This is great. In an ocean of depressingly terrible SEO information, advice and tools shrouded in secrecy by pompous quacks dressed in fake wizard robes SEOMoz has always stood out as completely open, ethical, high quality and useful.<p>I've also seen Rand talk and he's very passionate about what he does, I recommend anyone who gets the chance sees him speak. It's hard to not have his enthusiasm rub off on the audience and leave you re-motivated and full of ideas again.<p>There's definitely a huge market for this. Just look at how much absolute crud and misinformation there is out there. How many people are still being ripped off by SEO cowboys. I'd really like to see SEOMoz succeed and become more mainstream and well known.<p>I'd like to one day to hear small businesses asking about SEOMoz and other high quality companies/tools/sources of SEO information as supposed to going along with the first cold calling spammer that phones them up.
Talk about taking transparency to the next level. This post has revenue, freemium conversion data, cap table breakdown, valuation, vc negotiation detail, and how Rand and his co-founder / mom amicably decided to part ways. Amazing. Has there ever been a private company at this scale with this level of transparency? Go SEOmoz.
I'm very impressed with their openness and in describing the process. They share revenue projections, their cap table and pitch deck.<p>I'm also impressed with their non-standard move: They 'each sacrificed shares we owned to give back to each active employee at the company so they maintain their ownership percentage.'<p>They want to be a 'role model company in Seattle' and I truly hope companies follow in their footsteps in terms of openness and consideration for their employees.
I love the transparency. You definitely get the feeling Rand would be an amazing person to work with.<p>I love that a funding announcement is so interesting that it will pull in tons of new customers.
I paid 99$/month for few months, but I end up only using keywords tracking tool... 99$ was too much only for that feature.<p>Any saas offering only keywords tracking? For something like 9.99$/month?
Really great writeup. Congrats Rand and the whole team! I'm impressed the VCs were ok with Rand publishing so much data publicly. I hope more companies are this transparent with information...it really helps level the playing field for startups and entrepreneurs to have access to this kind of data.<p>Congrats again!
Love it. Their software is pretty damn good, I hope they become the de facto SEO package and make scads of money.<p>Rand's writing about marketing and the inner machinations of growing a company are always worth reading.
Not really an SEOmoz fan (nor do I have an opinion on them), but the insight into their deal was very welcome and it's good to see that they've got big plans.
Rand is also pushing a HN for online marketing - <a href="http://inbound.org/" rel="nofollow">http://inbound.org/</a><p>I hope it takes off, but the community behind it is currently non-existing.
Now that they have their own backlink crawler their information is extremely valuable to any self respecting SEO. It's expensive, but that's probably because of lack of competition.
mercenary, if you knew Rand at all, you'd realize how dumb such an insinuation sounds.<p>Also, Brad Feld is no dummy. He may not have the Midas Touch, but he doesn't buy into crap, either. I suspect we'll be hearing a lot from Moz in the future.
There's an infographic in one of the slides about the SEOMoz culture that I love and reminded me of the originating post that gives a solid overview:<p><a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/establishing-guiding-principles-at-seomoz" rel="nofollow">http://www.seomoz.org/blog/establishing-guiding-principles-a...</a>
EDITION: stupid brainrashed children say "rite dis" i rite. i say rand good guy rand good. seomooooooooooooooz i buy. 99 cents onry. i buyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.<p>congo rats ulations rand seomoz good marqeteen jawb. sory end congrexuleeytions end have nice day.