Been awhile since I posted the going on's of Emurse. Growth rate is really solid and is compounding (meaning, our growth % stays in our target range even as we add more and more users). Raw traffic, as defined by returning visitors and new visitors (unique), is exploding. Raw traffic this month is about 2000% higher than March, to give you an idea. On one hand, I want to say it's surprising, but I think that's only because I remember how this all started -- just a simple utility to help Gavin, myself and our friends.

We've been getting some blog press lately, which is great. Lockergnome, a favorite of Gavin and I's, posted a really glowing review. Always cool to wake up and find a site you enjoy talking about you!

We have some new features in the works, and some features that were postponed are now once again on the short list. Expect some exciting things over the next weeks/months.

I told both Jason and CK awhile back that I'd pass along my thoughts. I wanted to sit back for awhile and watch how things all started to develop before offering up anything.

There are two users to a search engine. You have the person searching for information, and you have the person providing the information. In the case of Mahalo, the first use-case I get. Curated, edited, focused information that I'm looking for. In fact, I had my first Mahalo moment while searching for information on Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, and Mahalo was a big help. Awesome.

But when Dave Winer mentioned that Jason didn't bring a Win-Win to Gnomedex, it struck me as the words that I was looking for to describe the second use-case, although he probably meant his words in a little bit different context.

The second use-case falls flat on its ass. There is currently zero incentive for a blog author/content producer to support Mahalo. On Google, the value proposition is clear -- the more people a producer suggests to Google, the more people who are using it. The more people who are using it, the more traffic the producer's site ultimately gets. Yes, some people cheat and get more traffic than they should, but ultimately everyone has a chance to receive "votes" by way of organic links. It's a classic win win.

When Mahalo first launched with curated results, the existence of this proposition was at least debatable. Google backfill kept the basics of a search engine in play. Now that Mahalo is producing original content instead of SeRPs, however, it isn't really a search engine, but a knowledge base. From a content producer's point of view, why on earth would they want to contribute pagerank/trust rank/support to something that will ultimately overtake their keywords and traffic on Google? The slightest change in the rankings can dramatically affect a sites ad sales/conversions/whatever. Supplemental information makes sense I suppose, it's just like linking to a blog post. But again, that's seems like an awkward conflict of interest in the role of a search engine.

Remember when Google started giving their properties premium placement in the SeRPs? The damn near riot that almost ensued? People were grabbing pitch forks and lighting torches chanting "do no evil". That's nothing compared to the outrage people would have if Google started indexing their own open-ended random content on all subjects ahead of their second group of users, the content producers.

Mahalo will probably succeed with whatever Jason does. Answers.com, about.com, wikipedia, etc are all really popular high traffic sites. They just all happen to also be incredibly boring. If Mahalo wants to be exciting and redefine search (which seems to be J's stated goal), then it needs to create a win-win for the people who are building out the rest of the web. Figure that out, and Mahalo stands a chance to really help a lot of people.

UPDATE: In fairness, I should note that while sitting here thinking about the win-win comment, I saw the mahalo "how to write a resume" link scroll by on delicious. Talk about putting it all into context ;)
UPDATE #2: Both Jason and CK respond in the comments.

Josh posted the session schedule on the blogOrlando site yesterday. I'll be presenting on the local Orlando scene. My thought is to basically extend the "Why Orlando" portion of my venture post (that was in response to John's announcement). From there, talk a little bit about who's here (companies, user groups, various meetups), mix in some local initiatives (a little co-working pitch never killed anyone.. ;), and hopefully a whole lot of great conversation.

I'm told my buddy Alex Hillman gave a similar talk up at blogPhilly, so I'm sure I'll bounce things off of him.. Any thoughts from my fellow yolcals though?

Oh, and Emurse is now a blogOrlando sponsor. w00t.

A couple posts ago, I reiterated the cliche that ideas are a dime a dozen. There's more to that statement than simply "there are a lot of ideas," which is true, of course. There is also the fact that whatever idea you've had, there is a huge chance that someone else has had similar thoughts already. Ideas, themselves, are rarely 100% unique (hence the importance of implementation, execution, survival and luck.)

That's probably something to do with how we all arrive at our creative conclusions. We see different factors in play across whatever industry we're a part of and we start connecting the dots with other things that we already know. Certain things online really are kind of formulaic anyhow. Search, video, content, dating, social networking, music, classifieds -- these are all features that define an idea as "sexy" (which is largely influenced by previous success more so than interest level, I'd imagine) If some new technology comes along that makes it easier and cheaper to produce any combination of those winnable ideas, you can expect a flurry of activity in that space. The chance of a million twitter clones intensifies (okay, okay... poor example).

Part of being an entrepreneur is the emotional capacity to withstand the defeat of seeing "your" idea being developed by someone else. At least, I tell myself that, because it seems to keep happening to us ;) It seems to be a pretty relateable concept though, as almost everyone with an entrepreneurial spirit has some sort of story about the one that got away. The folks with the home runs are often the ones who swung the bat the most (BTW, Cliches are cliche for a reason. Because they kick ass.) So what's the best way to counteract it?

My thought is that you have to be able to move fast. You need the resources to take action right away. The key resource being talent. There doesn't seem to be much time available these days for learning curves. In our latest case (which I won't go into detail over, doesn't seem cool to the team that pulled it off), there was a ton of ramp up time and the fact that we have pretty active day jobs. A bad combination. We could have outsourced everything, but.. What's the learning curve like on Hindi? I say that in jest, but it's not hard to guess what the pitfalls of outsourcing may have been.

The good news is that we added a new skill set to our tool belt. The world's a better place because someone pulled the idea off. It's comfortable to know that our head is still in the right place (well, Gavin's at least. I wasn't the most passionate about it). There are other directions we can take the prototype in anyhow, and well, Emurse is kicking serious ass lately regardless ;) All in all, it ain't no thing.

If you're working on an idea that isn't first to market, and you get the wind knocked out of you by whoever is, don't let it slow you down. Analyze the situation, decide if it makes sense to compete, and if not, move to the next idea. After all, they're a dime a dozen, right? ;)

While I was away, John Rife posted an excellent assessment/announcement over at his blog FindingJohn. I've been friends with John for about a year now. He has a lot of passion for both Orlando and for technology, and a ton of experience when it comes to investing. We've had a number of conversations over the last couple of months sizing up the local tech scene and trying to determine our collective needs. It's great to see him moving in this direction, as I think it will help our community a great deal.

Why More Local Venture Funds are a Good Thing

As most of you probably know, Gavin and I have so far chosen to self fund Emurse.com and our other web products (hoping for a new yet-to-be-announced-product to launch soon, possibly barcamp?) The #1 reason for doing so is, well, because we can, but a close second is the lack of available options locally. We do not intend to leave Central Florida. In fact, I moved back to Central Florida from DC largely because of our growing company. The idea of packing our bags and heading west feels like we'd be selling out. We don't particularly have a problem with the west coast, but we don't particularly love it either. Orlando, we love.

Many of the issues entrepreneurs have with outside investment (besides the obvious equity exchange) revolve around losing control, losing corporate identity and risking their culture. When there are a plethora of options available, these risks are minimized by the presence of choice. If you don't like the investors, don't work with them -- there are others to choose from.

To give you an idea of what goes into choosing an investor.. I can't speak for everyone, but in our case, it's not so much the money that would be important as much as the connections the money might carry. Being on the east coast, someone with west coast ties would be appealing. We're in the HR space, so someone with strong local ties would be nice (easier to pilot beta products with someone right down the street). Then there are other questions, like what are the other companies in the investment groups portfolio? Are there in house partnership opportunities? How does the web industry view the investment group? Are they well received, controversial, or flat out hated? This might all come across as being picky, but investment is more than just money, it's an added business partner.

No one investment group will appeal to everyone, and thats where the necessity for multiple firms comes into play. Off the top of my head, Dan Rua and Inflexion comes to mind. There is also the option of the UCF incubator, but from what I've been able to gather, it wouldn't necessarily address our particular needs. The EDC can also help match up investors with investments, but I'm not sure their capacity. All in all, the Central Florida region desperately needs choice. We're far from establishing our own version of Sandhill Road.

Why Orlando?

I get asked pretty often why we chose to base ourselves out of Orlando. In most folks eyes, it's the tourism capitol of the world and not much more. What is sadly overlooked is the rapidly growing $10 billion a year technology industry that resides here in Metro Orlando. The fact that the metro area has 7 airports gives us easy access to other markets when we need to be there. Florida has an extremely friendly business tax system (Tax Foundation named us 5th in the nation), and no state income tax. UCF, UF and USF are all within a hundred mile radius of Orlando. UF is the 3rd largest school in the country, UCF is the 6th largest in the country, and USF is the ninth. All in all there are more than 25 colleges and universities in metro Orlando, and more than 50 technical schools. There's plenty of talent here, and it's cheap talent, because our cost of living is so low. In the last couple of years, more than a few leading business magazines have echoed the same sentiments -- Orlando is a great place to be an entrepreneur and a great place to live.

We have a great community locally that's finally starting to come together. Ryan's done amazing things with Florida Creatives, and Gregg appears to be organizing the barcamp to end all barcamps. Josh's blogOrlando format has not only taken root here, but all over the eastern seaboard. There's a ton of money here in Central Florida, and more choice in the venture arena can help get financing into the hands of people who need it. The success of our area's new companies will help create even more mentors and knowledge locally, and that will help create even more success.

Orlando's monstrous growth rate, local wealth, ample qualified talent, great weather, low taxes and creative spirit make it an amazing place to live and work. All that's left for this town is for the startup scene to start connecting the dots.

We had another record setting month over at Emurse.com. Traffic was up something fierce, largely from various SEO improvements (all of the new traffic was organic, no paid links/ads/whatever)

I really think it was the result of ongoing work throughout the first quarter. April was big, but if you zoom out and measure from say, February, its been astounding. We're looking at 200% growth easy. Combine these improvements with the new look we launched a couple weeks back (mike is the man), and we get the month of April.

As far as accomplishing the objectives we laid out at the start of the year, we changed gears a little bit in late February. We started assembling the pieces to the "new" emurse project and realized that a complete I.A. overhaul was in order. Our focus then became the new look and feel, and it has really paid off in spades. Our conversions are up, we're all buzzing with excitement, and really, we just look much more like we ought to now. Sometimes it helps to stay flexible and responsive I guess ;)

We're focused on getting back to some of these shelved things now, though we've decided to break apart some of the components and bolt a few of the features on independently. This lets us easily test out the concept (much like we're doing with contact manager on network). It's a lot easier to get a solid idea of how something will play out once you can measure, tweak and change based on the responses. It's kind of like having a beta, but a bit more effective in that they are completely usable features on their own. (less about bug testing).

We'll probably contact our beta list about participating in a limited trial first though, so stay tuned. Also, drop me a line if you would like to be considered.

Recent Emurse Blog Posts:

• Phone Interview Tips
• New Resume Design
  

General

Traffic increases continue to impress us. March 2007 was the highest traffic month in our history, eclipsing our initial launch numbers when we were all over the web. March also set the bar for revenue in all categories.

Development

Some of the things we thought would be priorities this quarter have been delayed until next. We're getting better and better at understanding our metrics, and really think we can improve a few things before releasing all the new features. Changing our internal design (signed in users) helped improve things greatly, we're expecting even more success with the next couple of changes.

Currently Around the Web

• Sean Lavelle tries his hand at building up his online persona, starting with Emurse. Word on the street is that we are now Nadine's #1 search result after an initial rocky start. I'm positive Sean will have great success right away though!
  

We've created a google group for the Orlando coworking initiative. This isn't intended to replace the general Coworking group of course, just more of a place to get noisy about finding spaces and hooking up various folks looking to get going.

We have a couple groups that are ready asap, and a number of people who are ready one-day-in-the-future. All are welcome. If nothing else, it's more community building for our town ;)

Check it out here.

Congrats to the fine folks over at SimplyHired with what appears to be a successful launch of their new product. Basically, it's a set of tools to allow blogs to create their own job board. Those postings then get factored into the SimplyHired search results (right?). Revenue gets split 50/50.

I'm not exactly sure what the benefit of ditching your already existing job board would be, but then again, I haven't played with the product yet. Getting factored into the search results would probably bring a windfall of traffic to a small niche site. If you're looking for exposure, the 50% split is probably worth it.

Mike Arrington mentions that each job board will be its own separate bucket of information. He chimes in with his personal thoughts on this near the end of the TechCrunch post:

Instead, I'd like to see a single job board for tech bloggers, one that we can all sell into, and share the revenues pro-rata. There's no reason why TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOm, Guy Kawasaki and the others should all have their data in separate silos, aggregated only at the SimplyHired or Edgeio level along with other less interesting listings from all over the planet. None of these announced products do this.

And he's right. The thing is, I know of 3 companies (at least 1 of them funded) working on the exact same thing as SimplyHired's Job-a-Matic. There is also JobThread, JobCoin, JobTarget, and I think even Jobvertise offers something similar. They all lack the SimplyHired branding and the cool kids in the web2.0 circles aren't necessarily using them -- but they also all take way less than 50%.

As Jason Calacanis might say, the web is a hit driven market. If either Edgeio or SimplyHired moves in this direction with any success, expect a dozen other "me too" products. They'll all claim to be the bestest place in the world for you to store your data, and chances are there will be little sharing. There's the potential for all this to create further fragmentation and a world of mess when trying to distinguish what blog uses what product.

Hmm... if only there were a single place on the internet to store your resume that supports both hResume and HR-XML... ;)

Ryan Carson over at DropSend has been chronicling his attempts to sell his company. I admire his transparency, as an entrepreneur it's fun to read along at home. His name dropping accounts of failed acquisitions though may be breaking some sort of unspoken rule.

A commenter on TechCrunch mentioned how it should be fair game, since most companies are just interested in getting details on competition rather than making a serious acquisition offer. The cynic in me would like to agree, but I still think it may be best to turn the other cheek.

We've had both at Emurse, the serious and the not so serious. Hell, we've had a company bring in a team of engineers with notebooks to hear us describe how we do certain things. I guess we just figured if they're going to rip us off, they'll do it no matter what. You just have to be smarter and faster in the places where you can. If you're innovating and people are copying, we figure that means we're in the drivers seat.

But are faux pas and failed deals worth burning bridges with inappropriate name dropping? At least in our case, absolutely not. Everyone we've talked to has led to interesting and beneficial relationships. Even visiting the company with the note taking engineers, we found a cultural environment we could relate to and a host of intelligent thinkers.

As an entrepreneur, I'm grateful for Carson's posts. Then again, I'm not someone looking to talk to him about a possible acquisition. Actually... maybe we should... I wonder how much traffic his blog gets ;)

Wow

June 30, 2005 I have an e-mail thread between Gavin and myself where we outline exactly what Emurse would become. The idea was that the job hunt, especially for younger folks, centers largely around the resume. They're a royal pain in the butt to create, hard to maintain and difficult to keep track of. We set out to create a ridiculously easy method for accomplishing these tasks. Our stated mission is to "Improve your job hunt," putting technology to work on the traditional aspects and not trying to replace them.

We launched initially just as a private thing between us and a few friends. Soon after we added an invite system, and eventually we opened it up to the public. The first time we publicly mentioned the project was June 22, 2006, right here on this blog.

On July 11th, a user/friend of ours sent a link to Brian over at SolutionWatch.com. From there, it was all she wrote. Lifehacker, Digg, Delicious, C|Net, USA Today, PostBubble and a host of others ran blog posts regarding our site and our user count soared. We went from hundreds of initial users, to tens of thousands over the next couple of days.

User Feedback

Overall, the feedback has been incredibly positive. We've had countless testimonials and compliments sent in via our feedback link. We've grown the feature set by listening and adapting our service to meet user suggestions. We've user tested just about every aspect of the site, and have scored extremely high marks. (Side note: people still miss the drop down menu on sections. If anyone has any suggestions here, we're most certainly open to it ;)

The web resume screen and the privacy centric details have almost entirely been user driven. We've kept many of the form elements on the resume open ended, despite many business pressures to standardize and validate. We're committed to maintaining a job seeker focus, and we've followed through on these suggestions. We aim to give our users 100% control of their resume.

Growth and Traffic

We have, for all practical purposes, never made a serious marketing push on our product. We've experimented with a few advertising channels with various degrees of success, but our growth largely centers around word of mouth and viral activity. Most of this, of course, was spurred by July's flurry of blogosphere coverage.

Here are some graphs...

Here's our raw traffic log graph (May 1st, 2006 to December 28th, 2006):



Orange represents first time visitors. Yellow represents total visits.

August is a bit skewed, as stats were dead for a decent portion of the month. The low-point for us traffic wise was actually late August, early September. It's safe to estimate that August traffic with a tad bit higher than September.

And Alexa (Internet Explorer users only, June 1st, 2006 to Dec 28th, 2006):



The big discrepancy in terms of the graph patterns is due to the inaccuracy of Alexa, which is furthered by the fact that the majority of our user base uses some variant of Netscape/Firefox/Safari (the long tail of the browser world ;). This traffic, sadly, doesn't get factored into Alexa. Sure is pretty though ;)

We're especially proud of our numbers in November and December, as these are traditionally slower traffic months due to the holidays, and we were swamped with other initiatives (not much Emurse activity during that period). Much of what offset us in December was the blog relaunch. We're planning one article a week related to our space. We've done two articles so far (negotiating and personal branding), and both have been picked up on various social news sites and other blogs.

Our SEO efforts have paid for themselves 10 times over as well. Search traffic has seen strong increases in the last few months.

Revenue

Without going into specifics, Emurse is paying it's own way and the bank account is growing. As of December 28th, this month has seen an increase of 29% above our average for total monthly user transactions. Bot filtering lowered our overall cost, and refinement in our very limited marketing campaign increased our ROI. Mix that with our increasing conversion rate, and we're left with a very positive outlook.

Not too shabby for a boot-strapped project that turned down both acquisition offers and repeated investment attempts in 2006. The future prospects for Emurse look bright.

Looking Ahead

We expect 2007 to be an even bigger year for our small company. There are a number of new features planned for the first quarter, including some long tested aspects of the site. We're finishing up a small beta test of something we're especially excited about (hint: it's on the share tab). We've written it, tested it, and rewritten it probably three times over completely based on user feedback. It's simple and to the point. No frills is actually a pretty tough thing to do ;)

There are also some completely off the wall, unexpected and unannounced features planned for 2007 as well. We'll be running a beta test for these, and if you'd like to join, simply drop us an e-mail at service@emurse.com.

One of the only criticisms we've seen repeatedly is the lack of spell check. With many of our users moving towards more advanced browsers that have spell check built in (FF2), this feature stalled in beta testing. I'm very happy to announce though that you will see spell check added in the next couple of days. You can also expect smaller feature releases, such as updated resume templates and hopefully a wide scale roll out of the hResume micro-format (premium templates already have it).

The first half of 2007 will be very active development wise, and we're very excited about the next couple of roll outs.

Thank you for supporting us.

Without the suggestions, criticisms or occasional pats on the back we would have undoubtedly gone insane. Our product is a user product, and we're extremely grateful for all the blessings that we've had this past year.

Can't wait to recap 2007 ;) And if you haven't already, Create an Emurse account!

We gave the Emurse Blog a face lift a week or two ago. We're now looking to post an "Article" style post once a week, along with some of the testimonials that our users send in. If you have an idea for a post, or would like to be listed as an Emurse testimonial, shoot me an e-mail at alex at emurse.com, or leave it in the comments below. For testimonials, we'll link to your public emurse resume if you have one :)

Emurse Articles:

• How to Control Your "Google" Results - The premise is that there is going to be information on you out there somewhere. It's up to you to be proactive and take advantage of services on the web. Participate on highly searched, public websites in a positive way and you'll dominate the google result set for your name.
• Negotiating a New Jobs Salary - A handful of tips to help you position yourself for a higher salary when starting a new job. Simple tactics anyone can try.

"Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can "sponsor a business" and help the world's working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you've sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back." (more)

We've been researching various charity sites lately, and Chad forwarded this along to me. Turns out, the Director of Technology over there is a former colleague of Chad and I's at our old company. Basically, the jest is that you loan small amounts of money interest free ($25) to people in developing countries who need it (and are prescreened). They repay the loan, and you get your money back. You can then withdraw the money, or re-loan it out. There's no profit motive, no catch, no guarantee, no tax deduction -- it's entirely a goodwill operation, and they are seemingly doing really well with it.

I mentioned to Gavin last night that it has a sort of.... adopt-a-manatee feel to it. I know that might sound a bit... less-charitable than it should, but thats the best comparison I can come up with. You get e-mail journal alerts from the people you loaned the money to keep you posted on how their business is doing and the like. It's like Adopt-a-third-world-convenience-store, and that approach would seem to be pretty marketable here in the states.

Suggestions:

• More RSS - The journals and business pages have them, the user portfolio pages should as well.
  
• Widgets - Help spread the word on this thing and make JSS widgets people can stick on their blogs/myspace/whatever pages.
• Friends - Ability to buddy up with someone else and match contributions or distribute risk
• mod_rewrite - Maybe I'm just way to geeky for my own good, but query strings make me queezy.
  
• Even more micro - Maybe administration costs are prohibitive, but I'd love to load up an account with $50 and give 50 people one dollar.
  
• Stats - What's the most charitable state in the US? What developing countries have the highest repayment rate? What industries? People love information porn.

It's a neat service and I wish them the best of luck. I just loaned out $50 to give it a whirl, I'll blog about it again if I'm ever actually paid back ;) You can check out my kiva portfolio here.