What's up everyone?

This is Cortland Allen from NDHackers.com, and you're listening to the EndieHackers podcast.

On this show, I talked to the founders behind profitable internet businesses,

and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.

How do they get to where they are today?

How do they make decisions both in their personal lives and at their companies? And what exactly makes their companies tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful businesses. Today I'm talking to Rand Fishkin. Rand is one of the world's foremost SEO experts, and as such, he doesn't need much of an introduction, but I'm going to give him one anyway. Rand is the founder of Maas, a marketing and SEO company which he helped grow to $47 million in annual revenue, and which has helped many people, myself included, find customers and drive traffic to our websites. Rand is also the author of a new book called Lost and Founder. It's a painfully honest field guide to the startup world. I read it and it's like a very transparent, very detailed indie hackers interview. So if you enjoy indie hackers, you'll love the book and it should be available by the time that you hear this episode. And finally, Rand recently left Moss to start a brand new company from scratch. It's called Spark Toro, and I'm sure we'll get the chance to talk about that as well. So, Rand, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining me. Thrilled to be here, Corland. The problem with talking to people like you've done so many things is that there's no way we're going to fit all of it into an hour, and so people will be mad at me. So I just want to start by saying, shame on you, Rand, for putting me in this awkward

position. Shame receipt. So probably everybody who has a website that they tried to get to the top

of Google has heard of Maas. But very few of them are aware that you started the company with your

mom. In fact,

I've never met another mother's son founding team. So can you tell us a little bit about

what those early days were like? Yeah, it turns out mom and son software startup is the least

likely venture funded company out there. I've also never met a, never met a mom and son, you know, venture back to startup

founding team. So I think, yeah, the early days were hard, right? I dropped out of college.

I was working, you know, at my mom's office out on the east side of Seattle. And we were not good at building a client base, not great

at getting paid. The dot-com bubble had just burst. And a lot of clients were trying to get their

websites done, but then, you know, not paying. We were struggling to just make ends meet and, in fact, going into debt

at the same time. So by 2004, I think it was, maybe the end of 04, beginning of 05, we had about

half a million dollars in credit card debt. That's because, you know, we actually had more like

$140,000 or $50,000 in credit card debt, but then we couldn't make the minimum payments. And so, you know, we actually had more like $140,000 or $50,000 in credit card debt,

but then we couldn't make the minimum payments. And so, you know, the interest rate spikes and the

penalties jump up and a couple months into that, you're, you know, you're lucky if it's not 2x.

So as a result, we started trying to find anything to grab onto.

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