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Thanks for commenting on the actual business struggles - I found that missing here too. I have watched Moz very closely for the last 3 years as well and was no

Thanks for commenting on the actual business struggles - I found that missing here too. I have watched Moz very closely for the last 3 years as well and was not super delighted by Moz Analytics, and this sheds some more light on it now. I do love their Moz Academy though, that was a big improvement. On the content tool - why do you think they couldn't pull in Webmaster Tools keyword data instead of the GA keyword data? Not as accurate, but 75% of the way there. They could have also matched up rankings to content pages to still make a cool tool. I imagine they are 80% there on a bunch of features like this but just haven't finished them. Possibly related to the comment on Rand's high potential/low performance (although that take a team and that quote is quite deterministic).

dchuk 12y ago
Well they certainly can do that now, I just think that that's not what they were planning on doing originally and with all the other dev problems they ran into, they couldn't pivot fast enough to the new data source. I think they're just facing a lot of growing pains in trying to become a Big Company in an industry (SEO) that is getting rocked year by year by Google. That's why they're trying to change to "inbound marketing" with a more balanced focused on social, seo, etc. I don't think they're necessarily wrong for doing that, I just don't think the market they're targeting is big enough personally. The thing about the recent Google updates for Analytics and Penguin/Panda is that it knocked a ton of beginner or amateur SEOs out of the park. Basically the guys who dabbled in Grey Hat, thought Black Hat was cool but didn't know how to do it right, and fed on as much White Hat stuff as they could to "protect" themselves from the big G. When Google rocked all of their sites, most of them just gave up - I saw this directly in my subscriber numbers after a big penguin update - leaving the pure White Hat guys and the Black Hats. The Black Hats don't give two shits about Moz and most openly deride them because they either build their own tools or plain just don't care. So that really just leaves the White Hats, which is a tough road to follow when you ultimately have no control over the algorithm.
- AznHisoka 12y ago
  "I just don't think the market they're targeting is big enough personally." Last I checked Hubspot will be filing an IPO with close to 1 billion dollars market cap. Hootsuite also will be approaching 1 billion market cap when they file their IPO.
  - dchuk 12y ago
    Hubspot has a very different client base and sales system than Moz does. Hubspot sells their services and tools directly to small business owners and it is not cheap at all. Moz sells to SEOs, of which there aren't a lot of and the pool is drying up slowly every day.

dchuk 12y ago

Well they certainly can do that now, I just think that that's not what they were planning on doing originally and with all the other dev problems they ran into, they couldn't pivot fast enough to the new data source. I think they're just facing a lot of growing pains in trying to become a Big Company in an industry (SEO) that is getting rocked year by year by Google. That's why they're trying to change to "inbound marketing" with a more balanced focused on social, seo, etc. I don't think they're necessarily wrong for doing that, I just don't think the market they're targeting is big enough personally. The thing about the recent Google updates for Analytics and Penguin/Panda is that it knocked a ton of beginner or amateur SEOs out of the park. Basically the guys who dabbled in Grey Hat, thought Black Hat was cool but didn't know how to do it right, and fed on as much White Hat stuff as they could to "protect" themselves from the big G. When Google rocked all of their sites, most of them just gave up - I saw this directly in my subscriber numbers after a big penguin update - leaving the pure White Hat guys and the Black Hats. The Black Hats don't give two shits about Moz and most openly deride them because they either build their own tools or plain just don't care. So that really just leaves the White Hats, which is a tough road to follow when you ultimately have no control over the algorithm.

AznHisoka 12y ago
"I just don't think the market they're targeting is big enough personally." Last I checked Hubspot will be filing an IPO with close to 1 billion dollars market cap. Hootsuite also will be approaching 1 billion market cap when they file their IPO.
- dchuk 12y ago
  Hubspot has a very different client base and sales system than Moz does. Hubspot sells their services and tools directly to small business owners and it is not cheap at all. Moz sells to SEOs, of which there aren't a lot of and the pool is drying up slowly every day.