By Paula Pant
Welcome to Greatest Hits Week – five days, five episodes from our vault, spelling out F-I-I-R-E.
Today’s letter E stands for Entrepreneurship. This episode originally aired in September 2018, at a moment when startup culture was loud, venture capital was abundant, and entrepreneurship was often framed as something that involves outside investors and rapid […]
Written By Paula Pant
I’ve been following Rand Fishkin’s career for years. He has one of the best rags-to-not-quite-riches-yet stories I’ve heard.
Rand is a college dropout who spent his early 20s spiraling into a deep debt hole. His problems began when he tried to grow a marketing company but funded it in the worst way possible. He leased office space, rented booths at conferences, hired expensive contractors — and paid for everything with a personal credit card. Yikes.
His credit card debt ballooned to $150,000. He couldn’t make the minimum payments, so he defaulted. The late fees and penalty interest rates caused his debt to swell to more than $500,000.
Anyone else might have declared bankruptcy, but Rand stayed the course. He doubled down at work. He decided to specialize in a marketing niche, search engine optimization, which set him apart from the pack.
He brought new clients into his business. He developed internal tools to use for his clients, then started selling subscription-based access to this software.
