The past 2 months here at Viralogy have been the strongest months of our startup careers:
We launched our product
Secured paying customers
Increased sales revenue by up to 11% for our paying customers
Received payment from our paying customers
Launched multiple features for our product
It feels like the stars have aligned and we’re in a perfect position to take the startup to the moon… or Pluto (if it were still a planet)!!!
The team is ready to receive an angel round of funding that will allow us to increase inbound leads, scale our infrastructure, and increase our product features. If you or someone you know has money to invest, the following sections detail the pain we solve, the market opportunity, the business model, the milestones we’ve hit, and what we plan to do with your invested dollars.
One of the area most commonly overlooked by eCommerce websites is the utilization of their robots.txt file. As eCommerce sites can be one of the most difficult types of websites for search engine crawlers to index, a robots.txt file can help crawlers find content to index without much trouble.
One of the biggest reasons many eCommerce sites fail to have one, is that they don’t understand what a robot.txt file actually does. In simplistic terms, a sites robot.txt file will guide search engines in the direction of content to index. For example, if you didn’t want search engines to index content within your ‘documents’ folder, you should place it within your robots.txt file. This will tell search engines that they shouldn’t index that content. As search engines have a difficult time in deciphering which content should and should not be indexed, giving the web crawlers a guideline as to what is off-limits can positively boost how your site is indexed. (more…)
Today we have Espree Devora from Minneapp who talks to us about how ecommerce stores can effecitvely use social media to increase their fan base and increase their revenue. We dive into some pretty specific techniques, so you can read the summary below which links out to the sites that Espree refers to. Hope you enjoy the video and please email us if you have any questions!
Regardless of how great you think your website is, without a sitemap, visitors, including search engine crawlers might not find everything they are looking for on your site. For an eCommerce site, an easy way to think of what a sitemap can do for one’s site is to think about each of the sites pages as treasure. While some ‘treasures’ are easier to find than others, it’s not a guarantee that you will be able to find all of them. Sitemap change this and give Google and search engines directions on where to find pages you want to get indexed.
What Makes A Good Sitemap
While there are many differing opinions on what makes for a ‘perfect’ sitemap, here are a few pointers are commonly seen as best practice for sitemaps:
A websites sitemap should be located on the simplest page of the website
A good sitemap will be informative in the sense that a visitor will be able to figure out what each page will direct them to
Site maps should not lead users on a wild goose chase. Site maps should direct users to the page that they are looking for.
Site maps that utilize text links should use anchor tags and keywords within the TITLE attribute
Site maps should be able to ‘guide’ search engine crawlers to all the appropriate pages of your site. Be sure to only includes pages that you want indexed. (more…)
Posted June 10th, 2010
by Yu-kai Chou
| 9 Comments
After an extremely successful launch with Dynamic Insights and GradeYourStore.com, Viralogy is starting to raise angel investments again. We have hit all the milestones we set out for when we raised our initial angel investment: built a product that significantly increases the sales of eCommerce sites, launched the first and only eCommerce grader on the web, and converted a handful of paying customers within weeks of launch.
This Week in Startups - LA
This week I(Yu-kai) paid a visit to Los Angeles (our alma mater city) and met up with some of the great peeps in the LA Startup Community. Giang Biscan, who previously interviewed me on AsAble.com, invited us to participate in Jason Calacanis‘ (successful entrepreneur, blogger, and CEO of Mahalo.com) This Week in Startups - Los Angeles meetup event with ten startups competing in their company pitch. The winner gets a chance to be on Jason’s Live Show and talk about his company to the show’s large audience base on the web.
The pitch itself was three slides and three minutes long, which is actually pretty tricky for startup presentations. We’ve done one-minute pitches with no slides as well as twenty-minute pitches with a complete deck in the past, but this one is awkwardly in the middle, enough time to have you start touching on the details about the company, but not enough time to get people to understand everything they curious about.
How to do a 3 Minute 3-Slide Pitch
We decided to go with this structure:
What we do (company and product)
How are we going to sell it (where most startups fail at)
What we have (traction with paying customers)
It worked out pretty well. Viralogy was selected as the winner of the ten exciting startups and I was immediately on the live show with Jason Calacanis talking about GradeYourStore and Dynamic Insights.
Jason actually seemed a lot more personable in person compared to his presence on the internet (which makes intuitive sense right?). Although on the other hand, our friend Loic from Seesmic seemed more personable online compared to in person, but that’s likely due to his staggering height.
Gaining attention after the competition
After the show, we got a lot of attention from companies and investors interested in working with us or investing some money in us. We also got a lot of congratulation messages sent from our friends on Twitter who were also watching the TWiST show.
I also emailed Jason Calacanis after the show to say it was great meeting him. His email address is one of the easiest to guess in the industry, and I didn’t expect him to respond at all due to his celebrity status. My aim was just so that when I meet him again somewhere in the future he would have vague memories of my name.
To my surprised, this is his response:
well done!!!
apply to open angel forum! you rock!
best j
Pretty nifty indeed.
Viralogy Builds Tools to Automate eCommerce Intelligence
This is the third competition Viralogy has won so far and we’re very optimistic about our outlook. We have a great business run by passionate people and we are excited to helping eCommerce sites make the shopping experience more personal for everyone on the web.
A simple way to understand page rank, is to think about votes. In a voting system, with every vote that you get, you are slowly achieving more visibility and credibility. The more you get, the stronger you get. Similarly, page rank is a link analysis algorithm used my Google search engines that essentially tells how influential or ‘important’ a site is.
In relation to eCommerce sites, page rank can be especially important as it not only helps in search results, but it also is a way to gauge your sites influence among your competitors. While the actual algorithm that Google uses is not public, there are many ‘experts’ that like to chime in with their advice. (more…)
If you had to wait 30 minutes to get into a theme park would you still go? While there will still be people who say “yes,” the fact remains that no one likes waiting. Similar to how Speed Racer was the best because was the fastest out on the track, when it comes to shopping for something online, the same can be said. If an eCommerce site is slow in loading a page, they are risking losing a potential sale. In an age where consumers have more and more options when it comes to shopping online, making sure that your site is able to optimized to bring a user the best experience possible includes making sure that your site has fast load times.
If you take a look at some of the top eCommerce sites, page load times are in and around 3.5 seconds max:
