RHS 036 - Rand Fishkin on the Opportunity That Exists Where Capitalism Meets Humanity

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Grainger, for the ones who get it done. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show.
today, I am joined by someone who it's hard for me to express the gravity of the impact this individual has had on the course of my career. As many of you who've listened to the show or if you followed along with my work for any period of time, you know that very early on in my career, 2010, 2011, even as back as far as 2009, content marketing and a focus on storytelling and delivering value.
And then a lot of the technical aspects of that that come with SEO and building out websites, that was what changed the course of my career. The reason that I'm sitting

here in this chair, the reason that Rogue Risk, my agency exists, all the parts in between this moment and 2009, if it wasn't for my adoption of what was then just called blogging, but essentially is content marketing in our current vernacular,

that Rand Fishkin played a large part, a large part in the development of my expertise and skills in that space. And I didn't know Rand personally.
Frankly, the conversation that we just add is the first time that we've ever spoke in person, 10, 11 years from when I first started engaging with his content. But the work that he did originally at SEO Moz, which then became Moz, and now he's transitioned, published a bestselling book, Lost and Founder, and is now a co-founder of a company called SparkToro.
His work has just always been there. From his Whiteboard Friday videos to the in-depth articles, and even in the episode, in the interview I mentioned, it's not just his work, but then the people that he brought into the space that he kind of put on blast, you know what I mean? That the platform that he originally built then allowed others to come behind him and build upon and do even more, it really, he is a cornerstone figure in my own career.
And we have a dynamic conversation. We go a lot of different places, business, we go a lot of different places in this interview and it is an absolute treasure.
I want to, by far one of my favorite interviews that I've probably ever done because I had no idea where this was going to go.

And I think what you get out of this interview is the cross-section of humanity and capitalism and the opportunity that exists in that space. and I will treasure the conversation because I think it was important and I just enjoyed the shit out of it.
So with that, I want to get on directly. No sponsor, no sponsor.
The only thing I'm going to ask you is if you like this episode, just subscribe, tell a friend, whatever. Listen to more episodes because there's lots of good stuff in here.
So with that, let's get to Rand and this absolutely tremendous conversation. I really enjoy it.
So I do a lot of interviews with people inside the space um but when I get to bring someone like yourself who is uh you know infinitely talented in something that isn't insurance and share your expertise uh that cross-pollination I think yields enormous dividends for them because they kind of hear the same voices over and over it's it's it's not, it's not a huge community. There's only about 500,000 people in the industry.
So when you, you know, and then take that cross cut and think of how many actually share what they're doing. Um, this is a, a very, very valuable to them.
Um, like I had Anne Hanley on, uh, in September, October and people just went bananas. Uh, I mean, rightly so.
I mean, she's tremendous, but, um, you know, just to hear this voice and all that from outside the space. So, so I think, um, I wouldn't overthink that side of it.
Not that you would, but I just want you to know that. Okay, great.
Well, I'm glad to Glad it for sure. Cool.
So we'll get right into it. And, you know, man, I just, I'm really excited to have you on.
You know, we did the little intro talk before we started recording here, but I walk downstairs to my office where I record these, and I'm sure you get this a lot,

but I just have to say it so that I can release the stress of our conversation.

I'm trying very hard not to just pepper you

with super nerdy content marketing questions

because I've followed you for so long.

Oh my God, why not?

But I was Moz subscriber from way, way long ago. I fell in love first with your voice and I want to ask you a ton of questions about that.
Um, but I do think, and I know you've heard this many times, but I think it's very deserving. Um, you, you are one of the, uh, jewels of the, the marketing leadership entrepreneur, whatever, whatever you're talking in, you really are.

And I just wanted to say thank you for all the work that you've done. Oh my gosh, that is so kind, Ryan.
Honestly, not all of that has been intentional. A lot of it's kind of stumbling through and just trying to be helpful to other people, but it's always great to hear that that's resonated.
For those of you who've ever followed my career, I can actually pin a lot of the content marketing work and success that I had back in my early days as an agent to literally mimicking and listening and putting into practice many of the things that Rand and then the then the people who he, he brought to us to, to, to the audience, the other people who, who he, um, not just you, but your team. And I'm just using you as maybe the, the, the, the, um, focal point, but, um, what SEO Moz and the work that you did and the people that you highlighted brought to, you know, small business owners, small business professionals like myself, who were trying to get our message out into the world.
It really has had an impact, man. And, and, and I'm sure you are aware of that.
But I would be doing your work a disservice if I didn't let you know that, that, you know, a large part content marketing is what changed the course of my career. And you played a significant role in that.
Oh, well, thank you. Yeah, I'm thrilled to hear it.
Okay, so now that the ego stroking is over, and I released that pent up stress that I had feeling the need to say those things to you, we can actually get into some content and talk through some of this stuff. So the very first place that I want to go is what I think is your superpower, just watching from the outside.
And it is the ability to mix a very technical topic, whatever that topic may be, whether it's SEO, content marketing, evaluating something that's happening in that industry or another, or even your book, Lost and Founder, which I have a couple of questions I want to ask you about, where you're talking very much about being an entrepreneur and growing a company. You mash up the ability to deliver technical value with personal transparency in a way that really draws someone in.
And my question for you is, is that a skill? Do you think there is an innate sense to you that that's just something that came out and is part of who you are? Or was it also kind of developed through the work? Like, how did you get to that point? If you even think that's a fair critique. No, no, I think that's a good assessment, right? One of the things that I've always seen over the course of my career is that, and it's certainly something I got better at, right? But it's a skill I've invested in and an effort, a conscious effort that I've made.
And that is to teach people and share my experiences in a way that's compelling and that earns attention. And part of that in my early 20s, to be totally frank, Ryan, was just about filling that kind of personal need to be paid attention to.
You know, when you're just getting started in work and in life as an adult, and you're like, look at me, look at me, look at me. I had that, right? I had that big, I describe it sometimes as like a hole in my chest that could only be filled by the praise of other people on the internet.
And in the early days of the internet, that was blogging and getting people to comment on my posts and getting nice emails about the stuff that I'd write. And if I got one or two of those, it fueled my ego for the next day, and then I'd try and get more and more and more.
And over the course of, frankly, a decade, 2001, maybe even 1999, when I started writing on the web, into the early days of Moz as a software company, 2007, 8, 9, that worked. It eventually turned into a great content marketing practice.
I didn't even call it content marketing back in the day. It was just me looking for attention.
And what can I say? I think that storytelling is a super powerful skill. It is absolutely something that marketers who want to reach other people should invest in.
And the more compelling you can make your stories, the more attention you can attract. Do you think that that feeling ever goes away or because I completely share that sense with you, especially early on.
And one question that I've asked myself is, does that feeling go away or do we just get better at managing it? That's a great question. Certainly I would say that with age and experience comes a maturity that recognizes that it's not everything.
Yeah. So I don't know whether I'd call that you get better at managing it or you just start to internalize the idea that what other people think about you and

how much other people think about you is not the most important thing in the

world.

Yeah.

And that,

you know,

that I think that is often why folks who are further on in their careers of all kinds

have a little bit less of that kind of desperate energy that you see in, I don't know, young celebrities,

young politicians, young stars in their fields, and just seems to be a reality of humanity, right? I think it's why when you look at cohorts of social media behavior from young folks, right? I, 10, 15 years ago, everyone was looking at Facebook and saying, oh, well, you know, young people are never going to use email. They're just going to be on Facebook.
Now, now everyone says that about WhatsApp or TikTok, right? But as you watch those cohorts move through, as they get into their later years, it turns out, what do you know, once people hit 25, no matter which generation they're part of, they start getting on email more. They stop using certain forms of social media as much.
Look at that. Curious indeed.
Yeah. I find it very interesting that, you know, we've stopped using the word millennials.
Thank God.

It's so nice, isn't it?

I just, in the insurance industry, it was like you couldn't get away from it. It was almost like you couldn't hit publish on the interweb would not allow an insurance professional to publish something without injecting the word someplace in that piece of content.
Yeah. Microsoft Clippy would pop in.
Did you use millennial more often in your copy? Exactly. Oh my gosh.
I'm so glad. I was like, I just remember standing on stage and going, it's not millennials.
They're 24. They don't know what they're doing.
Do you remember what you were like at 24? I could barely keep myself alive at 24. Oh, geez.
Young men are just the worst. I don't know what we were thinking.
But I will say, one of the problems I have with the generational divide lines and the markers is I think that while there are statistical correlations with behavior across decades and trends, the sharp dividing lines that we concocted in the media, sort of starting with the baby boomer generation and then going to others,

just simply makes no sense, right? I've never seen an analysis of people born in 1980 versus 1981

and how they are remarkably different from one another.

And yet there's this huge dividing line that the media has concocted

and that we all use around it.

And I find that misleading at best. Right.
And so I think that's, that's really unwise to use that. I think it's also very unwise to, uh, attribute to generations or age, what can be better explained by other phenomena.
So for example, you know, obviously

you and your listeners operate in the insurance industry, so you have a really good sense for the financial capabilities and financial biases of groups of people. And one of the biases that you see in folks who were born sort of in the 1980s into the 1990s is that as their generation graduated high school or graduated college, the work opportunities while still available were at a far lower number compared to the cost of living in most of the United States.
And so they simply don't have as much disposable income as their parents' generation did. And this gets media attention for like, oh, those millennials don't like homeownership or buying cars or having children.
And in fact, their behavior when they have the same finances as their parents' generation had compared to cost of living is remarkably similar. It's just the fact that that's not how the US economy U.S.
economy basically rewarded a very small number of people with a huge amount of wealth, and nearly everyone else kind of suffered and did not do as well as a generation 20, 30 years before. So that behavior is explainable with data, but instead we rely on these lazy media tropes.
I really hate that. I think it's bad for business.
I hope everyone listening takes to heart. I'm going to give one, absolutely.
As a supplemental factor, who expected the baby boomers to continue on for another 20 years in the leadership positions and retaining wealth that had normally been generationally transitioned down at this point, right? So, you know, there's, I couldn't agree with you more in that aspect. And one that's often pushed around the insurance industry is loyalty, right? Where, you know, they jump from carrier to carrier, from provider to provider, agent to agent, and there's a distrust in big business.
And to the same kind of idea that you said, if you had to live through the 2000 stock market crash as a child and watch your parents, either their careers or their fortunes be obliterated, then go through 2007, 2008, then live through hyperinflation and everything that's going on in our economy today and the massive move of jobs overseas, how would you be loyal to large enterprises? Would you naturally just say, oh yeah, they have my back Like it makes no sense. And then we're saying, Oh, well, you know, it's the internet and, you know, it has nothing to do with internet and everything to do with the, the, the cultural ramifications of the last 20 years of our economy.
And yeah, yeah. And I think that's, I think what, you know, I think that has interesting political implications, interesting cultural implications, but also really interesting business implications, right? Because if you successfully identify these trends, right? And if you can kind of mentally remove yourself from the, well, I don't believe it because it doesn't fit with the whatever political reality that I want to believe in or how I want to think about things.
Just take that away for a while and instead focus on the reality of how financial success has been distributed across the spectrum of, we'll use just the United States because I think it's a little tougher worldwide. But if we look at the distribution of where wealth is going and where it has been historically, right, essentially post-World War II, you have this very large middle class.
And for several generations, that wealth keeps growing and getting distributed more and more up until, you know, essentially the 1980s, when, again, people can argue the politics of what happened or why it happened exactly. but essentially that distribution stops going to a broad middle class,

folks who are low-wage earners.

That group starts to grow, the middle class, folks who are low-wage earners, that group starts to grow, the middle class starts to stagnate, and it is the upper, and even the upper echelon, right, the sort of top nine of the top 10% stagnates in terms of their wealth growth. And it's essentially the 1% and really the 0.1% and the 0.01% where almost all of the economic gains from the last really 35, 40 years have gone.
And so if you're recognizing that as a business, I think you can be very wise about how to play your products, right? And how to do your marketing because you can essentially target your products to, hey, we need to pay attention to how much people can afford, what they worry about and don't, what they care about and don't, who has wealth and doesn't, who can afford our products and doesn't, where to reach those people, how to market to them.

And that tends to have a lot more success than sort of burying your head in the sand and hoping that everyone's going to behave the same way that their parents did. Yeah.
You know how I usually attack these type of issues because I don't know that I don't know that I'm smart enough to understand the, you know, even just cultural ramifications of all the factors that go into decision making. But I know that mass market marketing, mass media marketing tends to do silly things.
So I watch what they do and then do the opposite. So when I see everyone going, millennials are unloyal and all they care about is price and the product means nothing to them.
What I say to myself is that sounds like someone who really wants a good product at a competitive price and wants to work with someone who's going to take care of them. It's, you know what I mean? Like, it sounds like someone who just wants to be petted on the head and say, everything's going to be okay.
Like you're not going to get hosed, um, and not placated to. And, and that's where, how I tend to, to engage people is to say, you know, to me, that action is not a, does not necessarily mean that that's what they want.
Just because someone may jump around from provider to provider or carrier to carrier, it doesn't necessarily signal that that is exactly the experience that they want. Right.
I think there's two ways to play that. I think you can lean very heavily against the trend to say, hey, we are going to provide a premium product that has relationships at the core of it that looks for the most relationship-driven customers, identifies those based on their behavior, based on where we reach them, all that kind of stuff, and then gets that share of the market, even if that share of the market is smaller than it used to be, but we're going to appeal to them.
Or we can go the other direction and basically say, hey, let's remove the hands-on touch, the heavy relationship aspect. Let's have a much more cost-efficient product by digitizing almost everything that we do, by removing a lot of need for customer service, for salespeople, for people costs, essentially, and then make that product really compelling for folks who are not relationship-driven, but instead are price-driven and are looking for the best value that they can get.
And then we make that available in a self-service kind of way. And you can really see the US economy bifurcating in sector after sector on these two vectors, right? Essentially, you get more high touch, more relationship driven at the higher end and more mass market self-service at the lower end.
And companies that have done this well have done extraordinarily well over the last 20 years. And there's not really, and what I hear you saying and would agree with is either option is not necessarily right or wrong.
Where you could get yourself in trouble is if you try to have one foot in one bucket and one foot in the other bucket. Yeah.
I mean, this is like the is like, uh, the core of product and marketing strategy, right? Is that you want a strategy that makes sense all the way through the path of, uh, how the product is designed, how the product is sold and marketed, how the product is, uh, served and serviced, how the customer is targeted. And if you're, if that strategy doesn't make sense all the way through, right? If it, oh, well, we're going to serve it in a self-service way, but it's going to be a premium product.
What? That's not the expectation that the premium customer has, right? Premium customer expects relationships. They expect sales.
They expect, you know, potentially high touch. They expect extreme customer service, right? Very, very high levels of customer service.
So you've got to play that. A good way to look at it is like the credit card and banking industry, right? There is your American Express Platinum customers, right? and then there's your, I have a visa from my local credit union.
And both of those are doing well, but right. It's the in-between stuff that gets really messy.
Yeah, I think, I think that. So for you guys listening, where I see insurance, both carriers, large and small, and agents getting in trouble here, is that right now we're stuck in a transition period where our business, and Rand, you probably are tangentially aware of this, but it is an incredibly traditional business.

I mean, we still have highly, the issue with independent, I shouldn't say the issue, an interesting business slash marketing problem in the independent insurance industry space in general is that you can still be 90% paper and be highly successful, highly successful. Now you could not start a business that way today and be successful, but you can maintain and even grow an agency using very, very old school tools.
The problem is the next wave, right? Like we talked about the millennial agent who is trying to find their place is struggling because the industry is set up for these larger, well-established, in some cases, 100, 120 year old agencies that are paper and they, they're completely okay with telling their clients. It's going to take them a month to turn around a proposal.
And, and I don't want to necessarily say there's anything wrong with that because they're doing business. I mean, you can't necessarily fault them for that, but if, if, uh, if the, the up and come or the upstart were to, were to make that same value pitch to a customer, they would have no shot.
They would go out of business. So they're pushing, they're trying to make their value proposition digital, but the industry's not ready.
We still have conversations about basic API connections. Like literally we have conferences about basic API connections and, and whether or not we should have them, it's a whole different world.
Um, but, uh, and I feel like that's where a lot of people are stuck. That's what I'm trying to get to is I feel like a lot of people are stuck in the middle between being taught traditional, but trying to go digital and they get caught in the middle there and their value proposition really gets lost.
What if you just not living in our space, but hearing what I just said, what, what kind of advice or what, what, what are your first thoughts? I mean, it does not surprise me. I think there's huge swaths of the economy and tons of industries that are that are similar I think that you know my my advice would generally be if you are one of the folks who embraces change early and can provide the product that your customers whether that be you know at the top end of the market the bottom end of the market whether you can if you can serve your customers better than your competition and you can market it in the right way to those right folks, you're going to have a competitive advantage.
And that, that is what you should be seeking. So I want to shift our conversation a little bit.
And I really, I really just have one question on this particular topic and then I want to talk about SparkToro. But so I saw you sent out a tweet a couple – to be honest with you, I have no idea when it was.
A couple weeks ago, at some point in the last few weeks. And it was basically – your tweet was – and I'll give you just the context here before you respond.
But it was basically, if you hire me to speak, you know, I'm going to come with my opinion slash politics or whatever, right? And I don't necessarily know if you meant politics, like actual politics, or just your general perception on the world. That's not really the point.
What I was so interested in, and this is kind of my impetus for this question is coming off of yesterday or the day before. A very good friend of mine, Marcus Sheridan, gave the closing keynote at Social Media Marketing World.
And he was crying on stage and was very vulnerable and was 100% him. That's who he is, right? So, and my perception of you is that you're very much who you are.
And I'm just interested in your development of that because I effort to be the same way as often as I can. I think it's a struggle for all of us to always be maybe exactly who we are.
And I'm just interested in the pushback that you get on that, like your, your experience, because to me, I, you know, I think in some ways our politics are different, but in certain aspects and in particular, your, um, openness with exactly who you are is something that I want to encourage in everybody, whether it's working in your local communities. I think my industry in particular, we get caught in feeling like we have to be a certain way because of a perception of us.
And I'm constantly trying to encourage the, be exactly who they want to be and allow others to come to them who are either interested in that, uh, agree or disagree or, or, or relate. Does that make sense? Yeah.
Yeah. That makes sense.
So I'll talk about this first from the, from the strategy side, right. Which is essentially, um, I was not strategic about this in the early part of my career.

I was very transparent about who I was and how things were going and those sorts of things. But I think I was, you know, what you might term asleep in terms of awareness about the broader world, how institutions and, you know, government policy and law and power impacted all of the world around me, right? Why was it that, you know, when I went to college, I could work a $4.85 an hour job and pay for my tuition and my rent.
And then only three years later, that was totally impossible. And five years later, it was impossible to the tune of, you know, five times as much, right, to go to the same state college., you know, I would just, it's not that I didn't care.
I just didn't pay attention. Right.
I didn't, it wasn't on my radar. I didn't, you know, I didn't think about how, uh, when I went to go pitch venture capitalists, um, in Silicon Valley, right.
And, you know, would drive all around, uh, go into these offices and try and raise millions of dollars for my company. I didn't think about how horrible it would have been if I were a woman, right? Because a lot of these meetings, frankly, were, hey, let's go to this bar and I'll meet you this night or like, come over to my house and let's chat about it that you know ryan if you

or i are invited to some 40 50 year old dude's house uh to have a glass of wine with him and chat about our business we don't have to think twice about that we're like yeah hell yeah put me in coach yeah right let me go wine and dine this guy and like get him to invest but if I were a 29 year old woman

who would I Yeah. Right.
Let me go wine and dine this guy and like get him to invest. And, but if I were a 29 year old woman, who knows? Like, what is that like? Yeah.
Right. Do I even get that invitation? Is that dude like, well, I don't, you know, I don't know.
I don't want to be, I don't want to have any impropriety. So better if I don't invite her, you know, it's not going to work for me this week.
Hey, let me know if you're back in Silicon Valley some other time. Or do you get that invitation, but it means something else? Or do you get that invitation and it means the same thing, but you have to spend tons of cognitive processing to try and figure that out? None of this stuff.
I didn't think about the unfairness or the changes in the world or how, who I was and who I wasn't affected me, just wasn't, wasn't part of me, right? And so I didn't, I didn't talk about that stuff. And, and even though it affected me and affected the world around me, I just wasn't aware.
And then, you know, over the course of, I don't know, the last decade or so, I've become aware of that, right? I have more of a diverse friend group, right? Lots of folks in my personal and professional networks who have been through all sorts of experiences of all different kinds in whatever, in the political field, in the financial services field, in the venture capital world, in startups and raising money as entrepreneurs. And I can see, right, I can see how that stuff changes.
And so, like I was in my early days at Moz, right, where I refused to be quiet about how search engines worked, right? Despite the fact that Google and Microsoft and whatever didn't like what I was publishing, I was like, no, screw you guys. I'm going to tell it how it is.
I'm going to show people what works in SEO. And that's how I built the Moz brand.
Nowadays, right, when I see injustice or unfairness or how things work in a field, I want to share that too.

I'm just unwilling to be quiet about it.

So I think I've always had this predilection for transparency.

It's just that now I'm not asleep on this other stuff.

I'm awake and my eyes are open And so I share what I see. I like the idea of not being asleep.
You know, one of the major issues inside the insurance industry is, is diversity. It's a, it's an, it means it's, we live in a white bread world here.
And when I used to put on, I, I i i used to put on a conference um called elevate and i you know one of my one of my one of the things that you say to my team is like i can't have any more white guys on stage like i need a different voice like if they're a white guy they need to come from a place that like we haven't heard that story 20 times you know I mean? Like it's gotta be, I need something different. Not because, you know, I always fight the idea of diversity for diversity sake, but, um, I think that Ryan, can I ask why is that? Yeah.
Um, because I fight the idea of diversity for diversity. No, no.
And here I have, I have a, and I'm super interested in your thing, but this is, I don't want to diminish the, I don't want to diminish the person who I put on stage because anyone could ever say the only reason they're on that stage is because they're not a white, white guy. Yeah.
So, but I have found two things to be true, right? So we did, I did the same thing at MozCon't early, and MozCon was, so for folks who are listening who might not know, right, Moz is this company that I started, used to be called SEO Moz, started Gesultcy, became an SEO software company. Now it's a $55 million a year revenue business with a couple hundred employees in Seattle and Vancouver.
You know, it's made a

few acquisitions along the way. I stepped down as CEO and left the company a couple of years ago, but during the course of that company's history, we built up this conference called MozCon.
It happened in Seattle every year, grew to about 16, 1700 attendees, right? So not, not dissimilar from your Elevate event.

And it was over the course of three days, sometimes two, you know, we had somewhere between 20 and 35 speakers, depending on the year. And early on it was, yeah, it was all, almost all white dudes.
Right. And then I started paying attention to these other voices, right? Reading stuff online, making friends in other communities, and hearing from folks like, yeah, there's no representation.
I remember, I remember so distinctly hanging out with a friend of mine. I won't say who won't say who it was, but black guy.
And, and he's like, yeah, man, you know, when I, when I got into this field, I, I was like, oh, you know, these conferences are pretty cool. I learn a lot, but I guess speaking is not for me because I don't see anybody like me up on stage.
Right. It's all, it's all you guys.
It's all, it's all you white guys.'s all you white guys. He's like, so there's no room for me.
And then I saw Will Reynolds, who's a black guy. Tremendous.
Yeah, awesome guy, right? He's been speaking for a long time. He spoke at MozCon.
He's like, I saw him, and I was like,, Oh shit, that could be me. Yeah.
I could do this

too. Right.
And that, um, that had a powerful impact on me. Right.
That was like, Oh my God, if, if I don't, if I don't, as the organizer put diverse people on this stage, this will never get better. This problem will never fix itself until I fix it.
This is my obligation now. I have the power.
I get to choose who goes on the MazCon stage. That means I have the responsibility to make sure that the next generation has fair opportunity.
Because the fundamental core truth is talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. We are wholeheartedly agreed on that.
I guess when I said, so I agree, you have responsibility as the organizer. And maybe the way that I positioned it wasn't the way what I actually meant no no I but I get where you're coming from right like so I have heard I have heard many times right exactly what you heard right which is the only reason that person is on stage is because you know whatever uh you needed more women speakers right like well, you know, that talk, whatever, it didn't resonate with me.
And so rather than saying, oh, that was a shitty talk. You say, oh, well, what a woman speaker, right? I have heard that before.
What I, what I can tell you from my experiences, those people who think in that way are not going to change their minds because of an awesome talk, right? Not quickly anyway, maybe slowly over time, over years and decades and generations, those attitudes change. But those voices, to me, they just, they kind of don't get to have an impact.
Yeah. So I have a different opinion on that part of what you're saying.
Because I think, and not the part where the person shouldn't be up there, but the part where I think that the steadfastness of positions that people are currently in is an ex is as much, um, an exposure and a, and a construct of the, of the, the, the social, their social circles. Right.
And when you can break someone out of their social circles and show them a world of people where exactly what you're describing exists, I think those minds can change a heck of a lot faster. I think the problem is not putting them, not finding situations to inject them into those places, right? Because oftentimes that person feels like just as much of an outsider.
And look, I'm not going to try to play in any way like some, you know, fat or white guys with tons of money have been discriminated against in any way. That is certainly not my position.
But the understanding is like, as much as, you know, to get people to the middle, we have everyone feels like an outsider, right? And inside all of us individually, we all feel like tiny little people, right? Like just imposter syndrome is universal. Yes.
Which is a wonderful thing, right? Because I think it can help give you empathy, depending on how you process it. It can help give you empathy for everyone else.
Right. You can have empathy for, you know, my, my friend, right.
Who's black and was like, gosh, I don't see anyone like me up on stage. Yep.
Right. And you can have empathy to being like, Oh my God, that, that could be me.
Right. Like I can imagine myself not, you know, seeing only whatever, right? Going to an event and it is all black women speakers.
And, you know, I'm one of the few white people in the room and it just feels weird. It feels so awkward, right? And gosh, I'm uncomfortable.
I don't know why I'm uncomfortable. It's just like, I don't fit in here.
It doesn't, it's not me, right? And how do I become part of this world? Because this world clearly has lots of opportunity for me. And if you, if you reflect on that awkwardness, you can then realize how important it is to have, you know, faces like yours, representation like yours, uh, up on stage.
Right. And that, that, that might not be purely tied to identity.
It might be tied to, uh, you're someone in a wheelchair and you're like conferences. What do you talk? What, what, what, how am I going to get up the fricking stairs? What are you talking about? Or how to, how can I participate in that? Um, and, and, and if conferences don't, you know, use accessible spaces and if they don't invite folks like that up on stage, right, who are also in those conditions, you can't see yourself there.
So I think that can be... The other part of it is you're missing the best of the best if you do that.
I guess that was always my point when I was putting on Elevate was I literally could do this blindfolded because to me, all I want is the max value. And if you're telling me that, you know, whatever we have to do to re-rig a stage, to get a person or whatever they look like, or their background or their sexuality, who gives a shit? Like you, if you are, this is the thing I never, I've never understood about an exclusionary mentality is you are purposefully choosing a lower value, like providing less value in exchange for being exclusionary.
I've never understood that mentality. It makes no sense.
Well, I mean, I think that's the core of racism and sexism and bias, right? It's that, um, you know, you want an in group who is like you to be the ones in power so that even if you, as part of that in group are not as good, you still get opportunity. Yeah.
Right. And you're artificially inflating your market value.
Yeah, exactly. Right.
I mean, what, what else is, uh, institutionalized, you knowized racism, sexism, stereotyping, bias, if not those things? But I will say this. One of the things that we had to realize when we were building MozCon, I remember having conversations about this with other organizers of other events in technology and entrepreneurship and marketing, was that your scores, right? So we did what most conferences do, which is we had the audience, you know, score speakers, right? They could go online to do that, or they'd get a survey at the end or whatever it was.
And your speaker scores will technically suffer, right? So you have to be aware, and we saw this somewhere in the 20 to 30% range that women were almost always lower, right? A woman could deliver the same talk that a man delivered, right? With the same quality, the same content, and it would be scored on average 20 to 30% lower by the audience. That's why I always put those speaker score things in my round filing cabinet that goes out the back door.
I put them out because I know the audience wants to be placated. Anyone who came to Elevate, this is exactly what would happen because I don't trust you guys.
I would watch all the presentations and I didn't care what anyone thought because I knew it, whoever the person was, I knew, you know, I knew if they were bringing it and that's all I really cared about. Everyone's going to miss or a point's not going to hit or a joke's going to flop or a story isn't going to be exactly what they wanted.
You know what I mean? Like I knew whether they were bringing it or not. So I would send out the surveys, the surveys would come back and I would slide them right across the desk and put them right into the trash can.
Well, so here's, here's what we found though. Here's what we found.
That was true in 2008, 2009, 2010, but fast forward six, seven years later, those numbers got to be more like 2, 3, 5%

because the audience. So this happens though.
Oh, well, maybe this doesn't happen in the marketing industry. I'm super glad that those are the numbers because that makes me feel happy as a human, as a citizen of the United States.
But what I found was there's just so many, like not even white guy on white guy bias baked in because he's from Montana.

And what do people from Montana know?

You know what I mean?

Or like, oh, I couldn't understand his Alabama accent or people from the North or pricks.

You know what I mean?

Like it's stupid stuff.

I just was like, you know, we did find, I will say this, uh, the, the English accent, those they're just smarter than us. Americans just love it, right? They're like, oh, he's so smart.
Listen to that accent. But no, so the more diversity that we put on stage year after year, the more diversity was expected, the more, this is also awesome, right? And for those of you who are thinking about like how does

this have a positive impact business impact for me we sold more tickets and over time our average speaker scores rose right so the average collective uh score that everyone was given uh regardless of the fact that you know uh in the early days right there was this scoring deficit, I was never able to look at it across racial or other kinds of diversity. But, you know, I could look at it on gender diversity, because we had a 50-50 policy, basically, we joined this 50-50 project early in Moz Cons.
I remember when you did that. yeah yeah sort of a commitment to like hey we'll always have um you know 50 50 split between men

and women uh on stage project early in Mozcons. I remember when you did that.
Yeah, yeah. Sort of a commitment to like,

hey, we'll always have, you know, 50-50 split between men and women on stage. And that led to more ticket sales.
And we found that in fact, it led to more women buying tickets, right? Because no surprise, right? If you see people like you on stage and who are going to be headlining, you are more likely to want to go to the event. I know that HubSpot had the same thing with Inbound.
It's one of the ways that they grew that event to, what is it now, 30,000 attendees or something that go to Boston in the fall. Just incredible.
As an event planner, that just makes me want to curl up into a ball. They have a whole team who works on it all year round.
But yeah, I think you have to be willing to make that sacrifice early on. Recognize that, hey, I think there's a mentality in the United States that I don't want to have to put my finger on the scale to tip it unfairly in one way or another.
But when there's historical injustice and historical bias, that's what you have to do in order to get to a fair place. And then over time, the scales balance themselves out.
I had this amazing experience recently where I did an event for entrepreneurs, invited a bunch of folks, and did not, failed to, forgot to pay attention to diversity. And then when I looked at it, I was like, oh my God, we have 14 women and 15 men.
Oh, look at that, right? And multiple black women and multiple women of color from other men from, you know, diverse backgrounds and like, Oh my gosh, this is so cool. I didn't even have to think about it.
It just happened. How cool is that? Yeah.
Like that, that is where you eventually get to and that's where you, you know, that's where we all ideally want to be where we're not selecting based on these, these other traits, but you got, to tilt the scales so i don't want to i don't want to monopolize the conversation with just this i know there's no i i find it that dude life to me is is fascinating and in in every aspect of our lives we can pull out um pieces and frankly i'm i'm just glad that we found a topic that you're incredibly passionate

about. Um, I love it.
That's my job. One of the things that, you know, going back to your early

question about like transparency and authenticity and all that, like one of the things that I have

found is by having conversations like this, which I think frankly, for many, for many Americans,

for many like white dudes, it's uncomfortable. This shit is uncomfortable to talk about, right?

It might even be uncomfortable to listen to.

I don't know if some of your listeners are like,

oh, man.

Yeah, probably some of them.

This is a little tough, right?

It's a little tough to process.

I have found that when you dig deep

into those uncomfortable conversations,

there is incredible value.

When other people are not talking about something, when other people are thinking about something but not talking about it there is huge amounts of marketing value content marketing value because people pay attention right yeah it gets it busts through the sort of noise of our usual day-to-day lives and how many you know mike bloomberg were bombarded with. That's all I see now.
My mailbox is just filled with Bloomberg ads. Not for long.
No, not for long, probably. My YouTube ads.
But like it breaks through that barrier. And so that, you know, that's another piece of advice.
If you know that there are subjects, topics, you know, areas, people that are not being covered in your space, that is a pretty killer way to get an audience. Yeah, I agree.
I think I also, you know, and I want you to feel, not that you wouldn't, but incredibly comfortable with the fact that what you've shared so far, because this is a major issue in our industry. I mean, this has been, uh, a bugaboo of mine, you know, and I, and I, you know, I've tried to use this platform in particular to put as many, um, we'll just call non white guys on as possible.
You know what I mean? Like we got enough white guys. I love white guys, but we got enough.
I want more. I want more different different people because you find interesting shit out like i know what most white guys know i'm in you know yeah yeah right i want to know what other people know you know yeah diversity of background often dictates diversity of experience yes and when you get diversity of experience uh you get diversity of perspective right which is what's so valuable in so valuable in a room.
Dude. And, and, and I know we're running short on time, but this is the thing that drives me nuts.
Take a pure capitalistic standpoint on this, right? Purely capitalistic. If you're racist, sexist, um, if you're a homophobe, if you, if you're biased against anybody, all you've done is decided to take a market segment out, cut that out completely.
You've now, you now can't talk to that group. You've insulated yourself into a group of people who maybe they're repeat purchasers, maybe they're not.
And, and frankly, you've created negative energy in your space and you've created a whole structure of value creators that could potentially be part of your organization who now won't work for you. So I mean, if you just want to take all the actual humanity out of the topic from a capitalistic perspective, these to, to, to, to live on in 2020 with this type of mentality is bananas to me.
It's absolutely bananas. I mean, it's definitely giving your competition an advantage over.
Yes. Then layer in actual humanity and, and, and, and, you know, we're talking about everything you've talked about before, but I, we have just a tiny few minutes together.
I, I actually pitched you on coming on the show because you have a tremendous new tool out that, that I'm, and I, and I want to give you the 30 seconds on how I'm using it to put it in context. And I'd love you to just, um, talk a little bit about it before we sign off here.
And that is Spark Toro. Everyone who's listening to the show, go to, uh, Spark Toro, S P A S P A R K T O R O.comO.com.
And what this, I'll share with all the agents

how I'm using this tool.

So as I launch my insurance agency, Rogue Risk,

one of the market segments that I'm going after

is fitness professionals.

And what SparkToro has allowed me to do,

and then Rand, you can fill in the blanks,

but what I'm using it in particular for

is I can target people who have, and, and just, just as some of the, uh, one microcosm, but I put the word fitness in and then I can target people with fitness in their profile. And then what it's giving me is what, what YouTube channels are they're following? What, uh, podcasts are they listening to, you know, what other channels are they're following? So now I can start to use those both from a research perspective and from a, you know, I'm actually going to do some targeted YouTube ads and stuff to some of these channels that I know a lot of people who I want to go after are watching.
And I can find ways to add, you know, what I'm trying to do for their business into that marketing mix. But otherwise, there's no other single point that I could derive all that information from.
And I've found Sparktoro to be an incredibly valuable tool, especially in the research phase of launching this business. So I just wanted to give that caveat so people knew what

I was talking about and then ran any, any additionals that you want to add.

Yeah. Yeah.
So, I mean, the, you know, the idea behind this was my sense is the duopoly of Facebook

and Google are really expensive, right? They're really expensive. It's hard to show ROI.
You know,

you spend a ton of money with Facebook advertising,

a ton of money with Google search ads. And frankly, where I was seeing a ton of marketers have success was when they looked at alternative channels.
Hey, let me go pitch this podcast to see if I can be a guest on it, or go pitch this event to see if I can be a speaker, or go get a booth at this event or sponsor this website, pitch a guest post, right? All these different kinds of tactics, right? Let me try and sponsor that podcast or advertise on this. You know, maybe I can do some influencer marketing, whatever it is.
But that is so, so hard if you don't already know what your audience pays attention to. And anytime you're going after a new market segment, right, what you should be able to do is say, all right, you know, go give me all the profiles of people who have public, you know, social and web accounts who say that they're an architect, right, in their bio.
And then give me a bunch of information about them. And there was just no tool to do that.
Like it didn't exist, right? That's like impossible. So what would you have to do? You'd have to like go survey a thousand architects and try and get them to tell you which podcasts they listen to and which YouTube channels they subscribe to and which social accounts they follow, what websites they visit and share.
That takes months of work, and it's crazy expensive. And so Casey and I, my co-founder and I, basically decided to build this thing, right? So we crawl tens of millions of web and social profiles, well, billions actually, and then we aggregate them up to, I think we have around 70, 80 million profiles in our database.
And so you can search those, right? You can search

for architect in New York, right? And we have, I don't know, you know, 1700 architects who are in

New York in our profile database. And we can tell you that 22% of them listen, share, follow this

particular podcast, right? 21% follow this other one. 19% follow this next one.
16% follow that one. And on down the list.
And that, yeah, for a lot of our early customers and beta users, and Ryan, I know you're one of our early customers, first hundred customers, which is awesome. Yeah, that's been super useful for them, right.
To be able to do that market research at the snap of a finger. Yeah.
Well, man, I, I, I want to be respectful of your time and we're over. I, we just got into so many other topics, but I would highly encourage everyone who's listening.
SparkTor is a tool that is going to separate many, especially my friends in the industry. If you're doing program business, if you're writing super regionally or nationally on a particular program, a particular industry or a line of business, finding, I think, some of the podcasts, some of the YouTube channels that you could partner with and do some targeted average app, like legit advertising into those spaces.
That is where I'm extracting incredible value. Being able to find real thought leaders in that space, partner with them, crafting a message.
And, and, and when I said, I, there does not exist another platform, which pools all this stuff, uh, pools all this data into one place it's it's well worth the

look and um and rand i man i i i appreciate you as a person i appreciate the work you do

and uh i very much appreciate you uh taking uh so much time out of your day to to share with my

audience it is my pleasure thank you for having me, Ryan. Really appreciate it.
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