Top 15 Sales Bloggers and Twitter Users

Posted by Tom Blue on May 28, 2009 under Sales, Technology | 7 Comments to Read

Here is our latest top bloggers / twitter users list. Since we sometimes focus on sales here we figured it would be nice to focus on the top bloggers that get the most traffic… The list is different than our original top bloggers list, in which the criteria is different. We are ranking on number of twitter followers, their Retweek rank courtesy of Retweetrank, number of unique visitors a month on their blog, and Google PageRank.

FunAdvice Company Profile & President Interview

Posted by Tom Blue on May 27, 2009 under Companies, Executives, Marketing, Technology | Be the First to Comment

I am always trying to profile bootstrapped startups so I was very happy we got in contact with FunAdvice and Jeremy Goodrich. He is extremely open about FunAdvice and I assume that really helps his PR. Of course, more bloggers, etc are going to be more likely to do a story on you if you can give them some dirt. FunAdvice has been growing 300% year over year and that is without the help of venture capital. Very impressive. Please the profile interview below…

1. What do you do?

FunAdvice is a question & answer service that allows anybody to register, ask questions, give advice and make friends. Our fundamental belief is that advice / answers is far more interesting when it’s truly social so over the years, we’ve added customizable profiles, friend lists, photo sharing & tagging, photo rating, groups, private messaging and more to improve retention and member interaction. Generally speaking, it’s worked very well, as our retention has been going up along with overall traffic.

2. Who are your competitors?

The main competitor’s that we benchmark against are Yahoo Answers, Wiki Answers and Answerbag, as those are the three largest Q&A sites in the US…there are about a half dozen or so that have raised VC money or been acquired, including Yedda, Answerology, Mahalo…however, I don’t worry about what they’re doing as from 3rd party stats services, we’re all pretty close in terms of userbase.

3. What makes you different than your competitors?

The social emphasis in FunAdvice is unique…eg, ‘interest’ lists you can’t find on other Q&A sites, nor customizable profiles, nor photo tagging, etc…our breadth of member features and functionalities is really what makes the service interesting as Q&A by itself is a commodity.

4. What are your or your ceo’s biggest challenges?

To be honest, building out a site and team is pretty new to me. Despite having built eight companies over the last nine years with my wife (and several with our CTO of FunAdvice, Ericson) the last year or so has been tough for me as my leadership and team building experience is very thin. As a result, I’ve been reading a lot of books, blogs and quizing companies I’ve consulted with in the past on how to build a team, how to ensure we attain the productivity I’d like and overall keep marching the numbers higher. It’s a tough juggling act, as I go back and forth on adding features to improving revenue to improving traffic…though our team is very capable and I think we get as much done as most companies with 2x the staff, full time and centrally located staff. The distributed ‘virtual company’ thing has some advantages for us, as I don’t have to deal with atypical office politics stuff…of course that doesn’t mean we’re drama free but I do believe it’s a manageable headache.

6. How long have you been in business?

FunAdvice was started in March, 2003…however, we filed to become an LLC just about two years ago, as the site grew to 700K+ visitors, we wanted to have a more formal business structure around things.

7. How many employees do you have?

Currently we have eight people in total, three are co-founders, three full time, two part time…though I only manage the two part time & one full time employee directly, as our engineering team in China is managed by our lead engineer who has been with us for over two years now and he manages the full time engineers who build out the bulk of the site there for us.

8. What are your revenue estimates for 2009?

Somewhere between six and seven figures…as we use adsense exclusively, their terms of service say we can’t share our revenue numbers publicly.

9. Are you profitable?

We have been profitable for nearly two years, however, the founders all work part time and don’t receive a salary…we should be profitable even with paying the co-founders (including myself) a regular salary in the next three to six months.

10. When were you founded?

March, 2003 the site went live and we haven’t looked back since. It’s been a wild ride, though we didn’t really work on the site proactively until August, 2006…in October, 2006, we had 70K visitors…now, on a busy day, we have nearly 200K visitors, which is quite a jump.

Top Bloggers/Twitter Users/Authors for Traffic

Posted by Tom Blue on May 19, 2009 under Companies, Executives, Marketing, Technology | 3 Comments to Read

If you are like me, you are constantly looking for ways to get more traffic to your site and more mentions of your company within the press. Below is a list of bloggers/writers/twitter users that A) Regularly discuss WEB startups & profile them, and B) have enough focused traffic to make a difference. The list is based on the type of site they write for, their number of Twitter followers, and traffic at their home sites. We used their traffic numbers from Compete.com.

Lead411: 40% Growth in 2009

Posted by Tom Blue on under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

As some of you know, I am the founder of Lead411.  Because we rarely do press releases I wanted to do a blog post on our growth so far this year.  I also figured that most people would like to know about companies that are actually growing during this downturn as I know that interests me as well.

For Q1 2009 we have grown 42% over Q1 2008 and are on track for 50% growth in Quarter 2.  What is great about this is that we are really making a dent in the market share of our competitors. The growth has to do with a number of factors, but as you can see below our traffic has increased almost 10x.  Our unique visitors are actually above 550,000 uniques a month.   Thanks to all of our customers that have been with us from the beginning including; Gartner, Corning, Administaff, etc.

 

Some companies are growing

Posted by Tom Blue on May 18, 2009 under Companies, Executives | Be the First to Comment

VentureBeat just did a post on how they are hiring. Great for them! It is nice to hear that a company that is primarily advertising based is growing in these bad times. I always love to hear that. Most tech entrepreneurs know about VentureBeat and Matt Marshall. He covered the venture capital “beat” with the Mercury News before he started VentureBeat. Techcrunch and VentureBeat are two sites that I check at least once daily.