Docoloco - Local Recommendation Engine

Vishal Sharma Friday, March 28, 2008 , , , , , , 0 comments

Today we are showcasing another venture from Melbourne, Australia, Docoloco

Co-Founded by Melbourne boys, Chris Mander and Johnny Cussen, Docoloco - is a community powered online recommendation engine that helps locals find, share and follow the best local businesses. In laymen terms, people can use Docoloco to

  • find recommended local businesses and services,
  • recommend the places they love (or love to hate)
  • and ask friends and other locals to share their recommendations.
Chris Mander, describes:
Today local businesses use Docoloco to:
  • list their business, features and products online free of charge,
  • appear in the top web results on Google,
  • use their loyal customer base to generate new business
  • and attract new customers.
Tomorrow businesses will use Docoloco to:
  • find out a whole lot more about who their customers and competitors really are
  • and deliver highly targeted ads to a local audience.

Let us explore bit more about Docoloco and Chris's journey as an entrepreneur and what his thoughts are on the changing landscape of innovation in Australia. This is what he has to say:

• Please tell us how it started
We both felt that online advertising is too complex and time consuming for small businesses and that small business websites are expensive and usually stagnant which means they gather very little distribution.
As consumers, we're sad that in 2008 consumer reviews are almost entirely absent from the Australian online landscape. That has to change.
So we decided to grease up our elbows and throw our hat in the ring.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
The concept was hatched early on in 2006 with a fury of sketches, diagrams and wireframes. Software development commenced during August 2006 and a 'friends & family' beta version of the site was launched in May 2007.

• What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
The recommendation engine is fully functional and the business marketing tools are still stealthy.

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
To give Australians a better place to go for local business recommendations than the tired old Yellow Pages concept.

• What is unique about your venture?
Docoloco is a collective intelligence platform with an infinitely expandable taxonomy. The structure of the collected intelligence is very effective at matching local search queries in general search engines.

• What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
We are targeting the small business advertising and competitive intelligence markets.

• What type of customers you are targeting ?
Small businesses.

• How many users are using your services?
We currently have more than 500 contributors and ~20,000 unique visitors per month.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
To date we have been focused on product development. We have done no real external communications to date.

• How are you measuring the success of your venture?
The two key metrics we're watching at the moment are recommendations per contributor and search referrals per recommendation. Over time the focus will shift to business account numbers and our ad product sell through for those accounts.

• Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
We spend a lot of time crunching our standard web usage data with a particular focus on how effective our SEO is. We also monitor key performance metrics through our custom reporting interface.

We are constantly measuring traffic, SEO performance and user behavior to decide on which features to keep, ditch or re-visit.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
We will be offering small business marketing and analytics products.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
Yellowpages.com.au and truelocal are the current leaders in the space.

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and good old fashioned butchers paper. We're product guys - wire-framing, concept mapping and task lists are critical. Ruby and specifically Ruby on Rails fits well with our Agile workflow.

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this? What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
100% open source. The application is developed using Ruby-on-Rails, running on Mongrel clusters, Apache and Ubuntu, our data lives in a MySQL database and search is powered by Ferret which is a ruby port of Lucene. We use a stack of other smaller open source pieces but I think you get the picture.

• How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up. Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
We are constantly in touch with friends and colleagues in the industry and try to attend organised meetups when we can.

We've worked in online and search for a long time so an awful lot of the people we know here and overseas work in the space.

• How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
The wonderful thing about building web products in an open source economy using commodity hardware is that the bulk of operating costs goes into man-power. Docoloco has been developed entirely by Johnny and I so has required very little cash investment.

We think time is perhaps a bigger factor than money - sometimes one can be independent of the other but it takes a lot of juggling.

• What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
We think the whole ecosystem is underdeveloped in Australia. It's harder to raise capital, there are fewer like minded souls to hang with, and even when we look for bread and butter consulting work our entrepreneurial activities are largely undervalued. Our experience in the US and to a lesser extent the UK is of a different environment. A move to the US is a constant question for us but we think the opportunity in Australia is real and ready so we're determined to push as far as we can here.

• What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
We expect the Australian small business online advertising market to approach $1 billion by 2011 and that small business online advertising spend will follow consumers who are shifting from category based searches on yellowpages to keyword based search on general search engines.

We think that it's unlikely the large search engines will develop a significant and ongoing relationship with consumers in the local recommendations space and that there will be one or two key local players in each market.

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Read this book
Follow Venture Hacks on Twitter
Love what you're doing.

Thanks Chris for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hearing from you in future on the progress of Docoloco. All the best for future.

For coverage on other Australian startups, innovation, tech trends check this out and our coverage on interviews can be found here and here

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Tuesday Surprise - Womow

Vishal Sharma Tuesday, March 11, 2008 , , , , , , , , , , 0 comments

Continuing in our coverage of bringing more surprise entries, today’s surprise enty entry is
WOMOW.

Founded by Fiona Adler and Brad Bond in 2006, WOMOW stands for Word Of Mouth On the Web and it’s an online business directory of word-of-mouth recommendations to help people find the best local businesses. All businesses are entered and rated by users who describe their experience, including what they particularly liked or didn’t like about the business. WOMOW helps users find the very best local businesses, using real information from real people. And for businesses, WOMOW is the only place where they can be promoted based on merit (not on how much they spend). And if businesses provide poor service, we believe people should know about this so that they can choose other alternatives. WOMOW gives consumers a voice and evens out the playing field for businesses.

Let us explore bit more about Womow and see how they are doing. This is what Fiona, one of the founders, has to say:

How it started?
The idea for WOMOW came about in 1999 when Fiona was undertaking some home renovations and found herself reluctant to choose tradespeople without a recommendation. At the height of the dot-com boom, she started thinking, "wouldn't it be great if recommendations were on the web?" But it wasn't until 2006 when we seriously started making WOMOW happen, and July 2007 when the site actually went live.
But that's not because we're slow movers! At the time we were in the thick of running Invizage Technology - the IT support company that Brad and Paul (Fiona's husband) founded. Fiona was the marketing manager here and Brad was director of operations. After building this to become Australia's largest IT support company for small and medium sized businesses, Invizage was sold to Sensis (part of Telstra) in 2005. Fiona and Brad then pursued other interests for a while (Fiona climbed Mt Everest) and then at the end of 2006, teamed up again and started planning WOMOW.

How long it took before it was up and running?
It took about 6 months of researching, planning, and designing, and then 3 months of developing and testing before we launched the live version of the site.

What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
Fully functional.

What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
Our goal is to make WOMOW a way to find the best local businesses, using real information from real people.

And for businesses, WOMOW aims to be the only place where businesses are promoted on merit (not on how much they spend) and good businesses can acquire quality-oriented customers without spending a fortune.

What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
A business directory based on real, word-of-mouth information. It lets people know what real customers say about a business, rather than what the business says about themselves.

What is unique about your venture?
There are plenty of online directories that let you find businesses, but how do you know if they’re any good? The businesses that pay the most are always the most prominent, but this tells you nothing about their service.

Everyone knows how powerful recommendations are, but these days it’s hard to have that over-the-fence chat with our neighbours to find out where they get their car serviced. But who doesn't want to hear about a great new restaurant that just opened, a fantastic plumber that won't rip you off, or a dentist that makes the experience pleasant?

On WOMOW, all businesses are entered and rated by users and it’s the only place where people can find out what businesses are really like – directly from real customers.
It’s word-of-mouth on steroids.

What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
WOMOW is proving to be most popular for services relating to; Building and Trades, Home Services, Automotive & Travel, Health & Medical, Children, Family & Pets, Professional Services, Restaurants, Shopping & Hobbies, and Weddings.

What type of customers you are targeting?
Discerning customers that care about good service – whether that be finding a great place to eat out tonight, a mechanic that won’t rip them off, or a hairdresser that comes highly recommended.

What age group of people will be benefited most?
There’s no particular age-group, but people that are online that use a lot of services get the most benefit from WOMOW.com.au. These might be people in their 20’s that tend to eat out and use a lot of personal services, through to people in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s that use more services for their homes and children.

How many users are using your services?
We now have almost 9,000 business ratings on WOMOW and have been getting more than 20,000 unique visitors per month.

What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
True to our name, we are using word-of-mouth to spread the word about WOMOW. We’re finding that most people love the idea and are quick to share the site with their friends and family. We also run member promotions from time to time.

How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
We use measures like traffic, number of ratings, and number of users but the real measure of WOMOW’s success comes from the feedback we receive. We often get people writing to us saying that they found a great little business on WOMOW.com.au and they’re so thankful. It might be a business they’ve driven past every day but never noticed and now it’s solved a particular problem for them or helped them in some way. Personally, WOMOW has helped me find a fantastic builder, cleaner, dog trainer, printer and heaps of great restaurants I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

The businesses rated on WOMOW are also contacting us – a hairdresser recently contacted us saying they’d acquired 13 new customers after only being on the site for 2 months. Another restaurant owner said that 30% of her customers are finding her through WOMOW. She also said that reading the ratings gave her goosebumps – after all, it’s not often that business owners get praise and recognition for their efforts.

What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
Businesses can pay a small fee to have an Optimised Listing. This allows them to include a description of their services, images, special offers on their profile, as well as appearing as a suggestion on the profiles of other businesses in the same category.

Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?

  • WOMOW is the first directory to be entirely based on user ratings. More traditional models (such as Yellow Pages and TrueLocal) base their directory around the businesses’ needs – which get in the way of the user experience. For instance, TrueLocal have just introduced functionality where users can rate businesses, but they lack credibility as the ratings are moderated and the business can ask to have any rating removed.
  • Other players such as ServiceCentral and ServiceSeeking have a model based on convenience. They help match consumers up with businesses that are ready to do the work – but there is still no effective way of telling whether that business is any good.
  • WOMOW is the only business directory in Australia where all businesses are rated and the information is based on real users.

What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
PHP, MySQL running on Linux.

What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
PHP has been very easy to learn and use.

Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
Yes everything is Open source except PHP Designer.

What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
MySQL running on Linux.

How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up. Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
No official dedicated communities but plenty of meetings where we bounce ideas off each other and our personal networks. Having been in business previously and recently finishing an MBA, we have many interesting, intelligent business contacts.

How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
Obviously this varies significantly from business to business and also depends on the speed you want to make an impact on the market. In our case, the true start-up costs are minimal as we developed the site ourselves. However the ongoing effort and funding required to market the site are significant. Fortunately our last business was sold to Telstra, giving us the ability to invest our time and funds in WOMOW and removing the pressure to be profitable. This is something we believe in rather than a way to get rich!

What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
Starting anything significant takes significant time and effort. Usually much more than people anticipate and certainly more than can be squeezed in around a full-time job. The biggest barrier is people’s dependence on their income – usually for servicing their mortgages. This means that they can’t quit their job and devote the necessary time to their venture.

What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
The web is continuing to change the way we do business and the trend towards user-generated content will create a lot more transparency in the marketplace. This means that businesses have to be more accountable, but also provides a great opportunity for those businesses that are providing a great service. Good service really is the new marketing.

Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
If there’s any way possible – just give it a go. Better to have a go and fail than to look back and wonder “what if?”. Having said that, take the time to research, plan, design, and test your ideas on your target market. Without the 6 months we spent in this phase, I’m sure WOMOW.com.au would not be the happening, vibrant site it is today.

Thanks Fiona for sharing your thoughts. Unfortunately we cant add your venture into the competition, but we look forward to hear from you in future on the progress of Womow. All the best.

Note : Surprise entries are not eligible for participating in competition. Previous surprise entries can be read here : 1

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