FaceContact Blog

Four months have passed since the great Seedcamp event in September 2007. So we decided to make a comparison of the traffic data for the Seedcamp finalists to answer several questions: how they are doing today and what Seedcamp gave them in terms of traffic. We have used Alexa.com and Compete.com for that purpose.

Main results:

• Ten out of twenty Seedcamp finalists are in top 100,000 sites according to Alexa by the beginning of February 2008. Here they are sorted by current Alexa weekly traffic rank (Artflock, FaceContact, Buildersite, Tickex, Debatewise, Zemanta, Kublax, Tablefinder, RentMineOnline, Avenue7 ). The ranking above heavily depends on methodology, so please see more details for each company below to get better understanding and do your own analysis. Other Seedcamp finalists didn’t passed the “top 100,000″ barrier, however some of them have better Alexa rating than those who passed, but there are no more additional details for those sites.
• So far, there are no substantial differences between Seedcamp finalists and Seedcamp winners. Moreover, the two top positions are hold by companies, who were not selected as Seedcamp winners (Artflock and FaceContact).
• We can see substantial spike of traffiс during Seedcamp event. Traffic surged around the time of the Seedcamp, but dropped back off to pre-Seedcamp levels. Seedcamp effect was at least 4-5 times less than Techcrunch 40 effect. 4 months later only 4 companies were able to reach comparable levels (Artflock, Buildersite, Tickex) or even exceed them (FaceContact).
• Through the geographical analysis of users we can separate those leaders in three groups:
  • UK-focused companies: Artflock (UK - 49%, Germany - 17%, US - 8%), Buildersite ( UK - 90%, Germany - 6%), Debatewise (UK - 96%, US - 6%).
  • International-focused companies with leading US presence: FaceContact (US - 27%, UK - 13%, Spain - 9%), Kublax (US - 46%, UK - 17%, Singapore - 8%), RentMineOnline (US - 26%, UK - 21%, Spain - 13%).
  • International-focused companies with leading European presence: Tickex (Romania - 37%, US - 28%, UK - 25%), Zemanta (Slovenia - 27%, UK - 18%, Germany - 15%), Tablefinder (Sweden - 32% , US - 22%, UK - 20%).

See detailed analysis for each company and more detailed tables on slides below

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Corporate sector may benefit from their employees involvement in social networks. Currently most companies take very aggressive position towards social networks, because most users expand their networks from their office computers during working hours. In a recent Clearswift survey of 1,200 global HR professionals, 79% percent said their company was completely blocking access to social networking sites.

For corporations it is hard to establish whether their employees use social networks for their personal needs or for business purposes. Most of them claim that they use social network like Linkedin mostly for business purposes to get new contacts and sales opportunities. But requests to integrate their contacts into CRM/HR systems are often resisted by the employees.

However, in a number of companies the policy has recently been revised. For example, Allen & Overy (an international law firm) has been forced to lift the ban after the firm’s IT department was bombarded with staff complaints following a firmwide ban on social networking website Facebook.

Recruiters and especially headhunters already actively use social networks to source new candidates, and corporate recruiters follow the lead. Corporate employee bonus programs could be a perfect match for integration with employees’ social networks. This way employees still control their social networks, but have enough motivation to share potential candidates with HR department.

According to a recent Spherion Emerging Workforce Study, 58 percent of top HR executives said that referrals are the best way to recruit top talent. In another survey by HCI/ExecuNet, 62 percent of recruiters listed networking as their most effective means of finding senior managers.

Cisco Systems Inc., the California-based Internet pioneer, created a program called “Friends,” where prospects are paired up with Cisco employees of similar work backgrounds. Cisco employees act as an extended sales force, helping convince on-the-fence and passive candidates that the company is a viable (and friendly) employer. 40 to 60 percent of all new Cisco hires now come from employee referrals.

Some companies like Eli Lilly and Company are transforming employee referral programs from de facto program for family and friends to an explicit program of talent scouting. Talent scouting moves employee referral programs from reactive to proactive operations to reach into the workforce at multiple touch points and on a regular basis and aggressively solicit the names of prospects, even when openings do not yet exist for them.

What’s next? Companies already expand referral programs to search not only via employees (for instance, through alumni and clients) and not only job candidates (for instance, new clients). It is easy to benefit from the social networking boom by using Software-as-a-Service options.

For example, FaceContact.com, a venue for getting referral rewards, will provide integration of referral bonus programs into corporate websites.

Today we are presenting our company on Silicon Valley Open Doors 2007 conference.

See the movie from our presentation, which shows why providing referral bonus is important.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zM-iAA8jtc]

See our SVOD presentation with animation. facecontact_svod_blog.pps

I have decided to write in detail about my Seedcamp experience, because I believe that the goal of Seedcamp is to help all tech entrepreneurs in Europe and other countries. Initially, I tried to include insights from all the people whom I’d met during Seedcamp, but soon realized that this would be impossible. I hope that the people whom I haven’t mentioned in this blog will forgive me for that, and understand that the omission is because the Seedcamp experience was similar to drinking from a fire pump.

I haven’t described the round table and general discussion, because I believe that the most valuable part of Seedcamp was meeting face to face with people (“face contact” J). The most surprising thing was learning about the different ways in which people view our FaceContact product.

Day 1.

Seedcamp began with brief introduction of each team, which helped us understand what other people are doing and get to know each other. After that, we moved to the mentoring session. It was organized as follows: two companies met in one room with 2-3 mentors. Mentors rotated into different rooms every 40-60 min. Thus, you had enough time to talk in detail about your product and learn from the mentors’ experience. Our first mentoring session was with Mattias Mikshe, CEO of Stardoll, and was very empowering. He told us about the history of Stardoll, which started out as the hobby of the Scandinavian-born Liisa. Liisa was a factory worker and cleaner, and when she was 54 she quit her job, due to health reasons. Liisa started to learn how to use a computer from the basics. Inspired by a childhood passion for paper dolls, Liisa started drawing dolls and accompanying wardrobes and taught herself web design. Her personal homepage on Geocities, with pictures available for download, became a popular destination for teens. As a result of the high traffic, Geocities limited access to her page. In 2004, with the help of her son and his friend, she upgraded the site. Index Ventures saw traffic growth on Alexa and approached Liisa with an investment proposal. Even her son didn’t believe it could be possible to create a succefful business from such a passion, so he asked to be bought out. Index invited Mattias to work on the venture, and he transformed the company into a leading website with a successful business model, based on the sale of virtual goods. Moreover, Liisa is still drawing dolls up to 12 hours every day. Mattias also provided interesting insights into how to run large-scale business with few people. Robert Hamilton, a product manager for Google in Mobile, Google gave us advice about the primary drivers of successful software applications.

These drivers can be:

- Speed (Google’s primary focus);

- Money (Robert believes that money isn’t the main priority at Google, which believes that money will come after the users do);

- Virality /referability;

- Other drivers, like cost or market.

He recommended focusing more on user cases during application development and suggested reading Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn . He provided great advice about how to handle disgruntled users when you launch software that has some bugs. Robert believes that nothing is perfect, but that by choosing the right tone of voice you can handle those problems. You can establish the right tone, for example, by blogging. He also told us about product development practices at Google. In addition, it was very helpful to get several tips about how to motivate your team when you are at final stage of product development but haven’t yet launched. Sten Tamkivi of Skype also gave us some insights on product development.

Lee Strafford (formerly with PlusNet) identified interesting niches for our product and a possible strategy for future development. Lee was very positive about our product and also told us the PlusNet story. We had a great discussion with Ian Worley from Flow Interactive about usability and how to make our product simpler to understand. Ian asked us to present the competitive advantage that our products offer over other projects, and we included this in our final Seedcamp presentation.

After our discussion, Sean Park of Sixth Paradigm, LLP mentioned our company in his blog as an example of his open money idea.

Day 2.

Donna Sokolsky, the founder of SparkPR, gave us an interesting idea for our PR. She also proposed a couple of new taglines for our company:

- Facecontact.com keeps networks alive

- Help a friend in need and get a reward of up to $10,000

- A good idea never goes unrewardedWe chose the last one to be the tagline for our entry page.

Jennifer Janson of Six Degrees PR told us that SEO is transforming into online PR. She provided examples of how online businesses need to add more personal and business drama into their blogs, and not be afraid to talk about their mistakes. Those mistakes make companies seem more human, and customers will be more likely to use their empathy and forgive you those mistakes, as long as you are open about them. Rachel Bremer of Spark PR told us some interesting stories about how mainstream newspapers are becoming more interested in technology products, and that some news is appearing surprisingly and increasingly often in top magazines and newspapers. Philipp Huber of XCalibre Communications believes that companies need to engineer the environment so that people can understand and comment on their products. He believes that case studies are great way to explain products to potential clients. And if you select a prominent and well respected company for your case study, it will be more likely to affect the minds of decision makers from similar or second-tier companies. He also provided examples of how to gain event conservative top managers as customers, by using a personal approach and demonstrating the product in the client’s office.

Olivier Beste and Fabian Hansman, partners of Founders Link, were great mentors. Olivier and Fabian have a very interesting model for their company. They look for interesting ideas and also look for good founders and then bring them together. Olivier provided specific advice, because he knew our market well and could comment on the advantages and disadvantages of various models in this market. He provided interesting ideas for features for our continuing product development.

Kristof Fahy of Blackberry analyzed our product in terms of mobile technology. He proposed referring to FaceContact as a way to push technology to the market for jobs and services.

Day 3.

The most amazing mentoring session was with Anil Hansjee of Google, David Ranjan of Oracle, and Stewart Townsend of Sun Microsystems. Anil started by joking that it is not right to have two entrepreneurs and the corporate development directors of three leading companies in the same room, and that it should be at least the other way around. We were pleasantly surprised to get very positive feedback from the corporate development directors. Anil of Google even called FaceContact.com a “crack of referral problem”: effective (as a result of cash incentive) lead generation with guaranteed quality (by your social network). Rodrigo Madanes of Skype, who is leading Skype’s design, provided helpful insights into how to improve our product.

Sam Sathi of Blognation.co.uk was very positive and recommended that we move in the direction of building intelligent applications, which will foresee users’ needs based on an analysis of their profiles and activities. Sam provided interesting suggestions for possible features.

Chris Grew of Heller Ehrman, LLP gave us additional advice about some legal issues and created a new definition of our product, “A job site without jobs.” We also spoke with Max Polyakov, who has an R&D office in Eastern Europe and headquarters in London, just like FaceContact, Ltd. does. We learned that Max is behind Jobtonic, one of our competitors. Max informed me that Jobtonic just overtook Zubka in sales. He also recommended reading Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore.

Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK spent a lot of time with each Seedcamp participant, preparing reports on every company. I also talked about our product with Heather Harde, the CEO of Techcrunch.

I also would like to thank other people, with whom I had shorter discussions: Charles Grimsdale, Eden Ventures; Ouriel Ohayon , General Manager, LightSpeed Venture Partners; Richard Evans, Headhunter, SheridanEvans; Bretton Putter, Forsythe Group; Niklas Zennstrom, Atomico (formerly Skype/ KaZaA); Nic Brisbourne, DFJ Esprit; Robin Klein, The Accelerator Group; Sonali De Rycker, Atlas Ventures; Ben Holmes, Index Ventures; Danny Rimer, Index Ventures; Klaus Hommels, Balderton Capital; Mark Sonne Kharazmi, Mattias Ljungman, Atomico; Marcus Taylor, Partner, Erlang Consulting, and many others.

And special thanks to Saul Klein, Reshma Sohoni, and other members of the Seedcamp team, who spent that week with us and made Seedcamp a great event!

Sean Park, founding partner at Sixth Paradigm (one of the mentors at Seedcamp 2007), believes that theFacecontact.com service also implements the idea of open money.

Sean writes:

Indeed, one of the seedcamp ‘07 finalists (disclosure: I am an investor in seedcamp), facecontact.com, is something along these lines: …it is a simple and effective tool for referral tracking and reward administration for referring job candidates, clients, investors and other prospects.

The description of the open money concept can be found here: open money: a wealth acknowledgement information system.

How does open money work?

You treasure what you measure, and you measure what you treasure. Open money provides the tools to implement this maxim. What should we be treasuring in our culture and on our planet that we so far have no way to measure?

Throughout history, wealth acknowledgment evolved by becoming more abstract and less substantial. Open money follows this same pattern by being a meta-currency system, not just a new single kind of money. It enables the creation of many new types of money. It puts currency creation directly in the hands of communities so that they can create wealth-acknowledgment systems for tracking all types of wealth–tradable, measurable, and acknowledgeable–and so that they can tailor the tracking to fit their precise needs.

Open money works by providing a unified platform for the interchange of all these different kinds of wealth acknowledgment, just the same way that the Internet provides a unified platform for the interchange of all kinds of information. Just as the great shift of the Internet was in not specifying what kind of data can flow across it (unlike the phone network), the great shift of open money lies in not dictating which new form of wealth-acknowledgment people should use. Instead it provides the basic building blocks for communities to create new types of wealth-acknowledgment systems themselves.

Right off the bat, communities can use open money for simple things like Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), Time Banks, barter networks, carbon-emissions trading programs, baby-sitting co-ops, reputation tracking systems, business loyalty programs, etc. But the interesting stuff will happen when communities apply their creativity to invent new currencies that solve wealth-acknowledgment problems we don’t even have names for yet.

I have just returned from Seedcamp 2007. It was an amazing experience! We have a new tagline: “A good deed never goes unrewarded.” I like it more than our previous one, “Do business through people you know,” because it highlights our advantage of providing a reward for any kind of engagement. Thanks to Donna Sokolsky from SparkPR for her great input on our tagline and for her ideas on positioning our service. The most surprising thing was learning about the different ways in which people look at our product. We have several new, great definitions of our service: 1. Adding cash rewards to business referrals (Rachel Bremer, Director, SparkPR) 2. Cracking the referral problem: effective (as a result of cash incentive) lead generation with guaranteed quality (by your social network). (Anil Hansjee, Head of Corporate Development, Google)3. Push technology to jobs and services markets (Kristof Fahy, Blackberry) 4. A job site without jobs (Chris Grew, Partner, Heller Ehrman LLP) 5. We made our dull definition more clear-cut: an online tool for referral tracking through your social network with cash rewards and managed application and selection processes. 6. SaaS (Software as a Service) meets social networks (definition using buzzwords). I especially like the second one. J Also, please see our presentation for the Seedcamp judges. (I’ve deleted a couple of confidential slides). In next post, I will provide more details on our day-to-day experience during Seedcamp. Alex

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