Internships at FamilyLink – Utah’s fastest growing web company
It’s still a well-kept secret, but last month FamilyLink was the fastest growing web site in the US according to Comscore. But you wouldn’t know it from the (low) number of requests we get for part-time employment or internships.
If you are studying web development, marketing, multimedia or business at BYU or UVU, wouldn’t you be excited to find a part time job or internship with a company that is growing this fast? You can learn so much and meet so many great people working at a company that is growing so fast and providing value to so many millions of families.
I often refer local job hunters to SiliconSlopes.com to find Utah companies that have raise capital. That is usually a sign of a company that is growing. You will find FamilyLink listed there, but you can also find stats about FamilyLink on Quantcast.com, which shows FamilyLink ranks about #100 of all US web sites for monthly unique visitors.
Almost every time I lecture to college students and entrepreneurs, I talk about catching the next wave in technology or business. FamilyLink is riding the huge wave of social networking fueled by Facebook’s platform, and is going to be launching mobile applications for families on iPhone and other platforms as well. But we need more talented and passionate people to make these things happen!
I’m very surprised at how few potential employees and students are contacting us to tell us how much they want to work for us, or intern with us. Either everyone is already employed, or maybe everyone is just busy playing Farmville on Facebook or something – because they certainly aren’t knocking down our door. We had a popular booth at a recent BYU job fair, but the conversation always starts with us explaining what we do. It would be much nicer if everyone already knew about us and what we do — then we might have people with passion coming to us with ideas about what they want to do for us.
We’re about to launch our first billboard on I-15 – so hopefully awareness of FamilyLink will grow in the next few weeks. I’ve always wanted to do a billboard (See Recruiting with Billboards), and now Cydni Tetro (our CMO) is making it happen.
Some of the positions (or internships) that we could create for part time employees this spring or summer include:
- web analytics
- graphics design
- banner creation – dynamic, flash, social, targeting
- brand partnership project management
- agency and advertiser account management
- css / javascript coding
- twitter / facebook marketing
- mobile app development (android, blackberry, iphone)
- mobile marketing
- pay-per-click marketing
- seo
- content licensing / business development
- sales lead generation and “setting”
- viral video production and marketing
- localization / translation
If you know any students who are smart, passionate, and get things done, have them check us out and give us reasons to create a position for them this spring or summer. Last summer we hired 8 twitter interns, many of whom learned a lot about social marketing and have gone on to do great things.
Maybe this spring or summer, you will be the one to use FamilyLink as a launch pad for your next career move.
“Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children”
Filed under: FamilyLink.com, History, Social Entrepreneurship
A couple of weeks ago my brother-in-law, who lives in Washington, DC, told me he was reading the multi-volume world history by Will & Ariel Durrant called “The Story of Civilization.” I was impressed. I have always wanted to read this series but haven’t yet done it. So I ordered a used set on Amazon and they arrived earlier this week. I started reading volume 1 last night.
The first chapter in volume 1 is titled, “The Conditions of Civilization.” Durrant defines civilization as “social order promoting cultural creation.” He lists factors that impact whether civilization exists, such as geologic conditions (”civilization is an interlude between ice ages”); geographical conditions, such as mineral wealth, fertile soil, and natural harbors; economic conditions (the sine qua non of culture is “a continuity of food”); and political conditions including “political order.”
There must be “some unity of language to serve as a medium of mental exchange.” There must be “a unifying moral code, some rules of the game of life” acknowledged by all. There may also be “some unity of basic faith” that “lifts morality from calculation to devotion, and gives life nobility and significance despite our mortal brevity.” And finally, he writes, “there must be education–some technique…for the transmission of culture. Whether through imitation, initiation or instruction, whether through father or mother, teacher or priest, the lore and heritage of the tribe–it’s language and knowledge, it’s morals and manners, its technology and arts–must be handed down to the young, as the very instrument through which they are turned from animals into men.”
How Civilizations Can Be Destroyed
Most interesting to me is Durant’s survey of how civilizations can come to an end; how even the disappearance of a single prerequisite may “destroy a civilization.” Here are some of the causes he lists which have led to the destruction of previously great civilizations:
- “A geological cataclysm or a profound climatic change” (he published this first volume in 1935)
- “an uncontrolled epidemic like that which wiped out half the population of the Roman Empire under the Antonines, or the Black Death that helped to end the Feudal Age” (he was 33 years old when the influenza of 1918 killed nearly 50 million people worldwide)
- “the exhaustion of the land, or the ruin of agriculture through the exploitation of the country by the town, resulting in a precarious dependence upon foreign food supplies” (the US became a “net importer” of food in 2005 for the first time in 50 years)
- “the failure of natural resources, either of fuels or of raw materials”
- “a change in trade routes, leaving a nation off the main line of the world’s commerce”
- “mental or moral decay from the strains, stimuli and contacts of urban life, from the breakdown of traditional sources of social discipline and the inability to replace them”
- “the weakening of the stock by a disorderly sexual life, or by an epicurean, pessimist, or quietest philosophy”
- “the decay of leadership through the infertility of the able, and the relative smallness of the families that might bequeath most fully the cultural inheritance of the race” (the total fertility rate in all European countries is below the population replenishment rate–NY Times article, 2002)
- “a pathological concentration of wealth, leading to class wars, disruptive revolutions, and financial exhaustion” (here’s a blog post about the concentration of wealth in the US)
Durant concludes that “civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or transmission may bring it to an end. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization.”
I am an optimist, not a pessimist
I realize that by even quoting Durant, and by adding comments or links in quotes, my position on world conditions may be completely misunderstood by my readers. I am not a pessimist. I do not believe the end of civilization is imminent. I do believe, however, that the dominant leadership role of the United States in world affairs may be coming to an end. It appears likely that in the 21st century the economies of China and India will pass that of the United States. It seems certain that the mounting US debt combined with the larger role of the federal government in the economy will stifle US economic growth in the next decade or two. However I do believe that is not pre-destined. I think it is a matter of choice and will. But the lessons of history seem to be largely unknown and/or unheeded.
If the spirit of technological innovation and entrepreneurship which made the United States the most productive economy in the past century can continue to thrive, we may indeed remain a leading world power indefinitely. Attending conferences with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs with their world-changing ideas gives one plenty to be optimistic about. The move towards transparent government, promoted by so many on the left and the right, and enabled by new technology, is a huge reason to be hopeful. The scanning of all the world’s books by Google makes the transmission of culture from past civilizations possible in ways that Durant could never have dreamed of.
And the power of social networks to bring people together as friends, families, and communities, may shape our relationships in the future more than industrialization, modern transportation, and even the telephone. The future of self-government may be connected to social networks and mobile networks in ways we can’t yet imagine.
In 1935 a religious leader I revere described his vision for a future civilization of peace and prosperity by referring to the power of mobile communication. “We must…improve the means of communication until with radio in our pockets we may communicate with friends and loved ones from any point at any given moment.”
Mark Pincus from Zynga described in a speech at Stanford how 100 years from now our generation may be described by people then as the generation that brought forth treasures to the world such as Amazon.com and Facebook. He feels his career has been or should be part of a great effort to create immortal internet treasures that will benefit the world for generations.
Having been involved in the founding of Ancestry.com, the leading site for discovering one’s heritage, and more recently, FamilyLink.com, the leading social site for families, Durant’s final words struck me:
As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.“
FamilyLink.com is now the top Facebook Connect site. We are helping millions of families connect with one another. We have more 16.7 million users that are connected to more than 10 relatives. We hope these families will transmit stories and memories and family values and heritage from one generation to another. Our demographic profile shows equal numbers of users from 18-30, 31-45, and 46-60, and half as many under 18 and over 60. There is clearly interest by family members of all ages to connect with other family members.
I am not suggesting that FamilyLink might become one of the “immortal internet treasures” that Pincus described, or that we are going to play a key role in preserving culture and civilization. In fact, we are a product of the civilized world’s focus on the family, not the cause of it. If we didn’t play the role we play, to paraphrase Durant, “given like…conditions…another [company] would beget like results.”
But I am suggesting that on this holiday weekend, you might want to get your own copy of “The Story of Civilization” and join with me and my brother-in-law in a conversation about what lessons can be learned from history and philosophy that might help all of us “preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own.”
This Week: Ancestry IPO, FamilyLink goes viral, Navigating Facebook Platform changes
Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Applications, FamilyLink.com, Genealogy, IPO Watch, Social Networking Watch
This week is going to be amazing. Possibly, the most interesting week of my career. I’ll explain.
Ancestry.com is slated to go public on Wednesday. I always dreamed of being part of that IPO, but I’ve been out of the company (7 years) longer than I was in the company (6 years). But my excitement about watching a company I helped create trade on a public exchange is mounting. I cannot wait to see what happens when ACOM debuts on the NASDAQ this week.
I’m thinking about holding an IPO party at my house on Wednesday for the early Ancestry.com employees who are no longer with the company. It would be fun to reminisce a bit and see where everyone is now. If “public demand” for a party is high, I’m sure we’ll be able to pull it off on short notice. Between LinkedIn and Facebook, my blog and twitter, we should be able to get at least a dozen or two people to show up. If you’re interested already (and qualify as a “former Ancestry employee”), shoot me an email. (paul AT familylink.com) We’ll watch a couple of old company videos and hopefully some Tivo’d coverage of some of the business news about Ancestry from Wednesday.
This week is also exciting because FamilyLink.com is going viral. Our FamilyLink.com Quantcast chart shows that we’ve had more than 6 million unique visitors since we debuted last month and we are just getting started. We think our Flash-based family tree tool is the funnest online tree ever created, and it is getting tons of usage. We hope to be a top Facebook Connect site soon. In fact, Facebook’s Wiki shows FamilyLink as an example of how to create invites and requests using Facebook Connect. Facebook has been an incredible platform for our company to build on.
Even though Compete.com shows us as having more unique visitors than Ancestry.com, and even though we are classified by them as a genealogy site, we are actually a totally different creature. We are a family social site. Users of our Facebook applications (we have about 60MM users) can easily navigate to FamilyLink.com and enjoy an enhanced family experience there. We connect you to your living relatives. We help you share content and life experiences and memories with your immediate and extended family. Family trees are a fun part of our overall experience (because everyone loves to see how they fit into their family) but we are not currently a deep research site for ancestral records.
About 15% of our users consider themselves genealogists (which means 85% do not). Many of them already subscribe to paid services like Ancestry.com or use free genealogy web sites for research. We believe that genealogy will likely be an important advertising category for us in the future, since we are attracting millions of families to our service and as the saying goes, “there’s a genealogist in every family.” But you can also say there is a photographer, event planner, scrapbooker, top chef, health nut, sports fanatic, vacationer and couponeer in every family. When we ask customers what additional features they want us to build into FamilyLink, we get everything from photo albums to recipe sharing to online chats and event planning tools. We will generate ad or product revenue from a lot of categories as we try to meet the needs of millions of families worldwide.
This week is also intense and interesting because of all the upcoming changes Facebook announced for their Platform last week. Here are some links:
- Video of Facebook’s platform changes. Ethan Beard, who heads up the Facebook Developers Network, describes the product roadmap in this nearly one hour video. Mark Zuckerberg introduced him.
- Facebook’s developer policies have been condensed from 17 pages to 3 pages — all policies are now in one place
- Nick O’Neill’s This Week in Facebook post shows how much is going on at Facebook right now. The pace of change is incredible, and it is hard to keep up with everything, but the pay off for being in the Facebook ecosystem can still be amazing.
More information has been coming out in the last few months about the best ways to monetize social web sites than I have ever seen before. The Social Ad Summit in NYC provided a lot of good information, especially about virtual currencies and virtual goods; PeanutLabs followed the Mike Arrington “Spam Facebook Like a Pro” blog post with some great survey data about how users prefer to pay for in-game virtual currency; and this article from VentureDig covers monetizing social networks with recommendations for 2010.
It’s a great time to be in social networking. Investor interest in social networking related companies seems really strong. For years the conventional wisdom was that social networks could not be monetized, but it turns out that for most of that time the fastest growing social networks (like Twitter today) weren’t even focused on monetization. They were sacrificing revenue or deferring even thinking about revenue to capitalize on the fact that millions of people would be joining social networks and that the network effect would lead to a few winners, with a winner-take-most outcome. That was a very good bet.
It is well known that Facebook has turned cash flow positive, Twitter raised money at a $1 billion valuation, and Zynga is generating a ton of revenue, some say about $250 million this year. But it is not so well known that teen social network myYearbook turned profitable this year (in Q1 according to CEO Geoff Cook) because of “Lunch Money” and virtual goods. There are other under-the-radar social networking companies and app/game developers that aren’t well known at the moment that will breakout in 2010 and become widely known.
Here’s to hoping that FamilyLink.com will be one of them.
What love songs did your parents love?
Filed under: Families, FamilyLink.com, Market Research Statistics
I am running a survey tonight on We’re Related (a family-oriented Facebook application with 17 million monthly users) to find out if people know the love songs their parents loved.
Given our modern obsession with music, I find it interesting that only 7% of the respondents say they do. (See Survey Results)
Come to think of it, I don’t know my parents’ favorite love songs, but now I want to. I do know one song that my in-laws fell in love to 50 years ago while dancing because my wife used it as the sound-track for their 50th anniversary wedding video last year. It was really, really meaningful to have that song play along with all the pictures of them dating and then having a family.
Here are some of the answers I’ve gotten so far tonight:
- Waltz Across Texas, by Ernest Tubb. (YouTube video)
- Always Love You, by Whitney Houston (YouTube video)
- Summertime (YouTube–performed by Billie Holliday)
- All Around the Water Tank, by Jimmy Rogers (YouTube video — “it’s a very old song. My momma’s 84 years old.”)
- He’s a Rebel, by the Crystals (YouTube video)
Do you know the love songs that your parents loved?
If you could run a survey about music and families, what would it be?
Does product loyalty run in families?
Filed under: Brand Marketing, FamilyLink.com, Market Research Statistics
Last year, as FamilyLink.com’s product strategy and business model were becoming more clear, we realized again that in many ways, the family is the center of the economic universe. So many consumer purchases are really made within families. Think about the mortgage, the car payment, educational expenses, travel, health-related spending, consumer electronics, and gifts too. Most of our major and minor expenditures have something to do with family.
As FamilyLink reaches more consumers each month with our family applications on social and mobile networks, we have more opportunity to understand our users better. We have developed a robust survey tool that allows us to collect thousands of answers very quickly on all kinds of questions. We often ask our members what they like or don’t like about our applications, what they want us to do next, and how we can improve our products and services. But sometimes we ask our members what products they use, or like most, or recommend. We also religiously read every user post on our Uservoice customer feedback site which contains thousands of ideas and suggestions from our customers, along with their collective votes.
Last year, before we developed our in-house survey tool, we ran a third-party survey to find out what products people used because their mother used them. I blogged about it last February. The top ten products were Tide, Ivory, Clorox, Campbell’s Soup, Crisco, Dove, Crest, Kraft, Comet, Quaker. I have no idea why 7 of the top 10 start with a K sound, but they do. These are all household products that most people use daily or weekly.
I asked a similar question recently to discover what products (brands) people use because their father used them. And for the first time, I’m publishing the list here, in ranked order. We received 19,288 responses to this question.
- Old Spice
- Ford
- Craftsman
- Colgate
- Chevy
- Gillette
- WD40
- Crest
- Heinz Ketchup
- Pepsi
- Budweiser
- Sony
- Coca Cola
- John Deere
- Nokia
- Tide
- Marlboro
- Honda
- Nike
- Dial soap
- Hellmans mayo
- Ivory
- Sears
- Toyota
- Folgers coffee
- Duct tape
- Brut
- Kraft
- Dove
- Dodge
Old Spice had 16 times more responses than Dodge, which was in 30th place. The survey was unaided and all the answers were typed into a text box. The hardest part in compiling the survey answers was in finding all the misspellings of Budweiser. The dads that influenced their kids to drink Bud also forgot to buy them a dictionary.
If you had a customer base of 50 million people of all ages and family sizes using a family-related web application, how do you think this kind of market research could both generate revenue for your company and also provide a better experience for your members than traditional display banner ads? In other words, how do you think we can or should incorporate popular brands into our user experience?
(We have some really fun ideas, and are working with some selected brands already, but I always love to hear other thoughts on big strategy questions like this.)
SpeedRecruiting
A few years back, inspired by the book “Angel Investing,” we founded FundingUniverse.com and started holding SpeedPitching events–two hour events where about ten entrepreneurs could have a few minutes at small tables with 2-3 investors.
FundingUniverse SpeedPitching events have been successfully held in six states, and are held bi-monthly in Utah. They are very affordable for entrepreneurs and they are popular with angels and VCs because they get a little exposure to a lot of deals very quickly–and save them a lot of time.
Most investors will tell you that they know within a minute or two if they are interested in a deal. But most introductory meetings between entrepreneurs (who think everyone should love their idea and can talk about it passionately for a long time) and angels/VCs are half an hour at least. Often, they go a lot longer than that, because it’s hard to cut a meeting short without appearing to be rude.
Many investors have told me they love this approach to deal flow because it saves them time.
As an entrepreneur, given the stage that FamilyLink.com is at, raising capital is not taking up much time these days. What is taking up as much time as I can possibly give it is recruiting–finding candidates on LinkedIn, responding to candidates who find us, identifying needs for positions we need to create and fill, and then doing lots of phone and in person interviews.
I blogged early today about our plan to use a Billboard on I-15 to attract potential candidates here in Utah. But the more candidates that we get, the more time it takes to screen them, hold preliminary interviews, and then finally, get the top 3 or so candidates in face to face interviews with at least 5-6 hiring managers.
To streamline this process, what we really need to do is set up some kind of SpeedRecruiting event, where we can schedule 2 hours for all our top managers to meet with maybe two dozen or more potential recruits in a rapid-fire format. Each manager can have a prepared list of questions they want to ask each prospective employee. (It’s probably a good idea to ask the same questions each time to fairly assess the candidates for any given position.)
The goal of SpeedRecruiting would be to filter out candidates who aren’t nearly as impressive in person as their resumes suggest, and to identify top prospects for in-depth interviews with key hiring managers.
I can already see several potential flaws in this approach, but I’d like to know what other fast growing companies have done to speed up the recruiting process without ending up hiring employees that don’t end up as valuable contributors. Hiring too fast almost always ends in regret.
Have you seen any best-practices in this regard?
Help, we need suggestions here!
Recruiting with Billboards
Filed under: Billboards, FamilyLink.com, Recruiting, Utah Jobs
Several of the best Utah high-tech companies have billboards along the I-15 corridor from Provo to Salt Lake City that are focused on recruiting. I recall billboards from Omniture, Mozy, Property Solutions, The Generations Network, Orange Soda, and Doba. I’m sure there are others as well that I just don’t recall. I’m wondering if Move Networks has used billboards–but I can’t recall.
Omniture can afford to creating an ongoing serious of recruiting billboards–most of them with messages that only hard-core developers would get. But more recently they’ve mainstreamed their recruiting message with interesting billboards like “We need more Dougs” or “We need more Kates.” They followed that up with a “We have too many Mikes” billboard and then more recently, a “just kidding Mike” message, though I can’t recall the actual wording. They are definitely the 800 lb gorilla in Utah recruiting and billboards seem to play a big part of that.
Mozy’s billboard talks about afternoon meetings (probably for the developers who like to work late and sleep late) and announces they have a Ninja-friendly workplace.
Property Solutions is always looking for top PHP programmers, but their latest billboard announces a run for the cure for Rabies. When you go to the Rabies web site, you do see a “We’re Hiring” link and they do have several open positions. I really like the design of their recruiting pages.
The Generations Network has billboards that focus on it’s “one million subscribers and counting” message, but I can’t recall if it is explicity a recruiting billboard or not.
There is an excellent billboard from APX, I believe, that says “Change your Facebook Status to EMPLOYED” and says they are hiring 85 internal sales people. Very eye-grabbing. Great message.
Does anyone at any of these companies know how important the billboards are in actually filling jobs? I would love to have reader comments about the use of billboards for recruiting. I assume these companies find the billboards a good investment, because they continue them month after month and year after year.
I decided yesterday that it is time for FamilyLink.com to try a recruiting billboard on I-15. I’ve asked our marketing department to put together some ideas for this.
It might be nice to combine a key message about our growth, with an explicit recruitment message. For example, we have more than 40MM users of our Facebook application, and we are nearing the top 100 of all US web properties based on unique monthly visitors. More importantly, we are profitable and will be filling at least 20 positions in the next several months, although only about 10 of the job openings are currently listed on our corporate web site.
What are your favorite recruiting billboards?
What suggestions would you have for FamilyLink.com? Most people have never heard of us, though about 1 of every 6 Facebook users uses our application. The app itself is called “We’re Related,” so most people haven’t heard of FamilyLink.com.
What is the best recruiting call to action you have seen to attract interest in a company?
I’d love to hear your ideas.
FamilyLink.com is hiring
We have several open positions at FamilyLink.com, and I’ve decided to blog about them in hopes that it will increase our pool of potential candidates and educate potential candidates on our hiring process–particularly our use of trust networks to vet candidates. If you are interested, or know someone who is, please refer them to our job listings at our corporate web site, or email paul AT familylink.com.
As background, FamilyLink.com is the developer of We’re Related, a top 5 Facebook application, with 37 million users. We also run web sites including WorldVitalRecords.com, WorldHistory.com, and will be launching GenSeek.com and FamilyLink.com in the coming weeks. We also run AdMazing.com, a niche advertising network with a family history focus. And our first iPhone applications will soon be approved for the App Store. We rank in the top 150 of all web properties in overall traffic according to Quantcast, are venture and angel-backed and cash-flow positive. We have nearly 50 employees and full-time contractors, including many that work in our Provo, Utah headquarters, and many that work remotely (California, Colorado, Seattle, overseas.)
For all key positions we try to use our LinkedIn networks. We reach out to 50-200 colleagues we trust and ask, “who do you know that is the best [job title here] you have ever worked with?” Then we actively try to recruit the top candidates that are referred to by our trusted sources. Internally, we like to ask, “Would Google hire this person?” (I mean, if the economy was good) because we are really looking for world-class talent. Like Google, we want to find smart people who get things done.
If we don’t get the right referral for a position by pro-actively querying our trust network, then we do accept applications via our corporate site, or through email. But in this case, our policy is to take a “try before you buy” approach — meaning, we will hire the top candidate as a contractor for a short-term project, to see how well they perform and how well they work with our existing team. We think this helps both parties determine if the fit is a good one.
We have a number of key positions that we are trying to fill right now, including an HR manager / recruiter, that will increase our ability to hire the rest of the positions more quickly. We already have some good candidates for some of these positions, and are working through the interviewing process, but none of these spots have been filled yet (and some haven’t even been posted to our web site.)
- HR Manager / Recruiter
- Usability Manager
- QA Manager (listed as Software Test Manager on corporate web site)
- Front end / HTML developers
- Product Manager for genealogy properties
- Controller
- Chief Genealogy Officer
- Content Licensing Managers (4-5 open positions)
- Project Manager / assistant to Chief Social Officer
- Twitter Interns (4-5 full time or part time summer openings)
- Outbound sales consultants
- Business Development / Marketing manager
In the coming weeks, we may be adding these positions to our corporate site, but if the right candidate emerges sooner rather than later, we will definitely jump:
- VP of Online Advertising Sales (should probably be located in NYC or west coast)
- Product managers for social applications/features
- Localization manager (for apps and web sites)
- Online Advertising Sales Managers
- Mobile developers (iPhone, Google Android, other platforms)
- Mobile product manager
- Product manager, WorldHistory.com
- Lead developer for genealogy properties
- Market research / internal survey manager
- User Interface Designer (reporting to current lead designer)
- Affiliate marketing manager (for WorldVitalRecords)
- Content Digitization Manager
If you want to apply for any of these positions, please make sure you have enough endorsements in LinkedIn that we know you are qualified and experienced in the position you are applying for.
Treat applying to work at FamilyLink.com the way entrepreneurs are told to treat approaching a venture capitalist. Almost all VCs exclusively look at deals that are recommended to them by people they already trust, including existing portfolio companies. VCs don’t have time to look at thousands of business plans that might be submitted “over the transom.”
Likewise, it is so important for us to build a world class team, that we often don’t have time to look at the dozens or hundreds of applicants that we might be able to find from posting job advertisements everywhere or scouring resume databases. What we need is for our trust network to tell us that you are a top candidate for a particular position. If someone we trust vouches for you, then we will put you through a series of interviews, where usually 5 or more of our existing employees meet with you to determine the fit.
We have an energetic, fast-paced, innovative culture, and we are on the cutting edge of application development on social networks and mobile platforms. We believe in investing in our people, including providing them with great equipment and sending them to many conferences and industry events for ongoing training and networking.
We hope to build a company that becomes one of the great places to work in Utah, with offices and remote employees in other locations as needed. For example, I’m trying to convince one or more of our developers to move to Silicon Valley so we can be closer to our friends at Facebook. I’d like to hire a VP of Ad Sales in New York City or possible San Francisco. We would consider hiring some of our genealogy team members to work in Washington, DC, and possible in 1-2 international locations — yet to be determined.
If you are interested in joining our fast-growing company, please help us find you by tapping into our trust networks and giving us sufficient social proof that you are right for us, that it makes the hiring decision easy. Or if you are an independent contractor or work for a company that could provide some of the services we need through outsourcing rather than hiring, please give us similar social proof from people we trust that we ought to hire your firm rather than fill some of these employee spots. We look forward to hearing from you.
Near Death Experiences
Filed under: Advice for Startups, Entrepreneurship, FamilyLink.com, Genealogy, World Vital Records
No, this blog post is not about metaphysical near-death experiences, but I bet the title caught your eye. (As an aside, I read the book Life After Life as a teenager, and thought it was pretty interesting. Since reading that book, though, I’ve seen many efforts to commercialize near-death experiences that I think are bogus. I firmly believe in the immortality of all human souls, and I believe that some near-death experiences are genuine, but that is not the topic of my blog post today.)
What I want to say is that many successful startup companies go through a near-death experience before they figure out how to make their business model work.
I’ve seen this over and over again, both in companies that I have founded, as well as in companies that I have advised or just observed.
I know many startups fail, so I suppose it makes sense that many other startups nearly fail, before becoming successful, but it does surprise me a bit to know of very, very few startup companies that don’t have a brush with death. You’d think that with all the business schools and case studies and entrepreneurial blogs and all the expert advice that is easily accessible to founding teams that many entrepreneurs could conceive of a business idea, write a plan, build a team, raise some capital, find customers and execute on the business plan without serious setbacks.
But that almost never happens. Implementing ideas is not easy. Recruiting the right people to a startup company is extremely difficult. Version 1 products have flaws. Internal systems can break. Competition can be extremely intense. Reaching the right customers can be difficult. Sales cycles can be way longer than planned. Getting attention in the marketplace can be expensive. So many things can go wrong, and usually do. Even when you’ve done startups before.
Paul Graham, who runs Y Combinator, which may turn out to be the most successful incubator of all time, publishes the most excellent essays for entrepreneurs. Founders should read all of his work. But more importantly, they should study the businesses that have come out of Y Combinator and try to understand how they can build products so inexpensively and attract customers so quickly and have exit options so soon. Y Combinator’s track record is amazing.
Y Combinator businesses may appear to be pursuing technology for technology’s sake, sometimes without a clear business model, but like Google, if you first set out to build an incredible world-changing product and succeed, you will almost always find a business model to support it.
I laugh at the commentators who speculate about Twitter’s future. People think the sky is falling because Twitter doesn’t generate revenue, doesn’t have a business model.
As a Twitter addict I know that such comments are completely absurd. There is no doubt at all that Twitter, like LinkedIn before it, will find a sustainable revenue model. Both companies will be worth billions. LinkedIn has forever changed business networking. It is ridiculous for people to try to do business without relying on LinkedIn. So while LinkedIn focused initially on attracting millions of avid users, eventually they got around to monetizing the very valuable audience. Google did the same thing before it. And Twitter will do the same thing after permanently changing the world of communication.
Another conclusion I make when considering Y Combinator is that Guy Kawasaki was right in Art of the Start when he talked about early stage company valuations. Guy said you add $500,000 for every engineer in your company and subtract $250,000 for every MBA. Pretty funny, but often rather true.
Y Combinator funds technologists. A lot of entrepreneurs are “business” people without the ability to develop their own technology. (In my first startup I was the product developer–now I’ve shifted to a management/executive role, and it is therefore more expensive for me to build a company now than it was in the early days. I need a “team” to build products now.)
Certainly a company needs management and sales and marketing and support eventually. But I think one reason that so many companies go through near-death experiences is that they hire their team in the wrong order. First you have to nail the product. Then you scale the team to be able to sell and support the product.
My favorite near-death experience of all time is the story of Enhance Interactive (formerly Ah-ha), a pay-per-click search engine that held a company meeting sometime back in 2000 or so, to let all the employees know that the business was shutting down. The company was out of money and while it has some customer traction and some revenue, there was no more funding runway–so the doors had to close. At the end of the meeting one of the employees said, “Can we go back to work now?” The CEO was taken back and said, “Don’t you realize what this meeting was about? We are shutting the company down.” The employee said, no, I’ve got some customers to service, and went back to work. Apparently so too did another dozen or two employees, who basically worked for almost nothing until the company turned the corner. A few years later the company was sold for tens of millions of dollars.
I won’t go into the details right now, and it wasn’t anything as dramatic as what Enhance Interactive experienced, but FamilyLink.com (corporate site) had its own very intense near-death experience in the past few weeks. Amid the global economic meltdown, a bank loan was called, and we scrambled for weeks to find a way to pay it off. A few options emerged, some less attractive than others, and then finally, a couple of days after Christmas, we were completely delivered from our financial pressures. We have now finalized our Series B funding which will be announced shortly.
Amazingly, at about the same time, we turned profitable. Just six months ago we were losing nearly $300,000 per month. But through a combination of very painful cost reductions and the growth in our subcription, advertising, and product revenue streams, we literally turned the corner the week after Christmas, and hope to never turn back.
It won’t be easy, since the economy is in rough shape and there are all kinds of execution risks still ahead of us. But there is literally a night-and-day difference between where we were last year and where we are today. Our team spirit is excellent. We’re hiring lots more people for our call center. And we are carefully recruiting top technologists who can help us improve our current web properties and build new ones as well. We’re also looking for a Chief Genealogy Officer who will help guide all our efforts to bring the world’s genealogy records to internet users worldwide.
We still plan to launch FamilyLink.com, GenSeek.com, and WorldHistory.com in the coming weeks/months. Each one has the potentia to revolutionize a market. We put up our corporate web site late last week, so that people can see everything the company does and not just define us by any single web site or application.
I have said many times before that FamilyLink.com is most likely my last company. This recent near-death experience confirms that for me. There is probably no way I can go through something like this again. I’m too old for this kind of intensity. I had serious insomnia for weeks and wasn’t able to sleep for more than 2 or 3 hours at a time. I missed out on most of the holidays with my family.
I am sleeping better now, thank you very much, but this near-death experience probably took a few years off my life, and I’m not eager to repeat it any time soon.
If you are a blogger and have written about your startup’s near death experience, please comment and link to it. (Maybe someday I’ll collect a couple dozen of these stories and have them published.)
Top 25 Facebook App and hybrid business models
Filed under: Facebook, Family Tree Projects, FamilyLink.com, Genealogy
I remember when I first learned about LinkedIn.com, and was the 4th person to sign up for it in Utah County. Soon I got into a competition with two friends to see who could end up with the most (real) connections. I finally won that competition, but we all ended up with hundreds of connections. But I remember when one of my friends knew they were losing on the connections number that they claimed to be winning on "endorsements." They changed their key metric, so that they could claim that they had actually won.
The key metric on Facebook apps used to be total installs. Some apps were incredibly viral, especially early on, and got millions of installs. But some of these apps were also fluff and lost their appeal very quickly, so they actually didn’t get used much. Later, Facebook reporting started focusing more on Daily Active Users (DAU), and apps were being valued by third party reporting systems based on how many people were using them each day. Last night, our social team told me that Facebook just replaced Daily Active Users with Monthly Active Users (MAU), and that we are one of the winners in this changing in reporting. With this metric, our We’re Related application jumps up to rank #23 overall for all Facebook apps, with more than 2.1 million Monthly Active Users. It’s gratifying to see our application being used by so many Facebook users world wide to connect with relatives.
Quantcast is now reporting that our FamilyLink Network of sites and apps for families now has 2.77 million uniques globally and 1.15 million from the U.S. The chart looks great, with real steady growth over the last few months. If this trend continues, we’ll soon become a top 1,000 internet property globally which could lead to more revenue opportunities for the company. Our advertising revenue continues to grow as a percentage of total revenue, and we’d like to see that trend continue, even though we absolutely love the subscription business model that WorldVitalRecords.com uses to generate the majority of our revenue.
We’ll also be launching a storefront later this month for the first time with thousands of products available for purchase, so for the first time we’ll be able to advertise these products to our millions of users.
Our investors support our hybrid business model (subscription, advertising, e-commerce) but it is hard to forecast each one of these with such a short track record. We started seling advertising in January. And now e-commerce is just about to launch. I’m sure all of these revenue streams will grow, but at what rate?
Can anyone who has worked in a company with a hybrid business model privately email me, or comment publicly about what they think is typical for the revenue-mix going forward?
I need to carve out a few hours to read some SEC filings from some internet companies so I can find some of this info out myself. A friend of mine said he’ll try to make SEC filings available on the Amazon Kindle, and I told him I’ll be subscribing to a bunch of them, so that every quarter I’ll get them pushed to my device
That reminds me of a great domain name that Provo Labs once
purchased for a potential service to make SEC filings more accessible
and searchable. The domain was suggested by social media creative
genius and podcaster Judd Bagley. It was 10qverymuch.com. We might even
still own it, if someone would like to make an offer for it.
I find myself reading TechCrunch and Mashable every morning on my back porch from my Kindle. I was amazed when I found myself paying for a subscription to these blogs, when they are actually free online, but they are really cheap and the Kindle reading experience is much more enjoyable and relaxing than sitting in front of a computer, or even using my blackberry or iphone. Yesterday I wanted to subscribe to the Economist on my Kindle, but it doesn’t seem to be available yet.
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