Rank Checker allows you to build and save your SEO keyword list and then run reports on their rankings at Google, Yahoo and MSN Live any time you want. You can also export the results easily. I used to check keywords one at a time, pasting individual results into an Excel spreadsheet one cell at a time. Now in about 10 seconds I can add an entire column of results and get to the much more important task of tracking trends. Another nice feature is it displays the matching URL so I can confirm the terms are leading people to the best landing page possible.
It’s brilliant. The best part is, it was made with privacy in mind. All data travels between your local computer, the search engines’ APIs and back to your computer. Your interesting data is not being spied on, aggregated, repackaged, etc. And it’s all free. (BTW: If you haven’t heard, building good product is the new marketing.)
In 2006 spending by auto makers on advertising on television accounted for ~40% of their overall budgets, while Internet only accounted for ~4% of spending. But BIGresearch found that in that same year less than 20% of car buyers were influenced by TV while 8% were influenced by the Internet.
Automobile advertisers are wasting money on TV advertising and missing out on Internet opportunies.
Anyone in advertising will know the ad industry rub: “We know we’re wasting half our money on television advertising, we just don’t know which half.” The reality is that large advertisers and the advertising industry spend so heavily on TV advertising because they’re all convinced it works, and they are not ready to cope with the reality that it is not. There is a very cozy ecosystem of ad industry who keep propping up the belief that they don’t need to know which half is working. Turns out it worked for less than 20% for automobile advertisers, and there’s no reason to think it’s the same for others.
If any automotive advertisers would like to learn how to have a big impact on the web, please contact us at 415.934.0400. Did you know 60% of dog owners consider their pet when buying a new car? We’ll be able to tell you what we did for Suzuki Motors and how to integrate your brand very successfully into large user pools and be part of their conversations and even their lives, in ways TV never will be able to.
One of the biggest challenges for start-up leaders is to remain objective. A great way to remove subjectivity is to cajole the smartest people in your industry to give you 3 hours to collectively consider and give guidance on how they would run your company.
To prep everyone we sent them an advance info packet and commenced the meeting with slides and charts of all our core data. Keep this data to pure facts: Geniuses will see right through any beautification you attempt to apply, so don’t waste anyone’s time. Make sure to show all company data, not just what you are proud of.
To lead the discussion we had someone intimately involved with the company but not an actual employee. Founders should simply sit back and listen unless answering direct questions. Listen carefully to everything that is being said. Record the session in audio or video so you can share with the rest of your management team or listen again to the meaty parts.
It’s most likely you will not agree with everything that is being said. You will be hurt that some things you deeply value get summarily dismissed. Do not try to defend anything, or you’ll likely miss out on how they do think it should be done. Check your ego and emotional attachment to your perspective and historical efforts at the door. Become the person who only answers questions asked and who only can speak the absolute truth. Pay close attention, and the magic will happen.
At the end of the day, we really felt that the one strategic path we had been leaning toward was valid, but we also realized it was time to stop focusing on anything else. Moreover, in that short 3-hour period the brain trust was so strong we were able to crystallize the path and fine-tune our immediate execution plan. We would highly recommend getting your industry geniuses together whenever you are considering the best way to move your company forward.
Here’s a refresher list of tips for organizing a similar session:
» Variety – two spoonfuls of VC, three cups of entrepreneur, a dash of McClure makes a yummy brainstorm pie.
» Don’t ask people who are too close to the company – that is a different session.
» Keep your mouth shut: just present facts and answer questions with facts. Say We don’t know whenever you are unsure. Let your Rock Stars do the talking.
» Record the session. Turn off phones and laptops.
» Select an outsider who knows the company well to lead the conversation, perhaps an investor or existing advisor. We recommend a French advisor if you have one – they know how to cut through the BS.
» Try asking VC’s who decided not to invest in you. They just might come. Josh Kopelman came, and he had decided not to participate in our Series ‘A’ in 2006. You rock Josh!
» Take everyone out to a sumptuous dinner afterwards.
» Don’t dilute the talent pool, Rock Star geniuses shine best when harmonizing amongst themselves.
This blog entry, by the way, is long overdue. We’ve already been able to bring about significantchange because of this focus session, and it was high time we acknowledged and thanked these folks.
Don’t let the relaxed nature of the pictures fool you. When everyone was focused and the group magic was happening I was listening, not taking pictures. ;>
March 2008 marked six consecutive months of profitability for Dogster, Inc. With our signed media orders and current growth patterns, we’re set through Q3. Our expenses are as high as they’ve ever been thanks to a 16-person staff, highly scalable tech infrastructure, great offices, talented contractors and important licensing deals. With this team and resources, we accomplish more in a single week than what our 8-person team in 2006 could complete in an entire month.
Our return to profitability is a result of a multi-year concerted effort of working directly with great advertisers and a great community partner, having a thriving user base that values our virtual currency, gifting and subscription programs and constantly expanding and improving our programming and product. Revenue does not simply land in a startup’s lap; it takes a ton of effort. Fortunately, we love this kind of work.
It would take 7 more months to match our longest profitability streak (13 months that ended when we started investing the proceeds of our Angel Round in the fall of 2006). However, we are keen to invest all the profits back into our master plan and take advantage of our unique position.
To all our site members and users, please know that you are at the heart of our future, and it’s going to be great. We cherish that we’ve been able to become a nationwide, and global, trusted property for pet lovers, but there is so much more we could be doing for and with everyone.
Question for you Fred… Isn’t liquidity cyclical? The solution to this temporary down cycle shouldn’t be legislative or regulatory (though Sarbanes Oxley could surely do with some loosening). ;) The solution is to invest a portion of your portfolio in companies with the ability to become profitable (ahem, like Dogster, Inc.!). If our investors really need liquidity for some reason, we could always pay dividends or offer incremental buybacks. The tax treatment isn’t always as nice and the returns get harder to calculate, but these sorts of historical investor payments work just fine.
What with all the attention on virality in closed networks like Facebook, we think it’s timely to remember that search engines can still throw tons of traffic without requiring users to spam all their friends or infecting them as coughers or zombies. But search traffic can only go to public webpages, not containers or canvas pages in a larger website, so while you may be huge in Facebook, Google will never know it.
One month ago we launched a dog breed quiz. People answer 10 questions, and we tell them what dog breed they would be if they were a canine. If they forward it to a friend who takes the quiz, we report back to the both of them as to what their doggy compatibility is. Not surprisingly, our “viral factor” was pretty mediocre (.30) because on the open web people post links or send their own emails, and very little of it is trackable.
After a big surge, usage settled down to one to two thousand people taking the quiz a day. Then suddenly, last week, the quiz started ranking in Google search results, and now five to ten thousand people are taking the quiz a day. The viral factor did not change, but due to a higher ranking in Google, many more new people were taking the quiz. Better yet, these new quiz takers were inviting their friends to take the quiz, so our overall potential pool of takers significantly increased.
Search engine referrals are still hugely powerful and have created huge new pools of visitors we frankly didn’t expect to find us.
[Thanks to Dutch and the Central Coast Hound Pack for the photo]
We’re already the cat’s meow for the most intensive of cat and dog owners. However, last summer, we decided to be just as meaningful to more mainstream dog and cat owners. For every person who loves making pet profile pages and making friends online, there are 100 people who simply need the internet for fast, resourceful help with their pets. Now when you arrive at our site you see just as much information and as many resources as you do sociality and entertainment features.
The change is so significant that it’s tough to call ourselves a “community” any longer. Keeping our community passionate and engaged is still a top priority, but we’re now really vertical portals (Egads, vortal alert!) and will significantly grow our reach, as Scott Rafer would say, “by a couple orders of magnitude.”
The following features have been added to Dogster/Catster since our strategic shift.
Dogster Answers & Catster Answers – If you love your pet you know how heart-wrenching it can be when something is wrong. Whether it is a health problem, puppy training setback, grooming issue or nearly any question, our community will answer. You will get several different points of view from the most knowledgeable, passionate pet-lovers on the planet. In the last 6 months over 27,000 answers have been posted to over 8,000 questions. To complement the community answers, we recently added nearly 10,000 free expert vet answers from a partnership with Just Answers.
Dog Owner’s Manual & Cat Owner’s Manual – These are two very informational and fun books we have put in a searchable, indexed online format in a partnership with Quirk Books. They cover almost everything a new dog or cat owner would need to know. Commenting allows site members to add their own experiences and advice.
Dog Breed Finder - Enter what kind of dog you are looking for, and we’ll tell you which breeds are best for you.
Dog Breed Quiz – Being meaningful to more internet users also means providing quick, engaging fun. Our tongue-in-jowl 10 page survey will tell you what kind of dog breed you are. In less than a month over 125,000 people have taken it; 75% are non-members. In fact last week it started ranking very well for quiz and quizzes in Google and blew our virality quotient out of the water (take that Facebook apps). ;)
Blogs – Our blogs are starting to strike a chord with pet lovers. Our flagship blog, For the Love of Dog Blog, covers dog news while our new Vet Blog by Dr. Eric Barchas, DVM is becoming a must-read. Our dog/cat of the day honorifics have been put into blog format as well. Another five blogs, from cats to legal issues to humor, will launch this month.
Dog Adoption Center & Cat Adoption Center – Our adoption area is a great way to find a dog or a cat who will love you forever! We have tools to help a would-be adopter search through all the adoptable pets on our sites by many different criteria. With our partner 9 Lives, we’ve published a lot of guidance on rescuing and adopting.
Dogster Local Listings & Catster Local Listings – Perhaps you have seen a Dogster Local or Catster Local sticker in a pet store or vet office near you? It wouldn’t be a surprise, because we have over 110k pet-friendly business in our Local Listings area. We have all the core business information, reviews, photos and more. Members can “mark a spot,” and the listings are cross-referenced on their pet profile pages. Special shelter and rescue accounts tie into the Adoption Center.
Our immediate goal is to pass one million unique users and 30 million pages served per month.
At the rate we are growing, we will achieve the goals by mid-summer. Direct ad sales people will know more unique visitors means more advertisers are interested in participating, and more pages served means more inventory to share with them. While Dogster/Catster will always have strong communities, it no longer seems fitting to refer to our sites exclusively as communities. If you can think of better name than “vertical portal,” by all means share it. We can’t help but chuckle that we are going back to the future in building the “it” site for everything dog and cat. However, two-thirds of U.S. households have pets, making pets a $42 billion business, so we’ve got our Flux Capacitors set on full-steam ahead.
Life at a start-up is filled with many ups and downs, many surprises and many changes. When an obstacle arises it is common for people to fall into a habitual pattern of resistance and negativity. “Why did that syndication deal fall through? This sucks!” One may get caught up in the past trying to figure out what went wrong and who is to blame. This state of mind dampens creativity, is hard to shake and, most importantly, is contagious to those around you. Your team can’t afford your state of resistance, but also you cannot deny that an obstacle has arisen. What do you do?
It is simple, change the way you look at the obstacle. Don’t label the setback as “bad.” Don’t complain or feel sorry for yourself. Instead, treat that obstacle as if you chose it to happen. You chose it to happen because it is the next step in fulfilling your company’s destiny. Try this approach next time and see what happens. See if the dynamic changes. See if you enjoy the process more and come out in a stronger position.
This has worked well for us, and I would guess that a lot of successful start-ups have their own version of this. We would love to hear about yours. It is your destiny to tell us. ;-)
The top reasons we run meetings without laptops and PDAs are:
» Meetings generate a more unified focus and completely agreed-to position
» Decisions made in meetings are much more likely to stand
» Meetings are much more likely to end on time
» The Internet can be very very distracting ;>
Of course there are times when it makes sense to have laptops, but it’s almost always just one person, and there’s almost never a reason why that person needs to be checking email or browsing websites.
In March our sites welcomed over 750,000 unique visitors that requested over 23,000,000 pages. That is a 20% growth in uniques from the previous month and about a 10% jump in page views. This follows similar growth from January to February. Our strategic plans meant to scale our audience and engagement are already taking effect.
With little fanfare we have been rapidly releasing informational and resource-rich features, expert programming and viral silliness all the while not taking our eye off our passionate member usage. In fact, it’s not even appropriate to call us just a community or just a social networking site anymore, but we’ll save detailing our plans for another time.
Here’s another way to put these numbers in perspective. In April ‘07 we spent $80,000 advertising our sites and it gave it us a huge pop, yet we blew past those numbers this March with $0 spent on advertising. Even though we are focusing on great product and growth; even though we are spending more each month; when it was all said and done, March ‘08 was our fifth profitable month in a row.
When Compete.com’s March numbers get posted, I’ll post them so you can see the trends. We’ll also post more soon on how we’ve become profitable again as well as how we are expanding and growing our sites.
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About Dogster, Inc.
When we started Dogster and Catster we never had any idea we could help so many dog and cat owners and guardians find their internet nirvana or just an answer to a quick question. Four years later it's as seriously fun as ever running Dogster, Inc., and being one of the largest pet destinations on the web.
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It’s brilliant. The best part is, it was made with privacy in mind. All data travels between your local computer, the search engines’ APIs and back to your computer. Your interesting data is not being spied on, aggregated, repackaged, etc. And it’s all free. (BTW: If you haven’t heard, building good product is the new marketing.)
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March 2008 marked six consecutive months of profitability for Dogster, Inc. With our signed media orders and current growth patterns, we’re set through Q3. Our expenses are as high as they’ve ever been thanks to a 16-person staff, highly scalable tech infrastructure, great offices, talented contractors and important licensing deals. With this team and resources, we accomplish more in a single week than what our 8-person team in 2006 could complete in an entire month.
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Life at a start-up is filled with many ups and downs, many surprises and many changes. When an obstacle arises it is common for people to fall into a habitual pattern of resistance and negativity. “Why did that syndication deal fall through? This sucks!” One may get caught up in the past trying to figure out what went wrong and who is to blame. This state of mind dampens creativity, is hard to shake and, most importantly, is contagious to those around you. Your team can’t afford your state of resistance, but also you cannot deny that an obstacle has arisen. What do you do?
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