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Numbers in Action
If you haven’t heard, Referly is switching gears to avoid becoming a “Zombie Startup”, and we’ve already posted a high level summary of our metrics on the front page of our site. This post is part of my ongoing retrospective, which is helping me get some closure while we incubate our next direction as a company.
Until 3 weeks ago I woke up early every day, eager to check our internal dashboard, Amazon Associates and Skimlinks and update a couple spreadsheets, set a goal or two for the day to keep us on track, and send an update email to the team with any adjustments to the week’s plans. There’s nothing I love more than operating the day-to-day. It was a joy to plow full steam ahead with our team of 8 content, engineering, and outreach folks. Seeing these numbers drop over the past few weeks has been painful, so after I post this it will be the last time I visit these operational tools for awhile, and probably my last post about Referly until we share what we’re doing next. Memento mori
I offer these metrics to you without analysis… and look forward to answering your questions and providing more insight in the comments depending on what you’re interested in.
Weekly Pace & Contributur Stats At A Glance
Each week we’d set goals for the week in our Monday team meeting. At our peak, we produced nearly 100,000 pageviews in a single week. The “X Created” stands for collections created. Engineers were asked to created 7 per week (and they were awesome!), everyone else on the growth team (myself, Andy, and our wonderfully creative interns) created 20-40 depending on our goals and the seasonal campaigns going on.
These show 0 created for everyone because this is a snapshot from today, but normally this would show the number of feature-worthy collections created (has cover photo, title, description, at least 3 pieces of content).
Daily & Monthly Stats
For each metric the graph on the left shows daily stats for all time, and the graph on the the right shows daily stats for the current month (so you can see more detail).
That’s it.
Show Me the Money
You might be wondering why we didn’t share a graph for revenue or gross merchandise sold. This is intentional. I believe that whatever you measure and share is what people will focus on. Having a dashboard for individual revenues earned, or each aggregate revenue, would distract us from our number one priority: creating awesome content people would love reading and sharing. While I tracked this data and shared it with the team periodically it was never the focus of their attention. I set out content generation and traffic goals based on the ultimate revenue goal, but revenue wasn’t something the content team worried about from day-to-day.
Sometimes I wonder whether we would be pivoting now if every person in the company had been focused on maximizing revenue in every piece of content they produced from day one. While I think we might have earned marginally more money in the short term, I think the quality of our content would have been much lower overall and ultimately we wouldn’t have been able to attract the right readership or community of content producers.
To Be Continued…
Over the past year I’ve shared more about Referly than I ever expected to, and I hope seeing these metrics gives you (especially other founders) a sense of what things look like under the covers of a company that is growing, hitting goals and getting PR. Personally, I have learned so much about how to operationalize a technology-enabled media business that consistently puts out content that drives meaningful traffic and keeps people coming back. While we are no longer paying rewards, people from our community of more than 25,000 writers are still logging in and producing new content every day with our awesome edit-in-place CMS. You can absolutely sign up to use Referly as it is today (this link can’t be found on the site, just a little perk for my readers!), and you’ll be among the first to hear what’s next.
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Do you need to create a business dashboard for your company? This one of my favorite things to do as a company mentor/advisor, and right now I am looking for opportunities to try different approaches and use some of my spreadsheets and other graphing and analytics packages. If you are interested, and willing to pay for my time (in money or beers or coffees) please get in touch at morrilldanielle (at) gmail.
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YC Entrepreneurs Rewarded With a Yawn
My site was having hosting issues this morning but I really wanted to get this “morning after” post out, reflecting on the reactions to Y Combinator Demo Day yesterday among friends, investors and the press. You can read the full article on my Distribution Hacks blog “YC Demo Day, the Morning After”.
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Apparently, this year it’s particularly in vogue to express a certain ennui about the batch of Y Combinator startups that presented at Demo Day.
As I checked in with investors and friends who attended the event, the overwhelming response was that there were tons of solid companies but nothing “amazing†or “10xâ€.
Even the tech press can’t seem to get behind one single company…
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Meet the 9 Female Founders of Y Combinator’s Winter 2013 Class
This post is part of my continuous coverage of Y Combinator Demo Day for the Winter 2013 Class. You can see all publicly launched companies from today’s presentations here.
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It’s always exciting to see more female founders, and the Winter 2013 YC batch brings us some awesome new faces (and some familiar ones). These are only founders from publicly launched companies – feel free to contact me at morrilldanielle (at) gmail if I’ve missed something. Enjoy!
Editor’s Note: Updated to include Iolanthe Chronis from Swish.
Iolanthe Chronis – Cofounder & CEO at Swish
Prior to founding Swish in August 2012 she held roles at Kayak, BetterOffline and Microsoft.
Iolanthe received her Masters of Engineering, EECS in 2010 from MIT and also holds a B.S., EECS, Physics from MIT.
Rosanna Yau – Design Cofounder at Backerkit
Rosanna graduated from the California College of the Arts Design MFA program in Interaction Design, and from the University of California Davis Design program with a BS in Visual Communications. In addition to life as a busy cofounder she also is a lecturer for a Community Arts course at CCA. Check out her portfolio and follow her on Twitter.
Photo credit: Mashable
Cindy Wu – Microryza
Cindy is a transplant from Seattle, where she was previously a Research Scientist and Engineer @UW Bioengineering. Microryza was built to serve herself and her colleagues who struggled to fund their own projects even as PhDs. Now they’re enabling anyone to become a modern day patron of science.
She is also a published scientific researcher and received her B.S. Cellular, Molecular, and Developmental Biology in 2011. Follow her on Twitter.
Photo Credit: WeFunder
Grace Garey – Watsi
Grace heads up marketing for Watsi, and previously has experience in the non-profit space working for Kiva, Sandbox Suites, Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life, and International Rescue Committee.
She is a Capps Congressional Fellow, studied abroad at the University of Ghana in Legon for 6 months in 2009, and lived abroad in India with the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement in 2012.
Erica Brescia – Cofounder & COO at Bitnami
Erica joined BitRock as VP of Business Development in 2005 and served in that role for nearly 3 years before becoming CEO. According to her Linked in profile she is still CEO of BitRock and founded Bitnami in 2011.
Prior to BitRock she spent 3 years as a manager at T-Mobile. She has a BS in Finance from the University of Southern California.
Photo Credit: About.me
Kelly Lau-Kee – Cofounder & Chief Product Officer of PayTango
Kelly was previously at Google as a UX design intern for YouTube and is currently Senior at Carnegie Mellon University double majoring in Human Computer Interaction and Industrial Design. Her academic honors include the Presidential Scholarship and Inc. Magazine, America’s Coolest College Startups 2013.
Photo Credit: PayTango
Kendall Herbst – StyleUp
Formerly an editor at Conde Naste for well-known fashion publications like Lucky, InStyle, and New York Magazine she’s now striking out to disrupt the magazine industry.
Kendall also is currently an MBA student at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Vanessa Torrivilla – Design Cofounder at Goldbely
Prior to Goldbely Vanessa headed up UX and Visual Design at Blip.tv, and was a Senior Interactive Designer for Gilt Groupe. As is the team’s “Food Wench” (don’t get all up in arms, this is a pirate reference which makes more sense when you see their awesome map-themed about page about being “explorers of food”) Vanessa handles UI/UX and all things creative at Goldbely.
As a self-described “metal head” I hope that includes rocking out with some excellent tunes! Follow her on Twitter and check out her Dribbble portfolio.
Photo Credit: Goldbely
Fei Deyle – CEO & Cofounder of Lollipuff
Fei is an electrical engineer turned fashion blogger turned CEO, and admittedly quite the fashionista. In fact, she is the lead blogger for her own site under the pseudo-name Bebefuzz. She is a trusted online brand authenticator, and previously worked a senior sales person in the power industry.
Photo Credit: Lollipuff
Michelle Crosby – Wevorce
Wevorce makes going through a divorce less financially and emotionally painful for everyone involved. Michelle gives a great interview about her passion, personal story, and vision for the future:
Wevorce introduction from wevorce on Vimeo.
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Watsi and the Future of Patronage
This post is part of my continuous coverage of Y Combinator Demo Day for the Winter 2013 Class. You can see all publicly launched companies from today’s presenters here, Watsi is currently ranked #7.
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While Watsi will probably not take in capital on traditional VC terms, I hope they can capture the imagination of some folks in the audience and gain new donors.
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Today Watsi, a non-profit for funding medical treatments, is presenting on stage at Y Combinator Demo Day by cofounders Chase Adam, Jesse Cooke, and Grace Garey. The company made quite a splash back in January when they were announced as the first non-profit to receive funding from YC.Hilarious by @paulg “There’s one company here today that’s a nonprofit. An intentional nonprofit!”
— Sundeep Peechu (@speechu) March 26, 2013
I am admittedly a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to donating to charity, but after seeing Watsi present yesterday and reading this post “The Bacon Wrapped Economy” about the end of cultural patronage as we know it, it got me to thinking. Maybe this is exactly the kind of platform people like me can get behind.
The East Bay Express paints a bleak picture the future for philanthopy, suggesting that our outcomes-focused giving will fail to build the kinds of institutions that have perserved American culture for the past 300 years.
And according to Medak and other members of the art world, it’s not just the donors themselves who are changing; it’s the entire ethos — and that may mark a change in a system that’s been more or less the same since the Renaissance. “A lot of those philanthropic dollars are now going to programs with measurable outcomes,” Medak said. “This shift toward a more transactional relationship in philanthropy, where you give something and expect to get something concrete back, has continued to escalate. The entrepreneurial infatuation we have now — and I don’t mean that in a loaded way — comes with a notion that the things we’re investing in should have a potential to [make] returns. It’s antithetical to the kind of philanthropy that has built institutions in this country.” Medak didn’t mention the logical, eventual corollary to this — that an end to institution-building philanthropy can also mean an end to the institutions themselves — but it doesn’t feel entirely far off.
I’m not so bearish. In fact, I wonder if the Internet can finally bring the meaning and accountability that has been lacking for young donors who won’t be building a hospital in their name, but simply want to feel they’ve made an impact on an issue they care about.
Old Money, Old Mindset?
The post goes on to explain that most patronage typically comes from older generations who have had a lifetime to accumulate their wealth. I can hardly complain – visiting the local museums, structures, monuments, artwork and other results of this philanthropy is a pleasure. I would never make the argument that this is an either/or situation where all funds should move away from arts and toward solving the world’s problems.
However, I think charitable giving needs to be aligned with the values of the people donating money, and it’s possible that those values have shifted for a younger generation toward institutions that solve real world problems.
In the case of Watsi, the public is clearly in support of a new institution that works to support those in need of medical attention around the world. Operating like a startup and providing an unbelievable amount of transparency is mostly a marketing gimmick today, but long term it could reset the expectations for a new generation of givers.
Today’s Demo Day at the Computer History Museum attracts high net worth individuals, investors and professionals looking to put their charitable giving to work, so while Watsi will probably not take in capital on traditional VC terms I hope they can capture the imagination of some folks in the audience and gain meaningful new donorship.
Wish them luck today, and take a moment to make a donation to Oumar, a 19 month old child whose life is threatened by meningitis and chronic epilepsy. He needs just $1370 to save his life, and 100% of your donation goes directly to his treatment.It’s been 2 years since @chaseadam17 imagined Watsi.org. Today we’re pitching at @ycombinator‘s Demo Day twitter.com/watsi/status/3…
— Watsi (@watsi) March 26, 2013
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YC Demo Day Winter 2013 Batch – Quick Reference Index
Today is Y Combinator Demo Day, and I’ve compiled a list of Y Combinator startups from the current batch who have officially launched (27 of 47) and ranked them using the same methodology as this month’s YC Index. It is extremely early days for these companies, this can give you a sense of who is getting attention and seeing early growth and we will use this as a benchmark for them in the index going forward. I will update this post as new companies are launched throughout the day.
The companies highlighted in orange would have made it into the top 100 of the Y Combinator Index released for March. All companies will be included in the April index.
I post this with the caveat that web traffic rarely tells the full story for any company. We have done our best to also factor in Facebook monthly active users and mobile app rankings, but for enterprise and developer tools companies the amount of website traffic they receive can be disproportionately low compared to how much money they make.
Update: Now includes PayTango, which launched last night.
Data sources include TechCrunch, Crunchbase, AngelList and YClist.
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The 500 Startups Index – 369 Companies & Counting
Last week I published the first Y Combinator Startup Index, which ranks the companies who have gone through the YC program using traffic data, Facebook monthly active users, and mobile data where it’s available to determine how well each company is doing.
Update – 500 Startups head honcho Dave McClure left some helpful insights on the Hacker News comment thread related to this post.
As with the other index, there are caveats. Web traffic only tells part of the story for any company, and this index doesn’t contain complete information about Facebook app usage or mobile app usage. What’s most useful is seeing how these rankings change over time, so I will be updating this monthly.
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Did I Just See the Future of Advertising?
Have you ever seen the ability to capture leads directly from search before, with email subscription directly in an ad? I just saw this on Google for the first time while sleuthing around trying to figure out the Decide.com announcement apparently happening tomorrow morning. I can’t currently find a way to create my own lead form in Google Adwords, and I haven’t ever seen this on any other search result. Is this the future, capturing leads without ever leaving the search results?
Looks Like It Worked
Subscribing to the email newsletter doesn’t take you off Google to Decide.com, you get a confirmation right in your search results. Google on!
Not Sure How I Missed This
The SEOmoz community were among the first to play with this feature, as one post in this thread says:
Yep its a communication ad extension – it wasn’t open to all advertisers at first. You need to check in your account to see if you can add this extention in camp/adword settings if you dont see it then contact adwords support, it was trialing, but might now be live for one and all…
It sounds like this feature is still in beta and limited to certain accounts. If I were so lucky as to have an account manager I’d hit him up, but in the meantime I’m curious to see who else is playing with this feature for customer aquisiton. It seems powerful.
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The Y Combinator Startup Index
In a former life I served as Editor of Seattle 2.0, and one of the most popular pieces of content we produced was the Seattle 2.0 Index – a monthly ranked list of all the local startups. It was a labor of love by Marcelo Calbucci and I was never a part of making it, but I always loved seeing how my favorite companies were doing and discovering new ones. I always thought it would be fun to make something similar for Silicon Valley, but it turns out there are a lot more startups here (I know, I know). To test drive the idea I’m starting with the companies from Y Combinator who haven’t exited, and are still operating.There are plenty of flaws with rankings like this because traffic and Facebook monthly active users hardly tell the full story of any company and it compares web to mobile, social to enterprise, and on and on. What is valuable is seeing how things change over time. This is the first index, so it doesn’t have the month over month comparison. What it does reveal is that some companies you might not hear about every day in the press are doing really well.
Important: This does not include companies in the current YC batch.
Take a look, let me know what you think, who I missed, or any other feedback. You can read about the methodology at the bottom of this post. I will update this with any corrections and leave an update note.
Methodology
The ranking is based on Alexa traffic rankings first, and Facebook monthly active users second. Right now it doesn’t factor in the iOS or Android rankings because the data is very limited. The MAU numbers are weighted as a percentage of the total MAU across all the companies, multiplied by ten, and subtracted from the Alexa rank. It sounds simplistic, but looking at the list it seems to make sense. I’m open to feedback on mkaing it better.
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After the Launch [Founder Fiction]
Founder Fiction is a new series I have created to express common experiences, thoughts and feelings I discuss with founders using fictional characters and situations that blend my own experiences with stories from others.
Robert Peterson placed his drink on the slate counter of the bathroom and leaned his forehead against the cool mirrored glass. It was done. After more than year spent hustling together investors, several more months rallying a team to build beyond the original prototype, and a summer spent in Y Combinator getting ready to launch and raise again, he had done it. Today the world had learned about his company, splashed across the pages of the trade and business magazines read by millions, and he knew he should feel satisfied.Closing his eyes, the word “should†hung in his mind. So many things he should feel. Like a success, like a winner, like a fucking golden god if his friends drinking in the next room were to be believed. He did feel something, a kind of quiet pride — but it was more like a smooth stone that had settled in the base of his stomach. There was extra gravity there, a weight, maybe even a bit of dread. In all, it was far less exciting than everyone had lead him to expect and while others celebrated all he really wanted to do was go home and sleep for 24 hours straight. Then he would get back to running the company.
Laughter spilled over from the next room, and he knew he’d have to get back soon, before his cofounder came looking for him. He stepped into a stall and unbuttoned his fly, wanting to prolong the solitude a little bit longer as his mind wandered to the events of the day. The stories had broken at nine in the morning just as they had planned, and the site was inundated with traffic. Then the calls, emails, and texts had started coming in.
His parents emailed proudly, with a link to the New York Time’s story. His sister had joked he better get her something really nice for Christmas. He’d texted his old boss to tell him how grateful he was for everything and gotten a smiley face back. His girlfriend, who he’d met just a few months ago, squeeled with delight as she told him her office mates were jealous that she was dating a millionaire. She’d hinted pretty blatantly about a ring too, so that was probably another he’d have to deal with after getting 24 hours of straight sleep.
“Hey Robert!†a voice called from the doorway, jolting him from his reverie. “You okay man?â€
Swinging open the door he ran a hand through his hair and smiled sheepishly at Raf Bell, his favorite angel investor. “Yeah sorry, just not feeling very social I guess†he shrugged.
Raf smiled knowingly and bent down his salt and pepper head to examine the glass on the counter. Sniffing the contents and discovering it was only soda with lime, he looked back at Robert. “Zip up your fly Rob, I think I should drive you home.â€
They ambled through the big open house, Robert nodding and smiling shyly and Raf shaking hands graciously as he went. “Just taking a little drive,†he said, “Thanks so much for coming.†They climbed into the perfectly maintained white Porsche 911, which was probably about 7 years old, and headed down the 280 toward the city in silence. The car hummed, and with the top down it was impossible to speak or hear anything, so they rode together in roaring silence.
Photo Credit: jcoterhals on Flickr
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Would you like to read more startup fiction? Let me know in the comments.
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As LinkedIn Passes 1 Billion Profile Endorsements, Has Klout Stagnated?
Klout, the company that calculates your individual influence score based on your engagement on various social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, feels stagnant. To make matters worse, last week TechCrunch reported that LinkedIn’s new endorsements feature is kicking serious butt. From the article:
“Today, LinkedIn is announcing that Endorsements has passed the 1 billion milestone — with 58 million members getting recognition on their profiles for different areas of expertise, according to a blog post from Peter Rusev. The marker is a sign that, were LinkedIn so inclined, it could likely give sites likes Klout, which measure influencer status, a run for their money.” – read full article on TechCrunch
I logged into Klout for the first time in months today, and it felt like a veritable ghost town. Not only have my friends stopped talking about it or sharing their scores in the past few months, but according to Alexa the website is showing slowly declining traffic at a stage when it should be growing — losing most of the ground it appears to have gained since early 2011.
On the other hand, their Facebook app monthly and daily active user data suggests they’ve recently had some growth following a long plateau period – so maybe people are just more active with Klout on mobile?
So What’s Going On?
Klout offers users perks, which are special offers and coupons brands want to give to people with certain behaviors or demographic information. The idea is that I will test out these products and then talk to my friends about them. In the past I’ve been offered awesome perks like a free Nike Fuel Band or free 3-day test drive of the Acura ILX, but logging into is a lot less exciting. My perks include a $5 McDonalds card, $15 off Chilis, and a free Norton Mobile Security pack ($30 value) among others.
Back in the early days when that was a thing I connected my Facebook and Twitter accounts to Klout because I was curious about my “score” (a number 1 to 100 which tells you how influential you are relative to others), and when they launched their iPhone app I installed it. Now I get mobile push notifications when my score goes up and down and often tap the alert to check it out – which I guess makes me an “active” for that day or month. I’m pretty sure Klout’s sales team goes to big brands and sells them on accessing these active users with their offers… but is it really working?
Doing the Math
According this January 2012 funding announcement the company was pre-revenue at that time.
The company has more than 4,000 API partners, up from around 100 in early 2010. And it has indexed north of 100 million public profiles. A few million people have actively registered on Klout.com in order to tie their various social profiles together (and boost their Klout scores). reported by TechCrunch
Sources confirm that the company is now doing paid deals and brought on a COO over the summer of 2012 to focus on ramping revenue and improving operational efficiency.
Brand partnerships with McDonald’s and others probably pay healthy sums (I’m thinking $50-100k month per month or engagement), but if my perks are any indication the offerings to consumers aren’t particularly compelling.
Klout has raised $40M raised to date, including a strategic investment from Microsoft about 6 months ago. The company is 5 years old with around 80 full time employees. With a big beautiful office, daily catered meals and a substantial sales and biz dev team I could easily see them burning $1M+ a month ($10k per employee fully loaded + $200k G&A), which means they could be nearing halfway through the $30M raised in early 2012.
What Do You Think?
Do you regularly use Klout to track your personal influence (daily, weekly, monthly)? Have you worked with them to do a brand placement reaching influencers and seen meaningful ROI? Is the future bright for paid promotions to social media influencers? Let me know why or why not in the comments.
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Danielle is an early Klout adopter, her score is 69.
