Today we bring you another in the Founder Origin Stories. Sherry interviews Brian Clark, of Copyblogger and Rainmaker Digital, about adoption, abandonment, being a misfit, and walking away from law. He also talks as his motivations for creating successful businesses and the power of being early (alone) in a new space.

Love this episode and want more? Check out Brian’s interview with Sherry on Unemployable.

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Episode Transcript

Rob Walling:

This week on ZenFounder, we continue our founder origin series with Brian Clark. Sherry interviews Brian from Copyblogger and Rainmaker Media. Brian was an early blogger. I remember him coming to prominence in the maybe 2005 to 2007 range. Has always had a unique voice, but also, a voice that kind of straddled two communities; the startup community and the Internet marketing community.

 

Brian and his crew kind of came up with this idea of the third tribe, and it was a tribe that wanted to do startups, but actually wanted to make money. It was much more in line with the type of bootstrapping ethic, and I’ve always respected Brian and thought of him as someone with a bootstrapper’s ethic; an ethic of launching a company in order to make money, not just going out and building slide decks and trying to raise funds. So I hope you enjoy this interview as it delves into Brian Clark’s origin story.

 

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Sherry Walling:

So for anybody who’s been living under a rock and doesn’t know about Copyblogger or the tremendous work that you’ve done to really push forward the content marketing space, before that was even a thing; what are you most proud of, in terms of your professional accomplishments?

Brian Clark:

That’s a good question. I’m obviously proud to have kind of been at the forefront of what’s such a big thing now. Of course, I didn’t know what I was doing. I mean, there are some people who are much more determined. Joe Pelusi was very key from an early stage at … He came up with the term content marketing and really advocated for it, even to me, to get to adopt it.

 

But I was doing in the late 90s; I just didn’t know what to call it. That eventually led to starting Copyblogger, which was the first blog to talk about what we now call content marketing. It’s still the largest. So, yeah, I’m very proud of that. Like anyone else, I think some days I get tired of talking about it and just enjoy doing it, and yet that’s kind of like looking a gift horse in the mouth. You know, you take the territory that you’ve kind of charted in that regard.