What's up, everybody?

This is Cortland from AndyHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.

On this show, I talked to the founders of 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 through their companies and in their personal lives, and what exactly makes their businesses 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 profitable internet businesses. In today's episode, I sat down with Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SparkTorro, who is perhaps best known as the founder Moss, and he's one of the world's foremost experts at Search and Optimization. Rand and I are also good friends in real life. So we decided to sit down for a casual chat and just talk about what's going on in each other's lives, how we're dealing with this COVID-19 pandemic and making business decisions as a result of it, and also how he's grown his company, SparkToro, in the last two years since he was on the

podcast. I hope you enjoy the episode. How's life otherwise? How are you personally?

Like everyone else, some days are good. Some days are really emotionally hard and personally,

relatively unaffected.

We, Geraldine and I both work from home, as you know, and we have, you know, a relatively

sizable house.

So I can be out here in the shed and she's in the house and like we're not sort of stepping

all over each other like my friends in new york apartments right now

or kind of nightmare situations bay area too i'm sure and we're very social you know we have a lot of

friends but we don't um you know so i think we're missing out on a lot of like going out and seeing people

and having people over but we don't have kids so we don't you know, we aren't impacted in the way that a ton of parents are right now.

Right.

Yeah.

And we both have careers that are, I don't want to say unaffected, but lighter, have a lighter effect from the broader kind of secondary tertiary impacts of the economic market

rather than directly impacted by, you know, healthcare things or physical things.

Even, you know, I do a ton of conferences and events, right? So I canceled a tremendous amount

of travel. Thankfully, with like one exception, everything was refundable.

You know, the net of that is basically Spark Toro saving a bunch of money on me probably

...