The State of the Consumer Internet – A Perspective from Boston
On Wednesday last week during February’s Vilna Shul Speakers Series event a spirited audience of 80+ people and an all-star team of local CEOs explored the State of the Consumer Internet. Expertly guided by Jeff Bussgang, General Partner of Flybridge Capital Partners, who served as moderator, the all-star team of Dave Balter, founder and CEO of BzzAgent, Jeff Taylor, founder and CEO of Eons , Tributes and Monster, Brad Rosen, CEO of Drync, and Scott Savitz, CEO of Shoebuy served up insights into the operational details and issues related to running consumer Internet companies based in the Boston-area.
Customer acquisition was addressed as the first and priority topic among these CEO business drivers. Net-Net: They try to make money on the first sale and iterate a lot. They tried TV ads not so successfully (in Eons case); content that successfully drives traffic (a very popular “Longevity Calculator” in Eons case); SEO to grow virally (all four companies); channels (Drync benefited from being selected by Apple to appear in print and TV ads), and building value into technology to rise above the noise. The common denominator: Experimentation, followed by perfected adoption or abandonment of the idea followed quickly by conducting tests on something new.
Brad found that wine is a great app for Drync on the iPhone. The iPhone platform has 15,000 applications and Apple could ship 300 million phones in the next 5 years. Drync now has approaching 20,000 customers and is growing almost as fast as vines along the Weinstraße.
Jeff Bussgang asked an interesting question: Which companies/sites were role models to these CEOs. The answers varied included Amazon, Vista Print, Blue Nile, and Ning. No surprises in this list. What impressed Jeff Taylor, in particular, was Glam – a rollup of sites for woman who are 18-35 years old. That was a surprise because I did not know Glam’s origins and strategy and to be honest never visited the site.
The panel believed that predictably, we need more companies to support the growth of the consumer Internet community and channel graduates from local schools. But these amazing companies show the strength in Boston and the northeast of the consumer Internet community, the need to increase awareness about them and point to the great potential of this cluster.
As you would expect, these CEOs are quant jocks, recalling data and their company’s dashboards with ease and lucidity. For them, and all consumer Internet executives and boards, traffic in general, bounce rates, lifetime value, pages views, time spent on the site, number and types of products sold (for Drync, wine bottles stored in user’s cellars), searches and other criteria help them know about the enterprise value and health of their businesses. What Scott stressed was the importance of customer experience, including among other things navigating quickly and easily to the shoes customers want to buy and checking out, resulting in many happy returns.
Two people blogged about the event: Dan Bricklin did an audio blog (here) and Keri Singer has a blog post (here).
NEXT UP: Bobby Sager speaking on “Repairing the World” (more info here) on Tuesday, February 17, 2009.