Ask any marketing consultant focused on inbound channels (SEO, social media, conversion rate optimization, email, etc.) what the most challenging part of their job is and 75%+ will say: “working with the engineering team.”
This should come as no surprise. Engineering and webdev resources are, along with web marketers, the biggest scarcest and hardest to hire for web-based businesses. We…
“Why can’t we build it faster?!”
I’ve never met an entrepreneur in the software field who doesn’t ask themselves that question daily. For a lot of the past few years, I had an excuse: the constraint of capital. But, since April (when we raised $18mm), that argument’s invalidated. There’s an excess of cash on the balance sheet, and yet, from…
I really, really like Moz’s Renea Nielsen. I was having a rough day at the office today, mostly because my calendar was filled with calls to Wall Street market analysts (more on that in a future post), but also because my sleep this week hasn’t been great. 45 minutes with Renea and it was gone – I was just… excited.…
I had lunch with Thomas from our production engineering team today. During our chat, we talked about the future of the company’s organizational structure and plans to split into feature-focused teams after a big launch we have planned for 2013. Thomas noted that in his previous role with Amazon, teams were judged directly against metrics for the features on which…
Of all the tools I use each day on the web, perhaps none frustrates me more than bit.ly. I like being able to track all the sharing I do across networks with a single URL shortener, but the site’s frustrating from numerous levels. Historic data and habit are most of what keeps me from moving to other services (along with…
Last Friday, SEOmoz held our “allhands” meeting at the Big Picture theater. Out of ~98 Mozzers, 85 of us were in attendance (sadly 3 had to leave intermittently to deal with a misbehaving Riak database we’d just upgraded). We’ve grown a ton over the last 6 months (from ~50 in January) thanks in part to our funding round in April.…
Seattle has long been in need of good VC bloggers. What Mark Suster has done for LA, Brad Feld has done for Boulder, and Fred Wilson has done for NYC just through writing high quality blogs (nevermind all the other great stuff they do for those ecosystems) is remarkable and game-changing and we need it.
So you can imagine that…
Startup life has intense time requirements. In the early phases, there’s a lot of nose-to-the-grindstone need, and if the company successfully scales, the internal and external demands on your time rise dramatically. With this blog, and my commitment to staying close to the everyday issues of the marketing industry, I’ve had to build up a lot of segmentation to effectively…
I really liked Rae Hoffman’s post from last month, Entrepreneurial Lessons: 48 Things I Know Now That I Wish I Knew Then. And, while I don’t agree with everything on her list (at least as it applies to the experiences I’ve had), I felt compelled to take up the format she’d presented and do something similar.
(via waltërcin on Flickr)…
Being a moderately analytical marketer, I should be pretty smart about assuming a correlation between two events that might not necessarily exist. And yet, for the past few years, I’ve foolishly done the opposite. Below is a chart of my Twitter follower growth from Followerwonk over the past 60 days:
The spikes are probably days when I’ve sent some awesome…
