Before launching SparkToro as a paid product, Casey and Rand built and shipped three free tools built entirely on top of Twitter data.

“Before we launched SparkToro as a paid tool, we built three free tools, all centered on Twitter”

Each free tool built an independent audience and reputation for the eventual paid product.

“Each of them had thousands of users and helped both our traffic and brand reputation.”

Rand personally pitched people and publications already influential with SparkToro's target market for calls, guest contributions, podcasts, and joint research, and used those relationships to seed early awareness.

“We rely on folks hearing about our brand, directly from me doing some marketing thing with an existing source of influence”

In the first few months after launch this direct-outreach flywheel was the dominant source of new signups, before word of mouth overtook it.

“In the first few months after launch, it was almost entirely the former.”

Free-tier subscribers who get value from SparkToro are, in Rand's telling, the company's single biggest source of new awareness.

“Free subscribers are our #1 marketing channel”

By the one-year mark, most new signups traced to secondary word of mouth rather than Rand's own direct outreach.

“Today, it's 80%+ the latter.”

Rand says he does almost no active SEO work for SparkToro, and that keyword-driven search doesn't meaningfully factor into how people find the product.

“It's not that search sends us no traffic, but that SEO doesn't really factor into it.”

What search traffic SparkToro does get is overwhelmingly people searching for the brand name itself, a byproduct of the brand SparkToro has built rather than of SEO tactics.

“which brings ~60% of all our Google visits”

Rand's stated reason for not pursuing SEO as an active channel is that the underlying problem SparkToro solves isn't something marketers know to type into Google.

“isn't something people search for in Google”