I’m fascinated by the mechanics of startup marketing, customer acquisition, and revenue generation. So when I received this email for my WPEngine WordPress Hosting account (on which Dharmesh and I host inbound.org), I couldn’t help but get curious:
It’s hard to list all the ways this email is a work of marketing art, but I’ll start with a few of…
As I often note on this blog, I’m a rookie CEO who’s gotten very lucky. Much of the time, I wish I had more experience in other corporate and startup environments, so I’d better know what works and what doesn’t. I rely on other team members and a lot of outside advice for that, and I’ve been thinking that maybe,…
It’s tough competing for candidates with the likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. In the past 6 months, we’ve lost bids for half a dozen or so engineers to these companies, and more than a few mentioned the additional cash bonuses as one of the reasons they were motivated to choose these companies over us. Despite this, I’m holding…
When we first raised an investment round in 2007, SEOmoz’s board of directors (consisting of Michelle Goldberg from Ignition, Gillian & myself from Moz, Kelly Smith from Curious Office and Sarah Bird as secretary/counsel) would meet nearly every month. Over time, that became every 2-3 months and now it’s quarterly. Unlike some CEOs, I’ve (almost) never dreaded or stressed for…
We’ve all received a work email that made us cringe – the ones that sound formal and threatening or vaguely like a punishment for something we’re pretty sure someone else did. They often have titles like “New Travel Policy” or “Changes to Benefits Package” or even “Office Happiness Update.” These subject lines sounds innocent enough, but in the modern professional…
Every year for the last 7, we’ve held a customer event in Seattle during the summer (and only been rained on 3, maybe 4 of those years). It started small – I was the only speaker, we had ~100 attendees and the total budget was <$5K. This year, Mozcon had 28 speakers, 800+ in attendance, and a budget of ~$600K+.…
I feel like a broken record. Lately, I’ve been sitting down with founder friends of mine and having a discussion about how their business is going. Inevitably, I get a sense that even those with a lot of tactical successes or growth seem to be missing a larger purpose. Inevitably, we end up in a discussion about “the big picture.”…
There’s a long-running meme in the tech & startup ecosystems that goes something like this: The top 10% in any given professional field are the only ones good enough to work at a startup. And even among these, the 90th-99th percentile only contribute 1/10th as much as the amazing, top-tier 1%. A great team can only be built by recruiting…
This week at Mozcon brought some big launches of new products and projects – the Google Algorithm weather forecast project, Mozcast, the new job board on Inbound.org, this blog, Rich Baxter’s OSE for Excel, and more. Over the years, I’ve done several big product announcements tied to events and plenty independent of them.
Weirdly, in spite of pros and cons…
I had coffee with SEOmoz’s new recruiter, Sierra, recently. She’s amazing, and she has to be. The people who make up our team over the next 3 years will determine whether we can become a truly remarkable company, or just a mediocre one. In terms of which current Mozzers will impact that most intensely, Sierra’s pretty close to the top.…
