I'm taking a temporary break in conference coverage (don't worry - there will be more next week) to poll some of the smartest people I know (that's you, SEOmoz readers), about an issue that's been keeping Gillian and me up plenty of nights during the past 3 months.

SEOmoz is at a tipping point of sorts - we've gone from being primarily a search marketing consultancy business to one that's heavily focused on an SEO product - premium content & membership. In the 6 months since launch, we've had approximately 1800 people sign up for our premium membership, of which ~1200 are members today (looking at our subscriber details, it appears that many folks will sign up for one month, cancel, then sign up again 3-4 months later).

Right now, SEOmoz membership and content isn't for everyone. If you're someone who regularly works on multiple site campaigns, the tools are terrific. If you need a little bit of strategic consulting or experienced professionals to bounce ideas off, the Q+A is great (BTW - sorry for my slower than normal responses due to the conference). Even novice search marketers can get a lot of benefit out of the guides & tips. However, there are certainly folks for whom premium membership isn't a terrific value - our goal is to change that.

We've recently been working with a venture capital firm, thinking about investment from them, as well as considering other options like private financing. Why? Well there's a lot of things we want to do, like:

• Cool new tools
• More experimentation & reporting
• Greater tracking abilities for member websites
• More premium guides
• Marketing & advertising
• 70+ specific projects that are probably very unwise to share publicly

To do this, we need to hire more people, add hardware, grow our marketing budget & put investment into R&D. Inside SEOmoz's offices there are two extra-large whiteboards, filled to capacity with all of the products and services we'd like to launch (both free and premium). At our current development rate, it would take between 18-24 months to roll out all these great ideas, but with investment capital, we think we could probably do it in 6 months. Not to mention the fact that we come up with about 10 great ideas per week that generally go on the shelf.

We're looking at our financial & growth projections and thinking that something between $750K and $2million (for something between 10-20% of company ownership) should take us where we need to go at this point. While this is a rare amount for VC participation, we've had some interest even at this small level.

And so, the question fundamentally becomes - do we take outside investment and grow fast, scale up and use marketing to expose more people to premium content? Or, should we continue to grow slowly, reject external financing and keep a tight marketing budget?

Pros of taking outside financing:

• Build content/tools/services more quickly (with more people)
• Have funds to conduct marketing activities
• Build greater formalization into the company
• Form relationships that may help the company achieve goals

Cons of taking outside financing:

• Give up some portion of control of the company
• Experience pressure to accelerate growth very quickly
• Lose a percentage of financial benefit from growth
• Invest significant time in appeasing and working with a board or investors/directors

What do you think we should do?

p.s. Yes, I know you're never supposed to share this stuff outside the company, but that's what makes us different :)