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Building a Startup Without Burning Out: Lessons from SparkToro on Sustainable Growth

Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad are investing in the sustainable scaling of SparkToro without targeting aggressive growth. Here are their best tips for scaling a startup sustainably through prioritizing audience research.

Interview with: Rand Fishkin & Amanda Natividad
Written by: Paige Bennett 

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Introduction

In the startup world, aggressive growth is an implied requirement. For many, this approach is perceived as the only way to attract investors and make the impact required to survive.

But, aggressive growth is always risky, especially if the startup’s finances, team, or culture can’t adapt to the pace.

According to M Accelerator, many startups feel pressure to meet the $1M annual recurring revenue (ARR) mark within just one year of launch while hitting up to 25% month-over-month growth to meet investor expectations. Yet, as Startup Genome uncovered, 70% of startups scale too early, which can actually stunt long-term growth.

The pressure of aggressive growth is helpful for some founders, but aggressive growth isn’t the only way to build a successful company. For founders who want to build a useful product and grow their clientele while still maintaining a sense of balance in their lives, there are other options.

 

A conversation with Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad of SparkToro

Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad have decided to approach startup growth differently. Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SparkToro, and former CEO and co-founder of Moz, and Natividad, SparkToro's VP of marketing, rely on team communication and trust to build their company.

By skipping aggressive growth tactics in favor of audience research, creative content strategy, and team trust, SparkToro is building a brand on organic, sustainable growth—which ultimately leads to a high-quality product and a loyal following over rapid growth.

Fishkin and Natividad sat down with HubSpot for Startups to share more about their experience in building SparkToro with customer and employee happiness as their top priorities.

 

HSFS: Can you share more about your perspective on GTM?

Amanda Natividad: As far as I know, the phrasing of go-to-market strategy was developed sometime in the 1990s in Harvard Business Review. It was a notion that this is the whole plan that you come up with before you put a product or service on the market. What is the strategy you're going to the market with? Of course, there are a lot of companies today where a GTM strategy makes sense for companies that have a product to launch. 

But what happens when you are post-launch, when your product, your service, or your offering is already in the market? Can you still call it a GTM strategy? 

With SparkToro, we essentially offer one product: our audience research tool. We have other things that we market; we have webinars, our blog, and our newsletter. Those are things that we market, even though they are not what we sell. We sell one product.

 

So, for us, I don't think of it as what strategy we are going to market with. To me, it's ongoing. What's coming up that's launching, and how can we think about messaging for that? How do we think about the different ways we can weave that into our customer journey/prospect journey? 

 

HSFS: Can you explain more about how you run the startup outside of an aggressive growth environment?

AN: We're probably healthier (as individuals and as a business). That's one major thing. 

We're not in this hyper-growth, startup-y phase of growth-at-all-costs, feed the customer acquisition beast. But we're also not the bigger, more established company that has a bunch of team members who need to look busy. So, we don't do things that will break our butts, like working too hard, although we do work hard. 

We also don't do things just for the sake of doing them. We don't just try to fill up a work queue. We're not pushing papers for no reason. We have very autonomous days.

I’m not working with a bunch of team members who are waiting for me to approve things or waiting for me to do the thing and pass it off to the next person. It's sort of just like, “Hey, you're responsible for this program or this thing. It's got to get done. I know it's going to get done. I'm going to do it so that it gets done.” It just doesn't have to happen between 9-to-5 specifically. 

Rand Fishkin: I think there's true beauty in the simplicity of single team members owning projects fully and completely, being competent and capable enough to do the work on their own in its entirety. The productivity that we get as a team of three is similar to what my previous company was able to regularly produce with a team of 50. 

Granted, a lot of that is Casey. Casey Henry [SparkToro co-founder] is a one-in-a-million type of developer and engineer who is full-stack, front-to-back. You ask him to do something, and he can do it. He also says no to a lot of stuff, and I think Amanda and I do as well. We say no to demos, podcasts, interviews, conferences, and a dozen daily emails each.

I do think there are probably people listening to, watching, or reading this who might think to themselves, “Okay, so nothing you're doing applies to me. I can ignore and should ignore everything SparkToro is doing.”

I would just caution against thinking that way because I think even if you are a very aggressive, growth-minded person, it pays to understand the ludicrous efficiency of small companies (not necessarily SparkToro, but certainly organizations like SparkToro), and what people are able to accomplish when they have siloed work that depends on no one else, when leadership believes in everyone on the team, everyone believes in each other, and there’s no question of trust. 

 

Sometimes, I wonder to myself when Casey's going to get this thing done, or I wonder when Amanda's going to get this thing done. But they always do, and I almost never send an email asking, “Hey, where's that project?” And they don't send it to me either. We just manage our own psychology, trust the people around us, and it's okay if a deadline slips. It does not actually matter if we get this particular upgrade to the product, that particular blog post, or this particular video up on this day, with rare exceptions. 

Other people can design their businesses to work in this way. You can design your products and systems to be deadline-tolerant. You can choose to hire people who work well this way. You can choose to manage them with the same trust and siloed workflow we do. You can even choose to manage them out if it doesn’t work. If you hire someone and you treat them as this autonomous person and say, “Hey, you go do your siloed work,” and then after a few months, you're like, gosh, I don't think this is the environment for you. Okay, just let them go and find the people who are. 

I really don't miss at all the massive amounts of interdependency and the complexity my previous, traditional startup environment brought, or the social engineering challenges and politics that come with that from bigger organizations. 

AN: I'll add that what I think can work across bigger teams or maybe what people can learn from us is to think a little bit less about job-function-specific roles or teams and a little bit more about what I'll call program-specific

I worked on a marketing team where I was the content marketing manager and sort of de facto copywriter. So, when things needed to get written, whether it was customer prospect communications, I would write it. I would write the copy, our boss would approve it, our email marketing manager would get it ready in our marketing automation platform, and then it would go out., That was just how it went. The problem there is that I'm essentially the bottleneck because all marketing collateral needs to get written. 

If one person is writing all the things, that's not great because then the email marketer is waiting for those things, or worse, they might feel like their job is merely to copy and paste text, then schedule it. 

I think what would be more impactful is having people own discrete programs end-to-end. Maybe a better scenario would've been having one person own the email newsletter, which means they write it, and they're responsible for getting it approved, and they’re the ones who schedule it in the platform.. The person who runs email or demand generation as a whole can do a last look, but ultimately, maybe the email newsletter is its own program that is 90% executed by one person. Maybe a different role is somebody who runs all of the lead generation campaigns. Somebody else runs the webinar program. They're responsible for getting registration, sending out the emails and promos, and scheduling them. Then, you have a team that is proficient in writing and working in various marketing tools. They're responsible for reporting and metrics but for their own given programs.

That might enable a more autonomous team. People can just say, “I have to do this thing twice a month and make sure all these things get done ahead of those deadlines.”

 

HSFS: How does your team handle disagreements?

RF: This is a beautiful thing about small teams. If we disagree, it’s generally really simple. If the thing costs money and we disagree, we probably won't do it. If the thing is just someone's time, especially the person who agrees, they'll just do it. So I might say, “Hey, Amanda, I think we should do X, Y, and Z.” She'll say, “I'm not super into that, but if you want to do it, go for it.” Sometimes I'll go for it, and sometimes I won't. That works out kind of great, too. 

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I think this is because Amanda and I have excellent rapport and communication skills and very good marketing instincts. It's really hard to tell people to follow in our footsteps and ask them to t do what we do: have great instincts that you've developed over a quarter century of experience, and then apply them to every situation. That is terrible advice, but it works. 

So, we will essentially come to some semi-regular conclusions about what we think is most important for the coming quarter or year. It's usually more like six months or a year. As an example, right now, we're pulling back on a bunch of marketing stuff to invest in a bunch of product stuff. There are only three of us. We can't do everything. 

 

HSFS: How do you think founders and startups can maintain growth while keeping a spirit of creativity?

RF: We sort of ruthlessly interrogate the idea that things are going to keep working the way they used to. I would say this is our core example and probably one of the biggest things that people take away from SparkToro and our marketing, which is that if you were to look at the standard startup marketing playbook, you would see that we do almost none of those things. 

We do email and content marketing, but not the way almost anyone else does it. We do no SEO or paid advertising of any kind. We don't do account-based marketing (ABM). We don't do direct outreach. We don't have a sales team. We do virtually no analytics or measurement of anything. 

Our primary way of marketing is to create things of all kinds, everything from this interview to videos that we distribute in various places to blog posts to product announcements to speaking at events and conferences. We do a lot of webinars. 

 

Almost everything we do is our content, our ideas, or ourselves appearing in places our audience already pays attention to. That does not have a name. This is why I think almost no one invests in it because 50 years ago, you might've called it public relations. Now, public relations mostly refers to handling inbound press and media rather than seeking out press and media to get it, and I'm not talking about press releases either. That's, I think, a largely dead tactic. 

Most of our marketing is to figure out where our audience pays attention, be present in those places with a message that resonates with them, and reach them however we can. We call it marketing through sources of influence, but because it doesn't have a classic name, you'll never see it on almost any startup playbook. You won't see it on a GTM list. If you ask ChatGPT, there are no words that often come after other words that include this.

It's funny because I think this is the reason Amanda and I work together. Amanda sort of saw me talking about it and was like, “That's a good idea that people should be doing. I want to do that. I want to join your team. Why does no one do this?” And then she was like, “Hey, you should make me SparkToro’s first employee.”

 

HSFS: How does authenticity play a part in driving interest in your startup?

RF: If you expand this to the broadest definition of it, this is how everyone finds any product or service that they have ever purchased. Your source of influence could be Google and searches for these 1,400 keywords. Your source of influence could be your friends and what they recommend to you when you need an electrician. It could be how you decided to go to this restaurant instead of that restaurant because, well, you really like Eater's recommendations, or there's this new Infatuation article about the best burgers in Seattle. I think I'm going to check that one out and try a couple on that list. 

Whatever the sources of influence are, the challenge for the marketer or the startup founder is how to discover the correct audience and then figure out what they pay attention to. Very few people, for whatever reason, it's like that process is blocked in their minds. They don't bother.

If you were to look macroeconomically and ask, “Are more purchases and sales flowing to companies with people that their customers generally trust and agree with, the founders’, CEOs’, leadership’s, or board of directors’ decisions?” I think that's not true. I think it's the opposite. 

I don't want to call it fandom, but a personal connection, where you like, trust, and want to support this person or the people behind this company, is capital that you can build up, but I don't think it outweighs other market forces, at least not for long. 

We've benefited from that tremendously. I think we continue to benefit from it somewhat. I would guess that even right now, somewhere between 5% and 10% of our customers almost never use our product, but they also don't want to cancel. 

I received an email from someone like that. They were like, “Hey, I don't really use the product, but I love SparkToro. I love everything you guys do, and I want to support you.” 

AN: It's like their Patreon. 

RF: My reply to them was like, “You should cancel your account. We're doing great. Don't worry. Come back when you actually need the product.” 

If you want to support us, I don't know; put my blog post on LinkedIn or something.

 

HSFS: Do you think that people who know you personally are also super-users and have helped get more people on the product?

RF: Casey just sent us a list of our most active 500–600 customers. I actually know very few people on that list. 

So, I would say the people who know and trust us were instrumental in helping us amplify our message to the places where we acquired many of our customers and got in front of them. But they weren't necessarily the perfect customers themselves, which I think makes good sense. 

A lot of the people who know, like, and trust Amanda and I were in worlds of, for me, SEO, and for Amanda, content marketing, strategy, and agency worlds, and not all of them do audience research. So, it makes sense that there'd be a difference there. 

I think the lesson for a marketer or founder is that if you can build your network with people who would be likely to be your customers, that's wonderful. But, even if you are building a network that is not people who are likely customers, they can still be amplifiers, and they can still help you reach the places and people that you want to reach. 

 

HSFS: Can you share what’s next for the SparkToro team?

RF: At the end of October, we're going to finally have U.K. and Canada support. SparkToro will no longer be exclusively an American product, which is great. I'm hopeful that if that goes well, we can do Australia and New Zealand next year and maybe some other geographies as well.

The other thing that I'm super excited about is that we're actually using the help of AI to be able to take all of the massive amounts of demographic and behavioral data that we have on an audience, then using some transformations, clever logic, and a bunch of filtering that Casey had to manually build to extract the interests, hobbies, passions, and topics that these people care about. The results so far look really good. I think that might launch in November or December, too, which is great because it's one of those frustrating things to be like, what do interior designers in California care about? I don't know. 

I am personally hoping that we can take SparkToro.com, plug the tool into our product, and then see all the sources of influence in Canada or the U.K. that our audience has. Then, next year, we can make a concerted effort to be on those podcasts and video channels, participate in those content places, figure out the social followers, get them to amplify us, and all that kind of stuff. 

 

Conclusion

There’s a lot of advice out there that recommends how to achieve aggressive growth as a startup. But that’s not the only way to build a successful business. As evidenced by SparkToro, founders can also follow a slow-and-steady approach to win the race, all while enjoying a little more work/life balance and a sustainable stream of customers and revenue.

Rather than investing all your time into advertising and SEO, the SparkToro team recommends meeting your audience where they are, whether that’s on their favorite podcasts or at their local events. And when you’re not taking interviews or hosting webinars, it’s okay to hunker down and simply focus on product development, too.

Whether you prefer an aggressive growth phase for your early-stage startup or you’re hoping to build at a slower yet more sustainable pace, there’s no one right way to create a successful startup.

Knowing how selective they are about where they spend their time, we at HubSpot for Startups are extremely grateful they didn't say "no" to this interview.

"The Big Cheatcode"

As a "spin-off" of the Spiraling Up documentary film series we did with LinkedIn, we also interviewed Rand, Amanda, and Casey to tell the story of Rand's Moz-to-SparkToro journey. It's a raw and authentic look at the trials, tribulations, and triumphs over two decades.
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