SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 368: From Blog to $40M/Yr, 23k Customers At Moz With Rand Fishkin
27 Jul 2016
Chapter 1: What is the story behind the founding of Moz?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: How did Moz transition from a blog to a software company?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million.
Chapter 3: What were the early revenue figures for Moz?
He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark.
Chapter 4: How does churn rate affect a SaaS business like Moz?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Dustin Goodwin. He's in the HR industry, specifically in the software as a service space, looking to increase his revenue. So congratulations, Dustin.
For your guys' chance to win 100 bucks every Monday on the show to build your idea, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444. Again, text the word Nathan to 33444. This is episode 368. Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll hear from Anant Kail. She has 22 customers that pay $50,000 per year with her SaaS application, AppZen.com.
Chapter 5: What strategies does Moz use to lower customer churn?
Top drive.
Chapter 6: Why did Rand Fishkin decide to replace himself as CEO?
Good morning to you. Our guest today is Rand Fishkin, and he uses the ludicrous title Wizard of Moz, which we'll talk about later. He's the founder and former CEO of Moz, board member at presentation software startup Haiku Deck, and co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and the co-founder of Inbound.org.
Chapter 7: How has Rand Fishkin's approach to business changed after stepping down?
Rand, are you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 8: What lessons can entrepreneurs learn from Rand's journey?
I am. All right, let's do this. So first things first, tell us what Moz does and how Moz generates revenue.
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.
And you did something remarkable recently in the business, which was replacing yourself as CEO. I want to get to that in a second, but first I want people to get some context on kind of business size. So give us the story. What year was the business founded in?
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.
So what was the main asset of the blog that you used to launch Moz? Did you build a big email list?
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.
How many people read that article and how many people purchased and what was the price of the PayPal to get access to the software?
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.
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