Spark Toro

Rand Fishkin had built and scaled Moz, one of the most successful bootstrapped SaaS companies in the marketing world, raising about $30 million in venture funding. But the venture ecosystem left him frustrated. After stepping down from Moz, he wanted to build differently—not chasing 100x or 500x returns, but creating a sustainable, profitable business that could exist for the long haul.

The idea for Spark Toro came from a simple observation: marketers spend enormous effort trying to understand what their audiences pay attention to. They research podcasts, YouTube channels, websites, social accounts, and publications. But when Rand interviewed target customers, nearly 95 out of 100 said they had no word for what they did. There was a massive, unnamed practice in the market.

In June 2018, just a few months after the original Andy Hackers podcast episode with Cortland, Rand closed a unique $1.3M funding round from angel investors. The structure was deliberately unconventional: investors put money into an LLC that would be paid back through company profits, not via acquisition or exit. This aligned incentives around profitability and sustainability rather than growth-at-all-costs.

Rand and his co-founder Casey kept the team minimal—just the two of them with a few contractors for design. They spent the next year building in stealth, launching an alpha version to investors around April 2019. Two rounds of beta testing followed that summer, involving about 400-500 people total. After significant feedback, they did a major redesign and began early access in February and March 2020, with plans to launch publicly shortly after.

The first early access cohort in late February 2020 performed "extraordinarily well." Rand was so excited he sent investors an email saying they were "one year ahead of our projections." But then COVID-19 hit mid-March. The next early access wave converted at only about a quarter of the previous cohort's rate. Cancellations spiked. Interest plummeted as the entire world shifted focus to survival.

Rather than panic, Rand decided to double down on generosity: more free access, more free content, less focus on immediate revenue. "We still have almost half of our investment dollars left," he said, "so we can power through the next 12, 18 months, no problem."

Rand's primary growth strategy wasn't direct sales or paid ads—it was content marketing. Because "audience intelligence" had no clear market category, he couldn't do simple broadcast messaging. Instead, he built broad, valuable content about Google's zero-click searches, digital monopolies, advertising imbalances, and marketing strategy during crisis.

He also leveraged his personal brand heavily. Unlike many SaaS companies with corporate Twitter accounts, Spark Toro's voice came entirely from Rand personally. He blogged relentlessly—before the pandemic maybe monthly, but during COVID ramping to weekly. This wasn't just business; it was genuine helpfulness. He was transparent about being overwhelmed, about reading 40-50 articles daily, about wanting to help people navigate crisis through marketing advice.

One unconventional tactic: he donated speaking honorariums from webinars to GiveDirectly, eventually raising around $2,000 total. He positioned the launch not as "please help us succeed" but as "we're having a conversation at a funeral—the tone is different, but the conversation still matters."

His investor base, chosen deliberately from people within the marketing and conversion optimization world (like Ben and Carl from ConversionRateExperts), became both customers and advisors. They understood his problems intimately and could give hands-on guidance worth thousands in consulting fees.

As of the April 2020 interview, Spark Toro was about to launch publicly into a pandemic. Expectations were deliberately lowered. Revenue projections were adjusted downward. But the fundamentals were sound: a profitable business model, conservative spending, no pressure for growth-at-all-costs, and an audience that had been patiently educated for two years about the problem space.

Rand embodied a philosophy increasingly rare in startup culture: patience, profitability, sustainability, and empathy. "We know we need to get this thing out there in the market," he said. "Eventually, when they need it, they'll come to us. So let's be a little more generous with free access. Let's worry a little bit less about our revenue." It was a bet that doing right by people would ultimately win.