September 2009 « GrowthTimes

Posts for September, 2009

Should you focus on revenue or on raising money? (and the case for a VC-management consultant hybrid)

September 26th, 2009 by Greg Boutin

Varun Mathur, the Techvibes Community Manager, who I just learnt is based in Toronto (I look forward to meeting you, Varun), made an excellent point yesterday in his Techvibes post on What Separates 37signals And Twitter ?

For all the talk about “getting to revenue” as fast as possible, VCs are still valuing companies based on hype and unproven potential for exponential revenues. You can build valuations based on traffic, but if you can’t attach a realistic average $ amount to a visitor, and if you are going to hemorrhage your traffic as soon as you offer ads, then your valuation is built on shaky grounds – which in finance means you should likely be extremely conservative or discount it.

I don’t say there is never a case for giving high valuation to companies that have great brand awareness and usage even if they haven’t made a buck yet, but my thesis is that the risk of this revenue never materializing should lead to discounting valuations more heavily than they currently are. VCs should put their valuation through a simple risk-based, probabilistic tree analysis, contemplating the likelihood of 3 basic scenarios: (more…)

Tags: 37signals, initial public offering, monetization, revenue generation, revenue model, silicon valley, tech venture, twitter, valuation, valuation model, venture capital

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Discussing government open data and data.gov with the Semantic Web Gang

September 22nd, 2009 by Greg Boutin

Paul Miller has just put online our semantic web gang podcast for this month. We were joined by Brand Niemann of the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for a discussion on the efforts to apply semantic technologies to Government data in the USA and elsewhere. I also touched briefly on the Twine news at the end, and look forward to discussing that some more in the future, especially in the context of user utility, usability, and monetization models for semantic web companies.

See the following links on government open data:

Linked Government Data (Sept. 11, 2009)
Publishing Open Government Data (W3C Working Draft 8 September 2009)

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Twine confirms traffic drop on ReadWriteWeb and spins it

September 15th, 2009 by Greg Boutin

ReadWriteWeb just wrote about my last post and relayed Twine’s response, which in a nutshell is that they saw a 20-25% traffic drop but that it doesn’t matter because they are all focused on version 2.0 which will free their traffic acquisition model from its dependence on Google rankings. Couple of immediate comments (also see comments on RWW site): Compete.com shows a 85%-90% drop, and so does Quantcast. They tend to be reliable in quantifying % changes and even Twine has endorsed them in the past. Twine has a huge incentive in downplaying this, since a drop of the scale Compete.com shows could lead to a withdrawal of investors’ support. So, until I see actual proofs, my assumption is that the 20-25% drop claim is a misrepresentation. (more…)

Tags: compete.com, geosign, PR, quantcast, readwriteweb, spin

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Twine in freefall?

September 14th, 2009 by Greg Boutin

Image via Wikipedia

What happened to Twine? Earlier this year, VentureBeat characterized Twine as an “early success”, based on information from Compete.com. ReadWriteWeb followed suit in March explaining that Twine could soon surpass Delicious.com. In May, Techcrunch made the observation that Twine had overtaken Friendfeed in traffic. Fast Company wasn’t as fast, but in June it echoed the comments with an article labelling Twine as “red-hot”.

Twine indeed surpassed Delicious in May and June. That was shortlived, however. Since then, the same source VentureBeat used to discuss Twine’s traffic, Compete.com, which Twine has endorsed a number of times, shows a huge drop in traffic. According to the traffic tracking application, Twine’s traffic would have been divided by 10 between an April peak of 2M unique visitors and the August number of just about 208,000. Quantcast, on its end, reports peaks in April and July above 500K “people”, together with a similar drop in August with 50,000 visits only. I don’t know which source is correct about the volumes, or how their definitions of unique visitors and people differ, but the trend is what matters and it is striking. Alexa, generally much less reliable, doesn’t show a huge drop, although it doesn’t show any increase either.

According to all 3 sources, Twine is now back well below Delicious and Friendfeed. Have you read anything about that? I haven’t. (more…)

Tags: chasm, delicious, friendfeed, RWW, tagging, techcrunch, traffic reporting, traffic tools, venturebeat, web 3.0

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To Revenue becomes GrowthTimes

September 14th, 2009 by Greg Boutin

Image by AdamSelwood via Flickr

To Revenue has a new address! I have decided to rename To Revenue into Growth Times, to better convey this blog’s core concept: assisting growth companies in their journey towards explosive growth. Additionally, most of my clients have already achieved revenues, so To Revenue was a bit of misnomer.

A little more profoundly perhaps, in this time of recession, I also want it to express my belief that the ultimate antidote to all crisis is human creativity and innovation, targeted towards solving real problems and driven by a sense of financial, social and environmental purpose.

And lastly, it’s a better-sounding and more attractive domain name. Let’s not underestimate the power of packaging and marketing!

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