Thanks to whoever posted a Digg for Bessed last night. I was thinking that might not come until next week when we make a more concentrated push for coverage, but I’m happy to see someone thought it was worth their time.
If you’re of a mind to, stop over at Digg and give us a vote.
One thing I’ve learned in the age of the Internet is that many people will talk to you, especially if it’s via e-mail on their own time versus you trying to force them to get on the phone with you. I’ve been surprised at the well-known people in a varety of industries I’ve managed to converse with simply by e-mailing them.
That said, as Bessed is launching, I told a few people about what we’re doing, and the opinion I heard most frequently is that the human-powered aspect makes it not scalable, meaning we’d need more and more people to run it as it gets bigger, which means more and more costs.
The ideal, especially from a venture capital perspective, and especially these days, is something that uses technology to do all the work and/or has a user-generated aspect to it, so that your company just supplies the tools and it grows by people providing content and then driving traffic to their content.
This is an understandable opinion, and the scalability question is one I’ve struggled with. On the other hand, when I read thing like this report on the DEMO show, which is supposed to showcase these hot Web 2.0 companies, but instead prompts the writer to exclaim “People, these are extensions, not companies!”, I can’t help but think that the race to be hands-off, let the user create the value, results in worthless ventures.
The strategy of “create something, anything, and let’s hope a bigger company buys us out so we don’t have to find a business model” is certainly one way to go about things. But doesn’t it make sense to build a company that has a larger value, even if that means it’s going to take a lot more work/time/money/people to get the product/service to a place where it’s at a high profitability?
From my understanding of the venture capital game, they’re looking for companies that they can throw a few million into with the hope of taking $30 million out down the road, but the things they invest in give you the impression that they just throw their money across 10 or 15 companies and hope one gets lucky. It’s sort of an insane diversification model.
So, when I hear the comment about Bessed’s scalability, it doesn’t discorage me as much as you’d think (or maybe as much as it should). There are very few successful companies that are spewing cash with small numbers of employees and a technology that does all the work. Even Google needs massive numbers of employees and facilities to run a technology that is insanely powerful but needs an insane amount of power.
If you’re going to be big and successful, scalability is an issue no matter what industry you’re in or what technology you’ve created. So Bessed will plunge forward, build, and see what happens. I feel good about our chances.
This story over at Tabblo illustrates why it sucks to be a startup, or, worse, to be a bootstrapping startup. (I don’t know if Tabblo bootstraps or not, just saying it’s worse if you do.)
A broken sprinkler head started shooting water into their offices and soon enough they has three inches of water on the floors, not to mention that everything got soaked since the water came from above.
Tabblo’s probably got some venture capital, everyone seems to these days, but if you’re a company trying to bootstrap, an incident like this can be a killer. Not only do you have damages to deal with but you also have to deal with the fact of not being able to do anything for a few days while you get your office up and running again. This is a huge money and time waster.
Insurance might cover your damages, but it won’t cover the value of things you may have created that are ruined, whether it’s important papers, drenched computers with lost data (yes you should back it up, but does everyone really back up?), or some other piece of work that took a long time and will have to be recreated from scratch.
And if you have clients who have deadlines that you’re now going to miss, that’s just one more thing that’s not going to win you any love.
That’s why bootstrapping sucks. One false move and all your efforts are down the drain.
The pay’s not out of this world, but if you’d like to make a little money blogging to help Bessed expand its topic areas, go here for details.
Seth Godin wrote a post yesterday about trust, and although it rambled a bit, or at least didn’t go where I thought it was going, this line is absolutely true:
We are almost always in search of recommendations, especially from people who don’t seem to have an ulterior motive.
He mentions that it doesn’t make much sense for us to take his recommendation on music or good tea just because we read his blog, but that we might take those recommendations anyway.
Why? Because Godin seems intelligent and probably doesn’t love crap. So, if I like tea and want to try something new, why not go for the Kalahari red tea that he suggests versus shooting in the dark? He may be wrong, or at least his preference may be wrong for me, but chances are better I’m going to be satisfied than if I pick completely randomly.
This is the very reason that smart marketers, especially those with little money but a good product/service/idea, work so hard to get journalists (or bloggers) to write about them. Who do you believe more–the journalist you’ve never met and know nothing about who says she’s happy with her new Mobi1Kenobi mobile phone, or the ad right next to that story that says “The C3PEOPod Mobile Phone Will Change Your Life”?
As Godin says, you assume the person writing without an ulterior motive is telling the truth, at least as he/she sees it, and it’s better to buy based on someone’s real truth than based on someone’s real lies (or, more graciously, their unconfirmed promises).
The big idea behind Bessed is that it’s a search site which allows you to comment on search results and add new pages via the comments section of each search results page.
To accomplish this, we’re building the site on WordPress. We did this for a number of reasons:
1. WordPress is free software. We don’t have much money.
2. WordPress has a community that likes WordPress sites and are familiar with WordPress sites. That makes it more likely a core group will latch onto our site, like what we’re doing, and spread the word.
3. WordPress is a cinch to install, and at this point the tech end of things is not our greatest strength. This will have to change as our traffic grows, but for now it was nice to get up and running quick-like.
But I have reservations about WordPress, mostly centering around its speed and its ability to process lots of traffic, lots of comments and lots of searches.
We are using WordPress in an unconventional way, perhaps in a way that WordPress is not meant to be used, a way that just might be asking for trouble. WordPress is blog software, and the majority of most blogs’ traffic is on the first few pages, while older pages are more likely to collect dust, especially once you’re talking about content that’s a year old or more. I would also guess that the average blog has a fairly low number of searches conducted on it. So WordPress does the job for these blogs.
But Bessed is a different model. It’s going to be a huge site content-wise, more on the scale of a Wikipedia, and past posts aren’t just going to be old-news archives that are searched only occassionally. Instead, they are going to be the pages that are accessed repeatedly by site searchers looking for relevant sites that fit their needs. In addition, by asking our visitors to comment on results and add their own sites via comments, we’re setting ourselves up for high comment usage.
We’re not half-assing this. Even though our traffic is nothing right now, Bessed is sitting on a dedicated server and we are prepared to upgrade that when the situation becomes necessary. We’re not trying to cheap out here.
But I’m already seeing that while WordPress is posting, the site can become inaccessible for anywhere from a few seconds to a half-minute, although it’s usually the former. I suppose this is database stuff happening, but that lag isn’t very acceptable to me, especially if I’m thinking that this site is going to have thousands of visitors in the future. It has to be accessible and fast.
I mentioned this to a friend who knows a little about this stuff & he told me it’s not WordPress so much as the fact that a MySQL database isn’t really built to handle high numbers of queries and house a truly huge site. Since I’m no expert, I don’t know if he’s right or if he’s just one of those techies who thinks everything is done wrong unless the idea on how to do it came out of their very own heads.
For now, it’s WordPress. And I hope it’s WordPress for the long haul. But I’m going to be keeping a close eye on performance and be open to making a switch (which would be a royal pain in the ass) if necessary.
For a long time people who spend time trying to get their sites ranked highly on Google would debate whether there was a “sandbox”, or a place that Google put your site for a while to see if you played nicely. If you played nicely (meaning that you created good content & got some links from “trusted” sites), then your site got to leave the sandbox and actually get ranked for something desirable, which maybe meant you would get money or happiness.
In my experience, getting out of the Google sandbox takes 10-12 months, which for most Webmasters is an eternity.
Via Search Engine Roundtable comes this list from Andy Hagans on how to “beat” the sandbox. It’s all good information and something that every Webmaster should be doing, but in my view Hagans isn’t offering ways to beat the sandbox as much as he’s offering ways to rank well when you are out of the sandbox. Doing these things may cut down your time in the box the tiniest bit, but unless you’re a major corporation or movie star putting up a new site, you’ll stay in the sandbox for a while and you need to prepare yourself for that up front.
In Hagans’ mind, you’re let out of the sandbox in stages, which means you start with Google acting like you smell bad and refusing to touch your site with a 39-and-a-half-foot pole. You then graduate up, meaning you start to see your site ranked #95 for a search term you’re targeting, and then if you’ve done your work well, you start to move up to the big leagues, meaning the first two pages of results, which is all most people ever look at.
I think he’s right about the stages, but for Webmasters the most pain comes in stage one, when you’re building your site out, writing original content, finding trusted, relevant sites to link to and hopefully be linked from–only to see that you’re still persona non grata in Google’s eyes.
This is when many people get discouraged, because you have absolutely no idea when you might actually snag a ranking, or whether you ever will. (Or, whether you’ll get any rankings before you run out of money, or starve.)
Hagans’ advice is good–do all the steps he advises, at least as many as you feel comfortable with. But maybe more important, stick with it. Google loves you, yes it does, and eventually it will show you the love that up ’til now has created an emptiness in your heart (and wallet).
I’ve become a big fan of venture capitalist Josh Kopelman’s blog Redeye VC, although I wish he’d post more frequently. Last week he offered a post titled Domino Rally Business Models that centered around startups that require everything to go exactly right for any chance of success. He used this example of a business model that requires that all the dominoes fall perfectly:
“If we can negotiate a deal with the top 10 publishers on the Internet AND cost-effectively convince millions of users to install a co-branded plugin AND convince advertisers to buy a new form of advertising THEN we have a billion dollar business”
That’s a lot of “ifs” required to reach the final “then”. As a VC, Kopelman wants to see fewer dominoes that must fall, more than one path to big revenue, or solid plans that make domino-toppling more likely.
Kopelman offers a concrete example of the latter when he was building Half.com:
When we started Half.com our two major dominos were (1) can we get sellers to list inventory, and (2) can we get consumers to buy stuff. To offset the risks of the former, we went out and signed contracts with dozens of used book, CD and movie stores to list their inventory — launching with over 1 million items available. To offset the risks of the latter, we launched with partnerships with all the major price-comparison shopping engines, providing us with quick access to millions of price-sensitive consumers. While we didn’t eliminate the risks, we were able to credibly convince our investors that we were able to position the dominoes in the right place.
The obvious question for me is: how many dominoes is Bessed requiring fall into place?
Let’s see. Our challenges are three-fold (maybe more, but these are the biggies):
Create enough content – Because it’s a human-powered search site, can we create enough search result pages to reach critical mass, which means…
Driving Traffic – Getting people to a site is always a challenge, but I think much of number 2 is wrapped up in #1. Creating a lot of content should drive traffic, but there has to be a LOT of content.
Monetizing the traffic – Right now we’re just using Google’s AdSense program, which maybe 500,000 other sites are doing. Adding other ad options could mean higher revenues, but I’m more concerned with traffic and content right now, which is of course what makes Adsense so attractive to me and others. But of course you need people to actually click the ads.
Here’s some numbers for you. If you have 1 million page views per day, but only get $1 CPM ($1 per every thousand page impressions, which can easily happen depending on the content of the pages in question), you end up with only $1,000 per day, $365,000 per year. If your site can get a $10 CPM, you’re talking $10,000 per day, and $3,650,000 per year. That’s still pretty small potatoes unless you’re content with being a small company, and let’s not forget that you need a million page views per day, which isn’t exactly easy.
Using these numbers, what does it take to have a $100 million company? Being generous and using the $10 CPM, which I think a site like Bessed could probably get as we drill down to content that brings higher CPMs (such as financial products, luxury retail, etc.), here’s the equation, drawing from my high school algebra:
($100,000,000/365 days) = $273,972.60 per day
X number of page views / 1000 x $10 CPM = $273,972.60
I can’t remember how to solve for X, but I can do a workaround to tell you that it would be necesary to serve up roughly 27.4 million page views per day to reach $100 million in revenue. Looking at this page, that’s roughly the number of searches that the MSN search engine does each day. Less than Google or Yahoo, but still, you’re talking the big, big leagues.
Now you can of course think a bit smaller. $50 million in revenue only takes about 13.7 million page views each day (which is about what Ask.com does in # of daily searches, according to the site linked to above).
Thinking even smaller, 2.74 million page views per day gets you to $10 million in revenue. Much more doable, but still we’re talking wikipedian proportions, so we’re still talking major traction.
And, of course, to get to those numbers under our current business model means many, many, many pages created by a combination of real human editors and visitor submissions. A tremendous amount of work done by a tremendous number of people, almost all of who do not work for us today and will not work for us tomorrow unless we can get this built on a small scaller scale, show it’s feasible, and then go after investor dollars.
That’s a tall order, with unlikely success. I’m going to do it anyway.
I’m a huge reader of non-fiction in general and business-related books in particular, so I’ll be using this blog to share my reviews of what I’ve read. Today it’s the new book from Mark Sanborn, who scored a big hit the last time around with The Fred Factor.
I also post these reviews at Blogcritics.org; you can see my complete list here. (I actually only have one previous one thus far–Seth Godin’s Small is the New Big.)
Away we go…
Last weekend, after a week walking past a broken bottle on the sidewalk near my home and thinking, “someone should clean that up,” I grabbed a broom and dustpan and cleaned it up myself. While I had self-interest due to my child regularly falling on the sidewalk for no apparent reason, this was still unlikely behavior for me. What spurred me on? The new book from Mark Sanborn, You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader.
Like Sanborn’s previous book, the best selling The Fred Factor, this book is another small (102 pages) package with lots of advice on creating a real impact regardless of your position in the world or within your company. The premise here is how to be a leader even if no one’s put you in charge (or, in my example of sweeping up the broken bottle, even if no one notices). By taking the initiative regardless of expectations or official job description, you set yourself up for rewards down the road, including, in many cases, that lofty title you didn’t have before.
You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader is a good book for anyone needing motivation doled out in bite-sized chunks. And I’m sure that Sanborn’s past success will ensure this one has a long run on the bestseller’s list. That said, if you read a lot of these types of books (which I do), I can’t say Sanborn’s breaking new ground here.
The beauty of The Fred Factor, of course, is its “hook,” a nice story about an overachieving mailman — which is then extrapolated out to teach us all how to have a positive impact in our small slices of the world. You Don’t Need A Title to Be a Leader tries to do something similar, but the “hook” of being a leader regardless of your title is a little less meaty. As a result, while everything in the book is great advice, the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts. It’s just not as cohesive a message as Sanborn intends. (By the way, the book’s title comes from the reply a contract worker gives after happily accepting a critical assignment without the promise of receiving a lofty title on the other end.)
I’ll try to give you an example of what I mean. The heart of the book is the Six Principles of Leadership, which include The Power of Self-Mastery, The Power of Focus, The Power of People, The Power of Persuasive Communication, The Power of Execution, and The Power of Giving. Those all sound fine, but having just read the book, I already have forgotten what half of them mean or what I’m actually supposed to do to put them in practice. There’s good stuff in there, but it didn’t light a fire under me. (Although it caused me to think that maybe I should be the one to sweep up that broken bottle.)
While the book as a whole doesn’t strike me as a classic, I did dog-ear some pages that struck me, so let’s highlight some strengths:
Sanborn is at his best when he offers compelling stories that show instead of tell. You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader could have used a little more showing and a little less telling.
e-mail me: adam@bessed.com
Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.
So, it’s 10:19 on a Friday night and I’m in front of the computer again. I spend a lot of time here. Lately I spend a lot of time here because I’ve become obsessed with this idea.
I’ve always been fascinated with search, and have always wanted to start a business around it, but I never could think of something truly unique that wasn’t already being done better than I could do it myself. Like many people, over the past couple of years I’ve also become fascinated with blogs, wikis, social networking sites, etc. One night about 8 or 9 months ago, right before bed, an idea popped into my head that I haven’t been able to remove.
The product of that idea is Bessed, a human-powered search site built on WordPress. It’s not quite a search engine, not quite a directory, not quite a wiki, and, really, not quite a blog.
Here’s how it works: Each blog “post” is actually a search topic/keyword/category. Our Bessed editors seed the topic with 5 or 6 of the best sites for that search, then we open it up to you for comments. Use the comments section to tell us what other sites should be included for that particular topic, what should be excluded, what should be higher or lower in the rankings, or just leave a comment about the topic in general.
While our Bessed editors ultimately control the search results, the comments from visitors play a crucial role in determining what those results should be, and how they should be ranked.
We call it “search without the spam.” And the equation to get there is simple:
Search Results + Searcher Feedback = Better Search Results
So we’re not Google, we’re not Wikipedia, we’re not Digg–we’re a hybrid that has echoes of all those things.
Bessed is something different, something I hope is different enough–and interesting enough–that people will use it to search for what they want while also helping it reach its full potential by contributing their comments. In some cases, I hope they’ll use it as a meeting place to talk about a topic of interest to them.
All right, my son’s got soccer tomorrow morning, so I should get to bed. I’m looking forward to fleshing out our business plan in this blog, and I’ll be grateful for any constructive comments you have along the way–on the idea itself, its feasibility, our progress, my sanity, etc.
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