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Originally Posted by fishsticker
1. What was Milo's concern and the angel concerns about launching the site prior to major investment and just having the idea ripped off? What were your plans and strategy to deal with that?
Well, to some degree this is always a concern, and as a result usually before you get any angels (and definitely before you get any institutional VC money) you will need to have a solid answer to why your idea is defensible.
Personally I think most of the explanations entrepreneurs come up with for defensibility are usually BS. There are some extreme cases like with Facebook or eBay where there are valid arguments about network effects and there are other (usually non-web) products where there may be patents in play that provide a degree of defensibility but at the end of the day I think the real answer (for most web businesses) is really "there is nothing stopping someone from copying this, but we're going to move fast, we're (already have or our going to) build a great team and we are going to out execute them.
This article gives a quote from Marc Andreessen saying that as a VC when he asks a company "why won't facebook role out this feature and crush you?" that basically the answer he's looking for (but never gets) is "We're going to kick their ass, and here's how..."
http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-...n-quora-2011-2
Quote:
Originally Posted by fishsticker
2. Did you create tools for retailers to send their inventory or did you hire people to maintain that information? If you created tools, were they on location or web based?
This is an area I probably can't get into too much since eBay may consider it to be competitive info, but the short answer is that we tried just about everything you could think of and stuck with what worked.
Quote:
Originally Posted by fishsticker
3. I have to ask again, you mentioned traffic was generated early via SEO (techcrunch pr only goes so far). Organic SEO will only take you so far, and I can't imagine paid advertising with major product keywords as being financially viable (or was it?). You launch a site, you tell friends and family to spread the word... but at what point and because of what vehicle do you start attracting 100k visitors a month?
You'd be surprised how far SEO will go if you can really work it. We did some experiments with SEM and display ads and I think that could've found a way to make that work if we needed to, but we never allocated any budget for advertising spend. We got all the way to 1m uniques/month almost entirely from SEO.
Again I can't go too much into our specific strategy but I will say that ultimately with SEO there are two major things I've learned:
1. Find a way to find keywords that are not heavily targeted by everyone under the sun but that will still generate good traffic for you. One trick is to figure how to target a large number of keywords in the long tail and get a little bit of traffic from each of them. In aggregate they can really add up over time.
2. Everything else (on-page SEO) is important but getting a large volume of
high quality inbound links is king.
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Originally Posted by fishsticker
4. What do you consider was the best marketing early on to bring visitors to the site?
You can probably guess the answer by now, but: SEO.
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Originally Posted by fishsticker
5. Did you launch a private/open to the public beta prior to public launch of the site? If so, how many people roughly participated?
We did a very small private beta of our initial (pre-local) site to get feedback from friends and family (maybe 30 people) but after we decided on the local angle one of our early investors pushed us very hard to just launch whatever we had and start iterating on it, which is what we did (and this worked out much much better).