One of the things too is automatically creating new content based on popular search phrases. That’s something you’re doing too. How does that work and does that ever get you in trouble with the spam bots?
No, not at all. What we’re doing is helping a website to generate more relevant content to match the sort of queries that searchers are performing. So if you look at just a single product, different searches will often represent that in different ways.
So let’s say for example a Sony digital camera model XYZ was being sold. Some people will enter into the search engine the specific model number. Some people may actually refer to Sony the brand and maybe some features of that camera, maybe it’s a 5x zoom or whatever.
So the reality is there are many different search queries used to get to the same product. To rank on a vast number of different search queries is very difficult. But one way of doing that is to expand content and to build additional new content that really focuses on some of those key search phrases.
Now to do that ordinarily is a very slow process and in fact as content changes it’s almost impossible. But we have a very scalable technology solution that’s able to automatically generate new quality content which is actually published under the website and is there not only for users but also for the crawlers to come and get and actually improves the results of Google and other search engines.
And how does it create the new content?
It analyses essentially two key things. It looks at all the existing content and what’s being sold. It looks at what people are searching on the internet search engines that are relevant to that content and then it will start to aggregate products and in a sense do sub categorisation of the content.
So that example I gave before of the Sony digital camera. It could for example aggregate together all the Sony digital cameras that have 5x times zoom, put them all on one page and summarise that information and now you have a very nice page that’s very specifically built that way. But typically you won’t find that sort of categorisation occurring naturally on a website through the authors of that website.
Run through your strategy. You started in 1999. How much capital did you have to raise to commercialise the technology?
We raised capital over about three different rounds. In a sense we were unlucky enough to be trying to raise our first capital externally shortly after the NASDAQ crash of around April 2000. So after the founders put their initial money in we went out in a very difficult time. But through that period and the next couple of years, and including 9/11 which was another difficult period, we managed to raise a few million dollars. It was really necessary to raise that amount of money because we had to develop the technology and that took almost two years and a sizeable team to do that. But secondly we believed that the offerings we had were very unique with extreme worldwide potential so we wanted to go immediately for the markets in the United States and Europe and it’s quite an expensive course in terms of getting to those markets.
How did you do that? Did you build your own sales force from here?
Yes, in the early days we actually tried two different models. We tried building our own sales force, but rather than taking Australians over to the US and Europe, we employed locals in both North America and Europe and that was actually quite successful. So that was our own, if you like direct sales force. In addition to that we tried selling through resellers, so other companies that had the right sort of customers. That was quite patchy in terms of success. Sometimes it worked, often it didn’t and these days we’re putting more and more focus on our direct sale force rather than working through resellers.
Who ran that sales force?
We had essentially a vice president of sales who was based in Australia but who travelled regularly to both United States and Europe and of course obviously did a lot of work through the phone and email and so on with the sales force. So we have quite a kind of dispersed sales force. For example in the United States we have people in California, New York and Florida and so rather than having one big office with a whole bunch of people in it, we have people dispersed closer to where the customers are.
And that works best?
Well it’s worked well for us, it’s the way we’ve chose to do it I guess. I think places like the United States you do have a three hour time difference. There’s definitely value in meeting face to face with big customer prospects and so on and so by dispersing the work force in that way we’re able to work around the time zones better and also be closer to our customer base.
Smart Company is the leading online publication in Australia for free news, information and resources catering to Australia’s entrepreneurs, small and medium business owners and business managers.
