The Contrarian's Playbook: How Rand Fishkin Built Success by Going Against the Grain (Part 1)
The entrepreneur who turned transparency into a weapon, challenged Google on stage, and chose zebras over unicorns
Written by: Brianne Garrett Original photography by: Reuben Evans Additional photographs: Provided by Rand Fishkin
Summary
- Challenging Google's secrecy: Fishkin publicly exposed how search rankings could be manipulated through live conference demonstrations, openly reverse-engineering algorithms when Google refused to share how their systems worked.
- From debt to Moz: Drowning in over $500,000 of debt in his early twenties, Fishkin taught himself SEO out of desperation, eventually building Moz into a $50 million company with 40,000 customers.
- Rejecting unicorn culture: Despite generating $30+ million in annual revenue, Fishkin grew disillusioned with venture capital's obsession with billion-dollar valuations and embraced the "zebra" philosophy of building real, profitable companies.
- Transparency as strategy: Through the TAGFEE framework, Fishkin made radical openness a core value, publicly sharing revenue numbers, mistakes, and methodologies that competitors could copy—turning transparency into a competitive advantage.
- The unconventional pivot: After leaving Moz, Fishkin founded SparkToro as an LLC with 25-30 hour work weeks and no traditional VC funding, then used acquisition money to start Snackbar, a video game studio fulfilling his childhood passion.
This is the first part of a 2-part look at Rand's entrepreneurial journey.
Introduction
Rand Fishkin did what most in tech wouldn’t dare attempt.
At one particular conference, Fishkin walked onto the stage and asked hundreds of marketers to take out their phones, disconnect from WiFi, and search “wedding planner Seattle.” He instructed everyone to click the fourth result. By the end of his presentation, he told the crowd to refresh the page. The link had vaulted to the top of Google’s results. It was Fishkin’s cheeky way of exposing how search rankings can be manipulated by user behavior in real time.
As the CEO of Moz, the SEO software company he co-founded in 2014, Fishkin became known for openly challenging the search giant’s secrecy. “I think I probably made a few more enemies than friends on Google’s team.”
That on-stage moment captures Fishkin’s lifelong penchant for questioning authority. From reverse-engineering Google’s algorithms to rejecting Silicon Valley’s obsession with unicorns, Fishkin has built a career around going against the grain.
It’s a contrarian streak that’s shaped every company he’s founded, from Moz to SparkToro to Snackbar.
The Google Antagonist
Fighting the Giant's Secrecy
Fishkin’s contrarian reputation stemmed from frustration. In the early 2000s, search teams kept their algorithms a closely guarded secret. Fishkin, a young web developer drowning in debt (more on this later), found that infuriating.
“I knew in these early days that people inside Google, inside Yahoo, inside MSN Search, which was still quite popular at the time, knew exactly how their systems worked,” says Fishkin. “But they refused to publish information about how they worked. I hated that. I thought that security through obscurity was a poor practice. I still think it is.”
That anger fueled the creation of SEOmoz, a blog he started to chronicle his experiments in understanding Google’s ranking signals. What initially began as a passion project proved to be lucrative. “I had no idea that eventually it would turn into a monetizable business,” says Fishkin.
The Conference Stage Demonstrations
The “wedding planner Seattle” stunt wasn’t a one-off. Fishkin ran versions of these live experiments for 18 months straight, testing how user behavior influenced rankings, and using each session to expose what Google preferred to keep hidden.
Google noticed. After several of these talks, employees emailed him asking if he could, in Fishkin’s words, “just shut up.”
“That was my favorite thing to do for a lot of the years,” said Fishkin. It cemented his reputation as the rare founder willing to challenge the biggest company in tech. And it didn’t stop there.
“I wanted to learn it, prove to people how it worked, and open source it,” says Fishkin. “Even if they wouldn’t.”
Building Alternative Metrics
For years, the SEO world relied on a single number to understand how “important” Google considered any given webpage: PageRank. Google displayed this score directly inside its browser toolbar. It analyzed the links pointing to pages across the web and used that link graph to estimate which sites carried the most authority.
“This link-based algorithm and iterative system was one of their early sort of genius moves,” says Fishkin. “They showed it on every page you visit.”
Moz even built early tools to track PageRank across clients’ sites — until Google abruptly stopped updating the metric. “Over time, Google realized, I don’t think we should be showing PageRank anymore,” Fishkin says. Updates slowed from monthly, to annual, to nonexistent.
Fishkin saw an opening. When Moz raised its first million dollars in VC funding, he decided they’d build something Google no longer offered. “My idea was: We're going to crawl all the pages on the Internet and then build our own system.”
Using the very first version of Amazon Web Services, Fishkin’s team built Moz’s solution to PageRank’s dissolution. They called it MozRank.
While Google’s PageRank sometimes went two years without updating, MozRank refreshed monthly. Eventually, Moz built toward daily updates, giving SEOs far more visibility than Google ever had.
But the breakthrough didn’t stop with MozRank. With their growing link index, Fishkin’s team created, trademarked and patented a machine-learning metric called Domain Authority: a score that predicted how likely a site was to rank in Google. “That became a huge driver of business to Moz for better or worse,” says Fishkin. “Even to this day,” he adds, “when a spammer emails you offering ‘high-quality DA links,’ that’s Moz’s Domain Authority.”
It became one of Moz’s biggest growth engines, and in many ways, the industry’s replacement for PageRank.
“You probably detect a theme,” says Fishkin. “I just love being the little guy and sticking it to the big guy.”
The Accidental Entrepreneur's Unconventional Path
The $500K Debt as Catalyst
Before Moz became a $50 million company, it was a last-ditch effort to survive. In his early twenties, Fishkin and his mother had racked up more than $500,000 in debt.
In the early 2000s, Fishkin was helping his mother run a small marketing business in Seattle, which relied on credit cards and personal loans to stay afloat. To hide the damage from his father, his mother put most of the debt in Fishkin’s name.
During this time, Fishkin lived with his partner, writer Geraldine DeRuiter, who paid all of their bills — the electricity, the water, the rent. Some months, Fishkin contributed $800, most months he made nothing. The debt he and his mother accrued reached egregious heights to the point where minimum payments couldn’t be made. Fishkin had to step in to replace the subcontractors, forced to learn the SEO ropes to complete client projects and chip away at the debt.
That desperation became the unlikely foundation for what would eventually become Moz.
Rand and Geraldine.
Hacking Since Childhood
Largely rooted in the dynamics he observed at home, Fishkin’s contrarian instinct was shaped long before entrepreneurship. “The older I got, the more suspicious I became of what was ‘normal’ and what was ‘right.’”
As a kid, he discovered that by manipulating DOS batch files, he could trick his computer into thinking it had more RAM than it actually did, allowing him to run games it technically wasn’t capable of playing.
“I immediately questioned whether the things I was being told were the only way or the right way,” he says.
That skepticism eventually shaped everything from his political beliefs to the way he now builds companies.
The Beginner's Guide Miscalculation
As Moz evolved, so did Fishkin’s contrarian sentiment. Like this one: the notion that mainstream press doesn't always drive tech traffic.
In 2004, Newsweek planned to publish a story about SEOmoz. Expecting an influx of mainstream readers, Fishkin built “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO” to capture traffic. When the article finally ran, it brought an extra 1,000 website visitors, not nearly the groundbreaking traffic Fishkin had hoped for.
The real explosion came from somewhere else entirely: the guide went viral on Slashdot, a tech community site that functioned like an early Reddit. SEOmoz’s visibility skyrocketed.
“‘The Beginner’s Guide to SEO’ rose up the rankings in Google so that when you searched for ‘Learn SEO’ or ‘How to Learn SEO,’ Moz was right up at the top,” says Fishkin. “In a very real way, it transformed the reputation and the awareness of Moz's business.”
“I just love being the little guy and sticking it to the big guy.”
— Rand Fishkin, co-founder of Moz and founder of SparkToro
Rejecting Silicon Valley's Playbook
The Zebra vs. Unicorn Philosophy
Like many founders in the 2010s, Fishkin thought the path to success was reliant on venture capital.
“This is incredibly embarrassing to admit,” he says, “but I was obsessed with trying to build a billion dollar company because I wanted to be viewed by my peers in the startup world as a serious entrepreneur. I wanted to be able to stand on stage at TechCrunch or the Web 2.0 conference and be the person that people admired and looked up to the way they did Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page or Bill Gates at the time.”
But the more time he spent inside the ecosystem, the more disillusioned he became. “In VC, for every 2,000 companies that are venture backed, one will eventually be valued at more than a billion dollars,” says Fishkin, “and it’s weird that they're almost all white and Asian dudes.”
The pressure to chase billion-dollar valuations and the status of a “mythical beast” was no longer as appealing.
It was through this lens that he discovered the concept of “zebra” startups — a term first coined by Mara Zepeda and Jennifer Brandel and what Fishkin defines as real companies solving real problems with sustainable models. He immediately recognized himself in it.
For the first time, he saw an alternative. “My mind just exploded in possibilities,” says Fishkin. “That same feeling as when I hacked my computer when I was 13 years old. I just fell in love with this concept.”
The Profitable "Failure"
At its peak, Moz’s numbers painted a success story: generating more than $30 million in annual recurring revenue, supporting more than 200 employees, and bringing in more than 40,000 customers — virtually outperforming 90% of VC-backed startups. But because it wasn’t growing fast enough to command a massive exit multiple, it landed in what Fishkin calls “the messy middle.”
“The craziest part,” Fishkin says, is how arbitrary unicorn valuations are.
He adds, “What if you are worth a billion dollars in your Series C round, but in your Series D, you're now worth $600 million? Did you lose customers? No, not necessarily. Did you lose employees? No. Was your technology less impressive? Nuh-uh. Did you do something to screw over your PR? No, nothing. There’s no physical thing that separates the billion-dollar company from the 600 million. It’s just investors worshiping a meme.”
Building Sparktoro Against Convention
When Fishkin left Moz, his contrarian tactics transferred right over to SparkToro, his next venture built as a deliberate contradiction to Silicon Valley’s rules.
Rather than a C-corp, he formed an LLC, nearly unheard of for a tech startup. SparkToro has also stayed founder-controlled and free of traditional venture capital, yet profitable. Instead of glorifying burnout, he instituted 25 to 30-hour workweeks as policy.
His discovery of what zebra startups — “real,” profitable companies — could build became a major pillar. The model resonated because it described something few people in tech ever talk about: You can build a great company by serving an underserved niche that venture capital won’t touch.
“It can be successful by growing slowly, reasonably over time, staying profitable, and existing inside an underserved niche that venture is not interested in because it’s too small,” Fishkin explains. “When you pitch a VC, you have to show a multi-billion-dollar market. But there are lots of million- and tens-of-millions-of-dollars sectors that need to be served. And very few startups try to go after them.”
SparkToro marketing VP Amanda Natividad, Rand, and second co-founder Casey Henry.
Transparency as Rebellion
TAGFEE and Radical Openness
While most companies protect their trade secrets, Fishkin made transparency another core value.
So much so that, with the help of his wife DeRuiter, he codified it into the company’s cultural framework, TAGFEE: Transparency, Authenticity, Generosity, Fun, Empathy, and Excellence.
The approach — at least before Fishkin exited Moz in 2018 — stood in sharp contrast to Apple’s famously secretive culture, denoting Moz and Apple’s positions as “oil and water.”
While Apple perfected the art of withholding information, Moz thrived by sharing it, even when that meant competitors could use Moz’s insights to build their own tools or replicate its methodology. Moz published everything: detailed SEO guides, correlation studies, ranking experiments, revenue numbers, strategy notes — and mistakes.
“It's not the same kind of people,” says Fishkin. “I don't think we ever recruited or hired someone who had worked at Apple previously.”
I want people to visibly see that you don't have to build a big business to have a wonderful life and an exciting company.”
— Rand Fishkin, co-founder of Moz and founder of SparkToro
The Personal Cost of Contrarianism
Radical openness also carried emotional weight, something Fishkin wouldn’t fully unpack until years after leaving the company.
After Moz came a period of emotional decompression. What helped was Fishkin deciding to reframe the experience as neither a triumph or a tragedy. It was a chapter of his life versus the defining one.
“I can now treat it as what it was,” says Fishkin. “We made some OK money; we have some savings; we built up a lot of friends and a network that helped me get to my next company. So we're going to treat it as that. That has to be enough.”
Outside of work, he sought out pursuits that had nothing to do with business growth: Video games — his childhood escape — became a form of creative exploration again. Cooking offered similar joy.
The Meta-Contrarian Move
Accepting the Documentary
Fishkin isn’t interested in being remembered for some grandiose legacy. What matters now is building small, meaningful businesses that reflect his values, not Silicon Valley’s expectations.
So when he agreed to participate in the documentary The BIG Cheat Code: Rand Fishkin's Founder Story, produced by HubSpot for Startups and LinkedIn, the goal was to widely showcase the ultimate contrarian position: success without scale.
“I really want there to be alternatives,” says Fishkin. “I want people to visibly see that you don't have to build a big business to have a wonderful life and an exciting company.”
The Game Development Pivot
His unwavering philosophy later led to one of those most unexpected pivots of his career: using part of the Moz acquisition money to start a video game studio, turning back to his childhood to fuel his next exciting venture.
The idea for this studio, Snackbar, started as a what if. That is, until his wife pushed him to take it seriously.
Fishkin recalls: “Geraldine said, ‘Rand, if you're so passionate about it, don't wait until you're done with SparkToro. You don't need to wait until 10 years from now, who knows if you'll even be passionate about it by then. Just do it,’”
So in another definitive zag, that’s exactly what Fishkin did.
Conclusion: The Contrarian's Compound Effect
Across every chapter of Fishkin’s career, acts of resistance became unexpected advantages.
Fighting Google’s secrecy built an audience. Crushing debt created discipline. Transparency built trust. Rejecting traditional Silicon Valley ideology opened the door to sustainability.
In a world that worships mythical unicorns, Fishkin is choosing to document real zebras — and in typical contrarian fashion, he’s parlayed that transparency into his competitive advantage.
At the same time, his transparency helps founders with similar trajectories navigate their own journeys with fewer blind spots or “fireballs” as Fishkin refers to them. He’s aware he can’t resist a video game reference.
“A great story from another founder who's been through something similar? That can save you,” he says. “It can stop some of that running off the cliff. They can show you who’s about to shoot the fireball. I think that's the big cheat code."
Author: Brianne Garrett
Brianne Garrett is a journalist, editor, and producer focused on entrepreneurship, lifestyle, and food. Before pivoting to freelancing, she held editorial roles at brands including Sweet July, Forbes, and Wine Spectator. She’s also the founder of Stella, a newsletter, podcast, and community platform that champions and connects Black women in media. A dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, she splits her time between London and New York. She’s both a tiramisu lover and a Chardonnay hater.
