We continue our rotating Startupbootcamp
blog series - our ten teams take turns sharing their thoughts and
experiences. This entry is by Arturas Bartas of Local Measures.
Entrepreneurs' non existent cultural lives
The cultural lives of budding entrepreneurs are often as barren as
the steppes of Kazakhstan after a scorching summer season. Seeing that
my cultural program for the entire last month consisted of a single
film, I also must admit to this failure. But the movie that I did manage
to see – “
Soul Kitchen”
by Fatih Akin – was exactly the kind of light-hearted comedy that every
entrepreneur loves to see: a comic story about a young guy, Zinos, who
tries to turn around the fortunes of his failing restaurant "Soul
Kitchen" while simultaneously juggling a long distance relationship, tax
inspectors, a younger brother dabbling in petty crime, a scheming real
estate crook and acute back pain.
Watching how Zinos goes about his daily life, I could not help, but
notice certain similarities between his comic predicament and our own
life in Startupbootcamp.
To be fair, we don’t have to deal with girlfriends, crooks or government
officials for now, but the range of problems we confront every day – from
adjusting to life in Copenhagen and leaving previous projects behind to
developing a successful product and managing a hectic schedule of
meetings with big shot entrepreneurs – can be overwhelming at times. And
just like in Zinos' case, the only motivation for this stressful life is
that maybe, just maybe, one day we will have a chance to run a
successful business we built from a scratch.
Get to know your visitors
This last point brings us to Local Measures – the startup that helps
you to know your audience better. If you have your own website or blog,
you should be familiar with tools like Google Analytics, Feedburner or Clicktale
that provide websites with snapshots of their virtual audiences. While
these tools are excellent for measuring your relative standing vis-à-vis
others and recording your website's growth over time, they do little in
terms of providing insight into who your audience is. So at the
end of the day you might know the number of people who came to your blog,
but there is little you know about their age, hobbies, social interests
or histerical loyalty to their iPhone.
This is where our service comes into the picture: Local Measures
provides you with metrics and dashboard explaining what kind of people
come to your website. By indexing a variety of social media sources, we
gather public information that - when presented in the right context - helps
you to make sense of your audience. So rather than spend hours tracking authors of comments on your blog, you take one look at a
dashboard and devote the rest of the morning developing more engaging
content. Knowing your audience also helps website owners increase
revenue: either by improving the quality and fit of ads they run or
by developing offers and partnerships that appeal to web visitors.
We understand that the idea of personal profiles jars many people and
we ourselves would be among the first people to complain about our
private data being collected across the web. So in developing our
service we are focused on putting transparent privacy controls in place
and making it easy to opt-out of our service. Yet, we also think that
the so-called science of audience has been exposed to a lot of
ungrounded criticism, sparked by sloppy reporting or misconceptions
about technology currently employed on the web. To counter this trend,
we want to emphasize the benefits more targeted content and advertising
hold for web visitors: from less obtrusive advertising to more quality content available online for free.
What's your dream visitor profile?
Seeing how many engaged readers come to the Amino blog, we would like to
use this opportunity to ask you what kind of information about your
website visitors you would find most interesting? Would that be gender
break down of your visitors (and how would you feel suddenly discovering
that full 90% of your readers are males)? Or are you more interested in
social interests of your visitors, meaning music and film genres they
like? Then again, if you are writing a fashion blog, you might be
interested in learning about the brands your readers like and engage
with across social networks. Feel free to leave your thoughts and
suggestions in the comments section.
Meanwhile, we are back to meetings and presentations, algorithms and
Excel sheets - all those things that one day will help our startup grow
into a kind of company that makes you say “Yeah, man!!!” upon learning
the kinds of services we provide.
-Arturas Bartas (@artasbartas)
Local Measures