Krugle - It won’t survive
Revised: Krugle - It might survive
Revised: Krugle - It will survive, their people in power get it
After reading Robert Scoble post on Krugle I ran over to krugle.com to see what type of advertising I could get (we write software development tools so it should be a nice fit), this is there business model right? Some red flags went off when it became a chore to find advertising info. Finally I came to their “Contact Us” page where I found Bill Daniher VP Finance & Corporate Development as the contact for advertising. More red flags - Why is a VP of Finance handling advertising? Maybe their VP actually do work, so I send him an email. He responds back that Krugle doesn’t have an automated way to do this yet, but he can manually add an ad to the site for a selection of keywords. I’m thinking this is going to be ugly to deal with, but still worth a try. I give him the word we want to proceed, what are the next steps? His response? Well, there is no response. So your a start up and someone wants to buy your service and you don’t respond? Not good. My email probably slipped thru the cracks, but that is why a VP shouldn’t be handling this. Then I read today that they partnered with Yahoo! to do their developer code search. I sure hope Yahoo! is paying them enough to survive, otherwise it won’t.
This is a big reason a lot of .com companies don’t survive. They put more stock into partnerships and VC funding then doing what they need to do—earn revenue and become profitable.
Written by Tim on February 15th, 2007 with
4 comments.
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#1. February 15th, 2007, at 6:18 PM.
Tim,
Thank you for checking out our site, and more importantly for
attempting to place an ad. I’m sorry we did not make that as easy
as we could have for you. It will be much easier in the near future.
I admit that from an external perspective, it looks
as if we’ve only focused on building a great search engine for
developers. But we actually have put considerable work into a
backend system that allows advertisers to buy keywords and
for those ads appear in context. Our goal is to ensure the ads
are as relevant as possible, especially for developers – they tend
to not like ads. Relevancy is the key to not having the ads be
annoying. So our starting point was to manage this manually.
As to business model questions and the best time to monetize,
that is always a debatable point. Seth Godin cautions that “he who
monetizes early monetizes least,” but there are always
different points of view on this.
But thanks for thinking about this and for writing about us.
It is most appreciated.
Steve Larsen, Krugle