A Review of Rand Fishkin's Book "Lost and Founder"

09/13/18 • 41 min

With an emphasis on empathy, vulnerability and transparency Rand's writing style allows readers to see the good, the bad and the ugly of his experience.

Rand is undoubtedly one of the pivotal figures in modern digital marketing. Moz's early success set them on a path of raising ~$30 million dollars from venture capitalists and forever changing the company to focus on software. Rand writes about his struggles coping with this new phase of the business and what he'd do differently.

One idea that stood out to us was the concept of a "startup cheat code".

Rand's best advice for starting a company is to solve a problem you have yourself, that's the cheat code. This way you know what to build early on and have the validation of at least an audience of one. We can echo this sentiment because our platform is built to solve problems our team saw first hand in our careers. Early on especially, this was a huge advantage when building new features.

Other concepts, ideas and events of the book we discussed:

Why despite all his negative feelings for the fund raising process, he still chose to raise $1.5 million dollars from investors for his new company. He did tweak the way he went about it this time, but Rand is a realist when it comes to the advantages capital provides early stage companies.
Flywheels > Growth Hacks
We wonder how Moz employees are reacting to the book in which Rand describes the experience as a "mostly horrible, sometimes awesome experience."
Why entrepreneurs are actually some of the most risk adverse people out there. They don't take risks for risks sake.
Why Jon hates stats like '1 in every 150 startups lasts 5 years'.
The importance of building a diverse team for the health of your product.

We commend Rand for his "painfully honest guide to the startup world." It can't be easy to describe in detail some of the toughest moments of your life. Will be fascinating to follow the journey of Rand's new company SparkToro and see how he adjusts.

Check out Rand's book "Lost and Founder".

If you want another perspective on the same story, Rand's wife Geraldine DeRuiter wrote "All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft".

Reach out to us with any ideas, questions, or feedback on the podcast!

✉️ [email protected]
✉️ [email protected]

With an emphasis on empathy, vulnerability and transparency Rand's writing style allows readers to see the good, the bad and the ugly of his experience.

One idea that stood out to us was the concept of a "startup cheat code".

Other concepts, ideas and events of the book we discussed:

Why despite all his negative feelings for the fund raising process, he still chose to raise $1.5 million dollars from investors for his new company. He did tweak the way he went about it this time, but Rand is a realist when it comes to the advantages capital provides early stage companies.
Flywheels > Growth Hacks
We wonder how Moz employees are reacting to the book in which Rand describes the experience as a "mostly horrible, sometimes awesome experience."
Why entrepreneurs are actually some of the most risk adverse people out there. They don't take risks for risks sake.
Why Jon hates stats like '1 in every 150 startups lasts 5 years'.
The importance of building a diverse team for the health of your product.

Check out Rand's book "Lost and Founder".

If you want another perspective on the same story, Rand's wife Geraldine DeRuiter wrote "All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft".

Reach out to us with any ideas, questions, or feedback on the podcast!

✉️ [email protected]
✉️ [email protected]

Previous Episode

The General Stigma Around Advertising

People seem predisposed to resist advertising and marketing because they don't want to feel manipulated. People also tend to lump all advertising in with the worst advertising they are exposed to.

Nicole and Jon dug into people's relationship to advertising/marketing and covered topics like:

How Jon believes people don't hate advertising, they hate bad advertising.
- Bad advertising = wrong person, wrong time, wrong message
- How great advertising can truly enrich someone's life.
- Some of the best and worst advertising Nicole and Jon have seen in the market today.
- Why search advertising is close to the perfect advertising experience
- Breaking down the opinion some people hold of "advertising doesn't work on me."
- Why it only takes a few bad ads to change your mindset on advertising as a whole.
- It's important to be more than an Excel Wizard.

We think bad advertising comes from marketers forgetting there is a human on both ends of the conversation. Having more empathy for who is seeing the ad, when they are seeing the ad and how the message speaks to them is more important than ever.

Don't get lost in the data all the time. Pick your head up out of the Excel sheet more often and think about the person consuming your advertising.

Next Episode

The Ideas of Andy Raskin

We highly recommend you read through Raskin's writing on LinkedIn to pull out all the nuance for yourself. But in our eyes his post, "The Greatest Sales Pitch I've Seen All Year" is the place to start.

Nicole and Jon broke down the 5 elements to a crafting a powerful story for your product/company/service according to Raskin which are:

#1 Start with a big, undeniable change that creates stakes
#2 Name the enemy
#3 Tease the “Promised Land”
#4 Position capabilities as “magic” for slaying “monsters”
#5 Present your best evidence

Nicole and Jon have seen this principles at work in high growth companies but never seen it articulated so clearly before Raskin.

We also highly recommend checking out more of Raskin's work starting with "How Winners Really Differentiate" and "Why Great Pitches Come From Customers".