Rand Fishkin > Quotes

“if possible, build your expertise before you build your network, and build your network before you build your company.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Great Founders Don’t Do What They Love; They Enable a Vision”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Take Maya Angelou’s advice: when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Emotional comfort with one’s colleagues was a better predictor than IQ, than years of experience, than the strength of previous work, than literally any and everything else researchers had hypothesized about.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Bing’s gotten much better since then, and is now as good as or better than Google on most queries, but that MVP hangover has stuck with the brand for years and, in my opinion, continues to dampen the prospects of what should be a very decent option for web searchers.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“The problem with MVPs, and with the “something > nothing” model, is that if you launch to a large customer base or a broad community, you build brand association with that first version.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Of the most successful startups, nearly everyone has a clearly identifiable marketing flywheel that brought awareness and traffic from the right audiences and helped those people convert to a sale or a signup at the right time.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Managing Is a Skill, Not a Prize”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“The people who multitask the most tend to be impulsive, sensation-seeking, overconfident of their multitasking abilities, and they tend to be less capable of multitasking.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“The best entrepreneurs … know how to tell an amazing story that will convince talent and investors to join in on the journey.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“National Venture Capital Association data showed that the average time from funding to exit (via an acquisition or an IPO) increased dramatically from 3.1 years in 2001 to 6.8 years by 2014.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“People judge by first impressions.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“We have the power to change the ways we react and the way things make us feel.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“That’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned about startups: it’s dangerous to go alone.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Consulting is limited entirely by time and people.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Investors. Media. Employees. Fellow entrepreneurs. Startup enclaves. They push us to “go big or go home.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“First Who … Then What,” posits that great organizations are made up of people who share fundamental core values and use these as their guiding light for decisions big and small.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Clearly, the answer to the product versus services debate is “it depends.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Simultaneously two competitors in the market—one, a secretive operation based in the Ukraine and Singapore called “Ahrefs” (pronounced “A. H. Refs”), and the other, a British firm founded by a passionate Russian engineer whose initial goal had been to build an alternative to Google’s search engine called “Majestic”—grew to market dominance. After years of leading the industry, Moz became an also-ran in the field of link data.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Every founder (or set of founders) has a different take on the hardest parts of building a company.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“But as a founder, it’s critical to keep in mind your motivations and how they align with those of your investors.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“When your startup is growing, the tasks and competencies change every six months.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“The myth of “founding a startup so you can do what you love” is at least as enshrined in the tech world’s popular culture as the myth of getting rich.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Tragically, most of us have a poor understanding of our own strengths and weaknesses.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Unless what you love is managing people, handling crises, delegating, holding people responsible, recruiting, setting, then constantly amplifying and repeating the company’s mission, vision, strategy, and values, being a startup CEO may not provide you with the work you love to do.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“The subscribers who signed up via the $1 offer had a much lower retention rate than subscribers who’d signed up via a non-promotional offer.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Growth hacks alone can’t solve all your marketing problems, but the right ones may add immense value to an already humming marketing flywheel.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“No matter what stage of life your organization is in today, my advice is to have a written, transparent road map. Plans change. The value of a team with a shared plan doesn’t.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“A team with shared culture and shared values will, almost always, outperform a team without these elements.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“This is the work entrepreneurs do in growing organizations: digging into problems, untangling conflict, freeing people from the mind-sets or structures that hold them back, crafting (and refining, over and over) the pillars and policies of how the company functions.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World