Seán Crotty

Business Week names Yola as a Top 50 Startup

Yola has been named one of the Top 50 Startups You Should Know for 2009 by Business Week.

Business Week analyzed current startups for progress, traffic, mainstream media coverage, funding, blogosphere coverage, and other factors.  They worked with market research firm YouNoodle to assign a rating to startups.  Yola was rated at 60, which puts us at the top of the range for a company that is experiencing "some very strong growth".

Full list of top startups with ratings and links can be found here:  http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/tech_startups_you_should_know_2009/ .

Crediting Affiliates with Phone Calls

We're approaching some better solutions for one of the holy grails of affiliate marketing -- tracking phone calls and giving affiliates credit for them.

RingRevenue has created a platform designed for affiliate marketers and recently secured funding.

The system assigns and manages dedicated phone numbers for each promoter and already has signed up to work with Commission Junction and several other major affiliate networks.

Vinny speaks at the Global Technology Symposium at Stanford

Vinny Lingham is speaking right now on a panel about how policy initiatives can affect innovation.  Here's my summary of his points:

"Are the right incentives in place at educational institutions to promote entrepreneurship?

Currently, students have more incentives to stay within the academic setting than to break out and start a company.  They are presented with a tough choice.  It's very similar to poker, where you have to look at the pot odds and compare to the chance of making your hand.  Students must look at the chance of their start-up succeeding and weigh that against the benefits of staying within school.

Educational institutions could offer incentives to support students who decide to become entrepreneurs, such as:

• Investing in the student's start-up, to get IP from in-the-classroom to be "fundable"
• Giving academic credit toward their degree for the commercialization of the student's technology
• Deferring student loans to relieve financial pressure on the student" 

Q & A Session:

"Investors should be careful of patents filed in other countries, since the rules, costs, and standards can be very different.  For instance, in some countries, intellectual property which is developed in-country is very hard to take out of the country, so your investment will be limited by that."

The Global Technology Symposium is an annual event at Stanford University is a premier investor conference focused on technology and growth companies in emerging market technology corridors.

SynthaSite becoming Yola

We announced today that we're changing the name of our company from SynthaSite to Yola.

Yola is much easier to say, spell, and type. It's friendlier and less-techy sounding too. And it is in keeping with our philosophy of making things as easy as possible.  For anyone who's made a site with our site-building tool, and has questions about this renaming, we have created a list of frequently asked questions.

And when we launch the new name in a few days, you'll see a whole new look on our site.

SynthaSite raised $20 million Series B

Very happy to announce that SynthaSite has raised $20 million in financing as a Series B from Reinet Fund!

This is a follow-on investment by the people who lead the Series A round of $5 million in November 2007.  It's a strong vote of confidence in our company and business model, and follows our reaching 1 million registered users last month.

We got some great coverage, including a scoop article by TechCrunch.  Full details can be had in the press release, Vinny's blog post, and our company blog post.

Vegas with Vinny !

Just back from Vegas where 23 of us celebrated Vinny Lingham's 30th birthday in MASSIVE style. Full weekend of partying, "bling bling" themed dinner at Diego restaurant, then on to our own sky box at Studio 54 for all night clubbing in true "Blingham" fashion!

Good times at the tables with the crew also inspired me to post links to PokerStars.com, where you can qualify for the World Series Of Poker (Vinny and I worked at it for 2008, he ended up going, looking forward to this year), and when you've played a certain amount on PokerStars.com, they'll match your first deposit, up to $50, in other words, deposit $50, get $50 free.

Affiliate Summit West 2009

Having just returned from the Affiliate Summit in Vegas this weekend, I saw lots of opportunities for online marketing.  The internet marketing space is thriving, and I'm looking forward to several joint projects with people from the conference involving our SynthaSite web design tool.

Seeing Angel Djambazov, I was reminded of the industry award that the ReveNews blog he currently manages received in mid-2006.  As a contributing blogger to ReveNews, I'm part of the group that MarketingSherpa named as the Best Affiliate Marketing Blog. I would recommend ReveNews to anyone new to online marketing, since it's writers cover a wide range of topics, including:  search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, security, contextual advertising, and micro content.

I was also struck by the contrast in attendance between the Affiliate Summit, which is growing rapidly, and the Consumer Electronic Show (CES), which saw a sharp drop-off this year.  Admittedly, CES is a much, much larger show, but the growing Affiliate Summit attendance speaks to the continued strength in demand for performance-related marketing.  Kudos to Shawn Collins and Missy Ward for pulling off another successful major event.

Quot Libros, Quam Breve Tempus

Yes.  So many books, So little time.  :)

This quotation aptly found on the home site of one of Amazon.com's top book reviewers.

All encountered while I'm burning through "The PayPal Wars", a book I bought while working at eBay, and which is now becoming even more relevant.  Definitely recommend it as a good read.  Fun to run across some very familiar names from eBay and from the Valley VC scene, and see them in their earlier incarnations.

SynthaSite in the Wall Street Journal

Very excited to see SynthaSite mentioned in the Wall Street Journal this morning.

The article has a teaser on the front page, with brings you to the first page of the Small Business Special Report, where 2/3 of the first and 2/3 of the third page cover "How to create a successful website for nothing".

There were only three companies mentioned as places to host your site: Microsoft, Weebly, and SynthaSite! Here's the online version of the article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121803326363016929.html?mod=googlenews_wsj.

Wedding sites

Many people are using SynthaSite to create a website about their wedding.

Here are some examples:

Trevor & Christi included a map, reception details, and updates every few days.

Mirka has a countdown timer and some nice photos on her site.

Diana, in her first website, gives details for her bridal shower, bachelorette party, and gift registry.

I think the fact that our tool is free, easy, and allows you full control of the elements on your page is probably why people are using it for their wedding sites.

Breeding sites

One of the real joys of working in the web world is discovering the incredibly random sites that people make with your tools.

In the affiliate world, with eBay and Art.com, it was the super-specialized product sites. My favorite was the woman who scoured the globe for the latest in exotic hardwood knitting needles. She had quite a following; over 2,600 people per month subscribed to her newsletter.

For widgets, with Mpire, it was the product review fan-sites, like the guy who created a great-looking site dedicated to the BMW M3 and every possilble accessory for that model.

With SynthaSite, some of the fun, off-beat discoveries are the animal breeders who set up sites to promote their services and sell:

mini-lamas at http://Gingerichsminiaturefarms.synthasite.com/

parakeets bred naturally at http://thesanctuary.synthasite.com/index.php

leopard geckos at http://jandjleopardgeckos.synthasite.com/

cute shizshu / poodle crosses at http://puppylove4me.synthasite.com/

and many more ...

People's ingenuity never ceases to amaze!

Hiring update

Happy to announce that I've hired a Director of User Experience in San Francisco and two Community Support Specialists in Cape Town, South Africa.

I've also added a job requisition for a Product Manager to help me translate our identified business needs into specific Web 2.0 functionality.

Still available are the Community Support roles and the Interaction Design role in San Francisco. Tell your friends! :)

WSOP 2008

With this year's World Series of Poker about to start this weekend in Vegas, there's been a little bit of poker mania locally. Some friends are headed to Sin City to try their luck, and there's been lots of reading up and practice hands.

One of the latest poker resources that I've been referred to is: Phil Hellmuth's Black Belt course in Poker, which is a series of podcasts -- great for watching on the plane to Las Vegas, for instance ...

I actually jumped in and bought it. Looks pretty fun, albeit cheesy (but, that's Vegas), with some good poker advice.

I’m Hiring

I am currently hiring for several positions in our San Francisco office, all of which are a part of my Product Development group:

-- two people in the area of website interface and usability – a Director of User Experience and an Interaction Designer

-- two people, a senior and a junior, in Community Support, which is our combination of Community Management and Customer Support (I've recently hired 3 other people for this in our South Africa office, since we're going for round-the-clock coverage to keep our users super happy.)

-- at least one person in Quality Assurance

Our engineering group is also actively hiring Java and Ajax rockstars, our marketing group for Business Development, and Operations is looking for a world-class Executive Assistant / Office Manager. For more detail on positions at SynthaSite, please check out our Careers page.

If you’re interested in one of these jobs, or know someone who would be a great fit, please contact me at sean.crotty@synthasite.com.

Visit to SynthaSite South Africa

We had a very productive three weeks in Cape Town.

I got to facilitate five straight days of strategy, branding, and product planning sessions. We covered everything about the company, within our Exec Team level and with everyone in the company. It was one of the most satisfying corporate exercises I’ve ever done – mainly because we came out of it with a crisp statement of company objectives, specific product feature priorities, and clearly defined quarterly goals – which everyone had participated in and agreed to.

It was my first time in South Africa, and only my second time on that continent. Besides lots of concentrated work, Vinny & crew showed me and the other recent American hire, Randy Almond, a great time. You can see pictures of the trip at http://travelswithvinny.synthasite.com/Cape_Town.php. They are on a website I made with our free web design tool, SynthaSite (of course). The up-close pictures of the Rhinoceros are the wildest.

Encountering SynthaSite

While I was at the Affiliate Summit conference in Vegas in February, I ran into Vinny & Charlene Lingham.

This happens a few times a year, ever since I was running eBay’s Affiliate API Program. Vinny & Charlene’s business, Clicks2Customers, was consistently one of my best-performing affiliates – in the top 0.5 % every week. Vinny’s and my number skills also came in handy during one fondly-remembered winning night at the Wynn casino, where we both walked away from our private Blackjack table with a good amount of the House’s money. :D

Way back when, Vinny had presented a web design tool, targeted at affiliates, which was a side project of his company. I signed up for the early, early Beta program and checked it out. Over the last 3 ½ years, Vinny and I had discussed various ways of working together. When we happened upon each other during a party at the Tao nightclub in the Venetian, he told me he’d spun out the tool into it’s own company, SynthaSite, and recently gotten first-round funding of $5 million.

He said: “Come be our VP of Product Development!” in his trademark boisterous, spontaneous way. After an early morning group interview and several more rounds (where I was impressed with the progress from the first version, and the quality of the team he’d already assembled), I said “Sure.”. Thirty days from the encounter at the party in Vegas, I was on a plane to South Africa to meet the rest of the engineers, as a newly-minted member of the SynthaSite team.

Creating WidgetBucks

I spent much of the summer defining and testing concepts for various widget implementations at Mpire. This was quite timely, since Newsweek had declared 2007 to be “The Year of the Widget”. And, by the way, Seattle is a very cool place to travel to every other week – which was what I got to do.

We settled on a widget ad network, called “WidgetBucks”. It is a very cool set-up, informed by current market data, which presents the most popular products in an attractive Flash interface.

WidgetBucks launched on October 2nd and took off like wildfire.

As a pay-per-click network, it is designed to deliver revenue to bloggers and website designers, while providing them with relevant, self-updating, gorgeous content. TechCrunch covered our launch with this post: “A Widget That Actually Makes Money”.

We had 5,000 people sign up in the first week! One of the keys to our success was listening closely to our users and responding to their suggestions and concerns within hours. You can see how we were very focused on user needs in a blog post of mine on our official WidgetBucks blog.

Expanding the feature set and increasing the types of ads served helped us achieve “amazing growth rates”, delivering 1 billion ad impressions in the first 83 days . This Spring TechCrunch reported WidgetBucks delivering 700 million impressions per month!

Move to Mpire

This Spring I was recruited to join a company called Mpire.

Since it was a great opportunity to work on cutting edge internet marketing technology and the position was an incredible fit for my skills and industry contacts, in mid-June, I transitioned the management of the Art.com and AllPosters.com Affiliate Programs to the eminently capable Erika Lamoreaux (whom I'd been working with on several projects inside Art.com already).  I miss the gang at Art.com, but have been able to see some of them for lunch, and have full confidence that they will continue to succeed and grow rapidly.

At Mpire, I'm the Vice President of Product Marketing [press release] and their guy in Silicon Valley.  The company is a prodigiously productive engineering team, based in Seattle, specializing in distributed shopping, price analytics, and a widget network.  We take product, price, coupon, and review data from several major feeds and present it in compelling ways -- which are getting very high click-through-rate (x12 industry average).

Their ability to integrate and present data is impressive.  They accomplish the uncommon by being both data wizards and also having an excellent user interface -- something I really appreciate from my days at Apple and doing graphic design on my own [bio].  I even remember meeting with them when I was at eBay and helping them get started using the eBay API and eBay Affiliate Program.  I dug up their business cards from September 2005 and recalled hearing about them from my long-time cube neighbor Laura Della Torre (they are a prominent eBay Developer in her Certified Provider Program).  At one point, her walls were covered with magnets with the Mpire logo.

It's been a whirlwind ever since their recruiter pulled me from her rolodex.  In the middle of the interview cycle, I was in Ireland with my Mom, visiting the little coastal town where I'd lived for 10 months at age 3, and reconnecting with the whole clan of Crotty relatives in Ireland.  I dragged Mom to an internet cafe in Dublin and continued the e-mail discussions with the Mpire CEO.

It's also been a joyous reunion with many friends from eBay, since Mpire works so closely with eBay on quite a few engineering projects, such as the eBay Pop site.  I joined the Mpire guys in attending the eBay Developers Conference, eBay Affiliate Day, and eBay Live! in Boston.  Great to be back in the flow of exciting new technical developments on the eBay platform.  I knew I'd made a good decision in joining the company when on the first day, in his opening keynote speech, the President of eBay Marketplaces, John Donahoe, singled out Mpire as the first company he mentioned and then gave them the 2007 Star Developer Award for Best User Experience Design.

I'm working from my apartment in Palo Alto, which is a new thing for me.  No more 1 hour+ commute to Emeryville.  But my sailboat's still in Emeryville, since it's so quick to get sailing in the Bay from there.  I go up to Seattle to synch up with the whole team twice a month.  In the spirit of the Northwest, I got a kayak and store it on Lake Union -- our office being right on the lake.

In late June, we went to the Under the Radar conference for emerging start-ups; our CEO, Matt Hulett, presented and won the Judge's award in the Search category.  Then, separately, Time Magazine named Mpire.com #24 in their list of 50 Best Websites for 2007!

I then had a nice few days in Maine for July 4th, eating lobsters with family, visiting with old friends, and doing some classic New England rusticating.

Then off to the Affiliate Summit conference in Miami.  As usual, a great industry event.  Reconnected with many friends there and began spreading the word about Mpire's widgets.  Jim Kukral interviewed me on video describing what we do.

Immediately thereafter, flew to WidgetCon in New York City and did mind melds with some of the 140 other people defining the widget space.  Two buddies from eBay where there Ro Choy (now a VP at RockYou) and Rob Cross.  Also got to represent Mpire at the TechCrunch summer event.

Needless to say, the past few weeks have been very exciting!  I'm enjoying the new gig, and really like the team I get to work with and the widget network we're creating.

Sean Crotty - Affiliate Summit Bloghaus

Click to Play

Find your way

One finds inspiration in the strangest places.  I was watching a movie trailer about some surfing penquins and the big kahuna penquin says:  "Winners find a way.".

This really resonated because in the fast-paced world of a tech start-up, you don't have GE's research librarian to size your market for you, or eBay's UI group to tell you which landing page is best by analyzing user eye movements, or Apple's Advanced Technology Group to prototype three versions of your product.  Instead, in start-ups, you find a way yourself.

Whether it means driving through Nevada badlands to measure satellite visibility angles deep within canyons, training a partner's whole salesforce on a product you created the day before, or ferreting out the elusive tech-savvy super-affiliate and showing them why your link conversion is the best.  You just find a way.

I also wanted to give a shout out to Brad Justus' new post on Wired's GeekDad blog:  "GeekDad Bookshelf Essentials:  The Way Things Work".  Brad works a few feet away from me, masterminding the artist community and marketplace sites here at Art.com.  And the book he talks about is great too.

Innovative Affiliates

One of the things I love about the affiliate business is the never-ending variety of business models that affiliates come up with.  Just when you think you've seen all possible ways of affiliate linking, an affiliate will call me with a funky new idea.

Some of my favorites are the domain name hunters, who scour the web for the latest lexicon, buy related domains, and put up modules with relevant, self-refreshing best sellers.  Some of these guys pay their annual fees within days.

Even better are the elaborate site constructors, who pull from one or more datafeeds, build a deep site, with logical, useful link paths, and automatically pull in relevant text.  The key is how well-matched the products, links, and text are.  I'm not talking about the schlocky cram-the-page-with-random-words junk that too often appears; I'm extolling the highly-context sensitive, sophisticated algorithm-based assembly of actually relevant content.  It's masterful when you see it.

I'm finding that the key restriction on affiliates is tech resources.  By that I mean, technically trained web programmers who can build a site, incorporate complex data types, keep up with changes to the web, and keep the site fresh and functioning.  These people are highly sought-after and quite expensive.  There are only a few affiliate shops who are in the business seriously enough to be able to support these rock star web programmers.  Everyone else makes due, learning it themselves piecemeal or begging favors from techie friends.  The only relief for the majority of affiliates is the slow progress of new tools to make all this simpler and more standardized.