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The Journey Ahead
Rand | November 2013
Topics:1. Where We’re At (performed in the style of Star Trek)2. Re-visiting Moz’s Vision-Based Framework3. Strategic Initiatives for 20144. Our Roadmap & the Launch of Adventure Teams
Where We’re At(performed in the style of Star Trek)
November 2011
November 2011Our mission: to seek out a new software product and new ways to help SEO-focused marketers
succeed!
November 2011We shall help not only with search, but social media,
content marketing, link data, and brand mentions… And
that’s only the start!
November 2011Ach! Captain, that’s no wee
investment you’re committing to.
November 2011
It could take us 7-8 months to develop this new starship… err. software.
November 2011
I concur with Mr. Scott. We shall need to enhance our resources.
March 2012
I’m on it, Star dudes!
July 2012
The Federation has drastically underestimated the complexity of this
project. Yighosdo'
July 2012
Do’na worry. We just need a wee bit more time… By November, she’ll be
ready to fly!
November 2012
Bones, we need to get this thing launched or we’re in trouble.
November 2012
Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a miracle worker. We can hit March.
March 2013
It would appear your schedule was optimistic Doctor. We will
need a new strategy.
March 2013
Our dilithium crystal supplies are running low…
March 2013
Your human emotions are clouding your judgment. Leave
the fuel issues to me.
May 2013
Our rebrand must launch. We’ll create an invite list, and as soon as Moz Analytics is
ready, send it to the people.
May 2013
Captain, I’m picking up some skepticism in the delta quadrant.
May 2013
I’m sorry, but this is the only way.
May 2013
It’s not my favorite plan, but I trust you guys.
May 2013
Captain, ve can be ready for launch in September.
July 2013
The invite list is filling up fast.
May 2013
We might just make our budget after all!
Our Budget for the Invite List
Invite List Emails: 90,545
Signups: 4,500
~5%
The Invite List’s Actual Performance
Invite List Emails: 90,545
Emails Delivered: 88,110
Click-Throughs: 26,832
Free Trial Signups: 5,058
Conversions to Paid: 2,094
97.31%
30.45%
18.85%
41.4%
November 2013
Invite Liiiiiiiiiist!!!!
November 2013
We’re dead…
November 2013
I’ve been dead before…
The Reality
Thanks to our line of credit, we still have a long runway.
Retention hasn’t gotten much worse; it just hasn’t gotten better.
By being cautious and conservative, we can be profitable again in June 2014.
The worst part – the waiting & wondering - is behind us. Now we just need to make our subscription better and delight our customers.
Re-Visiting Moz’sVision-Based Framework
Why Does a Company Exist?“Many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. As we investigate this, we inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively that they could not accomplish separately—they make a contribution to society."
- David Packard
Vision-Based Framework
http://moz.com/rand/vision-based-framework/
Defining Core PurposePurpose (which should last at least 100 years) should not be confused with specific goals or business strategies (which should change many times in 100 years). Whereas you might achieve a goal or complete a strategy, you cannot fulfill a purpose; it is like a guiding star on the horizon -- forever pursued but never reached. Yet although purpose itself does not change, it does inspire change. The very fact that purpose can never be fully realized means that an organization can never stop stimulating change and progress.
- Jim Collins
Our Core Purpose (aka “Mission”)
Moz's mission is to help people do better marketing.
Defining Core ValuesCore values are the essential and enduring tenets of an organization. A small set of timeless guiding principles, core values require no external justification; they have intrinsic value and importance to those inside the organization… Ralph S. Larsen, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, puts it this way: "The core values embodied in our credo might be a competitive advantage, but that is not why we have them. We have them because they define for us what we stand for, and we would hold them even if they became a competitive disadvantage in certain situations.“
- Jim Collins
Our Core Values
TransparentAuthenticGenerousFunEmpatheticExceptional
Defining Strategic VisionStrategy takes what you want to achieve and develops a plan to get there. From strategy you can develop tactics and implement them. For me, strategy is as much about what you are not going to do as what you are going to do.
Strategy is important because the resources available to achieve your goals are limited.
- Fred Wilson
We Believe (and have evidence) that Marketing Spend & Effort Will Shift from the Red to the Blue
Our Strategic Vision
Power the shift from interruption to inbound marketing by giving every marketer affordable software to measure and improve their efforts.
Moz Analytics and Moz Local are
designed to help marketers here
In the future, we might help marketers in these
areas, too.
Defining a BHAGTo build a visionary company, you need to counterbalance its fixed core ideology with a relentless drive for progress.
One way to bring that drive for progress to life is through BHAGs (short for Big Hairy Audacious Goals). With his very first dime store in 1945, Sam Walton set the BHAG to “make my little Newport store the best, most profitable in Arkansas within five years.” As the company grew, Walton set BHAG after BHAG, including the still-in-place goal to become a $125-billion company by the year 2000. The point is not to find the “right” BHAGs but to create BHAGs so clear, compelling, and imaginative that they fuel progress.
- Jim Collins
NASA’s 1960s BHAG
To put a man on the surface of the Moon, and return him safely to the Earth.
Our BHAG
A quarter million people paying to use Moz’s products by May 29th, 2018
Strategic Initiativesfor 2014
Earlier This Year, I Talked About Five
1. Increase customer retention in every cohort
2. Return to profitability
3. Reach a broader marketing audience with our products, content, and brand
4. Remove reliance on Google data
5. Improve Moz’s company culture
For 2014, We Only Have Three:
#1: Improve Retention in Every Cohort
#2: Return to Profitability
#3: Launch Moz Local & Learn
Why Remove Culture?
Because being TAGFEE is not a temporary, strategic initiative. It’s not a goal we will accomplish, celebrate, and be done with. It won’t shift in 12-18 months.
Culture is permanently important – it must infuse all of our efforts forever.
Having culture as a strategic initiative confuses the definition and purpose of both culture and strategic initiatives.
Why Remove Broader Audience?
We need to focus on delighting our current audience before we expand into more new markets.
SEO alone continues to grow fast, and both content & social marketers are including SEO into their workflow (just as SEOs are including content/social in theirs). If we can build a great product for this base, we have a great opportunity (and a lot of learnings we can apply) to reach less SEO-focused folks in the future.
Moz Local is a big bet on its own and a great way to reach a broader audience in 2014.
Why Remove Dependence on Google?
Google Analytics has been good to us, and doesn’t appear to be a short term risk (as it did earlier this year).
With the disappearance of keyword traffic data, rankings are more critical than ever to understanding how campaigns/pages perform. Hence, we can’t empathetically serve our customers in the next few years without rankings data (and Google appears not to be actively working against us or others who get that data).
Why Make Retention Such a Focus?
Retention is extremely well correlated with customer happiness. If we’re to be empathetic to our customers, retention is the best way to measure success.
In any future liquidity event, retention will be a huge part of how we’re valued. Every dollar we make is worth more if we improve retention.
Retention is something everyone at the company can directly and indirectly impact, and something we can all see and measure together.
Retention means higher CLTV, which means better margins, and an easier time staying profitable as we grow.
Why Do We Need to Be Profitable?
Profitability lets us control our own destiny vs. being beholden to raising future rounds of investment, and potentially losing our ability to prioritize the culture we want.
Profitability means we can make investments in long-term bets (like we did with Wonk, Local, Moz Analytics, etc).
Being profitable reduces risk that we’d need to take more drastic cost-cutting measures in the future.
Profitability removes the emotional challenges that a limited runway create.
Everything we work on must be:
1) Mapped to either retention, profitability, or Moz Local
2) Measurable with numbers that are made transparent to everyone at the company
3) Prioritized against other things that can move the needle on these initiatives
Our Roadmap & The Launch of Adventure Teams
Here’s How We Crafted the Current Roadmap
List of active and backlogged projects from teams
Eteam planning meeting facilitated by Tim & Karen
Retention, cancellation, and usage data from Alyson
Here’s How We Crafted the Current Roadmap
Usability, Stability, Accuracy
Every priority had to fit 1+ of the following:
Discoverability
Highly Requested by Users
Big Innovation / Game Changer
Creates Advantage Over Competition
Reduces Costs
Tim & Karen then circulated to each team to get feedback + input, which led to this:
Adam will share more about this in his presentation
How Will We Do This in The Future?
Some folks like the top down approach
But we believe great solutions should come from more diverse groups, and that, long-term, planning should be more inclusive.
The future process is still TBD, but the hope is to make the Eteam + Board responsible for defining problems, and Adventure Teams responsible for solutions.
Rand | November 2013
