A Nice Little Niche

They say that when you’re trying to get into shape, the best motivation is seeing the dieting and exercise pay off. That principle applies to genealogy: The best inspiration to do more research is getting results.

So when you keep not finding new information despite your best efforts, you’re in danger of embarking on a downward spiral—lack of motivation to look for records followed by (wonder of wonders) not finding your ancestors.

But entrepreneurial leaders sometimes forget that in startups, you can’t allow a “corner case” to derail fearless decision making.

A corner case is an objection that may be:

1. technically reasonable
2. may have a probability of occurring
3. its probability of occurring is lower than your probability of running out of money.

For a startup “No Corner Cases” needs to be an integral part of your corporate DNA.

Any startup that’s striving for consensus on corner cases instead of speed and tempo will be out of business.

Focus on Speed and Tempo

For example, I’ve talked a few times about how IMVU raised its first venture round with monthly revenues of around $10,000. This wasn’t very impressive, but we had two things going for us:

1. A hockey stick shaped growth curve. People often forget the most important part of the hockey stick: the long flat part. We had months of data that showed customers more-or-less uninterested in our product. We were limping along at a few hundred dollars a month in revenue. All this time, we were continuously changing our product, talking to customers, trying to improve on our AdWords spend. Eventually, these efforts bore fruit – and this was evident in the data. This lent our claims about learning and discovery credibility.

2. Compelling per-customer economics. We had only a small number of customers – if memory serves, only a few thousand active users. But a little math will show that we were making over a dollar per-user per-month. Our cost to acquire a customer on AdWords was only a few cents. Our eventual VC’s were quick to grasp what this meant (in fact, they understood it better than we did): that if our product achieved significant scale, it would be wildly profitable.

We’d love to have professional genealogists join our provider network, but we suspect for many it will not be a good fit…

Instead, we see Genlighten empowering determined _amateur_ genealogists to find records for each other, sharing vicariously in their respective “happy dances”, building reputations for reliability, dogged determination, and resourcefulness in the process.