Startup Lessons: Guard Your Equity and Make Every Day Productive

Here’s the latest installment of our Q&A Series – short interviews with talented, experienced, and successful entrepreneurs who are on the front lines of running online businesses.

My guest is Curt Dalton, founder of the new search engine NowRelevant.com – yeah that’s right. I said new search engine. I had a chance to chat with Curt this week. He had a lot of great insight’s about the entrepreneurial game and the search business. He’s got an interesting idea.

This interview is super interesting because of the industry involved – one that’s obviously occupied by giants that we’ve all heard of. Here’s our discussion:

B5: Before we get into your new venture, tell me about being an entrepreneur.
For me it has always been about how you think about a problem and how you look to solve it.  I have always been the “I can create a better mouse trap” type thinker.  So, you will strike out some, but you if you stick with it and be persistent you will find success on a project sooner or later.

B5: So tell me about NowRelevant.com.
NowRelevant.com is a new search engine that shows you everything about a subject, but just for the last two weeks. We want to give users relevant information on topics without having to sift through 55 million results that date back to the beginning of time. We’re able to remove spam and SEO dummy sites from the users results as well.

B5: My first reaction is that there are some big players in search. What made you decide to get involved?
Well, NowRelevant.com was our own search engine that we had to build in order to run The Internet Time Machine trend analytics software – one of my other ventures. We realized that over the past 8 years of creating the Time Machine, that we also built a very powerful and new search engine. We are able to get blogs and forums indexed and to the user much quicker than Google can. So we felt like we were on to something.

B5: How do you make money?
NowRelevant.com offers a robust platform for advertisers such as the use of video in PPC ads and a 20 percent commission to affiliates on our pay-per-click (PPC) program.

B5: What’s the profile of your target user?
We see the Twitter-Facebook generation as our ideal user – a user that has tons of information thrown at them everyday but wants just updated, non-spam based results.  They aren’t looking for an historical perspective on the subject of their search, just very recent and current information on the subject.

B5: Is NowRelevant.com backed by any investors, or is it bootstrapped?
As of right now it is a big pair of army boots.  No complaints. We have never tried to raise money yet.

B5:A lot of our readers face the dilemma of how to properly fund their ventures. Can you talk about why you took the company in that direction?
Equity is the most important thing you have in your company, and you should only give it up when it makes tons of sense or you need to do it to survive.  Based on past success we haven’t need to do that with NowRelevant.com or TheInternetTimeMachine.com.  I understand a lot of people don’t have money just laying around to fund their own startup, so the have to give away equity in order to get the ball rolling. But my advice would be: don’t do it if you don’t have to.  Once you introduce shareholders or equity holders, life gets complicated and you have someone you need to report to and explain yourself to.

B5: Back to the business….what, specifically, makes you different from the big dogs in search?
With the historical clutter that frankly overwhelms the web (not all of the html pages are clutter, but much of it is irrelevant content) we wanted to set up a complex system of filtering and algorithms to give you just discussions and information about your subject for the past 14 days only.

Contemporary search engines have all been presenting us with most recent ‘additions’ to the web database, and have concerned themselves with making the most valuable of these new daily additions available to the public on a minute by minute, day to day basis. Search Engines are therefore able to run pay-per-click engines on top of their search interfaces. The advertising media is based purely on keywords input by users at the time of the search, and users of PPC advertising services on search engines have become a target for massive levels of spending incurred as a result of there being a serious lack of a ‘targeted’ and more ‘focused’ PPC engine that allows users to maximize on their PPC exposure by choosing keywords that they know are in demand, or have received considerable mention on the internet.

We allow users of our PPC campaigns to access the wealth of its resources dating back chronologically to exactly 14 days from the time of their search. This enables both the viewers of search results as well as PPC advertisers to target their PPC campaigns to a specific set of keyword phrases that are bound to receive public attention no matter what, enabling advertisers to compete better on NowRelevant.com with a much lower advertiser competition ratio than found on any other search engine.

Users of our search facilities will be able to retrieve a specific subset of information dating back on 14 days, allowing them to immediately benefit from the most up to date and recently mentioned information. Users of the our PPC engine will therefore be able to reap the benefits of a highly focused PPC campaign where advertiser competition for a specific set of keywords changes by the minute – it’s based on the most recent information coming into our databases by the minute, so there’s no chance of the same CPC levels staying for more than a minute either!

B5: Let’s move on to marketing. This is a really unique situation since I’m guessing you’re probably not going to market on Google. How are you going to get users?
I believe for a search engine to make it a group of people have to own it, as in put it into their personality, as in “I use NowRelevant.com because I am relevant and in the moment”.  So we are doing viral videos, and blog posts about it in order to promote a social trust and word-of-mouth feel. You can’t just put banners up and say “go use us”.

People like to buy something, not be sold something.  That is a big distinction.  If somone finds NowRelevant.com from a video or blog, then they can pass it along to their friends as a new and exciting thing, as opposed to seeing a banner and having it shoved in their face.

B5: What tips can you share with our readers about traffic acquisition?
Well, great question. That’s the golden goose right there. You can have the most life-altering product ever created, but without traffic, you are dead. There is no magic bullet.

I believe in a two-pronged approach: do your testing with PPC to get traffic started and see how things convert. But also put time and money into your long term link-building and viral markets.

Much like life, marketing isn’t 100% this, or 100% that. You need to do a little of this, a little of that. Give it time. Build up creditiblity slowly. The Internet is craving authority figures and sites. As the amount of pages on the Internet doubles every 9 months, everyone needs an authority figure in a niche to tell them which product or idea to follow since there is too much information out there for one person to follow.

B5: How much of this entrepreneurial life that we live is skill versus luck?
You create your own luck by working at it everyday and not giving up.  Everyday you need to do something productive for your business. Adding links in blog comments, starting forum conversations, starting an ad campaign. Whatever. Just do something positive to grow your business everyday and those little increments will add up to a lot over a year or two. Lucky breaks, as they are called, often happen because you have been working everyday on something and then finally caught someone’s attention or Google noticed you.

B5: What are NowRelevant.com’s plans for the future?
We hope to increase our spiders so we can pull from more sources as we grow. We think there is huge demand for non-corporate based results that Google is stuck showing due its size and corporate relationships. Adding spiders for different languages would be big as well.
Thanks again to Curt for sharing his thoughts.

Got any reactions? What do you think about Curt’s take on search? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.