Viralogy

I can’t believe 2009 is about over. Throughout the year we have truly been on an exciting journey with the startup life, fighting many obstacles, staying flexible, and remaining passionate about making an impact on the web.

Since product conceptualization, Viralogy is now one years old, and I’d like to share with our loyal community the challenges we faced and the lessons we learned during the year. Instead of a lists of facts, I want it to be more like a story that helps you understand who we are and what we have been through. Perhaps it will help you one day when you create your own startup.

The story of the Viralogy Team

To begin talking about 2009 for Viralogy, it would be useful to first talk about how the team came about and how we led into the beginning of 2009.

Viralogy is founded by a group of UCLA Alumni who met during their undergrads. We first created a startup called FDCareer in 2007, making recruiting talents more efficient through gaming. It was doing well and even got rated on Mashable as one of the Top 10 Social Networks for Gen-Ys. This continued until the market crashed midway through our good year. As firms were looking to layoff everyone they could, a tool that helped them recruit more efficiently wasn’t needed, so after various adjustments to the market, FDCareer ended up folding.

Lesson 1: when your startup faces obstacles, you always need to decide if you should continue to refine the concept more to see if it will catch on after the change, or determine that you need to switch directions completely. In case of large environmental changes, usually continuing to refine the process in a bad market is not as good as changing ideas completely towards that new market.

Start of the Viralogy Concept

After we folded FDCareer, the team was disappointed but not discouraged. Most startup folks in this case just pack up, go home, and find a full-time job. This actually creates an interesting phenomenon that, in recessions, entrepreneurs find corporate jobs because their startups fail, and corporate employees start companies because they get laid off.

However, for our Team, instead of all calling it quits, the core group decided to stick together and create something new. We realized that we were all avid bloggers and tweeters, and that the social media world is not going to shrink in a recession but will grow massively instead. More importantly, we were passionate about it and wanted to make it better.

Lesson 2: When your startup fails because of the external environment but the teammates work well with each other, stick with the same team because it’s so critical and precious that you are working with someone you know you have good dynamics with, even in the toughest times.

Towards the end of 2008, we thought about the concept of a Social Media Rank, something that determines how influential everyone is on the internet. We liked the idea and was lucky enough to get the domain name Viralogy.com. Somehow the site was discontinued by the previous owner right when we were domain hunting, creating a good name that we feel gives us enough legitimacy in the industry. In all honestly, and I’m sure you can relate, our name brainstorming sessions were hilarious and all over the place. We even considered calling the company Blogasm (however short that consideration may be) (And yes, I hope this is not the only thing that gets tweeted around from this article).

We had tons of people excited about Viralogy even before it’s launch, with a lot of credit going to the website name. Some people even said they were super excited for our launch because it “sounds huge!” Anything that can sound huge before it was actually born sounds good to me.

Lesson 3: When you choose your name, on top of having an available domain for it, choose something either that sounds very legit, or choose a name that helps with SEO since your domain name can put some important keywords on steroids. One choice is for branding, the other for sales.

The first five months of Viralogy

The first five months of 2009 was mostly the incubating stage of Viralogy. During this time, we mostly worked on product development while also doing a lot of consulting work to keep us alive and sustain our operations.

Doing consulting work at the same time was tough and definitely slowed down our processes, but that was necessary to keep us going as a startup. We worked twice to thrice harder than our friends in corporate firms while making an eighth of what they were making if anything at all (since the more the company pay ourselves, the less chance of it being successful). We wanted to make sure that, in a recession, our survival or death was not determined by if we can raise money from investors. And we trucked through that period with good rewards.

Lesson 4: Working on a startup is like a Lord of the Rings Journey. You don’t do it because you can live a luxurious life with a cool car and big TV. You do it because you believe in the mission (destroying the ring), and you like the people you are traveling with. If you want a stable comfortable life, you stay in the Hobbit and become a farmer.

Way before we launched our product, our marketing team was not being idle. Our CMO Jun has already started to brand the company and sold the vision to many people. We started the Viralogy Blog(the one you are gazing at right now) and video interviewed bloggers three times a week. Since our service originally was there to promote bloggers, this strategy was very effective, as bloggers and their readers loved our interviews. Since bloggers don’t always get video exposure, they tend to include the video interview on their own blogs and share who we are with their readers.

Lesson 5: Promote bloggers and they will promote you. A lot of startups talk about their marketing strategies as somehow making the bloggers like them and write about them when the copany could be selling light bulbs or something. Since our service was to help bloggers, it was much easier for bloggers to like us and write about us. Within six months, we obtained a Pagerank of 5 when other sites take years to achieve that.

Product Launch

Viralogy officially launched in May 11th of 2009. because of our utilization of social media marketing, in the first month we already attracted a 5-digit visitors/month traffic and a loyal community following our activities.

At the beginning, we focused our site on blog-discovery. We wanted people to find the best bloggers and interesting content. However, we know that many social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumbleupon already help people discover great content, and even though we were doing well on that, we concluded that we wanted to do what we would be the best at, which at that point is looking at the web and identifying the most influential people, not content. As a result, we switched our homepage to displaying peoples’ VScores and influence compared to each other. We effectively wanted to be the “Alexa for People.”

Lesson 6: Don’t do what’s nice and interesting. Do what you can be the best at and focus on it.

Up to this point, we were still all bootstrapped. We weren’t looking for investors because we didn’t want to get distracted from growing the business. However, my friend urged us to join the CINACON 2009 VC Pitch Competition, a competition where we compete against dozens of startups and pitch to over 20 VCs and investors in the industry.

We prepared and pitched at the competition, and then Wala! We were fortunate enough to get first place at the Pitch Competition over many companies that had more mature technologies than we did, and got the interest of a lot of investors. Since we were not looking for funding, we didn’t get into negotiations, but it added a lot of credibility to what we were doing.

Lesson 7: Always be on the lookout for opportunities. Even when you are not focusing on something, great opportunities might pass you and you can never get it back. A sub lesson to this experience is that a VC Presentation is really a sales pitch, not a features manual. It is only to get them interested to learn more, not tell them how everything works. The other more mature technologies focused on all their amazing features, while we just briefly told them why we could make them rich. They obviously cared more about the latter and that is why we won.

Late 2009 Growth

Three quarters through the year, we figured that with our ability to track and analyze influencers in each niche, we should focus our model on helping companies find top bloggers in their niche as our revenue model. If a company needed to promote a new cellphone brand, we were able to provide them a large list of the top bloggers who talk about gadgets, give them analytics of these influencers, and even provide ways to contact them.

With our ability to connect top influencers to companies, we actively made social media marketing much simpler and faster to execute.

Lesson 8: If you have a big pain, and if you conclude that enough people are like you, that’s the best pain to solve because you KNOW what matters and if it is truly properly solved.

During this time, our team went from 3 people to the beginning of the year to over 12 passionate contributors, based virtually within the US and internationally. We would have people emailing if they could help us every two weeks, and we did our best to make it a great experience for everyone we took in. We also had the opportunity to be a Platinum Sponsor to the HYSTACON 2009 with Steve Balmer of Microsoft as Keynote Speaker and it gave us the opportunity to brand ourselves to an executive crowd. Finally, we competed in the TheFunded.com and Vator.tv startup competition and won Top 10 out of 140 startup in the Silicon Valley Area. All of that, as well as a supporting userbase and passionate friends through Viralogy made this rigorous journey exciting and worthwhile.

Getting Angel Funding and our expanded vision

In November of 2009, we finally decided to raise some angel money. We were careful in selecting our investor and wanted to make sure there was enough value-added on top of the money. We chose the President of a well established Entrepreneur Organization in Silicon Valley as our first investor and are poised to grow into even more exciting fields.

Lesson 9: Don’t find investors who just put down money and hide, nor ones that are always in your face. Find ones that have the ability to give you good advice and help you green light your activities better.

After we improved our capacity, Viralogy is actually on an exciting transition ending 2009 and blasting off in 2010. We’re expanding our vision from a Social Media Rank to a Social Media Science and Business Intelligence firm. You’ll have to stay tuned to know exactly what we’re going to do with this, but it will make a profound impact on the internet.

2010 is going to be an exciting year for Viralogy. We’re going to encounter a lot more obstacles and get our lives stressed out with arguments, disasters and crises, but we will remain a passionate team that will stay true to our mission and make the web a better place.

As always, if you have any questions regarding startup life, entrepreneurship, social media or random things like chess, just shoot us a message anywhere online, and we’ll be there for you!