Rand Fishkin

Sure.

So Moz is a software company.

We have a self-service software as a service SaaS model, and we primarily help web marketing professionals, both in-house web marketers and consultants and agencies with SEO.

And our software is designed to help track and monitor, audit, discover opportunities, analyze competition, all those kinds of things that you need to do for SEO.

Well, it depends what you mean by founded, but the software company Moz was founded in 2007, although it had existed as a blog for four years prior to that.

Kind of my own personal side project blog.

Um, we did, but we didn't use that until 2009.

Oh geez.

Funny.

Yeah.

Um, so literally the thing that launched the software, uh, as a service product was I put up a blog post saying we now have software that you can subscribe to via PayPal.

And, uh, and back in those days, uh, yeah, apparently that, that was enough.

We built up a lot of loyal daily readers.

And so, uh, that, uh,

became kind of our primary marketing channel.

I wish I could tell you I was sophisticated enough to track all those things.

I was not.

So I can tell you that in the first six months, we had about 400 people sign up, maybe a little more than that.

And by the middle of the year, it was about half of our consulting revenue.

And so we saw that by the end of the year, it would be neck and neck.