For the last few months you've seen me writing less and less on this blog.
I write about what I'm living in the moment, but we have two news coming out tomorrow that took almost all my time over the last few months. Also, to maximize the punch of the news items, I had to keep it quiet. But expect a flood of very powerful, insightful and revealing blog posts starting after the press releases hit the wire!
The big news is actually two news items and is pretty big for all people involved with Sampa. First, we closed a $1M financing round with several local and Bay-area angel investors. Second, and most importantly, we released the version 2 of our product that will make a dramatic change to our engagement, stickness and viral rates.
On the financing side, we got great names investing on us, including a lot of great people that didn't want to come public about it for personal reasons, but some angels are ok to be named, including: Geoff Entress (Madrona Venture Group), Alex Algard (WhitePages.com), Jon Lazarus, Rick Schell (VC at OnSet),John Hansen (ex-Lightsurf) and Mike Koss (StartPad). To all our investors, I'm very thankful for your belief in what we are doing and we know this is just the beginning. I want you to know I'll do my best to make this work!
Funding is great, but doesn't get you anywhere if you don't put it to good use. And that leads us to our new product launch. That is the big news of the day.
We chopped the head off!
In the end of November we decided that there was nothing that we should re-use from the existing interface into the new interface (almost nothing). So we freed ourselves (and our minds) of have to be constrained by what exists already. Sampa, technically is a combination of multiple systems and components that create the service, but for our users it's the UI!
We re-created about 20% of the service (the part that users see) and made it amazingly trivial for anyone to create a web site. The flip side is that we had to remove some features to make it simpler, and we won't put them back in unless we can figure out a way to make it fit and be easy to use. We got bloated, and now we are slim, slick and cool.
If you pay close attention to it you'll see one thing about Sampa... We dropped 16 positions!
Pretty scary stuff? Not really... There are explanations and is simpler than it might look.
First of, a minor factor has been that both Alexa and Compete rank better for startups that have a "geekier" audience. Every time we appear on TechCrunch our Alexa rank shoots through the roof. From October until April we had almost no mention on the press, hence, the people that had the Alexa/Compete toolbar would not visit our site.
Second, and what in my opinion caused the largest drop on our ranking, is that we started moving friends & family sites into their custom domain, if they wanted it. So, for example, I used to run the Seattle 2.0 site out of "seattle20.sampasite.com", but I decided to move it to "seattle20.com". Neither Alexa nor Compete knows this site is running out of the Sampa infrastructure, so they don't include that into the UU/PV count.
The reality is that once we start offering Custom Domains for our customers in a few months, our Alexa and Compete rank will each day reflect less and less of the reality of Sampa growth and traffic. Oh well, we have Google Analytics to save us.
I'm selling my house in Redmond. Since most readers of this blog are on the Puget Sound and a good number on the Eastside, maybe it'll work:
The house has 3 bedroom and a bonus room, formal living and dining, kitchen w/ granite and new stainless steel appliances, family room, laundry room, master bath with walk-in closet, fully fenced yard, 3 car garage, great curb appeal, Cascade view, on the Abbey Road (Education Hill) neighborhood.
Open House is Sunday (April 20th) 1-4PM.
The MLS number is coming shortly. But you can find plenty of information on this site I put together (using Sampa of course):
This is a list I've built over the last 2 months on ways for you to advertise your house for selling it online (and offline). I haven't tried most of those, but I thought it would be useful to share it.
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. First, we closed a $1M financing round with several local and Bay-area angel investors. Second, and most importantly, 
September, 2007