He gave up on chasing unicorns. Now he earns $500K+/year from his 3-person startup. | Rand Fishkin, Founder of Moz & SparkToro

A Product Market Fit Show | Startups & Founders

If you feel like the ‘unicorn or bust’ playbook isn’t for you, then this episode definitely will be. Rand Fishkin is a multi-time founder and published author of Lost and Founder. He founded Moz, raised $29M in VC, grew to $50M in revenue and exited for $70M.
But he ultimately realized that the VC-backed life wasn’t for him.
So he went on to start SparkToro, a profitable 3-person startup that does $2M in revenue and takes only 30 hours a week of work. For those of us in the VC-backed startup world, it’s a totally different way to play the game. It won’t make you a billionaire. But it very well may make you $10M— with less stress, less work, and less risk.
If you want a transparent account of the pros/cons of a venture-backed vs a bootstrapped startup, check this episode out.

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Chapters

1. He gave up on chasing unicorns. Now he earns $500K+/year from his 3-person startup. | Rand Fishkin, Founder of Moz & SparkToro (00:00:00)

2. Founders, investors, and power dynamics (00:02:10)

3. The story of Moz (00:05:44)

4. Resigning as CEO (00:17:11)

5. Venture vs Bootstrap (00:23:46)

6. The 3-person startup: SparkToro (00:25:10)

7. Building great instead of building big (00:30:17)

8. Risk focused mindset (00:35:45)

9. Writing Lost and Founder (00:40:52)

10. The Product Market Fit spectrum (00:44:22)