Rand Fishkin

We'd essentially have, you know, half software, half consulting revenue.

And that that made us really stand up and take notice like, wow, we have done almost no work on this thing except build these tools and then launch them.

Maybe this is a more interesting model than all the consulting work we have to do.

What was that?

Let's see.

So the full year, 2007, I think revenue was $850,000.

It was 400K in consulting and 450 in software.

And then the next year we, you know, backed off on consulting.

I think we did $300,000 worth of consulting in 2008 and software went to 1.1 million.

And then the next year it was...

Gosh, what was it?

It was like $2.2 million in software and $900,000 in consulting.

Do you recommend this, Rand?

I think it can be a very fine model.

That being said, you're assigning me far too much sophistication than what we had at the time.

I really was a complete rank amateur.

And so I would say that

One of the challenges here that I see many, many folks make, and I've talked to hundreds of consultants over the years who've wanted to productize and build software and those kinds of things.

And the real story is that while you think that the hard part is finding a pain point and then building the software, the true hard part is...

Launching that software, getting enough people on your software to make a real difference, which means having a great marketing channel for it, and then having a phenomenal retention rate.