Rick Segal writes about www.wesabe.com that has a "Talk to Jason, CEO of Wesabe" text on the Homepage and how out of the ordinary that is. He continues and says:
"... I doubt most web start up companies will ever take this approach..."
I agree.
Here is a cool thing about Sampa: The CEO (me) answers all support and help messages. We ask you to send email to feedback@sampa.com because that is a distribution list where other people are also listening in to learn what customers are asking for.
At one time, we had a customer write a nasty feedback to Sampa. I politely replied to her agreeing with some of her comments and pointing out that some were incorrect. Always talking on the first person and, as always, using my own email address to reply to her. She was surprised that a "real person" was reading the feedback and was much more willing to give us even more feedback -- of course, she apologized for her language on the original feedback.
I just came back with another presentation to a VC. I don't think he is going to invest in us, but it was an interesting talk.
The most important thing that I've took out of this conversation is that despite a fairly uniform way of measuring revenue and success, each investor likes to divide the data differently.
Some investors, just talk in terms of Page Views as in "How many Page Views you got per day?" and "How many Page Views you expect to have at the end of 2007?". Those are the Ad-business investors. People that are familiar with Web 1.0 and worked on/with Google, MSN, Yahoo.
Then, you have the Web 2.0 investors which always ask you "How many unique users you have?" and "How much revenue do you generate per Unique User per month?".
Finally, there are the investors that understand traditional businesses and ask you questions in terms of "widgets", as in "How many sites do have?", "How much revenue do you generate per site per year?" and "How much does it costs for you to acquire a customer?".
Those are all pretty much the same data, just displayed differently. I like more the "traditional investor" that thinks in terms of widgets. It seems more obvious and less likely to manipulation. Page Views and Unique Users can be easily manipulated upwards. It alwasy depends how you count it. Sites are sites, and they only way to manipulate is if you change your definition of Active Sites. In our case, we use a industry standard definition.
Seattle still behind Silicon Valley in terms of the number of technology startups. They have TechCrunch, they have Valleywag, they have 10 times more VCs and money than us, but there is a lot going on in Seattle right now that gets covered up by all the noise news coming from down below.
That said, I decided to create a simple Blog List of Seattle's Startups, their founders & CEOs, reporters, investors, and other people working on the new Seattle Startup scene. To begin with I added about 20 blogs to the list. You can access the live list on this address:
The list is also available in OPML for those that want to easily import into their Feed Reader.
Send your blog
If you want your blog listed, just send an email to seattlebloglist@sampa.com with the address of the blog. Or, if you know somebody that has a Startup in Seattle, send him/her this information. Check out the link above for the criteria to be included.
Google Analytics w/ Google Adwords information was supposed to be it! IT! But IT is not.
In a rare moment of marketing clarity, we decided to stop talking and start doing it.
We just started a small Adwords campaign last week. It has been very exciting. We are not that interested on the new users (sure, all users are welcome). What we really care about is the incoming data. And in just a few days it has been overwhelming.
So, when you expect to go to Google Analytics and see if they integrate well... Oh crap! It is broken. Not the good broken where you don't get the data, the bad broken where the data is wrong!
We are giving it a couple of days to see if it Google Analytics needs time to "catch up" or whatever with the Adwords data, but at this point we are implementing our own conversion tracking.
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January, 2008