrible for those first, you know, especially five years. And. Uh, basically it was like me and our programmer, Matt would decide like who, who was going to take a paycheck that month. My mom never got paid. Um, the paycheck was 800, you know, it was like, okay, I was making, I was making enough that I could chip in for the groceries. I was living with my girlfriend, who's now my wife, Geraldine, and she was paying our rent and all our bills. Yep. I mean, it was, it was, it was a mess. And then, yeah, I mean, Liam, if I'd had the foresight and experience and thoughtfulness or a financial advisor, you know, right. I, I think that I would have made very different decisions around Moz, but I mean, the weird part of that company was it was incredibly profitable, but ludicrously. So I think, uh, gross margins were north of 85 percent on the, on the most software business, right. Just incredible business because it doesn't cost that much to like collect all the data. And, uh, you know, it just, Um, it was in

undefined: 00:27:22

support.

Tim Winkler: 00:27:23

That's it. Yeah. Yeah. What kind of head count did you actually have? Like, we

Rand Fishkin: 00:27:28

blew up head count and paid people hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. A lot of people making more than I was making even after we were venture backed, um, because the whole venture philosophy is like spend money fast to make more money, right? To get growth. Yeah. And so

Liam Martin: 00:27:45

then what's the goal of that growth? It's to

Rand Fishkin: 00:27:48

get acquired. The goal of the growth is either get acquired or go public. Right. And that was, that was sort of the like, Hey, get to a hundred million dollars ARR and then sell for between five and 700 or go public on the stock market. So long as you're growing 20 percent year over year, that was the, that was the target. That was the goal, you know, and, and Moz was well on its way for, you know, six, seven years of that growth. That looked like it was going to happen. And then right around 40 million in revenue, things started slowing down. Um, and we just never got, I mean, I can talk a whole bunch about why, but yes, absolutely. The venture model, I think, is right for very, very few companies, but it's marketed to almost every entrepreneur, especially in software and tech. Uh, and Most of us should reject that marketing that one of the biggest things that it did, I'm very impressed. Liam. I'm so impressed that you were able to like, resist this. I felt like I was not a real entrepreneur. I felt like I was less of a less of a leader. I felt like I was a piddly shit, you know, little nobody. And my Silicon Valley peers, of course, you know, I'm in Seattle, but like my Silicon Valley peers, or even some of the more successful Seattle entrepreneurs, like they had raised so much more, their teams were bigger, their total, you know, market cap was bigger, all that kind of stuff. And, and the psychological comparison, I'm sure someone, someone called it a mimetic desire, like your desires based on memes of what You imagine other people to look like in your field. And that mimetic desire drove so much of my behavior, right? Like yeah, I'm going to constantly be going to Sand Hill Road and meeting these important people and like, Oh, I'm having dinner at Sheryl Sandberg's house tonight. And you know, like all that shit, dumb, like, just, why didn't I just make better software for my customers?

Tim Winkler: 00:29:49

I snapped my fingers, everybody just had a quick costume change. And, uh, jump into it. So Maz, you had kind of like given us a little bit of the backstory. I'm sorry, Ryan, Ryan, you've given us a little bit of the backstory on Maz, um, as the wizard of Maz. Um, and, uh, you know, I, I wanted to kind of transition to you, Liam, a little bit about, you know, growing Time Doctor and some of the early days. Um, some of those, you know, some of those growth hacks, I guess, in terms of running with limited resources and running as a lean team, some of those things that you deployed, um, that you would say helped you, you know, with early success at Time Doctor, uh, if that's anything from, you know, how you, how you approach user acquisition to, to marketing. Um, I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.

Liam Martin: 00:30:35

Sure. I have a philosophy that actually probably fits perfectly into Ram's strategy, which is if you're going to own a business for more than 10 years, a tech business that's on the internet, SEO is probably the best singular strategy that you could implement. And I did a lot. So we, I, when we had no money, I had, I remember I had one writer and I had one linker and I wrote two and I did link link building as well, and we just grind it out. To blog posts a week, every week for three years, like it's just, that's the grind and the reality is that you can optimize your, you know, there's all of these small little details that will get you an extra 10, 15, 20 percent juice out of every post that you're. That you're posting, but fundamentally it is, are you writing content that people really care about? Do they actually, you know, they actually consume it, right? And do they want to come back and check out more about you? Just like what we talked about earlier with regards to that post that I got from my assistant talking about your journey, Rand, it's like that piece will have me coming back later on saying, Oh, what else is on the pot or on the blog, whatever it might be.

Rand Fishkin: 00:31:52

I'm really curious. If you were today starting time doc, or let's say a new, new business, would you do SEO? Would that be your starting point? Would you start with SEO again? So

Liam Martin: 00:32:06

I don't want to send this to an SEO podcast, but I don't know, and there's a couple qualifiers for it. So Google barred. Right, the new version of Google. I am scared shitless of that thing because I'm 1st, 2nd, 3rd on a lot of really good keywords that generate tons of money for our business. And all of a sudden, if it's just a. Well, what's the best time tracking tool for remote workers and it's not me that responds. That's a big problem for us as a company because we invested tons and tons of money inside of SEO. Uh, and money is not the right word to use, um, energy time, which was money. I just wasn't paid. So like now I get paid a lot. So the. The reality is that there's a couple of things that I probably wouldn't have done. There's someone else that asked me that question, which is, would you take. Like, would you raise money? And I would probably, someone asked me that question around 2021. And I actually said yes, because it was so easy to raise money in 2021. Like, I don't know if you guys have seen that curve of like, yeah, it was the best time on the face of the planet to raise money in 2021 and now it's essentially the worst. So now I'm back to no, like, let's just keep all that equity for ourselves. I would probably say SEO would be one of my top three strategies that I would implement. Essentially, what I would do is I would say, what do I want? What problem do I want to solve? I would figure out the communities that exist around solving that problem. I would inject myself into those communities and or create a subcategory inside of that community. And then I would go after those basically, I would say, okay, now that I've built that ecosystem, now let's try to sell them something, something that I truly do believe that will solve the problem fundamentally. So like, that's marketing

Rand Fishkin: 00:34:08

one, one genius. It is shocking to me how few entrepreneurs think in this strategic, um, putting the cart before the horse, you know, putting the horse before the cart way of first, let me establish some expertise, authority, trust in a space. Let me learn about the people there. Let me build relationships there. And then I will create something that serves this group of people that I'm already connected with. And I know and understand them as opposed to so many entrepreneurs starting with. Hey, I've got an idea for a product in a space that I've never been in before. I don't know anybody in that space. I build my product and then I have to try and figure out how to market it. I mean, I think,

Mike Gruen: 00:34:52

I think there's a lot of people that fool themselves into believing that they're experts in the space because they have a little bit of, they, they, they're in that space a little bit. They, you know, I, oh, I see the problems, but like there it's, it's, they have a very small version of that view. Um, and then they fool themselves into

Rand Fishkin: 00:35:07

being experts. I don't mean to stereotype here, but have you ever met a 19 year old boy? There's something about like the combination of hormones and culture and, uh, surroundings that just makes them believe that they not only know everything, but can do it all and really well, and that, that hyper confidence can be. Useful, I guess, in some situations, but as it carries through to entrepreneurship, my God, do you just see, you know, you see venture style, uh, rates of company death, which is essentially, you know, for every a hundred companies that try to raise venture to succeed for every a hundred companies that actually raise it. You know, to return what the fund expects of them for every 100 venture funds, only about 30 actually returned to their LPs what they've promised. So,

Liam Martin: 00:36:06

yeah, I have a really crazy story connected to that. There was a company that I was mentoring and the founder was starting a, it is a couple of years back. So I don't think he would care that I tell the story. He was building a tattoo. Platform basically a platform to be able to manage tattoo parlors and I said, well, what's your history in, you know, in, in tattooing? Oh, I, I don't run a tattoo parlor. I don't like I asked him, have you run a tattoo parlor before? No. Have you worked in a tattoo parlor before? No. Do you have any tattoos? I'm planning on getting some. I was like, so is this a problem that is really. An itch for you. Like, is this something core inside of your being that you're really excited about solving? He's like, yes. I said, I don't like hot take. I don't believe you. And let's, let's break that down. And I remember about a year ago, he raised, he raised 1. 5 million seed. And, uh, he came back to me and he's like, listen, I'm really trying to grind out here. I, you know, I've got some issues, uh, we're about 3 months away from not existing any more payrolls. We're not going to have any more money in the bank. And I said, okay, cool. Like, what are your numbers like? He's like, well, I'm doing about 20 a month. And I was looking at his numbers and his payrolls, payrolls, about 40, 000 a month. I said, okay, listen, you have three months to do this. We'll cut down your payroll. We'll figure out how to make this work. Founder base sales. You've got to be the only person that runs it. And he's like, no, no, no, I'm not making 20, 000 a month. I'm making 20 a month. And I was like, shut it down immediately, shut everything down, give it back to the investors. Good advice. That happens all the time. And I think it comes exactly to your point, Rand, from these guys that are just, you know, I don't think he was 19, but he might've been like 21, 22. Yeah. And it's just that desire. You know, then you get the odd Facebook that comes out of that system too. So I

Mike Gruen: 00:38:04

mean, there's, there's, there's always those exceptions, but Dunning, I think what we described as the Dunning Kruger effect, right? The idea of like, I know a little bit, but my competence is not nearly as good as my capacity or my capability, my capability,

Rand Fishkin: 00:38:18

the curve of sort of knowledge, right. That as you. As you gain knowledge and become more experienced, you, your opinion of your own, uh, knowledge in a sector drops dramatically until an inflection point where it starts to rise again. And then you, you slowly gain confidence again. And, you know, that's probably, I suspect that's probably where, where folks like Liam and I are around, you know, marketing and company building. It's like, okay, we're through the, I know, nothing point over to the, I know something, I don't know everything. There's a lot to know, but I know something, I

Mike Gruen: 00:38:55

don't know everything. That's the key. Like the, the, I, I know enough to know what, that I don't know,

Tim Winkler: 00:39:01

I think also to like the beauty of what you're, you're building with SparkToro, right? So it's like, you know, let's think about user research and knowing where to spend your money, uh, before you just start. You know, spending all your time writing these blogs, but you might be writing these things on, on things that aren't really what people are researching or solving that problem at core. So, like, give us the quick pitch on, like, why SmartTurbo for you? I mean, you, you spent years and years doing SEO, so. What is it that you, that you wrapped your head around? Like, this is really what a lot of folks are going to get value from.

Rand Fishkin: 00:39:36

Yeah. I mean, and this is, this is sort of, you know, goes back to my leading question to Liam. Sorry to put you on the spot there, but, you know, my, my first business, you know, Moz was, was built on SEO as well. Right. So blogging five nights a week, uh, for years, the first two or three years, we didn't have nearly the success that you did. I was the only one blogging and, and they were not good, right? Like, I think you can probably go back and read some of the old posts from like 2003, four or five, not good stuff, not useful, not interesting. But slowly I built up the muscle. You know, like going to the gym, you sort of figure out what resonates with people. Oh, this worked. Why did it work? With whom did it work? Can I replicate that? Can I do it again? And building up this, this concept that I like to call the marketing flywheel, right? A repeatable process that scales with decreasing friction. So meaning every time you do it, it gets a little bit easier to do it again, or it's equally hard to turn the flywheel each time, but the returns become greater and greater. So, you know, I put out one blog post that turned into five email subscribers, but tomorrow's blog post turns into six email subscribers, and the next day it's seven. And you know, if you get a flywheel going like that, it works really smoothly. And so Moz was built on that. When I left Moz and started SparkToro, I started initially with a similar mentality, right? Publishing a lot, blogging a lot, and quickly realized probably Less than, uh, three months, four months into the process, realize that, oh, wait a minute. There's no this. methodology does not work because there is no search volume for the thing that SparkToro is doing. So unlike time doctor, right? Where folks are saying, I want the best time tracking tool for this purpose or that purpose. No one is going out there and searching for, I want to find, I want a tool that tells me where my audience hangs out online, their demographics, their behaviors. Nobody searches for that. They didn't even know to search for that. So we have to not only create. The product, we have to create demand for the product, right? And so going out there and talking, essentially finding the platforms that our audience was paying attention to. We knew that we wanted to reach marketers at small and medium sized businesses, agencies and consultants. Those are going to be our core users. And so interviewed tons of them, talk to them, had those. You know, uh, conversations at their, at their offices, sometimes over video, a lot over, over the phone and then turn that into surveys, right? Took that data. Ran a few big surveys to a few thousand marketers, took those results, um, and looked at what sources of influence do they pay attention to where, how, why, how can we be present in those places, right? How do I get these conferences to invite me to keynote there? How do I get these podcasts hosts to invite me on their show or accept me as a guest? How do I get these publications to write about SparkTor? And that has been the last four years of our marketing. We've still, we still get no search traffic apart from branded search, uh, for Toro itself.

Liam Martin: 00:42:46

Do you measure branded search as like an outcome variable? Because this is a debate that we've been constantly be talking about, which is. Okay. We increase paid acquisition and then our branded search goes up by 10, 15%. Well, then we equate that branded search to that paid advertising. And even right now it's very difficult for us, but I just did a relatively large podcast on the financial times. And almost no impact, but then we ended up having, I think it was like seven or eight customers that directly stated, Hey, I came here because of the financial times piece. So the other part of that too, is actual sales team talking about the attribution. I mean, where did you hear about us? You know, and then correlating towards that.

Rand Fishkin: 00:43:32

So I, I have a very controversial belief. Which is unless you are in the north of 50 to 100 million dollars of revenue per year. I don't think it is actually worthwhile to try and measure and attribute most of your marketing. I think that you're better off, better off hiring good, smart people and trusting your gut instinct and investing in sort of cool, creative in places that, you know, people pay attention with messages that you get the sense are resonating and you're going to, you will spend, even though you will have some waste and you'll make some mistakes, it will be worth it because the measurement process is so time and capital intensive and so misleading. that you'll actually fool yourself more than you'll help yourself. And this is because user journeys are too complex for, uh, multi device journeys in a cookie list, you know, no third party cookies allowed, EU regulation, Canada privacy laws, California privacy laws, ad blockers. Uh, multiple browsers, like in this world that we live in, you cannot track the way you could 12 years ago. I think it's beyond

Mike Gruen: 00:44:48

that too, because I think that

Tim Winkler: 00:44:51

it's

Mike Gruen: 00:44:52

hard. I know that a lot of the brands that I come to are because I've heard them in multiple places. It's not the one place. It's not the three. It's like the five places. And, and we had this debate at my last company too, about attribution and do we want first attribution? I said, like, what does it matter? Like. And then like, well, wouldn't it be good just to know all of the places, these people, we touch them from a marketing perspective and how do we capture all of that? And it's like, and yes, we spent a lot of money and a lot of time on attribution and probably could have just put into our marketing budget and done more

Rand Fishkin: 00:45:22

ads or, or right. I mean, like, you know, analysts, I think we had a team of basically three analysts whose whole job was. measure attribution, try and figure out the funnel, try and figure out what, what content was resonating, what to nudge people towards, right? Like, Hey, people who consume these whiteboard Fridays, these blog posts, these pieces of content, they are more likely to become subscribers and they subscribe for longer. Their lifetime value is longer. And that worked at the time because we could look across A journey, a user journey quite accurately and say, this person absolutely touched all these pieces of content across these places. And here's how they came to us for each of those journeys, right? This is the source. Dark social alone makes that nearly impossible. Search engines no longer tell you which keywords someone searched for when they came to your site, right? So like the way, you know, Liam, you and I could do SEO at a time when Google would tell you which keywords people arrived on your site with. That was incredible. Now that's gone. You can pay for it, right? You can, in paid search, you still get, if you believe Google, then you, you know, you're still getting those numbers, those, that data point, but it's, it's a different world. Well,

Liam Martin: 00:46:39

I mean, you're, you're getting it. You're not getting it. You know, it's like if you're running Facebook ads. Then Facebook, that says that you're responsible for every single conversion on the face of the planet. And then, Oh, look, and we're running Google ads at the same time. And they say they're responsible for every single conversion on the face of the planet. So then it's like, well, who's right here? Nobody at the end of the day, it's really, yeah. I think you need to take like a community based. Approach, which I think is kind of connected to what you were saying, Rand, which is which community you want to talk to. I mean, using Spark, using your app is probably a really good place to be able to start. One of the things that I do, if you don't have that, is find a subreddit. Yes. So if you find a subreddit about a community. That's your only subreddit and you should go to it every single day. If you're trying to understand like, um, you know, retro video games, and you're trying to build an app for retro video games, go on that subreddit and just be there. Be the most influential person that's on there. Comment, communicate, just understand as much as you possibly can. I have an incredibly boring book here that sits on my desk, and I'll cover up the name of the person because I just call it incredibly boring. It's, um, it's about the contact center industry. So this is a, this is a market that I'm approaching right now is the contact center industry, which is a very, very large market, tens of thousands of employees that would need time tracking. And I got to tell you. I have read almost everything. I mean, there's like 27 books on this entire industry. I've read all 27 books because I'm trying to understand that market and understand how they communicate, get in love with that particular market. There's so many people now. They're just like, Oh, we're just going to make money. Well, you actually have to like your customers, too, and I think that that's a big part of it that not many, as I said before, with my tattoo guy, right? Like, he ended up actually getting that tattoo and it looked quite nice. But fundamentally, if you're not passionate about the problem that you're solving and you're not passionate about the customers.

Tim Winkler: 00:48:37

It's not going to work. Yeah, you get burnout quick. Yeah. Ran, I was listening to a podcast that you were on recently too, about just how much digital marketing has just transformed from, you know, 2000 to 2012, 2013, when SEO and Google was, was everything. But now Google's almost, you know, what you were saying was like, it's where you end your search for validation. Now it starts on sites like YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and tic tac for. Your source of ideation where information is discovered. And so that transformation is just radically different for an entrepreneur starting a business in today versus starting a business 10 years ago.

Rand Fishkin: 00:49:15

And I want to be clear, right? Like it depends, you know, the answer is in every niche. This is why what Liam said is so important. If you get to know your customers and you understand, oh, they start their journeys on Reddit, oh, they start their journeys on YouTube. Oh, they start their journeys on. You know, in video games, Twitch, they start their journey wherever it is in. I would not be surprised if the time tracking B2B software industry still starts their research on Google. And that is one of the reasons why it is so crucial that your business, Liam's business ranks really highly in Google as compared to. Uh, something like SparkToro where people essentially learn about audience research mostly from podcasts and YouTube videos and events and, uh, blog posts and those kinds of things, right? These sources of influence and email newsletter. A lot of email newsletters have actually been very influential for promoting SparkToro, helping people, uh, become aware of us. And so the types of the types of marketing that you do will be dictated by the channels and sources of influence that your audience pays attention to. And if you, you know, if you get that wrong, fundamentally, you, you can spend millions of dollars, thousands of hours, tons of, you know, consultants and contractors and employee time firing arrows, you know, at, at a bullseye that is. That no one pays attention to, you know,

Tim Winkler: 00:50:41

and when you're bootstrapping or working without, you know, investment, you know, it's so, so critical to get it to get that right early on. Um, you don't have the, you don't have the, uh, freedom flexibility to, to waste, you know, months and years of getting it wrong.

Rand Fishkin: 00:50:56

You know, yeah. A big part of a big part of venture backed, uh, funding, you know, if you look at a lot of the consumer businesses, uh, uh, we work or an Uber or an Airbnb. Right there. They used a ton of their venture dollars to essentially just throw it every channel they could find and see which ones performed. And if you have a stack of hundreds of millions of dollars, you can afford to waste 10 million on wrong channels every quarter. Right, right. But you know what? In fact, you can even afford to throw those tens of millions of dollars that it. at channels that will pretend to take credit for sales that would have happened anyway, which I think is a ton of how digital advertising works, right? So there are many, I don't mean to say that Google and Facebook and Instagram and Amazon, uh, that all advertising on those places is useless, but a tremendous amount of the ad dollars that are spent there are spent there because those ad platforms. are essentially, I'm not going to say in the way, but they happen along the journey of a buyer. They don't influence the journey of the buyer, but they happen along the way. And so those platforms can take credit by saying this many people who eventually bought your product, saw your ad on our site. And that is fundamentally different from this advertisement on this site. influence this buyer who would not have otherwise made this purchase? Because why work hard to make more sales when you could just take credit for sales that were already going to happen? Liam, I'm

Liam Martin: 00:52:38

curious for you. Yeah, I have that issue too. But for us, because we're bootstrapped, the fun thing about it is that we can actually pull all that advertising for two months. So like we'll run experiments where we're like, well, let's just shut it down for two months and see what happens. And then our paid acquisition guy is like, you can't do that. This is 40 percent of our pipeline. We can't do that. Is it? I just did it. Let's find out. You know, and I'll, I'll get in trouble if, you know, it's all on me. And then we see a 5 percent reduction. In our pipeline and it's like, then it's 5%. So if I'm calculating it now, we're almost, you know, we've got a 22 month buyback, not a six month buyback.

Rand Fishkin: 00:53:21

Very, very smart to do that. And so few people are willing to cut their spend because growth is the goal rather than profitability or sustainability.

Tim Winkler: 00:53:32

Yeah. A couple of last things that I would point out too, just because, you know, it's something from my background anyways, I, I, my first business was an offshore recruiting company out in Indonesia and kind of quickly. Realized, you know, obviously the, the amount of money that could be saved if you find the right resources offshore for some specific roles that, you know, aren't really needed in, in internal stateside or, um, you know, this part of, uh, part of the world, uh, where your cost is, is much more extravagant. Um, what, what if any did, did you all do in terms of getting resourceful for Uh, manpower, uh, from, uh, hiring offshore to consultants, freelancers, you know, those are always interesting stories to hear as well. Yeah,

Liam Martin: 00:54:21

I've got two. So we operate in 48 different countries right now and. We do that. We generally issue a salary band for a position. So let's say I want to hire an engineer for 70, 000 us. As an example, you probably won't be able to get someone in San Francisco, but I might get someone in Canada. I might get someone in, um, Ukraine. I might get someone in Romania. So we just set the bands and then we have basically find the best person As it connects to that band, and that's a major cost saver for us generally. And then what I love to do with consultants and for consultants that are listening right now, I apologize. I've probably done this to you before. I call it hot tubbing. So I hot tub all the consultants. So what I'll do is I'll say, listen, I love what you guys are doing. Could I, could I get like four hours of your time? Like what's the minimum amount that I need to pay to be able to get you to just kind of tell me what's going on. And maybe, you know, the full package is 100, 000 and we can start with 5, 000. So I do that with like eight consultants and then I see them all in on the same email saying, hey, you guys all wrote these reports. looks like there's a lot of differences between them. Can you tell me which ones are true? And they'll do all the work for free. It's hot tubbing them. It's all putting them in on the same project saying, I actually bought a little bit of consulting from all of you guys. And you're all giving me different information and their ego feeds them into really doing the rest of that work without me actually having to pay them. And it's worked multiple times. I've done it for SEO quite a few times. Cause there's a lot of SEO gurus that will say like, I know what to do. Probably have five or six emails in your inbox today about those people, but you know, you can, you can hire them for relatively little to even do an assessment. And then, um, and then just introduce some of the other people that you did the assessment with. Yeah,

Rand Fishkin: 00:56:21

fascinating. Uh, I, I haven't heard of this hot tubbing concept before, but I do whenever I recommend SEO or marketing people to folks in my network, which, which I get asked all the time. My suggestion is always like, Hey, do your introductory call with 4 or 5 people. Explain that your problem have them explain their solution and why it's going to work. Pick the person who who gels with you, right? Whose responses resonate with you. And, you know, I don't think necessarily that that. Whatever the consultant who is is the most correct one needs to do the work to prove that, you know, sort of unpaid to the client like that, you know, whatever. I can imagine lots of scenarios where the consultant who was connected in would be like. I don't think I need to spend extra time on this, you know, trying to win Liam's business. I'm sure that many will spend and obviously have. Um, but I think there's so much value in having multiple conversations and I do the same thing, right? So we, um, SparkToro, uh, Moz was very anti consultant and contractor, unfortunately. Um, And I hold, I hold myself partially responsible for that because I essentially listen to my board of directors and my executive team who was like, hey, you know, consultants, contractors, agencies, you know, that's the devil. You shouldn't use them. Um, you know, you got to build expertise in house. That's what makes your company valuable, et cetera. So I listened to that. I probably, I should not have a spark Toro though. We use consults and agencies for everything, everything, everything, everything designed. I have

Liam Martin: 00:58:08

with agencies, I'll usually bring them a deal saying like, let's say it's an agency for paid acquisition and I'll say. Here's the deal. You guys will work really hard the first three months, and then you'll send me to some junior guy after that, and I won't get the same results, but because we've already opted in on those first three months, and I was happy, maybe you'll get an extra two or three months from me, and then I'll end up letting you go. What I would like to do instead is, why don't I pay you double? Whatever your fee is now and the goal is to be able to take my internal team and get them operational to the point in which we can do that handoff and I can move them to an internal perspective. Because then it's just straight up from the get go. Like, this is the purpose of this activity is to be able to take. What that agency knows, transfer it internally into my team. And I'm very happy to pay you whatever above the market rate is, right? If, if the average company stays with you for six months, let's pay you for seven, I'll pay you up front. And let's just actually execute on that strategy. Cause then it's just a lot clearer because these difficult conversations, I find it's just this, this trend of, it's really great at the beginning. And then. I get handed off to their B team because it's already a contract that's up and running and it's just, it's incredibly frustrating for everyone all

Rand Fishkin: 00:59:28

around. Uh, so there's a number of agencies I know in digital marketing world who specialize in doing exactly that. Their engagements are literally structured. 1 of 2 ways we can manage the whole thing for you or we'll train your internal team to do what we do. We'll set it up. We'll work with your team. We hand it off in 3 months. Then you go run with it. You come back to us if you need us. Right. And I actually, I think that's a great model to, um, trying to remember who's there. There's a Canadian woman whose agency is all based around that. Dana D. Tomaso. Her agency is just exactly that. I'll plug an

Tim Winkler: 01:00:02

agency that that we've found extremely valuable, uh, in terms of identifying. You know, offshore resources to help us out for, for skill sets like SDR or, you know, uh, coordinators, back office operations, types of, uh, types of skill sets. It's called shepherd. And so it's almost like a staffing agency for offshore. And, you know, one of the biggest challenges I think folks face when they're looking to engage in offshore resources. Where do I begin? You know, how do I sift through the talent? It's, it's overwhelming. They do all of that for you. You know, you pay a finder's fee, you pay a 25, 30 percent of that individual's salary. But you know, when you're, when you're, you're, you're talking about some of these, some of these compensations and areas of like the Philippines, it's, it's well worth that investment to get a pre vetted resource and it's also creating opportunities for them as well. And I've always approached it with the intent of like, I treat them like they're a part of the team. I treat them like they're an, like they're an employee per se. Uh, bring them into the, you know, any virtual events or, and make them feel part of that culture. Because the reality is that when you find a good one, you know, you don't want to let those individuals go. And it's so hard to find those good folks. So, so I've, I've had great success with, with Shepherd. Um, something that I heard from like a, like it was my first million podcast and, uh, you know, uh, I bought in and, and had great, great experience. Um, but they do a lot of offshore talent between, uh, Philippines and South America. Um,

Rand Fishkin: 01:01:33

actually, like, uh, Oh, sorry. Oh, go ahead. No, I was going to say that I love, um, we've used several consultants for essentially product development research, and, uh, I don't know if you guys have experienced this, but Casey, my co founder likes to say, you know, Rand, if you get on the phone with one of our customers, they will love everything you show them. It was like, your problem is you're quite charismatic and you have a personal brand in the space. And so people want to make you happy on the call, right? So you're not allowed to do any more product research, user research calls. You have to outsource it. Right. And he's right. Like he's absolutely right. So when. Uh, we hired like Asia from, uh, demand maven and she jumps on these calls and she records them, right? So we can watch the call that she has and it's, she has this ability to do a thing that I cannot do, which is she will ask a question, you know, about like, Oh, how do you, how do you find this valuable? The person will answer. Their answer will end. She'll sit there and wait for them to say more about it. Wow. Mm-Hmm. And I can't do it. I'm so

Liam Martin: 01:02:41

awkward. I'm like, awkward

Rand Fishkin: 01:02:42

people, awkward pleaser. I have to fill the space. Right. So which I suppose, you know, sort of makes me a good podcast guest, but a terrible user experience. Sure.

Liam Martin: 01:02:54

So I, I've had a small change to that. I do do a lot of product meetings and feature meetings, but what I do is I always correlate it back to. Putting money in the company's pocket. So I'll show them a feature. What do you think about this feature? Ah, it's great. It's great. Liam. I love it. This is amazing. It's going to completely change our business. Amazing. I see you're on the basic plan and this is only a premium feature. Would you like to switch and shut up? Wait for that awkward pause. Well, I don't know. And then the real reasons come out as to why they're not going to pay more for it. And that is an incredibly painful process. I still, to this day, fill that empty void. I, I, I learned this from a, a very smart salesperson that I used to go out in the field with. And, um, this guy was in like his fifties and he was our VP of sales for about two and a half years. And And we would sit on the same side of the table and I was the super enthusiastic guy that would like give the demo of the features and all this kind of stuff. And then he would say, so what do you guys think? Oh, it's great. How many do you want to buy? And then shut up. And sometimes I would say something. And I remember once we were on the same side of the table and he kicked me in the shin. He was like, shut up. Don't say anything. We need to know whether they want to buy it. And we need to identify. Okay. We need to identify as quickly as possible the noes so that you can move on to the yeses because this is long sales process. These are like, you know, 100, 000 a year plus contracts and you really need to figure out is there something there? Is there a there there? And if there isn't just one Boston

Rand Fishkin: 01:04:43

into the next, so this is so fascinating. I think that part of the big difference is that my suspicion is. You are talking to people who are responsible for buying and using the product simultaneously. Yep. Most of the time. I'm not talking to, let's see. I am often, if almost always, uh, the people that we do the product research with are almost never the people responsible for making the purchase. Interesting. Right. So they're the, they're the users. They're like a consultant inside an agency, their manager, the agency owner who decides, are we going to buy this product? So if you were to say, do you want to buy it? They'd be like, hell yeah, I want to buy it. I have no idea if I'll be able to, right? Right.

Liam Martin: 01:05:31

So they can't say yes, but they can say no. And those are the people that you, so those are the people that I have to stay away from, like the plague, right? Like those are the people, if you can't say yes, then, and again, that old sales guy is like. Ringing in my ears. If they can't say yes, then don't talk to them. And

Rand Fishkin: 01:05:51

yeah, it's the difference between sort of, uh, marketing, which is what almost all, you know, I have no salespeople. We don't do any sales. If you ask us for a sales call, which sometimes people do, we're like, no, I will not get on that. I won't say even if you're the personal say, yes, I'm not going to. I don't spend time with it, right? Like I'm not going to do that, but we do lots of marketing to get people who are interested and then they self service by so really different, you know, philosophically, but I, I see the value in what you're talking about. It's kind of, yeah.

Liam Martin: 01:06:23

Okay. And just one other question, kind of connected to that, um, self serve versus sales led or like product led versus sales led. So we do both and it's been really interesting over the last five years. We've had a transition from. Um, we had no sales people five years ago. Now we have 20 ish AEs and I think another 20 SDRs like we've got a sales team, right? And they're approaching a much higher level customer than we were before. Do you think, and there's, um, there's a couple other people that I've spoken to on this subject. I don't know whether or not this is even in the context of this podcast, but. It looks like there's more and more PLG that's entering the market as opposed to sales led. Like it seems to me like sales led is contracting and PLG is expanding to your point, right? You don't have a sales team and you've started and SparkToro is how many years old? I don't know. But you know, it's like you started from that point forward. Um, I'm wondering if we're also seeing kind of the compression or the, the reduction of a sales led model. Leading to more of a PLG model as we're moving forward. But that's kind of my own, my gut feel. And it's funny because we're going the opposite direction and my bias is towards PLG, not sales led. I don't know much about it. I there's other people that we've hired to be able to handle that side of the business.

Rand Fishkin: 01:07:53

Yeah, man. No, I think, uh, I think you're absolutely right at the macro level. And I do wonder if it's creating opportunity for sales organizations to succeed in spaces that are exclusively product led, because I think there's two different sort of kinds of people out there, even in the same space, there's people who in audience research software, there are people who will happily. Be thrilled to pay brand watch 30, 000 a year for something that they could self service get from SparkToro for a hundred bucks a month. But they want that sales experience. They want that person that they can email all the time. They want the support. They want to feel like they're part of the organization. They're at a company that. You know, works that way. They have to jump through security audits and da, da, da, da, da. And brand watch is happy to do all those things, right? And if they go to spark toro in the email us, and they say, hey, can you do a demo for my team? We will say, sorry. Right? Here's a video. Um, and I. I suspect there's a lot of opportunity that will be emerging there's there always is right anytime there's a trend in one direction. There's opportunity in the in the opposite 1 yeah, I

Tim Winkler: 01:09:03

really like the, the, the idea of the, the community, uh, base growth as well. Something that we did, uh, with hatch right around when the pandemic hit was. You know, we, we, we run a recruiting company, right? So we're selling recruiting services at a time when nobody was, was hiring. Um, so we had built such a, a network of both technologists and cool, you know, founders, technology leaders from startups. So we launched a community site called hatchpad. And, uh, what we decided to do was create value through. PR and marketing, um, little micro landing pages to showcase the tech culture of the companies that you're, that you're building. Right. And at a time when they were hiring fully remote, nobody was going into the office. We were like, Hey, you know, we'll do as a little one on one video with the CTO and kind of let them show, you know, their, their true self on, on camera. And then we'll put that and bake that into your little micro page. We're not going to charge you anything for this as a way of adding value for, you know, the technologists that are out there exploring opportunities. And so what we ended up doing was it gave us an outlet to have conversations with people and then add value first at no cost. And then just build awareness for what we're doing for later on down the line. And so what I, what I wish I had known this earlier on and in my, my career would be, you know. For those founders that are out there just trying to, you know, hit the pound the payment from a sales perspective, and they're getting a lot of rejection, which you're going to get, what is it something that, what is something that you can add as value to the, to, to your target customer? That's maybe, you know, complimentary and do it because the, the, the payoff for that down the line, yeah, it might be a little bit of your time. The payoff for that down the line will be building trust and building a network of folks that are going to say, I remember what that person did for me, you know, two years ago. Uh, I'll, I'll buy from you now. What are you, what are you selling? And, and that's something that it took me a long time to, to, to learn. And obviously, you know, it depends on what your size of your team is, if you're front and payroll and everything, but if you're scrappy and you're lean. You know what it is that you're doing if it's a product or service figure out what what you can do that's fairly quick and and not much of a cost and do it complimentary to build

Rand Fishkin: 01:11:16

trust. No, I mean, I love like we so spark Toro's product led growth happens almost exclusively through. Uh, the free version of the product, right? So we have a forever free plan. There's no free trial. Few hundred people every day come to SparkToro's website, right? They hear about us on whatever podcast or YouTube videos, or people write about it, or they screw someone screenshots, a result shows it in a meeting, whatever. And they're like, Oh, what is that? I want to see that. And they come to the site and they, they put in their email address and sign up. And, and now they're part of our, you know, roughly part of our community. And so we have this 150, 000 people in sort of our world, uh, who are at least roughly aware of and paying attention to SparkToro. They come back and try the product occasionally, right? They use the free plan. Um, and that's essentially the, the way that We think working on that thing will have more ROI than anything else we can do in the business, essentially making the product better for both free users and paid users. Um, and the transition between that, right? The, the things that you get for free that make you want to come back again and again, and the gate between what's free and paid. That makes you want to upgrade. We think that's essentially the core of the business and keeping it simple like that, right? Especially for a small team, like you mentioned. You know, there's three of us, you know, we're not, we don't have 20 people in a, in a sales organization and we don't, we have no aspirations. Like I never, Casey and I never want to run a company of more than a dozen people. So that's our kind of, you know, strict limit longterm, it

Tim Winkler: 01:13:04

gets a little more stressful the bigger you get. Isn't it?

Rand Fishkin: 01:13:07

Yeah. And it's just not something, you know, I. We, we plan to use lots of consultants and agencies like we talked about. Yeah. We plan to serve hundreds of thousands of customers, um, and build, you know, build an exciting business, but not, not in the same, like, you know, um, people driven. Sure. Size way. Right.

Tim Winkler: 01:13:29

Get much more creative, um, with, with running lean. Uh, so, so let's, uh,

Rand Fishkin: 01:13:35

yeah. Constraints breed cape creativity in all, everything we've talked about today.

Tim Winkler: 01:13:39

And Liam, the first thing you said when we got on this first call is like, I'm so tired of all these meetings that I'm having meetings, meetings, just come compound the larger you get to, but. Yeah, growth is a good thing, but you know,

Liam Martin: 01:13:52

and also to, I mean, to speak to Ren's point on this, I I'm not the CEO of the company. I'm a chief innovation officer. It was just a bullshit way of saying I get to play around with product and, you know, think about where the business is going and try to align to the words that, and it just frees me. I don't know if you guys have read, uh, or a follow entrepreneur operating system, but there's like the visionary. The visionary, uh, there's a visionary, which is basically just the person that like thinks of the product all day long. So, um, inside of, uh, inside of apple, that would actually be like Johnny Ives as an example, he's just like, how can I think about making this thing better? Right. I'm just entirely focused on making this thing better. I don't know how we get any of these materials to make these products. We're just, you know, I'm just thinking about how to get a better experience for the customer. And then there is the integrator. And that's essentially in a lot of these companies, it's the COO, but I actually think it's the CEO of the company at the end of the day, running operations, managing all the executives, having meetings with all of their VPs and their directors and all this kind of stuff. Relatively, basically, uh, about three months into COVID, I realized this is not the direction that I want to go in for the rest of my career, and I would much rather focus on connecting with customers and being on the marketing side and the product side. That and case in point, actually, I had a meeting with, uh, we run a, an R and D team called chainsaw, which is, I like to give my teams special little names. The only team that I manage and, uh, all the other product teams are focused on sharpening the ax, but we're focused on building chainsaws, which is features that could have exponential impact on the product. And. Inside of chainsaw, the, the entire executive team is like, let's expand chainsaw. Let's turn it into like 60 people. Let's turn it, you know, it's like 12 people right now. I said, no, I would like to keep it exactly where it is because that's manageable. And this is our happy place. And I think we'll actually ship just as much with 12 than with 30 people. Yeah. Again, it just is counter to that venture backed mindset of headcount equals growth, headcount equals more development. Not all the time. You know, you've got to be able to figure out how to use that effectively. And to me, I'm Much happier shipping 5 to 6 things next year that are really, really good as opposed to 9 to 12 things that kind of suck.

Tim Winkler: 01:16:29

Mm hmm. And you have the flexibility and the freedom to go and do what you want to do within the business versus having to, you know, connect with a sounding board that's like, Oh, well, we need you really over here.

Liam Martin: 01:16:40

Yeah, me and my business partner, we had a, uh, so you know, how, like, there's all this drama open AI just had Sam Altman get fired by the board and then brought back in. So I remember about a year ago, I messaged my co founder about it. And I said, remember when we do, we used to do our board meetings, which we still technically do, I guess, if we want to be very legal about it, because we're on the board, yeah. Like we don't have any other board members other than me and my co founder. The board meeting is like, Hey, so what's going on? Do you think that you should keep your job? Yep. Uh, how about you? I'm okay with that too. Board meeting adjourned. Let me

Rand Fishkin: 01:17:22

write down the minutes.

Liam Martin: 01:17:24

Right. Exactly. Cool.

Tim Winkler: 01:17:26

Well, I want to, um, wrap up with this last segment. Five seconds. We could talk for another few hours on, on this topic, but, um, I'm going to put a bow on it and, uh, pivot us into this last, this last little fun segment. This is an opportunity to just kind of hear a little bit about, you know, who you all are, uh, through, through some light business, like personal questions. We're not gonna, we're not gonna get too deep here. Um, but, uh, we get to spin that wheel behind you. Uh, we, it's not necessary, but we'll spend it for you anyways. My daughter loves that wheel, by the way, just hours just to look at it and it's great. Um, all right, I'm going to start with you, Rand. So basically I'll just ask you a question, try to try to keep it within a five seconds. I won't air horn you off or anything if you, if you go over, um, explain, uh, explain Spark Toro to me as if I was a five year old.

Rand Fishkin: 01:18:21

In five seconds? No, I will not. That's the only answer you can give in five seconds.

Tim Winkler: 01:18:28

Okay, give it ten seconds.

Rand Fishkin: 01:18:30

Ten seconds. SparkToro is an audience research tool that helps marketers and founders understand who their audience is and where they hang out.

Tim Winkler: 01:18:38

How would you describe the company culture that you're

Rand Fishkin: 01:18:42

building? We are all remote. Uh, French working hours, very fun, high camaraderie friendship before business.

Tim Winkler: 01:18:54

What are some things that folks can be excited about for SparkToro heading into 2024?

Rand Fishkin: 01:19:01

Next week, you will be able to play with SparkToro V2, which is no longer based on Twitter. And has, in my opinion, way better data and in sharpening that ax a lot.

Tim Winkler: 01:19:13

What is, uh, something that you like to do, but you're not very good at? Video games. I

Rand Fishkin: 01:19:20

love video games, but I'm terrible at all of them. You lose every time. Yeah, I have to have my brother like come over. Hey, Evan, help me beat this level. I can't beat this level.

Tim Winkler: 01:19:30

That's awesome. Uh, do you have a celebrity doppelganger?

Rand Fishkin: 01:19:35

Uh, I once, I was at a, uh, wedding between two actors in New York, um, who are friends of ours, and someone came up to me and thought that I was Oh, no. Alan Cumming. Alan Cumming. I think it's just because I was styled like him that day. So

Tim Winkler: 01:19:55

he's got great hair, I take it.

Rand Fishkin: 01:19:58

That's very kind of you. I'm trying to remember, he's been in a lot of stuff. His voice is really famous. Like they, his voice is used a lot. Now,

Tim Winkler: 01:20:07

now I'm going to, going to the Google.

Rand Fishkin: 01:20:09

So he's, he's a Scottish actor. What was his big couple of movies? Yeah, I can see the

Liam Martin: 01:20:14

resemblance. I just Googled that.

Rand Fishkin: 01:20:17

Oh, yeah. He had really similar eyes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll make

Tim Winkler: 01:20:20

sure to do a screenshot in the show notes to let folks decide, um, what's something that, uh, you're very afraid

Rand Fishkin: 01:20:29

of statistical dangers. So guns, uh, private jets, helicopters, scuba diving, highway driving. Um, yeah, yeah. Good answer. Small towns, small towns are really dangerous in the United States.

Tim Winkler: 01:20:51

What's a charity or a corporate philanthropy that's near and dear to you?

Rand Fishkin: 01:20:56

Give directly. They give money, uh, directly to people in need they with no strings attached and then they just follow up and track results. Their only cost essentially to distributing that is just the person who gives the money to people. That's helpful. And. The research to follow up and see what happens to it. And they have proven that it is more effective than almost every other form of giving no matter what.

Tim Winkler: 01:21:24

Yeah, we'll include that, uh, in the show notes, really neat.

Rand Fishkin: 01:21:27

Every, every event I speak at, I ask them to donate to give directly rather than pay me an honorarium. And so I'm very proud to say that, that I think I sent a 30, 000 plus in the last couple of years to give directly through that.

Tim Winkler: 01:21:42

Wow. That's awesome. If you had a one day left to live, uh, would you spend it with Morgan Freeman or Denzel Washington?

Rand Fishkin: 01:21:53

Geraldine DeReuter? Not an option. We don't know. I'm gonna say Morgan Freeman. Yeah, there's no answer here. Just gonna, you

Tim Winkler: 01:22:12

know, read you a lullaby. Put you, put you, put you to sleep. Yeah. I'd have him dictate my life. I think it'd be a good day. Yeah, that would be great, right? A little book on tape. Who's the greatest superhero of all time? Oh

Rand Fishkin: 01:22:34

man. Uh, Liam? A little help?

Liam Martin: 01:22:37

I'd go with Wolverine because he's Canadian, and he's got a very, like, he's a real character as opposed to all the other ones that are just really Nice. He's or Batman. No, Batman. I gotta go

Tim Winkler: 01:22:51

with Batman. I gotta go with Batman.

Rand Fishkin: 01:22:53

That's the right answer. Oh, yeah. I don't know. Every billionaire wants to be Batman. So gross.

Tim Winkler: 01:23:00

Okay. What about Disney character? Favorite Disney character? Ooh, uh,

Rand Fishkin: 01:23:07

gosh, I think I'm going to go with, um, Patton Oswalt's rat from Ratatouille. Oh,

Tim Winkler: 01:23:13

nice.

Rand Fishkin: 01:23:14

First time. First time. I think his name is Emil.

Tim Winkler: 01:23:16

Yeah. Solid. All right. We're going to end with Ratatouille. Um, that's a wrap for you. Ran Liam. You ready? Are they

Liam Martin: 01:23:25

the same questions or are they completely different? Cause now I'm terrified.

Tim Winkler: 01:23:31

So they're going to be pretty different. Okay.

Liam Martin: 01:23:34

Okay. That's fine. And, and one other question, um, French working hours, I'm French Canadian. What is

Tim Winkler: 01:23:40

French working hours? Yeah, I was going to ask that too. What do you mean

Rand Fishkin: 01:23:43

by that? So you, uh, I think France has a law that office workers can't work more than 32 hours a week. Oh, interesting. Okay. Cool. So they have the highest GDP per capita per hours worked in the, in the world by a good margin. And, uh, yeah, SparkToro, we sort of aim to be 30 hours or below each week. I love

Tim Winkler: 01:24:03

that. So is that like siestas built into the day or do you just take off like an entire day at the end of the week?

Rand Fishkin: 01:24:10

Uh, I mean, TBD, so Amanda and Casey both have kids and they're responsible for a lot of childcare in their homes. Casey also is responsible for like. Laundry. I do mostly meals and meal prep and cleanup and stuff and host a lot of things, but I also run a second company, right? It's a video game studio. So for me, it's a little bit less like I'm just not doing spark tour work. I'm doing this other thing. Yeah, that's great. Love

Tim Winkler: 01:24:34

it. All right, cool. All right. You are on the clock, Liam. Here we go. Um, so explain, uh, Time Doctor to me as if I was a five year old. Uh, time

Rand Fishkin: 01:24:43

analytics

Liam Martin: 01:24:44

for remote teams.

Tim Winkler: 01:24:46

What is your favorite part about the culture at Time Doctor?

Liam Martin: 01:24:51

We can work whenever we want, wherever we want.

Tim Winkler: 01:24:56

Can folks be most excited about for time doctor heading into 2024

Liam Martin: 01:25:01

thinking about this? I really can't tell you, unfortunately. Um, so yeah, no, I can't. I like it. I literally the team would scream at me and let's just say this. We're doing a lot of stuff with artificial intelligence, which will be fantastic. They

Rand Fishkin: 01:25:17

built a time machine. We're all going to call it time. Dr. Brown.

Tim Winkler: 01:25:33

I'm buying it. It sounds super exciting. What, what was, uh, what was your favorite cereal as a kid?

Liam Martin: 01:25:44

So my, my grandfather's Scottish and it's got to be oatmeal to be honest with you. That's just like really good in the morning. I still eat it today. It's

Tim Winkler: 01:25:51

fantastic. Just like straight up plain oatmeal or like flavors, some sort of like cinnamon, brown sugar,

Liam Martin: 01:25:57

just, you know, eight green cereal oats, a little bit of milk, maybe a little bit of brown sugar. If you want to be exploratory. Okay. And that's about

Rand Fishkin: 01:26:05

it. Two shots of Lafroig.

Tim Winkler: 01:26:08

That's right. I'm going to flip, flip this question that I just asked ran, but so what's something that you hate to do, but you're actually really good at.

Liam Martin: 01:26:23

Lots of meetings. I'm pretty good at doing meetings, but I don't like to

Tim Winkler: 01:26:28

do them. Hate them. Yeah, we need to outsource those meetings somehow.

Rand Fishkin: 01:26:35

What's

Tim Winkler: 01:26:35

a, um, a fictional world from a book or movie that you would love to live in?

Liam Martin: 01:26:44

These are really difficult questions. Uh, I would say going back to the time machine where he's able to go forwards and backwards in time. I don't know if you already read that, read that book when you were a kid, but he went way back in time or way forward in time, and then ended up in a world where there were people that lived underground and all this kind of stuff. Like I would love to just kind of go forward and backwards in time and just see everything that happened. So. I know that that's exactly the answer, but it does come from a book and that's what I'd like to do.

Tim Winkler: 01:27:18

Is that

Rand Fishkin: 01:27:19

the HG Wells that the time machine? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Winkler: 01:27:23

I, I find myself really craving life back in the eighties and nineties. Um, so much. So I started following just like these Instagram handles that it's like an old VHS walking into like a Walmart just in the nineties. And it's something about it's comforting because nobody's on phones and everybody's just. It seems it's like a simple way of life and I kind of crave it. Friday night blockbuster. Friday night at the blockbuster, man. That's it. That's been like, it's

Liam Martin: 01:27:49

just like, That's it. That was the highlight. Gives me, makes me feel warm.

Tim Winkler: 01:27:53

Yeah. Bang! Um, alright, so if you could have dinner with any tech icon, past or present, who would it be? Be with

Liam Martin: 01:28:04

it would probably be Elon Musk at this point because I would love to know whether I would love to know how he can do those many things at the same time because

Rand Fishkin: 01:28:18

it is hard to hate on trans people, Jews, gay people, all at the same

Liam Martin: 01:28:25

time. You know, I would ask him those questions too. I always have the free time to be able to do those things as well, because it's really, I think for me, I was thinking to myself, maybe, um, maybe someone at Apple, like maybe Steve jobs, but, you know, it's like, I think probably in a hundred years. Elon Musk will probably be the person people remember more than someone like Steve Jobs, fortunately or unfortunately.

Tim Winkler: 01:28:56

I'm going to keep going for ran has something to say. What is a charity or corporate philanthropy that's near and dear to you?

Liam Martin: 01:29:07

My daughter was born, um, preterm. She was born at 29 weeks and There is a company that I invest in and it's a, um, basically what it allows you to do is build incubators. An incubator costs about $25,000, and they've been able to engineer an incubator that costs about a thousand dollars. And they specifically take those incubators and sell them in developing countries. They, they specifically are actually, they've almost got all of India covered at this point. Oh. And when you look at the pragmatics of dollars. Spending money on an incubator is actually one of the most efficient dollars that you can spend in terms of a person having a happy and healthy life. Wow. So, uh, I spend money on incubators. That's cool.

Rand Fishkin: 01:29:55

Beautiful. I love it. Also, I kind of love that, uh, it's not a, it's not a charity, but it's, you know, it's got an economic model behind it, which encourages.

Liam Martin: 01:30:05

Yes, they, they actually do need to make a profit as well. Which is something

Rand Fishkin: 01:30:08

that I rely on donors to grow and spread, which. You know, has its challenges.

Tim Winkler: 01:30:15

Yeah. My daughter was born six weeks early, so big, big fan of, uh, the whole Nick you experience and those, those doctors and nurses are, uh, the superheroes. Really? Um, what is the worst fashion trend that you've ever followed?

Rand Fishkin: 01:30:32

Ooh, followed.

Liam Martin: 01:30:35

I had really, really long hair, like hair that went all the way down to almost my elbows and, uh, that was stupid. Did you have that?

Rand Fishkin: 01:30:46

Pardon? Were you a head banger?

Liam Martin: 01:30:49

No, it was, uh, so here's something else that I can, that I can say that I don't say that often. I used to be a competitive pair skater. I was 26 in the world. I did pair skating and I had like that kind of those top knot things that you would have. And it was part of just the setup and the outfit. And, uh. Yeah, it was pretty stupid. It's also like it takes a lot of time and energy to be able to wash that type of hair. It's much easier to just kind of roll out of bed and say, I'm ready to go.

Tim Winkler: 01:31:21

We're going to need pictures. We're going to need some pictures because we usually like to post that in the show notes to get a visual. Yeah. We need a visual of that. All right. We're going to wrap this up with the last one. What was your dream job as a kid? Stuntman. Ooh. Ooh.

Liam Martin: 01:31:38

Nice. That's a great answer. There's still time. Yeah.

Tim Winkler: 01:31:43

That's so good. All right. That's it guys. Uh, thanks for, uh, joining us on the pod. You've both been good guests. Um, can

Rand Fishkin: 01:31:51

I share my screen? I found images of Liam.

Tim Winkler: 01:32:01

We're going to need screenshots as well. Um, but again, thanks for spending time. You guys have been so gracious with your time and you're both very busy. And, uh, the, this is extremely helpful for those entrepreneurs that are out there is very top of mind. Uh, capital, obviously, like I mentioned earlier, it's extremely hard to come by. So ways to, you know, be efficient and scrappy, uh, bootstrapped is, uh, what this is all about. So thanks again. And, uh, uh, thanks for joining us on the pod.

Rand Fishkin: 01:32:28

Yeah. This was a joy. I hope we get to do it again.

Tim Winkler: 01:32:31

Yeah. Maybe two or three more times. Who knows?

Rand Fishkin: 01:32:34

Two or three more times. Exactly. Take care.