Fishkin founded Moz, one of the better-known search marketing companies, and wrote about the experience with unusual honesty — including the funding decisions, the health cost and the parts that went badly.
He now runs SparkToro, which is about audience research: working out where a particular group of people actually spend their attention, rather than assuming.
Most founder writing is retrospective and tidy. His book Lost and Founder is one of the few that describes the venture-funding decision from the inside including the regret, which makes it more useful than a success story.
Rather than guessing which channel to be on, research which publications, podcasts and accounts your actual customers pay attention to. It replaces a great deal of expensive trial and error.
Taking investment sets a required growth rate and an exit expectation. His account is that this is fine if you want it and painful if you took it because it was available.
His long-running argument that the winning approach to search is understanding what the searcher is trying to do and being the best answer, not chasing tactics.
These links go to their own work. We summarise and point — we do not republish it.
Anyone doing their own marketing who wants to know where to spend attention, and any founder weighing up outside investment.
The search material assumes some digital marketing familiarity, and moves fast enough that older posts date.
