At one stage you could have got some VC from a consortium of Silicon Valley venture capitalists but you wanted to stay in Adelaide. Is that right?
Yes. I mean, there were a couple of reasons for why ultimately we didn’t take the money and it was a large sum of money but part of it was that yes, we really saw this as a global operation that could be headquartered out of Adelaide. I think in the US things are extremely US-centric and whilst it is an extremely important market for us and is indeed our number one market, reality is that we do some very good business in Europe, we do some very good business in Japan and so we wanted to truly be global and offer this solution worldwide. At the moment I think we have websites in 30 different countries.
You’ve also done an IPO on the London AIM?
Well we’re actually planning to do one. We’re in the planning stages for an IPO on the London AIM Exchange. We’ve been working on this for a little while. It’s fair to say that the sharemarket of the last 12 months hasn’t been quite ideal. But it’s also fair to say that things have improved in the last few weeks and we’ve certainly done a lot of preparation for that listing and we’ll be ready when the market’s ready.
What are you looking to raise?
That will be a raising of the order of roughly ?20 million. Not all of that is new money. We have some existing shareholders, including the university, that are not long term holders in the company. So it will be I guess you’d call it a medium-sized raise in the current market for the London AIM market.
I can say it’s tens of millions of dollars and leave it at that.
And has it been growing continually, have you had any years where it hasn’t grown?
No it has grown continually, in fact every single year it has grown somewhere between 50% to a bit over 100% per annum each year.
And how long have you been profitable?
We’ve been profitable for about five years now. So you can see those early years, those first four or five years are really about building the business and a lot of investment in R&D. We still invest of course heavily in R&D but sales are to a level in the last four of five years where the company is actually quite profitable.
Can you just go back to those early days, what was tricky about getting that technology out of the uni?
That’s a really good question. There were a lot of issues involved. In the very earliest day it was essentially a licence agreement. And what you find with a licence agreement is that it’s not quite as attractive to external investors because of course there are rare circumstances that the licence agreement could lapse or technology could revert back to the university and so on.
So we had that changed to a direct assignment of the technology, so it was all completely owned by YourAmigo after an initial period. And that helped us in our quest to raise capital and really put the company with the right sort of structure for external investment.
And lastly I know our readers would kill me if I didn’t ask you this. How do you get on page one of Google?
Yes, well you know what? I wish we knew the answer for how to do that for absolutely every single search term that we deal with. I can give some sort of generalities though that can help. Quality content is really important. Think about what people are searching on that’s relevant to your content, having good titles, including those keywords more than once on your web page and getting some good external links and other people linking into your quality content from separate websites. But at the end of the day, if you’ve got a quality website and in fact SmartCompany is a good example of that, the content is very high quality and that will naturally bring people linking to your content.
And what are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen? We’ve seen some rippers – you go to people’s websites and often they can be quite expensive and you can see that the URL is useless and they actually can not be found on Google or they’ve got Flash all over.
You’re absolutely right. There’s a very big, different world – let’s call it the creative people that are responsible for how the website looks and sometimes that involves Flash and other things but that’s a very different world to how a search engine views the site. So I think in the design of a website it needs to be a blend between a creative side, but also considering search and I guess the other thing is when you do bring in a company to help externally with search engine optimisation, you really need to look at how that company is helping you. We changed the world somewhat with our model. We’re based on performance, we get paid for the value that we actually deliver. Most search engine optimisation companies get paid under a long term contract for a fixed monthly fee and I guess the question is if you’re paying a fixed monthly fee, what guarantee do you have of the results you might get and typically you don’t have one.
So you are cost per click and revenue sharing model for automated SEO?
That’s right, yes.
And has that worked well for you?
It has. It works well if you can perform and you have a really great solution. So we run it as a completely managed service and yes it is on that performance model. And in doing so we align ourselves with the customer. We don’t have long term contracts. Customers stay with us because they want to and because they’re getting the return on investment that makes sense for their business.
And just lastly, plans for the future. Where are you taking your business?
I guess the IPO is obviously a big important milestone for the company and that’s essentially the next big milestone we’re looking at. We’re looking at new technologies to do better what we currently do, particularly in relation to content creation and further expanding that. We already work with many, many spoken languages but we’re looking at scalable models for customer acquisition and really getting the message out there in the way that we’re doing marketing. A lot of it’s about execution in the market place. Really selling well, executing well in the market place and that’s important.
Good to talk to you today, good luck and we’ll check in in a year’s time and see how you’re going.
Thank you very much, it’s been my pleasure.
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