Following Startups & Tech Trends

Vishal Sharma Wednesday, June 18, 2008 Australia , Blogger , Entrepreneur , Interview , Media , Search Engine , Ventures , Web 0 comments

In our ongoing coverage of startups coming out of Australia and interviews with CEO's, Media Personalities, Philanthropists, and VC’s, today we showcase a successful venture and an exciting entrepreneur Ben Barren, co founder of Gnoos - Australia's Largest Blog Search Engine for Consumers and Enterprises.

I recently met Ben through our common friend Duncan Riley. I was highly impressed by his breadth of knowledge and enthusiasm. I followed up with him to do an email based interview with me to explore his thoughts on the progress of his various ventures and new emerging trends. This is what he has to say:

• What is the name of your company, the people involved, and can you provide some background on the venture?
Red Lion Ventures Pty Ltd owns Feedcorp Pty Ltd and Gnoos Pty Ltd. Red Lion Ventures was co-founded by Michael Leone and Ben Barren. The business has doubled revenue in the last 3 quarters so we’re hitting a real growth spurt.

In early 2005 Michael and I believed there was a great opportunity around enterprise RSS; This is when companies such as Feedburner, Newsgator and Technorati were flourishing and sites using RSS like MyYahoo, Flickr, and Delicious started to thrive. We wanted to localise this opportunity.

Feedcorp deals with our enterprise customers in the community arena. Gnoos relates to our Aussie blog search engine in the consumer space, whose business model is a mirrored deployment of the index running intelligence and syndication offerings for our clients who want to track when their brands and topics of interest are mentioned on Aussie blogs and twitter feeds.

In November 2007 the business also brought in Peter Burley as Shareholder + CEO of Feedcorp as an experienced media, online and management professional. Pete has previously worked setting up Fairfax Digital, ninemsn, and Vividas.

Our fulltime headcount has grown from 4 employees to 9 with the majority of those (6 FTE) being in engineering, as well as hiring an experienced CEO Peter Burley.

• Please tell us about your venture/company?
Gnoos has the largest index of Australian blogs and media RSS feeds – currently indexing 150k feeds : Which it then uses the power the Gnoos blog search engine to provide Australian blog only results; The unique business model is that blue chip Australian companies pay to access the blog and social network intelligence from the data, which includes when their company and product names were mentioned.

Gnoos also powers extensive content syndication for large media companies wishing to publish popular Australian blogosphere content. Clients log into a custom branded web based secure extranet with their own branding and set of topics and keywords. This is a unique offer in the intelligence and content syndication space. By indexing 150k media and blog sources, gnoos indexes far more content sources than competitor offerings.

We aim to grow this to 1m feeds within 6 months, at which time we aim to have a new consumer version of gnoos (finally) available, as well as a developer API so they can mashup the Aussie blogosphere and widgetise the content. Blog search in itself is not a business, as technorati proved. Blog search didn’t solve a real problem, and didn’t package up a digestable RSS product in the way FriendFeed or Dave Sifry’s new Offbeat Guides seem to.

• Please define metrics for success for your business?
We look at traditional business metrics : Proposals out to market; Percentage likely to close and Forecast Revenue and Cashflows, with tracking of expenditure against this. It was important our business was already due diligence ready with audited financials, and appointed accountants and lawyers. You need to be always ready.

We are on track for over $1m in revenue for CY 2008, with more than half of that revenue locked in. Since Facebook hit mainstream adoption, brands realise they need to have a social networking and web 2 product in their portfolio. We are looking to go to the next level of the business through launching a new version of gnoos, an API for the Australian blogosphere, and extended enterprise offerings in the user generated content syndication and intelligence space.

Acquired companies such as Pluck.com bought by Demand Media for $75M and Sphere.com bought by AOL for $25M-$35M - who have similar offerings - show there is a market for the enterprise intelligence, syndication and community offerings we currently offer and want to develop further.

• Any external funding – from VC, Govt, Self funded
The business was self-funded by Family and Founders for the first 2 years through the use of a $200K debt facility. Feedcorp did a Series A Angel round of around the same amount in May 2007 incl co-founder of Hitwise Adrian Giles, plus high net worth individuals and is currently raising $800K for its Series B round, of which one quarter is subscribed and is in advanced discussions to close the remaining amounts. So it’s taken us about $500K to get us to where we are, over 3.5 years; Which is a lot cheaper than what it cost to run a digital business in the dot-com period. But it’s not peanuts and good engineers, designers and project managers are all $80-$120 per hour cost lines, even with the benefit of equity and working on cool cutting edge projects. Unfortunately the banks in Melbourne pay engineers a lot of money to keep their online banking online, and a 9-5 job can be quite attractive to some people. Which is unfortunate because a lot of technical people’s skills are only getting semi-up to date by the programming they do on their own projects at night.

• What services do you provide for customers?
After 3 years of operations in the web 2.0 space, through trial and error, we have learnt what products customers will pay for, that we can deliver and scale, with good economics : That being powering online community and user generated content for media companies. As well as providing syndicated user generated content from the Australian blogosphere. Further, financial institutions and other blue chip brands are paying for our social networking intelligence offer, which provides them with a hosted secure extranet webpage where they can track if their name is mentioned on Aussie blogs, twitter and social networks.

Demand for these 3 products (community, content syndication, social network intelligence) has grown rapidly with revenue for the last 3 quarters doubling quarterly; $54K (Sep 07 quarter) to $96K (Dec 07 quarter) to $209K (till March 08 quarter) - The intelligence and syndication products are driven by the investment we made in the gnoos.com.au blog search engine. The benefit of Series B investment will be ability to upgrade the back end RSS infrastructure, as well as expand the sales pipeline, which at the moment is well over $3m.

• What type of customers you are targeting?
Customers we’ve worked with include large publishers such as business units within News Ltd, PBL Media, large media companies, digital agencies and online startups in high value verticals. We’re currently seeing the most demand in media, travel, automotive, financials, classifieds, and sporting clubs.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
Personal and company brand building using blogs, twitter, talking at conferences and interviews like this ! The most important marketing however is to traditional decision makers who read BRW + AFR, but are high unlikely to use Twitter or Facebook J For these people, our CEO Pete Burley and myself have done over 60 meetings with a qualified sales pipeline of over $3m. In these meetings a lot of time is spent educating clients about social media, and what types of tools they can use to participate in the conversation. You can’t beat hitting the pavement, day in, day out. We try and use well presented documentation that clients can understand. We also spend a lot of time with investors, where we do similar explanation of our business, with more of a focus on the business model, expenditure requirements and competitive scenario.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model?
Gnoos draws its revenue from setup and licensing revenue from its (hosted) intelligence and syndication offers. It also through Feedcorp offers a complementary community offering so a clients end user can create conversations around the syndicated content. Setup fees average $25K for intelligence and syndication; Up to $150k for community projects. Ongoing licensing fees are $2500 to $10k per month depending on the offering.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
Gnoos is the only blog search player with a dedicated index of Australian and global blogs and feeds. Neither google or technorati index Australian blogs solely. And other Australian offers don’t index globally. Indexing RSS is very hard though and we aim to major upgrades to the number of blogs we index (from 150k to 1m), the way in which the content is categorised (our enterprise clients want to slice n dice the data by location as well as product/brand name mentions) So we’ve got lots of work to do and to date our team of 6 engineers has been focused on the paying projects. So it’s a balancing act between back end investments and front end client work.

While we are just based in Australia presently, the same “localisation” issue applies to every other country such as UK, Germany, India, US, Singapore, Japan etc – So these are attractive markets for us, the same applies in the online community tools provision (+ blog syndication) where large publishers such as UK newspapers want to syndicate local content and embed tools in their sites. But we’ve definitely learnt we don’t want to be a Web 2.0 web developer, nor are we trying to be ning.com or google alerts.

Overall the blog search space is being subsumed in parts by google.com’s universal search. As a result, while blog search is important to Feedcorp, the next version of the site will be focused on having the most popular browseable blog (and mainstream media content) and the ability to filter it by location and topic, as well as personalise it.

So rather than compete directly in the search space, we want to be positioned more in the “hyperlocal personalisable news” space. A bit like http://www.outside.in (in effect similar to the tool that our publishers utilise) In this way gnoos.com.au will become much more like a hyperlocal theage.com.au or news.com.au – However it will include all the latest breaking blog news (and each of the categories to read thru such as travel, finance, auto, sex, politics, tech)

Unlike newspaper websites the next version of gnoos will have the ability to subscribe and personalise, as well as search. The original vision of gnoos was heavily focussed around the ability to use RSS to subscribe to feeds, topics, peoples and locations you are interested in, then when you login next time receive updates on what you have expressed interest in. It just happened that Search was the first feature we bit off. If you use google reader, the experience will be similar to this, however your feed reading will be setup and you just add and delete feeds, topics and locations you are interested in. Further, the ability to “share” and “clip” content you find interesting on gnoos, onto your blog/facebook/twitter/tumblr page is important as alot of blog search users want to blog about a topic once they find a relevant weblink. Again, we need to make this easy for gnoos users.

As you can see we want to build out the service away from the pure blog search space, and much of the functionality and algorithms we’ve developed in the enterprise space we want to apply to the consumer. (and vice versa)

Further, with funding, the aim is to create a developer API For gnoos.com.au so for non-commercial use developers can create mashups of Australian blog content eg if someone wanted to create an Aussie Politics Blog Website or Latest entertainment gossip (or overlay a google maps interface with Aussie blog content) This API should also stimulate media publishers who are interested in using Aussie blog content and want a quick way to get to experiment with content before going to market.

• What are the main technologies used behind this venture?
We’ve been an open source orientated company from inception : Using Wordpress Multi-User and MySql for our community projects with structured blogging and mh-reviews microformats for user generated reviews. On the search side we’ve used Lucene and Postgres running Java. For the mirrored enterprise deployment which runs separately (and doesn’t have the same speed and indexing freshness of gnoos.com.au which we should have fixed shortly) we’re very happy with the Django framework and Amazon web services.

• What’s your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia?
Feedcorp. is our company website which details the latest projects we are working on. My blog also captures my end of day thoughts in running a business a 24 hour flight from the optimal place to be doing it – California. There is an absolute lack of early stage specialist Web 2.0 and online investors like Mobius, Union Square, and Y-Combinator in the US. The benefit of Australia though is lack of competition. But the biggest challenge in running a worldclass online business is lack of skilled engineering resources downunder. I want to grow my RSS index from 150k feeds to 1m in the next 6 months, and run machine learning queries on top of the index to power my intelligence and syndication services to Corporate Australia for example : But I need RSS and search engineers to help me achieve this. Please contact me thru my blog if you are an engineer up to this challenge. If you do, it will make doing this interview worthwhile :-)

Thanks Ben for sharing your thoughts with us. 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

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Vishal Sharma Wednesday, April 09, 2008 Australia , Business , Directoty , Online , Search Engine , Startup , Technology , Ventures 0 comments

Today we are showcasing another venture from Sydney, Australia, RAYV

Founded by Anil Sabharwal , RAYV - a local business directory with recommendations, targeted towards Sydney customers, allows consumers to find, review, and talk about local businesses.
It's a cross between a web-based social community and an online business directory and a recommendation engine.

We explored bit further about RAYV from one of the founders - Anil Sabharwal. This is what he has to say in his interview with us:

• Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?
I’ve always had a passion for technology. It started with hardware – computers, video game consoles, mobile phones – but as of late my real interest has been the digital space. There is so much information in the world today but it’s all useless if it can’t be filtered and delivered in a meaningful manner. To me the Internet represents both our greatest opportunity and our biggest challenge – and this is what drives me day and night.

I have a technical background, having graduated with a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. Waterloo’s claim to fame is that it’s the number one University in the world that Microsoft hires from, so, like all good Waterloo boys, I started my career at Microsoft as a Product Manager. I then co-founded an e-learning company which is now the second biggest educational e-learning company in the world. After selling my share of the business to my partner, I worked in Senior Management roles (mostly Sales and Marketing) for a few different software companies. Eventually the entrepreneurial bug bit me again, and I started RAYV.

• What is the name of your venture/company/start-up?
RAYV Pty Ltd

• Please tell us about your start-up?
It is a well documented fact that most people believe asking friends is the best way to find restaurants, mechanics, hairstylists, or anything else local. RAYV makes it fast and easy to access these recommendations by collecting and organizing them in one convenient place.

For businesses, RAYV is word of mouth marketing amplified. Given that nearly 90% of all purchases are influenced by word of mouth, RAYV is an innovative new marketing channel for local establishments to target local consumers effectively and efficiently. Businesses are given the opportunity to differentiate themselves from the crowd and promote their business success stories to a captive audience.

• Who are the people behind this and how it started?
RAYV was founded in September 2007. The idea was simple – to fill a gap in the Australian market and provide consumers with a single place to go for trusted word of mouth recommendations across all types of local businesses.

Ian McCallam was immediately brought on board as my business partner to lead the charge on Marketing and Product Management while I focused on setting up the business, raising capital, and managing the software development team. Philip McCauley was brought on board in October, 2007 to manage the finances. All team member bios can be found here.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
RAYV launched in Sydney in January 2008.

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
Deliver the best possible experience to our users (members, visitors, and business owners) and become the ultimate Australian city guide tapping into the community’s voice and revealing insights on local businesses.

• What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
RAYV is a fun and engaging place for passionate and opinionated influencers to share the experiences they’ve had with businesses and interact with other like-minded people.

It’s a place where anyone can go to get a trusted recommendation on a local business.

And it’s a place where local business owners can promote their establishments to an active and captive audience.

• What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
RAYV currently targets 10 segments:

• Restaurants
• Nightlife
• Beauty & Spas
• Shopping
• Arts & Entertainment
• Automotive
• Professional Services
• Home Services
• Health & Medical
• Active Life

• What type of customers you are targeting?
Consumers who wish to share their experiences; consumers looking for a business and a trusted recommendation; and business owners looking to promote their establishment.
• How many people are using your services?
RAYV currently has several hundred active members and well over 50,000 page impressions a month. These numbers are growing at a rapid rate, given that the site is only 3 months old.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?

• Viral – videos, Facebook, MySpace, email
• Sponsorships – see Speak Up Sydney
  
• Online and Print Advertising
• Search – Google AdWords, SEO

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress? RAYV measures its success based on the feedback of our community and by the growth of our visitation and member base. As revenue picks up, this will become a crucial measure as well.
• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
RAYV provides a unique method for local businesses to promote their products and services. For a small monthly fee, businesses can sponsor categories and searches, be featured on the homepage, and take control of their business listing page to include pictures, price lists, special promotions, and take advantage of a host of other valuable benefits. These elements ensure the business owner gets more hits to his/her page, and in turn, more business.

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

• TrueLocal
• Yellow Pages (Sensis)
• RaveAboutIt
• WOMOW

• What are the main technologies used behind this start-up? Java, JSP, PHP, AJAX, XML, HTML

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology? All technologies have been easy to use so long as the proper time has been spent up front to architect and design.

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this? We use some, but are also building new technology, such as our Compatibility Tool which tells a member how compatible he/she is with another member. This is extremely valuable when trying to figure out whose reviews you can trust.

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

• 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 look to catch up regularly with our member base and business owners to better understand their interests, needs, and issues with the RAYV product. Through this direct feedback mechanism we’re able to make sure we build a product that is right for our customers.

• Have you sought any funding?
We have. RAYV is partially self-funded with additional investment coming from Angel Investors.

• What’s your thought on being an entrepreneur? How tough it is to start a venture in Australia? Having spent most of my life in Canada, the first thing I noticed about Australia is that the country appears to be risk averse when it comes to technology investments. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – just an observation. But it does make it difficult for entrepreneurs with good ideas, as investors here will typically require that a company has reached a certain level – measured by revenue, visitors, and/or members – before they take a risk and put money into your venture. That’s good news for entrepreneurs when it comes to dilution, since the valuation of a company is ultimately higher once you’ve hit a few key milestones. But it’s bad news if you can’t fund the project initially to get it to that point.

• Would you move your business to another country, and if so, for what reasons?
I think Australia is a brilliant country for RAYV and it’s where we plan to stay.

• Which city in Australia is more vibrant and can be regarded as Silicon Valley of Australia? I don’t think any one city in Australia can be singled out. The country is so well connected that technology ventures are popping up all over, and this is the way it should be.

• What do you think of new ventures and innovation coming out of Australia? Purely within the technology space, I fear that Australia is lagging when it comes to new ventures and innovation.

• Do you think we can create a new Google in Australia? Absolutely. Australians are some of the brightest minds in the world and creating the next world class technology company is definitely something we should all strive for. The challenge is that the odds are stacked against us. Based on population alone, the U.S. has 15 people for every one of us. Couple that with the government funding programs in the US, the abundance of investment capital, and the willingness to take risks, and it seems like a safer bet that the next Google will come from overseas. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying – it just makes the challenge that much more exciting!

• What do you think of our TAFE/Universities and their curriculum in terms of promoting and encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation? From what I’ve seen, they’re a good start. But more emphasis needs to be put on the practical side so that students don’t immediately get discouraged after graduating. Too often great ideas never see the light of day because an entrepreneur gets overwhelmed at the outset and gives up.

• What do you think government (federal and state) should do to improve the culture of innovation? Anything and everything. While Australia has some good government programs, they are underfunded and far too restrictive. While I agree we need to emphasise innovation, the truth of the matter is that some of the most successful companies have never invented anything new. Facebook and YouTube are great examples – at the outset (and arguably even today) they did no technology innovation. It was about taking existing technologies and putting them together in a new and innovative manner. The idea itself was the innovation, not the technology. But in Australia, if you can’t patent it, the government doesn’t want to hear about it.

• What Government resources have you used to help your business? And have they made an impact? For the reasons mentioned above, we’re not eligible for government support in Australia.

• At the 2020 conference, PM Kevin Rudd is meeting with top 1000 people from different background to discuss and collaborate on the issues facing the nation. What issues would you like to raise if you are given a opportunity to attend? I’d look at instituting more practical work experience programs into University curriculums (co-op programs and internships) as well as encouraging the government to set up more technology incubators and government funding in support of technology start-ups.

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Do it. Take the plunge and be willing to fail and learn from your mistakes. And find yourself a mentor to help you along the way.

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

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

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Vishal Sharma Friday, March 28, 2008 Australia , Business , Recommendation , Search Engine , Startup , Ventures , Web 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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Vishal Sharma Friday, March 21, 2008 2008 , Australia , Search Engine , Startup , Ventures 2 comments

As part of our ongoing efforts of providing more exposure to startups coming out of Australia and help them today were are going to showcase Clickfind™.

Founded by Carolyn King and Taco Fleur, Clickfind™, is an online business directory that charges a monthly fee to businesses who list their products and services. Established for the Australian marketplace, its intellectual property is owned by clickfind Pty Ltd which means the clickfind™ technology and brand can also be licensed to international markets.

Taco one of the co-founders describes:

The idea of clickfind came about when we wanted to list our own businesses in business directories, one of them being the Yellow Pages. We had an experience that left a bad taste in our mouth, an empty wallet and no results. Thats when we decided to create a business directory/search engine for Australia that is different and excels in the areas others don't.

Let us explore bit more about Clickfind and how they are progressing:

• How long it took to get up and running?
The business was set up in mid 2007. Business scoping, brand design and web development took approximately six months and clickfind™ was launched as a fully functional website in December 2007. It is Australian owned, run and managed by an experienced, enthusiastic team based in Brisbane. Clickfind’s aim is to become the best business search engine in Australia and become the definitive source for all of Australia’s over 2 million registered businesses.


• What is unique about clickfind?

• Comprehensive listings: Unlike other directories or search engines, clickfind™ allows a business to add individual listings for each of their products and services (up to 500 of them), as well as basic business info. This allows a business to create a complete online product catalogue which can be shared and syndicated in several ways. A clickfind listing can also act as a mini-website for small or start-up businesses, and a business can have its own unique URL.
• SEO performance: As well as being a self-contained directory, clickfind™ has been built to optimize performance in external search engines (such as Google) and drive traffic to clickfind™ customers’ websites. Other directories don’t utilise search engine optimization (SEO) techniques in this valuable way.
• No advertising: clickfind™ does not display any paid advertising (banners). Other sites often display ads of competitors next to business listings, reducing the effectiveness of the listing. They also offer premium listings, which means the most relevant results are often not shown first. Instead, clickfind™ focuses on making the users’ search as useful and relevant as possible.
• Genuine Aussie businesses: only businesses with a valid ABN are listed on clickfind. This means users will know they’re dealing with a local business (unlike those often found via search engines).
• Additional unique services: clickfind™ includes a number of additional features not found in other directories, including a wiki-like article sharing feature, free email service, postcode finder, and maps with driving directions. These features are either already available or under development, and other features are in the pipeline. The aim of these services is to increase clickfind’s overall value and usefulness, driving more traffic and thus more revenue.

• What is your target market?
There are two main target markets, which overlap to some extent:

• Owners/managers of Australian registered businesses: mostly small/medium businesses, but can include marketing/IT managers of larger corporations
• The general public: anyone looking for products or services in Australia. Could include international audiences, but primarily targeted at people living in Australia

Another target market is people involved in internet marketing. This can include SEO experts, web designers, copywriters, bloggers and marketing professionals. These people are in a position to influence business owners and recommend clickfind listings as part of a cohesive marketing strategy.
To address the overlap in these audiences, clickfind’s marketing strategy is multi-pronged:

• get the general public to use the website and realise how useful it is, so that they will then advertise their own business (whether they own one, or work for one)
• get business owners on board, stressing the competitive advantage they will gain, and encourage them to use the website to find products/services for their own use establish the clickfind brand in Australia and raise awareness of what it is.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
Clickfind™ is in the process of reviewing its marketing strategy, bearing in mind the two main target audiences and both current and long term business priorities. So far all the marketing has been online: Google ads, email campaigns, blogs, press releases and the website itself. Following recent PR, interest in clickfind™ is growing, but direct approaches to businesses have yet to pay off in listing sales.
Marketing channels under consideration (or in progress) include:

• Advertisements in publications read by small-medium business owners
• Regional radio advertising
• Viral email campaign
• TV advertising to promote the brand to the general public
• Ongoing SEO optimization of the clickfind™ website and blogs
• Press releases through several channels, including AAP
• Referral campaigns

These are the some of staistics available at mid-March 2008, with no investment in online advertising.

Statistics	Todate
No. of unique website visitors (in 1 month)	10,696
% of returning visitors	10%
No. of page views (in 1 month)	30,322
No. of businesses listed	4,105
No. of products listed	12,694
No. of services listed	2,035
No. of listings viewed (from launch)	273,000
No. of clickfind pages indexed on Google	26,300
No. of visitors who come to clickfind from Google	6,233
Visitors from Google as a percentage of pages indexed	23.7%
%. of visitors who come to clickfind from Google	66.03%

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
We are using Google Analytics to measure site stats and conversion rate. We also have created our in-house stats to measure success. One of the things main things we're keeping track of is the number of enquiries businesses receive, which is something we see increasing every week. In the end its all about businesses getting enquiries, enquiries turning into sales. Our customers will be happy and stay with us. In short, if business enquiries keep rising, we will be successful.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
Clickfind’s main competitors are local directories:

• Truelocal (owned by News Limited)
• Mylocal (owned by Microsoft, has business association with Yellow Pages)
• Yellow Pages (owned by Sensis / Telstra)
• Google Business Center

• What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
With more and more businesses moving to online advertising, our market will only grow and we'll be offering more services like; affiliate marketing, permission marketing etc.

• What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?

• ColdFusion
• MS SQL Server
• Windows OS

ColdFusion allowed us to rapidly develop the application within 6 months.

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
ColdFusion has been the most helpful to us in regards to development of the site. Its a rapid application development tool with lots of extra features, like fancy flash graphs on the fly and PDF creation to mention just a few.

• How much money is needed for the start-up?
We are actively looking for investment to take the business to the next level.

• What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia.
I believe the main barrier is raising capital and getting media exposure. We've been trying to break through with paid wire services that distribute our Press Releases, but nothing major has been picked up or used.

Thanks Taco for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hear from you in future on the progress of Clickfind. All the best for Clickfind.

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