What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers Podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense
of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they get to where they are today? How
did they make decisions, both through their companies and in their personal lives, and
what exactly makes their businesses tick?
And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and
go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
In today's episode, I sat down with Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SparkToro, who is perhaps best
known as the founder of Moss, and he's one of the world's foremost experts at searches
and optimization.
Rand and I are also good friends in real life, so we decided to sit down for a casual chat,
just talk about what's going on in each other's lives, how we're dealing with this COVID-19
pandemic and making business decisions as a result of it, and also how he's grown his
company SparkToro in the last two years since he was on the podcast. I hope you enjoyed
the episode.
How's life otherwise? How are you personally?
Like everyone else, some days are good. Some days are really emotionally hard and personally,
relatively unaffected. We, Geraldine and I both work from home, as you know, and we have,
you know, a relatively sizable house. So I can be out here in the shed and she's in the
house and like, we're not sort of stepping all over each other. Like my friends in New
York apartments right now are kind of nightmare situations, Bay Area too, I'm sure. And we're
very social, you know, we have a lot of friends, but we don't, you know, so I think we're missing
out on a lot of like going out and seeing people and having people over. We don't have
kids, so we don't, you know, we aren't impacted in the way that a ton of parents are right
now.
Right.
Yeah. And we both have careers that are, I don't want to say unaffected, but lighter,
have a lighter effect from the broader kind of secondary tertiary impacts of the economic
market rather than directly impacted by healthcare things or physical things. Even, you know,
I do a ton of conferences and events, right? So I canceled a tremendous amount of travel.
Yeah. Thankfully with like one exception, everything was, was refundable. You know,
the net net of that is basically SparkToro saving a bunch of money on me, probably reaching
more people through a lot of online events. Cause I think I've been asked to do two or
three video events every week for the next six weeks. Wow. So that that's been kind of
nice, but I think Geraldine and I are both very empathetic people. We have a lot of friends
all over the world. And so we kind of experienced the wave of I should read the news and I should
pay attention to my social networks and see what my friends are up to. Oh my God, everything's
so horrible and so overwhelming. And so many people are being hurt by this. How can I help
what, you know, let me do a million things and donate to charities and you know, support
this person's efforts and go amplify this and reach out to this person and do a call
with them. And then, oh my God, I feel overwhelmed by all of that. And I just need to crawl under
a rock and play video games and watch TV for a day. And then the cycle begins again, right?
It's pretty stunning how such a global crisis can affect all of us so differently. And I've
had kind of the same experience where personally, I'm just not nearly as affected as so many
other people. I mean, I've got an online job. I already worked from home. I'm not worried
about my job security. I'm not worried about... Just a lot of things are... I'm mostly worried
about my family and keeping them safe. But business wise and personally, it's just not
affecting me that much. And so a lot of my energy is spent outwardly on other people.
But then there's still this weird psychological effect. We're just knowing what's going on
in the world still can tire you out and exhaust you and affect you psychologically and emotionally.
I don't think there's any way that a rational sort of kind, empathetic person can read the
news or, you know, follow even their friends and family stories and be unaffected. It doesn't
matter how resilient you are, you will understand the depth and breadth of both the crisis itself
and the economic challenges. But yesterday I was watching the video of the trenches,
the mass graves that they're digging in New York, seeing coffin after coffin loaded into
these pits that are dug out of the earth and just...
It's unreal.
I don't know. That is an overwhelming experience, right? It's like reliving a plague from hundreds
of years ago.
It's unreal. It's almost unimaginable. And it's crazy because it's like this happened
so fast. I mean, four months ago, this was not on anybody's radar. And now like the entirety
of society has shifted. It's the only, it's basically the only thing that matters anymore.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think in the United States in particular, right, the tragedy is
just how preventable it was, right? Compared to a lot of places. I mean, you know, we have
a lot of friends and family in Italy and I think for Italians, it hit them so early and
so hard and it was so poorly understood. You know, there was bad information, various people
can debate whether some of that was intentionally misleading or just ignorance, right? You know,
Italy, I don't think they had much of a choice and probably a lot of Europe as well, but
the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, you know, a lot of other places did have that
option of taking it seriously, responding thoughtfully.
We had time, we had data, we had information. We ignored a lot of it. There's a lot of this
weird denial going on. You know, we see things on the news and it's not happening here. So
it can happen here. You know, I also canceled a ton of travel. Obviously, we were going
to be in Italy. I did go to Mexico, like a week before everything shut down. And it was
just so interesting talking to people there about what's going on because they have this
huge concert. This is right after they canceled South by Southwest. And then there are quotes
from the people of the concert are insane. Like, oh, this is a serious situation. And
we need to be careful. But at the same time, you got to have fun. And I was just thinking,
this is the one time and probably your entire lifespan where like, that is not true. You
don't have to go to this giant concert right now. Literally every other year, it's fine.
This is not the right time. But there's just this resistance, I think, to changing. I talked
to some friends as well, who were saying, oh, I don't think it's going to be an issue
in the United States. We have common sense. You know, we know not to go around sick people.
What are you talking about? And then in Mexico, I heard the same thing. Oh, in Mexico, we
have a lot of very hygienic people. We know how to stay clean. And it's like the number
of excuses and rationalizations for not taking this thing seriously. It's almost exactly
like a monster movie or a horror movie or a disaster movie, where you know what's coming
because that's what the movie is about. But all the characters are oblivious and just
doing all the wrong things. And apparently, that's realistic. That's what happens in real
life too.
Oh, God, I hate those movies. I hate watching that where it's just granted, there's something
that could kill us at any time. You have the gun, but why don't you go that way? And I'll
go this way.
It sets up the plot, but it always seems so unrealistic until it happens in real life.
And you're like, oh, I guess this is exactly what people do.
Yeah, pretty wild. I don't know how close to the numbers you are. But yeah, yeah, I
mean, part of my curiosity around Stripe more broadly is like the whether the sectors that
are experiencing increased demand right now are making up for some of the sectors that
are experiencing loss demand, especially online, right? Because my sense is so much of what's
happened in person commerce has kind of gone away entirely, right? We don't really have
the option other than maybe takeout or grocery and pharmacy. Everything else has to be done
via the web. And so I have this curiosity around whether, oh, yeah, Stripe has maybe
seen some sectors that have suffered, but there's so much more online activity that
overall business is up. And this is what I heard from some of the analysis from folks
like HubSpot and SimilarWeb. I'm trying to remember who else. Oh, the New York Times
was looking at it for looking at the shift to online activity. And yeah, I have a lot
of curiosity around that, right? Because it seems very plausible to me that even if the
economy overall takes a 25% hit, 30% hit, which is just massive, right? That's Great
Depression levels or worse, that so much activity will shift online. Folks who have been and
are online providers will actually see similar levels of business or increasing depending
on what you're offering.
Yeah, we know the answers to this. And we know it, even on a country by country level,
I will find out what I'm allowed to share and get back to you. And hopefully maybe share
some stuff in public too, because I think it's fascinating.
Yeah, yeah, I would love to see that. And I think that folks who are aggregating data
and sharing that out right now, that is hugely, hugely valuable. And I know the team from
ProfitWell, which analyzes right and is connected to a lot of Stripe accounts. And so they aggregate
data from you folks. I'm not sure if they do other payment providers as well. But they've
been sharing some of their stuff. I got their email newsletter, I think last week. And that
looked really interesting. So we'd love to hear what you're seeing. If you share that
on indie hackers or your Twitter account, that'd be awesome.
So this is actually what I really want to talk to you about today, which is communicating
sort of while we're in this time of crisis about the crisis itself. You've been doing
something that I think a lot of people are afraid to do, which is you're blogging very
directly about the coronavirus on your company blog. And I think a lot of people are afraid
to do it because quite frankly, it's hard to do it right.
Whereas you are prolific. Like I said earlier, you've been blogging every single week. Previous
to this, I saw a new SparkToro blog post every month or two, but you've been going at it.
So tell me about that. Why are you blogging so much about it and how you're approaching
it?
Yeah, I mean, I think Geraldine, my wife says that keeping busy right now is like a coping
mechanism for me. And I think that's probably true. I think there's also an aspect of feeling
overwhelmed by pain and hardship that other people are experiencing and getting asked
questions via my social channels, via email, on calls, all that kind of stuff, and wanting
to spread whatever knowledge I have or whatever opinions I've got in ways that can be helpful.
So there's people in need. I have something that can help. It's marketing advice, which
is admittedly not quite the same as going to the hospital and saving lives. But if it
can help anybody, I feel an obligation to do that. And I think that's the right thing
for businesses, organizations, individuals of all kinds to be doing. I was on a webinar
type thing yesterday or a big group Zoom hangout for startups. And I was asked the question,
should I feel ashamed or embarrassed to do marketing right now? Because now is the right
time to just kind of cut it off and bring it back later when the world isn't in crisis
because it feels really odd to be like, oh, are you or your business struggling right
now? My law firm can help. And I get it. That feels awkward. I think people are right to
have some hesitancy around that. And I think the only way to do it correctly is to have
empathy both for your customers and audience and also an ability to read the broader situation
and then apply that thoughtfully with your words and wording and positioning.
And I think there's probably people who don't know how to do it, who just feel like, I don't
trust myself to be able to do that. So I'm going to pull back entirely. Honestly, that's
okay. I think maybe that's fine. And you can leave it up to other people on your team or
consultants or an agency or folks who can help you with that. You can run it by people
before you publish. If your business can sustain it, you can hit pause on a lot of this stuff.
But for me, I think I am reasonably good at being able to read a room and be thoughtful
to folks. And so far, what I put out there has been received very thankfully and non-promotionally.
And so that's the way I want to lead. I think that's one great way to avoid the problem
of being seen as exploitative or overly promotional is to position whatever you're doing as I
am not going to personally or directly benefit from this. But here is this work that I believe
will help someone.
I think you've done such a good job blending what you do as a marketer and what SparkToro
offers with the messaging that you put out. Because you're not just like, okay, here's
a helpful thing for coronavirus. Here's how you can get tested. Here's how you can protect
your family. You're sort of specifying, here's how you as a business can take part in this
conversation effectively.
I don't think now is a time to everyone become professional epidemiologist or amateur epidemiologist
and go give advice about whatever, numbers and stuff. I can't remember the tweets I saw
a few weeks ago that were like, okay, if I see you tweeting about coronavirus numbers
and you're a techie in California, I know not to listen to you. And so my sense is,
if you have expertise and authority and experience in an area, and that area can be helpful to
people, that's where to lean in, not trying to become something that you're not overnight.
I wonder how much of the sort of principles you put into this have changed from now or
from earlier before this pandemic to now? Because some of the things you're talking
about are, you know, being aware of what your audience wants and reading the room, and basically
being helpful. Is that something that you're thinking about only now? Is that something
you're always thinking about when you're blogging and marketing? Or do you shift the ratio?
I would say that I personally have almost always been in that pocket. But my advice
has not always been that way. Because I think historically, I recognize that you can be
more sales focused, more directly selling and promoting and positioning your products.
And that can do very well. So even though that's not the way I like to do marketing,
that doesn't mean it doesn't work or didn't work. I think what's interesting about this
crisis we're going through is that it has taken a lot of that sort of, you know, if
this is help people and then rely on the branding that you build with them to mean that they'll
in the future, think highly of you and check you out and want to work with you. And on
this side, it is this other side, it's go direct sell the thing that you're offering
to people, you know, it's paid, you're shameless about it. And both approaches have worked.
In most sectors, both approaches can and have worked for different people. They resonate
with different audiences, differently, both work. Now, this sales side is working a lot
less well.
It looks like the window sort of shifted over from one side to the other. It's kind of cut
off the very salesy side. And now that just seems super taboo tone deaf.
Yeah. And I think less effective also because right now people are so budget conscious that
you can see this in especially there was really good data from HubSpot's email marketing.
So Darmesh had tweeted about it. I saw it maybe yesterday or the day before, but basically
HubSpot was analyzing their 70,000 customers looking at the emails that were effective
for them. And the ones that are basically direct sales outreach, which, you know, lots
of people send those types of emails through HubSpot system, those were down a considerable
amount in terms of their effectiveness. People were sending more of them and they were working
less and less effectively over the last six weeks.
Obviously, marketing education, free content, you know, essentially what you might want
to call content marketing types of emails, those had higher open rates than they did
six weeks ago and were consistently trending up. And we're driving more actions. You know,
you can see it in the numbers as well as kind of feel it in the room.
Talk to me about your reading routine because when I'm reading your blog post, you're constantly
quoting these different reports from HubSpot and from similar web and you just seem to
be on it. You know, all the numbers, you know, all the stats, and you're putting a lot of
this information into what you're putting out there. How often are you reading? What
are you reading? How do you stay informed and learn what to share?
Yeah, so I have to admit I am unhealthily addicted to reading content on the web. There's
no doubt about it. You know, there's that Star Trek Picard meme that comes up sometimes
where you see, you know, every morning you wake up damage report, look around the ship.
And I think that's I'm very much in that world. I would say I probably consume, you know,
no less than 40 or 50 articles a day. Wow. Sometimes more than that. Even on weekends.
I'm the kind of person who hits refresh on the new hacker news submissions. Yeah. They're
one of those Spark Toro trending, which is like a little free tool that we built that
tracks everything that web marketers talk about. I visit that six times a day. I'm subscribed
to a bunch of email digests. I read pocket all the time.
And this is always this isn't just like since the pandemic became a big thing.
I would say volume since the pandemic started is probably up three or 4x for me. So maybe
it was five to 10 articles a day that I'd read and now it's 30 or 40.
Which kind of aligns with some of the numbers you've been sharing about how many more hours
people are spending on the internet, how much more traffic media and news websites are getting.
Everybody can't stop reading. I mean, I'm not alone, right? For sure. A different kind
of world. The New York Times piece, I found fascinating in there. I think other people
had identified this before I had thought of it. But desktop is way up for the first time
in like 10 years. And mobile is down for the first time in 10 years because we're not going
anywhere because we're not going anywhere. And we all have to be on video all the time.
So we're on our laptops and our desktops, not our mobile.
I'm trying to get my mom to use her laptop more. She apparently has some huge bulky laptop.
And every time I talk to her, she's on her phone. I'm like, Mom, just call me on your
laptop. It'll be faster. She's like, I want to move it. So there's a few holdouts. But
the rest of us are on our desktops. Another thing I've noticed in the way that you're
writing and communicating, and I don't know if this is different now than it was before,
but you're very personal. I think there's always going to have a divide between who
you are as a founder, and the message that your business puts out. And for you, it seems
like there is no divide, like you've taken that blurry line and just erased it. Even
like you're sparked or a Twitter account has no tweets. It all just comes from you personally,
Rand Fishkin. How do you think about communicating through your business and then the line between
that and who you are as a person?
I think that for a certain kind of audience, that very human, very personal touch resonates
nicely. That is not, again, not true for everyone. And there are certain sectors and certain
kinds of companies where I don't think it's worked well. But for me, for the audience
that I want to build, for the business that I want to build, it works extraordinarily
well. And I think it creates far more engagement of the right kind. I think that a business
tweeting, posting, sharing, putting out content, when it is disconnected from an author, it
feels corporate, which can mean professional and polished, but can also mean inauthentic,
difficult to empathize with, inhuman. And now in particular, like we talked about earlier
with the sort of empathy read the room stuff, the tone is shifted worldwide. And so that
stuff looks like a very smart strategic and tactical move, not necessarily that it always
has been, or that it's the only way to go. But I don't know how intentionally you've
done it, but with any hackers, the voice has always been one of sort of like, yeah, this
is just us. There's no big corporate umbrella organization. It's like you and your brother.
And there you go. That's what you get.
Even after we got acquired by a corporate. Yeah, I think it's particularly useful in
any sort of business endeavor where you need a connection with your audience, and especially
where there's some education going on, because people just feel a lot more comfortable learning
from a human who is flawed, and who struggles with things, and who's reasoning things out
and can identify with them when they're stuck. And you do a lot of education on the Spark
Torah blog. You're educating people how to be better marketers, how to be better humans.
That makes a lot of sense. And I've seen this with other educators that I brought on the
platform too. So the people who talk the most about audience.
How was it? So I've been part of the acquirer in several scenarios. I acquired three companies
while I was CEO at Moz. And they acquired a couple more after I stepped down, one after
I left, and have also observed had a ton of friends whose companies were acquired and
brought into businesses. And I got 99% of the time, the tone, the leadership, everything
changes. I don't know if there's that big piece just this past week about Instagram's
acquisition by Facebook, and how Zuckerberg sort of drove away the founders. I don't know
how completely accurate it was, but there was definitely a tone of truth that rang true
for me. And I've messed up plenty on this front. How is it that Stripe was so and continues
to be so hands off, so smart about keeping away from ruining this wonderful thing?
I've gotten a lot of emails from people who've been going through acquisitions on the founder
side, asking me for advice based on what happened with me. And I found that I'm unable to give
advice because every situation is so different. It's so much depends on the exact interplay
between the two companies. I think in Stripe and IndieHackers' case, the fact that IndieHackers
exists at such a smaller scale than Stripe is actually really advantageous. There isn't
as much of an incentive for Stripe to need to come in and meddle with things and change
things because it's going to move the numbers at Stripe significantly if only IndieHackers
would do X. Sort of a less of a temptation to like put your hand in the cookie jar and
change things.
So I think, you know, somebody is like underlying the lack of incentives can really help you
make wiser decisions. I think for Facebook, for example, Instagram is was a potential
existential threat. It was a massively successful company. Make an acquisition like that for
a billion dollars or however much it was. You want to start doing things. You want to
start mucking around and you could sort of justify doing it because you can tell a story
about how it will make your business better if you do. Whereas with Stripe, I think IndieHackers
is more aspirational. IndieHackers could grow to become a thing that really helps Stripe.
But it's not quite there yet in terms of just size and material numbers based impact. And
so there's less of that incentive. And then the second thing I'll say is that Patrick
Collison and the Stripe leadership team are just very smart people. They're very thoughtful
people. They've read all the same stories that you and I have read about horror stories
as acquisitions. And I think they also have had the sort of discipline to avoid making
those mistakes even when it feels like you might want to.
So one of the superpowers I think of running a company is being able to learn from other
people's mistakes instead of just your own. Super hard.
I don't know why that is so difficult, why we all have to stumble through it, right?
You think that we would be able to internalize the mistakes that other people have made the
way we do in sort of other situations, right? We're not touching hot stoves. We're not.
Yeah, right. I don't have to screw up every recipe in order to learn to follow recipes.
I don't have to do a terrible job of whatever, building furniture before I read the IKEA
instructions. I don't have to know that it's going to be difficult for me to rewire my
own electricity and thus hire a professional expert. And yet, somehow, once Ma's got to
a few million dollars in revenue, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm going to buy this company. I'm
going to do this with it. And I'm going to buy that company. I'm going to do this with
it because I'm a genius.
Maybe there's something to do with being in charge and just like, I must be a genius.
I'm at the head of this ship. Look at how great it's done so far. That sort of blinds
us to it. Maybe, you know, one thing I've seen with Andy Hackers and honestly just trying
to look into like SEO for Andy Hackers and noticing that outside of like really specific
things, founders actually don't do a lot of searching for sort of how high level, how
do I do this type stuff? What they do is they kind of ask around specific people or they
just try and fail. And I think from what I've seen on the forum and how people behave, I
think people all kind of believe that their company is special in some way, that the variables
that apply to their company, I think it's hard for them to see commonalities. They say,
well, I have this specific situation. Well, I'm bootstrapping or I'm located in this country
or I'm in this industry. And there's just so many variables. Or if you're making a recipe,
you have the same stove as everybody else, you have the same utensils as everybody else.
And so you're just like, yeah, copy, paste, map that onto this. Maybe that's something
that some of that going on where people just don't believe others experiences apply to
them.
I think you must be right. I think the other challenge, certainly some of the time and
in my early years for sure was like the lack of examples, right? Like now, now I feel like,
oh, there's so many people sharing so many stories. You know, if you're not paying attention,
it's your loss, right? And we've, I don't know if we've done a perfect job of that,
but I definitely tried to listen to a lot of folks. I think one of the best things we've
done with Sparktoro for sure has been to hire consultants in agencies, right? And not assume
like, Oh yeah, let's hire and do that in house. No, no, no, no, no. I want someone who deals
with people like us all the time and has seen a million things go wrong and right. And have
them tell us what to do, right? That feels so much smarter than trying to reinvent a
wheel.
That does sound smart. So that's, it's one of the things I've tried to do with indie
hackers is put a lot of stories out for people to learn from so that they can, you know,
not have to stumble through these mistakes. Because even just a few years ago, the whole
thing of indie hackers is basically like, here is a database, right? A massive list
of people who are like you experiencing your same problems and a community where you can
go and, you know, if anecdotes are the way that you learn and internalize, it's magical.
Yeah. That's what I thought when starting it. Now I'm more convinced that the purpose
of any hackers is you're going to go out and make all those mistakes without reading anything.
And then once you've made those mistakes, you'll show up at indie hackers and be like,
I need to read some of this stuff because I messed up not reading it earlier.
It can still save you a lot of future pain, right? Because you only have to have that
one moment of realization to come over.
Let's talk about your story with SparkToro and sort of add it to the database. The last
time you were on the show was two years ago, April 2018. Back then, you were kind of just
getting started. Remind us what SparkToro is and why you started it.
Sure. Yeah. So it's a market research and audience intelligence tool. It's software
as a service. So very familiar to your audience and the indie hacker crew. It is like most
indie hacker businesses. It is not institutionally funded. We did raise money, but in a very
unique way just a couple of months actually after you and I chatted. So in June of 2018,
we closed around 1.3 million. We hope it'll be our first and only ever round. It's from
Angel investors who put money into an LLC that pays them back through profits.
Crazy.
If you're listening to the podcast, that was me opening my mouth wide in surprise. I know.
Profits, madness. Sounds crazy in the startup world. But for us, we knew we wanted to build
a long-term profitable business that could essentially get to profitability as quickly
as possible and then exist for a very long time and pay out dividends and not be forced
into a growth at all costs. Or if we only grow 10 or 50X, that's not nearly enough.
It has to be 100 or 500 or 1,000 in order to make our investors money. So I think even
though after leaving Moz, I certainly could have gone the venture path again. I raised
about $30 million with that business and built up a reasonably successful company there.
Maybe what a venture capitalist might consider a base hit, I think, to use their terminology.
But with SparkToro, we did not want to do that. I'm not a big fan of the venture ecosystem
for a ton of reasons, and I won't get a ton into that.
But basic story after UNI last chatted. So we raised that round. We spent the next about
year building our product. We kept the team, just Casey and myself. We used a few contractors
for a couple of things, mostly on the visual design, our UI, UX side.
We launched an alpha-y version for just a small number of people, including our investors
in probably about a year ago, around April of 2019. Worked on improving that, did two
rounds of beta over the summer. And then in December, we basically did one more big redesign
of the whole system after we'd gotten a lot of beta feedback.
We did betas with about 500 people total, maybe 400. And then we've been doing early
access launch in February and March. We were just about to launch when coronavirus hit.
Now we've been pulling back and trying to read the room, figure out whether and when
we should go forward. But right now, as of right now, the plan is to launch in a couple
weeks here.
It's funny how often it's said that to be a founder, you need to be nimble, you need
to be able to react. But I found it's actually pretty rare that something happens that makes
you have to change all your plans. There's a global pandemic, our competitor releases
a crazy product. It's possible to go five or six years without ever having that happen.
Has it been easy for you to delay things or change up your plans? How much thinking has
gone into that?
Yeah, I would say it has actually been very, very easy. One of the things that's wonderful
about having a very small organization, just two of us, and yes, I would say we have sort
of overarching pressure from investors and customers and a large community of marketers
that pays attention to me and what I do. That has not sort of seeped into our day-to-day
operations. Casey and I are very independent. Even in normal times, we'd get together maybe
once every two or three weeks in person, go through our task lists. And it was often the
case that we could go two weeks without even having a single conversation, maybe a few
emails back and forth. But we are extremely independent operators. We sort of put our
heads down and go do our work that we know is going to contribute. And that's great.
It's like, Rand, build up our email list for early access, talk to all the beta testers,
get all the feedback, put it all in the doc, blah, blah, blah. Casey will build all this
stuff.
Okay. Great.
I'm a independent. A lot of people don't know this, but you work from a shed in your backyard.
So you're...
That is what you're looking at right now. Yeah.
Oh, this is the shed.
This is the shed. Yeah.
Oh, this is incredibly fancy.
Yeah. Yeah. There you go.
Wow.
There's got like a bookshelf behind them and a nice seat and it looks like you're inside
of a house.
Yep. So it's rough in the summer because the shed gets very hot. But in the winter,
I have this nice space heater. So we've been, like I said, largely unaffected by this, but
we did recognize that trying to launch in the midst of the conversation being about
anything but market research tools right now was not going to go well for us. And we could
actually see that in our early access data. So yeah, Cortland, we basically, I think we
did one early access invite to a couple thousand people in late February, and that cohort performed
extraordinarily well for us. The numbers coming out of that were nuts. I sent an investor
update email that was like, oh, I think you have made a very, very good choice putting
money into Sparktoro because we are as of pre-launch one year ahead of our projections.
And so that was pretty exciting. The next early access email we sent, which was two
weeks later, now middle of March, no, that performed about a quarter as well.
Wow.
And yeah, that's been the trend with our last few cohorts. So we've been giving people early
access anyway, but seeing that cancellation rates are much higher, conversion rates are
much lower, which is okay, right? We're going to be fine. Our goal is, hey, we know we need
to get this thing out there in the market and give people access to the tool. And eventually,
when they need us, they'll come to us. So let's be a little more generous with free
access. Let's be a little more generous with our content and how we're helping. And let's
worry a little bit less about our revenue. We still have about almost half of our investment
dollars still left so we can power through the next 12, 18 months, no problem.
I have like a million questions I want to ask you. The first being, it's hard to launch,
obviously, in any sort of environment where there isn't room for excitement. It's hard
to be excited now. With indie hackers, we did a thing at the beginning of the year where
we started counting how many indie hackers have gotten started this year. And we like
tweeting about it and being excited. It's 5,000, it's 6,000. I don't want to say anything
like it makes me seem super excited when all the other news, every other tweet in my timeline
is negative. So what's your plan for how you're going to go through with this launch if the
mood out there is still so somber?
Yeah, I think the right way to play that is to express the appropriate level of excitement,
as in my excitement is still high around the product that we have built and the launch
of it. But it is tonally dampered to recognize this really challenging environment that we're
in. And so I think the way to play that for us is to have lowered expectations around
how much amplification and sharing we will get to be less, I want to say, sort of less
demanding of our audiences, of the people that we ask to help promote it, of people
who might do case studies. I think it's still fine to ask like, hey, Portland, did you want
to check out an account with SparkToro? If you have some bandwidth to write about it,
awesome. If not, no worries. Hope you're staying safe and well, as opposed to like, hey, man,
I really need your help. We're doing our launch this week. It's not two different messages,
but it's two different styles. Someone had commented on LinkedIn and they were like,
I feel like we're at a funeral. Like we are all attending someone's funeral because literally
so many hundreds of thousands of people have died. And I like that analogy a lot, not just
because I thought it appropriately captured the sobriety of tone that we're seeking, but
also because a funeral is a place where if we go, when we go, we don't exclusively talk
about the person who's passed, right? The death itself is not the only topic of conversation.
We ask how each other are doing. We talk about food. We talk about our hobbies. We talk about
our work. We talk about our friends. We talk about our loved ones and families. We talk
about adorable things that kids are doing, right? We might talk about a museum we went
to and that's all fine. It's just that the tone is a little different. It's not as gleeful.
It's not as bright, meaning in the light source kind of way. And I think that's right. And
that's exactly how I would say we're planning to approach the launch, right? We know we're
having a conversation during a funeral. So we're going to take the temperature and the
tone, but we're not going to not have the conversation at all.
It's such an insightful analogy. And I love your point about lowering your expectations,
having less demands that you put on other people, which I think is crucial because if
you kind of go into this with the same expectation you've always had, that's the kind of mindset
I think that drives you to make gas and mistakes and to feel bad. And I think you just have
to understand, like if we're going into a recession, you'll probably make less money
than you would have otherwise. And that's okay. If we're dealing with a global crisis,
you can't be as excited and expect as many shares as you otherwise could get. And that's
fine. Just lower your expectations. It's still okay. Make sure the financials work out. But
other than that, you're probably going to make bad decisions if you think everything
is going to be the same as it was before.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's really good ways to do marketing right now
that's still helpful to other people. So I have agreed to a ludicrous number of webinars
and interviews and all these kinds of things. And one of the things that I've talked to
a lot of the webinars that have invited me, a lot of the events that have turned into
webinars is I just say like, hey, instead of travel costs or offering me an honorarium
or anything like donate, like just donate, can you send that money to give directly?
And it's kind of cool. I think, you know, we've already tallied up like 1500 bucks so far
and have another 500 or so coming from this thing that I'm going to do with with Will
Reynolds in a few weeks and more after that. So that's another sort of way. Hey, we're
going to do this announcement. We're going to do this launch. And also with some of our
whatever revenue, some of the attention that we get, some of the community that we're building,
we will help people who are in need.
So another thing I really want to talk about is this super cool fundraising mechanism you
had where you only wanted to raise money once and so far you only have and you're sort of
directly incentivized to turn a profit so you can pay back your investors. You're not
incentivized to just grow as fast as possible and bring on more investors, which is exactly
what all my sort of high growth startup friends are talking about right now, the fundraising
environment and how hard it's going to be to raise more money, etc. But that's not your
concern. How's that work so far? It's been two years. Do you feel like you have any regrets
and any changes you would make if you could go back in time? Any comments about other
founders who might be considering doing the same thing?
I think it is still unfortunately a little early for me to be able to answer that fully.
As of right now, I have absolutely loved the pressure to stay low cost with a high potential
margin business as opposed to a high potential growth business. And coronavirus makes us
look like geniuses in this design of our business aspect because we sort of set up a system
whereby we would be one of the startups most likely to not need any future funding to get
through it, be able to survive the crisis effectively, have a business that was long-term
built for a recession or even a depression. So yes, I'm thrilled about that. I would say
our investors have generally been, not even generally, you know what? To a person, they
have been somewhere between quiet and extraordinarily supportive. I couldn't ask for anything better
than that. I also love the fact that the group that we assembled tended to be people who
could be very helpful to the business. And so that means that at any time I can reach
out to them. And I have several times, about a month ago, when COVID was kind of overtaking
every conversation, we had a conversation, Casey and I emailed Ben Jessen and Carl Blanks
who run conversion rate experts out of the UK and their investors in Spark Toro. And
we were like, hey, Ben and Carl, would you guys be willing to jump on the phone with
us for like an hour, 90 minutes, and just talk through all the scenarios of launch and
conversion rate optimization and positioning and all this kind of stuff that we're thinking
through because it is very, very different. We recognized once we hit that second cohort
that performed so much more poorly than the first one did, we knew that we were going
to hit headwind. And that was great, right? Essentially, I don't know what that conversation
would have cost thousands of dollars if they weren't our investors, but awesome. We get
their help for free, right? And they're incentivized to help us. And that's been true with a ton
of folks across the web marketing world. So I think one of the other unintentionally
smart things that we did was to raise money from people who were in our world and our
customers' world because that gave them both empathy for us as entrepreneurs and also the
ability to help us reach our market and better target our mark, all that kind of stuff. Ben
and Carl, on the call, Carl is describing to me, hey, yeah, we've been users of Spark
Toro over here at CRE. And our aha moment came when we did this thing for this client.
And as soon as we did that, and we sent them the results, we did a ton more for them, but
we were able to charge them this much. And that was the thing that stood out in their
mind. So if you can get other customers like us to have that aha moment with your product,
this thing's going to be huge. That's what you should focus on. It was great.
It's one of the best things about having investors or the very least mentors or advisors or
colleagues is you can hit them up. And they run companies too. And they can tell you about
what's going on and give you the customer's perspective. And also, I think they're pretty
motivating. It's not easy to run off nothing but intrinsic motivation all day, every day.
Your mood changes, your energy changes. But I wonder, do you feel a sense of obligation?
Do you feel like you're more efficient, that you care more because you have other people
that you're trying to make whole?
I am someone who cares deeply about other people. And that applies sort of in the broader
world but also applies internally for me. And so I know that if there's people who care
about my performance and progress and they're watching that, that's a wonderful motivator
for me in a healthy way. Where it got really painful with Moz was realizing maybe about
a year or two years after I stepped down from the CEO role that two things became true.
One, I could see that that business was never going to, I don't want to say never, probably
never going to hit the 10 to 30x returns mark on the $30 million that we had raised. It
just wasn't likely to sell for a billion dollars sometime before the event horizon, the horizon
of when it needed to return money to the funds.
And secondarily, that I no longer had the power to influence it. So there is obligation
and expectation and commitment without power to influence. I think it's the same way, I
don't know if you've ever or recently worked with a boss who sort of said like, Cortland,
I need you to do X. And you're like, fine, I'm happy to do X, but you have to give me
the power and authority to do X. No, I'm sorry, I can't do that.
Sounds frustrating.
Yeah, just a little bit.
A little bit. So you feel like because you're obligated to other people and you maybe not
obligated but you care about other people and you care about what they think, you're
maybe working a little bit harder.
The obligation is there, but so too is the power. And my investors do not have the power
to remove me or to change the direction. They can't all get together and say, we want you
to charge a lot more for SparkToro. They can't do it. I mean, they could.
They can say it.
They might be like, all right, input noted. Thanks for the feedback. But it's my call.
And that is a great thing. And so I would encourage a lot more entrepreneurs to structure
their rounds in these types of ways, right? To get creative around it. Just because venture
capital is marketed to 99% of us does not mean it's right for 99% of us. It's wrong
for most of us. Even venture capitalists will say.
So let's talk about your approach to growing SparkToro specifically. You said it is a market
research and audience intelligence tool. That's almost a new category in a way. There's a
lot of stuff you're doing that no one's done before. It's kind of hard, I think, when you're
doing that, explain what you're doing and find out what's going to resonate with customers.
How have you gone about solving that problem? Because I know so many indie hackers are trying
to figure out how do I explain what I do in a way that customers understand because they
know it's good for them. But how do I get them to understand that?
That is a great question because that has actually been one of our biggest challenges.
One of the frustrations I had even back in April of 2018, when you and I first chatted
about SparkToro, and then over the next nine months, was I interviewed so many people who
are our target customers, people who are doing the manual version of the work that you need
to do to get SparkToro's type of results, right? The thing that we're trying to help
people with in a programmatic way and ask them, okay, you know how you go and try and
figure out what your customers and your audience pays attention to? Like you try and figure
out, hey, what are the podcasts they listen to so that we can get on those podcasts and
advertise on them? What are the events that people go to? What are the YouTube channels
they subscribe to? Who do they follow on social and what do they follow on social? What do
they read and listen to on the web? All those questions that marketers have about their
audience.
So we talked to tons of people who did that work and asked them, what do you call that?
And the most common response by far, like 95 out of 100 said, I have no word for that.
That's tough.
Right? It's almost maddening to realize that there's this huge practice in the marketing
world and in product development and entrepreneurship as well, right? Because it crosses over into
all of those and yet we don't have a name for it. And so it's not easy for us to position
ourselves as, oh, we solve that problem. We call it audience intelligence, but most of
the time if you say audience intelligence, people are like, okay, what's that? I don't
know what that means.
Two words, much together.
Okay. A big fricking category could mean a million things. On the other hand, if you
say I help with SEO, everybody knows what you do, or email marketing or content marketing
or whatever video hosting, video conferencing, like everybody knows, but for us a little
more challenging. And so essentially we've had to take this approach of much more individual
marketing as opposed to we can do broadcast amplification and have lots of people get
the idea of which problem we help them with. We understand that we have to draw them in
through something else that they care about, educate them and inform them and then rely
on them to come back after having learned that. And so that's meant a lot more things
like broader content, right? So for the last couple of years, I've been talking about problems
like Google's zero click searches, the shift in internet use toward the internet giants
and monopolies and sort of control of that ecosystem.
Talking about imbalances in online advertising, talking about broad marketing tactics and
strategy, talking about helping people through COVID and marketing through that, right? So
these very broad types of things that we hope will be useful and helpful to our potential
audience. And then they will come and learn more about us. So a very second order effect
content marketing type of thing rather than like, come to zoom, we do better video conferencing
come to Spark Toro, we do better. Hang on, this is gonna be a long sentence.
So what does your funnel look like? I use one of these tools that you've built, which
are super useful, by the way, or I read one of your blog posts, which are also super useful.
At what point do I learn more about Spark Toro or enough so that I convert into a customer?
Yeah, most of the time we get that through one of three channels, they end up following
usually me personally, because I do most of the sharing on a social channel. And then
they see messages around Spark Toro and go check that out. Or they visit a piece of content
from us and go directly to the blog, sorry, to the product page and see our stuff there.
Or they learn about it. This was especially true the last 18 months at conferences and
events when I get up on stage and sort of give a like, Hey, here's who I am and what
I'm doing. And now here's the presentation or the other way around, right?
Here's the presentation and then buried somewhere in there is oh, and there's this hard hard
to solve problem around marketing. That's what I'm working on. I don't have anything
to sell you. But eventually, I hope to move on through that. So those all tended to lead
people to the Spark Toro product page or homepage, which then has a like, get an email when we
launch or get or sign up for early access. That's how we built our beta list.
We've had, gosh, I want to say maybe a total of 30 ish thousand people come through and
put their email addresses in there. You know, about 400 of those were part of the beta so
that we basically selected from the around 15, 20,000 who were in there when we started
doing the beta last summer, and then took that and most of those people have now been
sent an email for early access. And then that will be part of our launch list as well.
30,000 people is a remarkable number. What do you attribute most of that to? Because
I think most people who are trying to get people on their list will be happy to get
a 10th of that number.
And honestly, you'd probably most businesses would be fine with it, right? I think Spark
Toro, this is one of our huge strengths is the fact that we have a big audience who kind
of cares about, let's see what Rand does after Moz. And I think that is a big driver. That's
probably a driver of almost half of it. And then I think the other half is through content
marketing and presentations and descriptions of the product and having a long lead time.
We got basically two years from funding to launch, almost two years from funding to launch
to build up our community, build up our marketing channels. You almost never get that in startup
world, right? Once you raise money, it's like, all right, you better get to launch like nine
months maybe.
Yeah, it's crazy how much patience your fundraising model has allowed you to have. Because even
if you're going the sort of pure bootstrapping and the hacker route where you don't raise
any money, there's still some time pressure. There's only so much time you can work without
having a job before you need to be employed or your spouse goes crazy because they're
supporting you or something like that. But you've taken a sort of middle road where you
get the best of both worlds. You don't necessarily have to answer to anybody, but you also don't
need to have some sort of rocket ship growth out of the gate. You can take two years, get
your product right, figure out your messaging, etc. So it seems like you're chilling in your
shed.
That was an intentional move, right? Casey and I knew like, okay, we could fund this
ourselves for maybe six months, but we don't think we can validate the market and the product
and build the actual product in that amount of time. Like it's just going to take longer.
And we also knew we have a strength, which is this huge list, but we also have a weakness,
which is everyone on that list and thousands more people who are our core customers and
audience are going to check this thing out sometime in week one of launch, right? As soon
as we go live, many, many marketers, and especially a lot of the most influential people in the
marketing world will go and check out the tool and product and whatever they think about
it that first time they use it, that is what will stick in their mind for a decade to come.
I saw this with Moz, right? I know people who today when they think of Moz, they think
of the product they tried once in 2008, right? That's their only sort of benchmark for what
is Moz make.
And people who think Moz still does SEO consulting, a business we shut down, Moz shut down 13
years ago, right? That's how long brand depressions last. So I know that on day one, Spark tomorrow
has to be very polished. And so we wanted this patient approach where we could have
a long period to build, to beta tests, to early access tests, to get feedback, to improve,
and then finally get to this launch point that was going to be well received.
I often tell founders that there are billions and billions of websites. And the fact that
somebody is on your website instead of any of the other billions of websites is always
a minor miracle. It means you've done something right. And if they come back twice, more major
miracles. So you're right. I think you can't take for granted the fact that people's first
impressions matter. You're not necessarily going to get a chance to change that. One
of the other things that you've done that a lot of founders struggle with is you've
built a very general purpose tool. There's lots of different ways that you could use
Spark Toro. There's lots of different customers who could use Spark Toro, which is great because
I think the potential upside is huge. You could be used for so many different things,
but it also makes getting traction harder because you don't necessarily have one specific
customer. You say, this is for you. And here's the perfect use case. And it's not that easy
to get it off the ground. What's your advice for people in that situation? And how are
you handling that at Spark Toro when there's so many different ways to use what you're
building?
I actually think that unless you have the sort of unfair advantage of a huge community
of people who are going to play with it and then experiment, learn, apply, adapt, and
then broadcast, which we kind of do. I would say we have a lot of that, not all of it,
but a lot of it. If you don't have those advantages, I would go market by market. So if I did not
have the kind of brand presence and audience size and ability to promote that I do, I was
starting out fresh with Spark Toro, I absolutely would be starting with probably something
like small to mid-sized PR firms in the United States. That would be my one beginning market
or it would be content marketing firms maybe. One of those two because those are the most
directly applicable. That's where we've seen a lot of customer success.
And then maybe I later go to B2C lifestyle companies that do a lot of content promotion
and PR in-house themselves. And that would be my second market. And then I go to entrepreneurs
and founders of early-stage businesses who are trying to get their marketing strategy
right. And then I'd go to SEOs and then I'd go to email marketers and event marketers
on and on and on, right?
But because you have an audience, you don't have to do that?
I have to do it less. We definitely started with essentially four primary customer targets
that we were going after. That's who I did most of my in-person interviews with. A lot
of that was like visiting people's offices all around the country when I'd go to speak
at conferences and events and jumping on the phone with them, that kind of thing. And those
four customer targets ended up being the ones that we primarily built the product for.
So when we got feedback from those kinds of customers, we took it, I would say, more seriously
than we took the feedback from other folks. A lot of the suggestions that changed the
product came from those kinds of people.
And then we found during early access, well, even during beta testing and then into early
access, that another three or four groups of customers were having equal or even greater
success with the product as they were trying.
It's kind of learning as you go along.
Yeah, yeah. Learning as we went along and being able to simultaneously hit four of those
markets instead of starting very exclusively with one. The other thing we probably would
have done if I didn't have a big audience is we would have charged a lot more and sold
a lot less. So we probably would have started pricing more enterprise grade and done sales
more one-to-one like, hey, here's the secret sauce for your agency. It's a few thousand
dollars a year, a subscription, as opposed to like, yeah, yeah, 150 bucks a month, anyone
can sign up.
Charge more is advice that I rarely hear people not get. It usually works really well.
It usually does. For us, I think it could work fine. But Casey and I, neither of us
are interested in or willing to build a business that's reliant on one-to-one sales and it's
this choice.
I mean, marketing is your skill set. You're one of the best in the world. You're reaching
lots of people with a message. So why waste that?
I have built a self-service, software-as-a-service business previously. I know that world quite
well. I have an audience for it. So I think we are one of the rare cases where charge
more sell fewer but higher value to higher revenue companies is the wrong for us.
What's your long-term goal with SparkToro? I mean, this is something that a small business,
there's very few of you working on it. You don't necessarily have to answer to your investors.
Why are you doing this? And what do you hope the eventual outcome will be?
I would say there are three things that I'm trying to do. So one, I mean, you know me
a little bit personally, right? And I have this chip on my shoulder about my previous
position with Moz and sort of disagreements there. So I definitely have something to prove,
I think probably more to myself than to my old board of directors. Like that's almost
definitely the case. But I wouldn't totally mind getting on a Moz board call and being
like, oh, yeah, no, we're doing amazing. That would not bother me.
So that is one thing. I would love to build a business that is essentially looks like
a lifestyle business from the outside, but with the growth and revenue numbers of a venture
backed business. And I think SparkToro has potential to do that. And if it lands somewhere
in between, that's fine, right? It'll be what it'll be. We're really comfortable with that.
Casey and I work, I would say very responsible hours. We are smart workers. We are not kill
ourselves workers. I think there's rarely been a week where one or both of us have worked
50 or 60 hours.
I guess you could say you want the best of both worlds. You want the lifestyle of a lifestyle
business. You want the rewards and the bragging rights and the results of a venture funded
business.
And we want to be an example to other, not just to other startups, but to other investors.
I am hopeful that we can start to shift a conversation, change the conversation from
and the venture path is the only way to make money as an angel investor to, oh, no, wait.
If I put money into a business that survives for a long time and is profitable and pays
out dividends at the end of every year, I could make a lot more, right? And especially
because angel investors, if they get lucky or if they're able to put money into a thousand
or two thousand companies, right? In which case they get lucky through law of large numbers,
they don't tend to benefit. Most of the angel investors that I know in Seattle, in the Bay
Area, they've essentially are like, gosh, I'm not, I thought I'd be better at picking
good companies, but I guess I'm not. And I can only invest in like 30 or 40 companies.
And so my portfolio is just not big enough to capture the one winner that accounts for
the 500 losers.
What if you picked 30 or 40 companies that were like Spark Toro, where essentially the
model was survive long enough to become profitable and start paying dividends? Then it's kind
of like, oh, every year, every company that survives, I'm making a little bit of money.
This is amazing. It also helps change the macroeconomically and politically, I despise
the rich get richer, you know, income inequality distribution problem that the startup world
reinforces by basically having, you know, 99 out of 100 companies fail.
This is another model where it says like, hey, maybe we could survive more like small
businesses, you know, the rest of small businesses, which have like a 50% five year survival rate.
You know, instead of startup world, it's 15% or 17% or whatever it is. If we acted more
like that, we could create a lot more businesses that employ more people that create more diversity
in the economy. That sounds awesome to me too.
Those are my really big goals around Spark Toro, right? For myself and Casey and our
employees in the future, build a business with lifestyle like employment, but venture
quality metrics, and serve as an example to other startups and investors.
Listen, Rand, I hope you hit that goal, because then I can have you back on the podcast and
broadcast it to as many people as possible. It's my goal as well to see a world like that.
Yeah, I mean, this is I love what you're doing with indie hackers so much. You know this,
right? But it is I want the worlds of funding and the worlds of company structure to match
the community of indie hackers. Right? I want that whole journey to be possible for all
those businesses. I think that would be that would be a worthy contribution of my time
in the economic whatever in the free market.
I think we're getting there. And I think we can get there. It's not going to be a rapid
overnight change. But 10 years from now, the world will look very different, the world
of online businesses. And I think it'll be pretty cool to look back and say that you
played a part to sort of close out here. You know, I'm curious, I'm always hesitant to
ask people to predict the future on the air, because you know, this is going to be recording
that's safe forever. And we might just make a fool of you. But you've done some predicting
the future in your recent blog posts about what the conversation around this pandemic
and the recession might look like. And I think as a founder, you kind of have to, to some
degree, make educated guesses about what's going to happen. So you can sort of react
before it does. What do you think the future has in store for us as founders? And how do
you think we should be making decisions now so that we can get through this recession,
and so that we can continue to sort of communicate during this time of monotone conversation
online where everything is about the coronavirus?
Yeah, so I think we only have a few more weeks left of that. My suspicion is that, you know,
all the coronavirus has, has dominated and will keep dominating a lot of what I call
like knowledge worker and online worker conversation for the next two to six weeks. I think after
that it just becomes a habit. It just becomes kind of like we look at the charts and graphs
around the virus, we might look at the news, but it won't be quite obsessive, right? We'll
be coming out from under that bubble, especially because in most major metropolitan areas,
at least the United States, the, you know, sort of peak hospitalization and death rates
are coming in the next few weeks. I think after that wave passes, okay, we're all getting
used to life online at home, and we're figuring out our setups. And we've had a few weeks
of this already. So we have some practice. So we're familiar with that. We know what
the economic picture looks like, right? Most of the jobs that are going to be lost are
going to be lost either have already been lost the last three weeks or will be lost
in the next three to six. So a lot of that picture gets clearer. And then the uncertainty
of like, okay, when does a vaccine come or when do we have a solution to this problem?
I think that could last up to another 12 or 18 months. And that means a lot more quarantining.
So what all of that macro picture means for us as founders in my mind is how do we find
ways to be effective and efficient with whatever workdays we're given, whether that's, you
know, with kids or partners or alone at home, how do we find our sort of new groove? And
for some people, that'll be much harder than others. I think we will all get there, right?
Because that's how people are right as they find a way to survive and thrive in new environments
after a while. The other thing that I think we'll have to do is recognize that as founders,
we had better be strategically considering how to change our products, our customers,
and our marketing right now for that second wave.
So meaning I know that my audience is going to move from however they were doing things
to a new way of doing things. Maybe that's just video meetings and calls, but it might
mean a lot more different things, right? Whatever. Hairstylists are going to become video consultants.
Hairstylists are going to become, here's how, you know, here's a device that you attach
to your phone, to your phone's camera, and you stick it in your mouth and you take these
pictures and then you send it to me and like, and blah, blah, blah, a million things like
that, right? And who makes those? And who markets that? And how does it work? And what
about cavities? A million stories, right? So you and your business have to recognize
how you can serve that new world and make changes to your product strategy, your marketing
strategy, and your positioning, like which customers am I going to serve? Cause there'll
be demand that is huge in a bunch of areas and depressed in a bunch of other areas. And
so you, you'll have to go to these ones that are surging. That's my prediction for the
short term. I don't think that's particularly controversial or surprising. I would be somewhat
surprised if that aged badly, right? Knowing what'll happen in wave three after the vaccine
is developed and how things change. That's something I'm not really ready to predict.
I think that's so, so hard to know. Yeah, we're all in the same boat. We have no idea.
Honestly, I was worried about the coronavirus in January. I've chats with friends asking,
you know, what should we, should we be getting out of big cities? What should we do? And
I couldn't even predict something as simple as like, what is the appropriate response
to this oncoming pandemic? So now it's, it's, it's much harder. And, you know, I appreciate
you coming on the show, Rand, and then something tells me if you were president in Cortland,
you wouldn't have fired and ignored all your epidemiologists in January, but you know,
I don't think I'm wrong. That's probably the last thing I would have done. But unfortunately,
or perhaps fortunately for many people, I'm not president. Rand, thank you so much for
coming on the show and sharing your story with SparkToro and tell us a little bit how
we can communicate better in these difficult times. Can you let us know where we can go
to find out more about what you're up to? So sparktoro.com is our, is our website. And
I am most active on Twitter where I'm at Rand Fish in Cortland. I think I owe you an indie
hackers profile with some, uh, some numbers. Oh yeah. You should make a product page. Yeah.
I got to make a product page. I'm going to put that on my to-do list. Okay. I'll send
you a reminder. Excellent. Thanks so much, Rand. Great to see you, man. Take care. Listen
areas. If you enjoyed this episode, you should subscribe to the indie hackers podcast newsletter.
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