Before we get started, have you seen articles like this on TechCrunch about companies that were launched by startups who joined the Founder Institute. Well, the Founder Institute is accepting applications right now, and I want to encourage you to apply right now, before it is too late, on FounderInstitute.com. The Founder Institute is a technology startup accelerator, an entrepreneur training program that launches companies in 13 cities worldwide. What do you get if you are in the Founder Institute? Training, mentorship, help getting investors, and just about everything else you need to get a startup launched properly. Go apply right now before it’s too late. FounderInstitute.com.
Do you remember Patrick Buckley who I interviewed? He can up with an idea for an iPad case. Then he built a store to sell it, and in a few months he generated about a million dollars in sales. Well, the platform he used is Shopify. If you have an idea to sell anything, set up a store on Shopify.com because Shopify stores are designed to increase sales. Plus, Shopify makes it easy to setup and manage your store. Shopify.com.
Do you remember when I interviewed Sara Sutton Fell about how thousands of people pay for her jobsite? Look at the biggest point she made. She said that she has a phone number on every page of her site because, and here is a stat, 95 percent of the people who call end up buying. Most people don’t even call. But seeing a real number increases their confidence in her and they buy. So, try this. Go to Grasshopper.com and get a phone number that will make your company sound professional. See what it does to your business. Grasshopper.com.
Here’s the program.
Andrew Warner: Hey, everyone. It’s Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. Today’s guest is the man who built my website. He’s a man who is a good friend of mine who is actually stepping in last minute because today’s official guest did not show up. He is Adarsh Pallian. He is the CEO and co-founder of Geotoko. Geotoko is what?
Adarsh Pallian: Geotoko is essentially a platform that lets businesses manage location based campaigns. If you’re a business and want to set up something with Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Yelp, Loopt, Whrrl, and every other location based platform out there, we kind of let you set it all up in one central dashboard so you can manage your campaign essentially.
Andrew: Okay. All right. I don’t usually talk about new companies, and this is a new company.
Adarsh: This is a new company. We just launched.
Andrew: So, we’ll spend a little bit of time talking about it, but I also want to know about your history and how you got here. One of the things I saw that was very impressive is you launched a company called Chart.ly, as a domain.
Adarsh: Yes.
Andrew: And you sold it, I think, within minutes of launching it. I want to find out about that. You also launched a couple of other businesses including Tweetizen, which I loved and I used to use for my live chat here on Mixergy, and maybe we’ll get to some of the other projects like JustBought.it. Why don’t we start with what you were doing before you launched any of these? Were you a consultant developing websites for other businesses?
Adarsh: Yes, before I did any of these I was working with Timothy Sykes. You know Timothy Sykes. He is one of your biggest fans. I helped him for a year and a half until it got to a point where he didn’t really need me full-time. So, I started doing something on my own and built Tweetizen at that point.
Andrew: Tim Sykes was the first big project that you had? The first big customer?
Adarsh: No. Before that I did do a lot of . . . well, actually, yeah, maybe the first big thing I took a risk on. I did have a full-time job before that, and I did have small contracts that were essentially WordPress themes. But Tim Sykes was one of those guys, I read about him in “The New York Times” when he closed his hedge fund. He had a fascinating story. I really wanted to reach out to him and see if there was anything I could do to help him. He said, “Sure, why not?” We came up with an agreement that I would get 50 percent of everything he makes. We did that for a year and a half essentially, and it really worked out for both of us. I think it helped him become who he is right now, and it helped me gain a little bit more experience and eventually led to making your website for you. Making a name for myself essentially. That’s what I have been doing. And then . . .
Andrew: Actually, before we go on to “and then,” I want to just stay on this story because I love this. You just saw an article about him in “The New York Times.” You went over to his website. You saw that the website was not that hot. I think he was using Joomla or something else that a cousin of his created, right?
Adarsh: It was a Joomla site. It was just a blank white theme with mismatched information here and there. Most of the sections were not even working. There was no “About.” He really didn’t know. I understand that from his point of view he was a hedge fund manager. He couldn’t really talk. You know him, he is all marketing. So I don’t think the hedge fund was perfect for him, because he had to keep his mouth shut.
It was just at that point where he could actually open his mouth and start talking. He didn’t really have that platform to do it. So I came up with this elaborate idea for him. Let’s do this and this. Let’s try these things. Let’s see what happens from there. He said he was going to Sundance Film Festival that January, I think. This was two and a half years ago, I think, now. I said, “Sure, I’ll come to Sundance. Let’s parley it out at Sundance and sort of plan some things out. See what we can come out of it.” I flew to Sundance. I stayed with him and his buddies at a cabin up there. It was awesome. We got to know each other. We stayed and lived with each other for maybe a week and a half at that point. It was the first time I ever met him, too. We kind of built a relationship right there. We went from there. Then I flew out of New York. He flew out of Vancouver, back and forth.
Andrew: What did you imagine from that relationship? I see a lot of, a lot of times I see a website that does not look good, that does not represent the owner well. I figure, “All right, maybe somebody needs to do something about it.” Even if I were to do it, even if someone were to do something about it, there is not much of a future beyond building the website. What did you imagine would happen if you improved his presence online?
Adarsh: I think if you look back it wasn’t really a planned move. It was one of things where you just do it, go with the flow, and hope for the best. Everything that I have done so far has been kind of an accident. You kind of just stumble upon it, do it, and just hope things work out.
Andrew: You’re flying into Sundance. You’re taking time out of your schedule.
Adarsh: Yeah, but that’s the thing. At that point, I didn’t really have much of a schedule going on. I had some money. I had a decent job. I had saved some money up. I really didn’t enjoy working for this company. They required me to fly and all of that. So I said, “You know what? I should just do it. I should just make the leap.” I’ve always taken a leap until then. So why not, right? So I just did it. I figured at Sundance, it’s, you know, if worst comes to worst you end up watching a few movies and then you come home happy. I couldn’t really complain about that. It wasn’t like going to the middle of nowhere and sitting in a room and just chatting business all day. It was more fun at the same time. I knew right away. Just talking to him, I knew we would get along. He is one of those guys that you either get along really well with him or you don’t get along with him. So, I got along with him really well. That, I think, helped build that foundation.
Andrew: Okay. So, you get together with him, and I want people to understand why I am spending so much time on this. By the way, I see Noah Kagan, whose interview is supposed to happen now, is watching us live. He is saying . . .
Adarsh: Should I . . .
Andrew: No, no, no. You and I are going to finish this interview. Noah, if you are still out there, we’ll do our interview in about an hour. I’ll record it and Joe will have it set up for when I can’t do another interview. He is now in France apparently. Noah Kagan is traveling while he is building his business.
Adarsh: Okay.
Andrew: I’ll pretend that all those nasty things that I said about him when he wasn’t coming on, I didn’t say.
Adarsh: [laughs] I told you, there’s always a good reason.
Andrew: [laughs] Yeah, right. There’s no good reason. Well, we’ll find out. Maybe there is. So, the reason that I was asking about Tim Sykes is that it ended up being a great relationship for you. He keeps talking about how his website does, I think, $1.5 million in sales a year. I am going to ask in a moment whether that’s true. Also, Chart.ly was an idea that he came up with, the two of you partnered on, and you sold. Beyond the revenue and beyond that specific website, there were other opportunities that came to you. The idea was, that once you guys got together, you were going to help him sell product online by redesigning his website and giving him the ability to sell. He was going to be the guy who used your tools to go and talk, do promotion, and piss people off until they bought from him.
Adarsh: Correct. That’s what he is good at, so we just stuck with it. In the beginning, there was no product. There were just ads. I would sell ads. I would try to sell three month slots. Really just pull it out of the air. I’d tell him, “Let’s try to sell three months in advance so we get a big chunk of money.” Most of these financial guys, they have a lot of money, so I figured it is not that hard to cold call these guys and say, “Hey, this is timothy Sykes. This is his story. Pay us $10,000, we’ll make sure your ad remains on the home page and every fifth click will see it.” They said, “All right. Sure. Why not?” We made some money like that. We sold $5,000 to $10,000 lots depending on the agency.
That worked out until, I think I met him at Sundance in January and we did this until June. I flew into New York in June, again, for no good reason. I just said I wanted to come to visit New York, and he said, “Come stay with me.” I said sure. So, I went and stayed with him for two weeks, I think. It was a pretty long June. During those two weeks, we hashed out the TIMalerts idea. He said, “Why am I giving all this stuff for free? People should be paying me for it.” I said, “Well, why don’t we do it?” I think we almost coded it right there while sitting in his apartment and ordering in Chinese food. It was nasty, but, anyway, in those two weeks in New York. He always takes it, if I am there with him, you’ve got to maximize the time. Everything we do has to be related to work. He is a workaholic. It helps that I am also a workaholic. Essentially, we worked two weeks, eight hours every day, and got TIMalerts set up. Just a basic TIMalerts.
We found out that within almost a day of launching, he was making about $10,000, I think, within the first few days people signed up. Now, we knew that we had something there that people were willing to pay $30 a month for. Then there was a lot of growing pains.
Andrew: What was TIMalerts?
Adarsh: TIMalerts is essentially his exact blog post but in a form of an alert that tells you what to trade for that particular day. It is just what he would trade for that day. There was no guarantee you would get an alert every day, but you’d probably get two alerts a week. I think that’s what it is still even today. He always said, “You can’t force a trade.” If a good trade comes along, you will be notified of it. Part of that promise was that you would get an alert as soon as he makes a trade. There were a lot of pains as to how that would happen though. Emails didn’t go out on time. People were getting pissed. Somehow, magically, just luck I guess, he managed to keep customers and keep growing it even though they were not necessarily getting it 100 percent on time. There were a lot of growing pains there.
Andrew: This is important because, if you are going to give people a trade, especially with the kinds of trades that he is giving them in penny stocks, you need to give it to them in time for them to do something about it. If they miss the window, it’s too late.
Adarsh: It’s too late. Exactly. A lot of people were upset about that because they missed the window and it was too late at that point. The idea that he was trying to say at that point was, “Okay, here is my trade. Learn from it. See why I chose that particular stock. Try to apply that the next day. If I miss something, you won’t miss it because this is probably what you are going to do full-time.” That’s a message. It is all about teaching. It’s all about understanding and teaching. That was a message that he went about. That is still alive today. That is how he makes $1.5 million a year now. That and all the DVDs that came after it.
After we started doing the TIMalerts, we started thinking how can we teach people to do this on their own. The DVDs came then as a natural progression. Then we started cross-promoting them. You get this and you get half off that. That is what he is good at. We bundled things up. If you go to his homepage now, it is just a massive landing page to buy his stuff. It works. He is still making money. He is in Rome. He invited me, I got an email from him a couple of days ago asking me to go to Rome because he has rented a place there. Sorry, my computer just shut down here. He has rented a place there until November. A three bedroom villa and it is just himself and his girlfriend. He said why don’t I just move, fly there for the next three months and kind of just hang out with him. That essentially means, go there, come up with new ideas, and work with him. It is never hang out with him.
Andrew: You know what? He really is a workaholic. I emailed him asking him a question about one of my interviewees yesterday.
Adarsh: Yes.
Andrew: Within a few minutes, he emailed me back research on the guest. Then I emailed him afterward and I said, “Do you want to do an interview with this guest at some point in the future?” He said, “Andrew, I am in Nepal. I don’t relay have much Internet access and I don’t have time for this.” Somehow, while he was in Nepal, with limited Internet access, he was able to do research on a guest within minutes. He’s unreal.
Adarsh: He is extremely unreal when it comes to stuff like that.
Andrew: All right. Let me fill I details here. I want to make sure that I fully understand this. When you launched, even today he doesn’t have much traffic, he didn’t have much traffic when he launched, but you were able to sell ads at $10,000 an ad a month?
Adarsh: Yes. With that traffic.
Andrew: Why?
Adarsh: I think we just sold the fact that he has a dedicated customer base. It is the same customer base that he has had since day one. I almost know everybody who has signed up for his site. I know them on a one-on-one basis, I am sure, and they know me. It is the same people. Every now and then, they’ll introduce new students, college grads, or people who want to get into it, but it is not a crazy growth. I don’t think his model will ever scale to that level of crazy growth. It works for what he has right now. Besides he has a few other projects right now. I just don’t know how he is doing it. He has two or three other sites now that he is working full-time on.
Andrew: Okay. We said $1.5 million a year is what he is making with his website. I have asked you privately before I interviewed him, “Is that legitimate or am I about to go into an interview where I am lying to my audience and I look like an idiot for buying somebody’s shtick.” You said, “No. The numbers are real. He is a legitimate. He’s a marketer and he’s aggressive, but he is legitimate.”
Adarsh: Yes.
Andrew: Did you get half of that?
Adarsh: No. [laughs] No. No way.
Andrew: So, he is legitimate to a point?
Adarsh: No, legitimate to a point. The $1.5 million you see right now I think is a combination of DVD sales, TIMalerts, his trading. He has three or four trading platforms, trading accounts. It is not a very accurate number of what our initial contract was. Our contract was just for one year and now it’s three years ago. We ended a long time ago. I really didn’t feel right to keep collecting money from him when I wasn’t doing anything anymore. He has all the tools he needs. I helped along the way, and then I just started him on a monthly rate at that point for a little bit until he was, now he is all on his own. I don’t do anything for him. I just watch things go. Yes.
Andrew: The other thing that I was wondering is we talked about how much he is a heavy promoter.
Adarsh: Yes.
Andrew: Anything that you helped set up for him, including these TIMalerts that people would sign up for a monthly subscription to, he would promote like mad. In fact, his blog posts feel like they are promotion. It is just, “If you had signed up to my TIMalerts, you would have discovered this truth. If it is too late for you to discover that truth, go sign up for my CDs because then you’ll learn tomorrow’s truth.” That’s the blog post.
Adarsh: That is the blog post.
Andrew: Some of them have a lot more meat to them, but they are bookended by these promotions.
Adarsh: Yes.
Andrew: Does that work? Doesn’t that piss people off and say why am I coming back and subscribing?
Adarsh: It pisses me off. But, you know what? It must work because obviously people are coming to his site. I don’t think it works for everyone. I don’t think it works if you are a guy selling a WordPress theme. If you are an aggressive, see the whole stock market needs to be an aggressive spot. You need to be aggressive just to really sustain yourself and make money in the stock market. I think it works because the people who come to his site are, I think, mostly people with the same addictive personality that he has, which is like, “Let’s make money.” They don’t mind that in your face marketing. That’s what I figured over time is that these are people who have either addictive personalities or people with a lot of ambition to make quick money on the stock market. They don’t mind this in your face marketing, because that is who Tim is and there is no way to change that. You either deal with it and you learn to make money with it, or you just don’t come back to the site. People have stuck with him, which essentially means it works.
Andrew: I see. Okay. All right. I realize too that people kind of like that heavy marketing from a certain person. If they are going to learn how to make money online from one of these “get rich quick” guys, they want that person to be an aggressive, trying to make himself rich person.
Adarsh: Yeah.
Andrew: If they are going to go to Tim Sykes, a guy who is going to teach them how to make money, they’re going to want him to be aggressive about his own finances, too. That’s my theory.
Adarsh: Yes. Exactly. And have a good track record. He has a good track record. He is all about, “I’ve got this good track record because I am aggressive with my own ways of doing things, so you should be, too.”
Andrew: I see. Okay. You’re helping Tim there. That got you your start and helped you quit your job. What is the next thing that you do after that?
Adarsh: After that, well, after that I think I built Tweetizen. That is the time when Twitter was coming about. I wanted a way to group and embed widgets, which Twitter never had. Twitter never had lists, when we built Tweetizen. Twitter never had embed widgets back then. So it was an easy thing to build. We built it. I knew it was not going to be anything big. It was just a self-help tool.
A funny thing I just found out the other day, and I don’t know why I didn’t find this out earlier, Ellen DeGeneres, if you go to Ellen DeGeneres’ website, Warner Brothers website, there is a big Tweetizen widget right there. I’m like, “Awesome. These guys are using it.”
I’m still getting a lot of hits for the site. A lot of embeds. I think it is in over 10,000 websites now, that widget. I haven’t touched a code or looked at since, it’s been a year and a half since I actually looked at the site. It is kind of self-running, doing its thing. I cannot take it down obviously because then all the sites with these widgets would go down. It is just running on its own and I am letting it be there. There is nothing else I can do about it. That is what Tweetizen is. Tim helped a little bit. He put some money into it as well just to help with development costs. It was just so we could get into this whole app building thing which is more like a startup kind of thing more than our original marketing point.
Andrew: Okay. I had it up on my website. It was a way of pulling in Tweets based on a search. I’d have all the Tweets that mentioned my name or my company name put in there. There was a box at the top where people could Tweet out. If they tweeted out, their response would go into that list, too. I used it as a chat board that also helped me get some promotion.
Adarsh: Yeah. Since then, a lot of better tools have come about. I didn’t want to compete with that market. It wasn’t worth my time.
Andrew: But your dream was for some kind of business there, right? If Tim is investing money into it and you’re investing time.
Adarsh: It was. I think I got bored of it soon after. I saw what it could do. Then I saw all these other guys pop up in that same space. It was just one of those things where I just didn’t think it was worth putting much more time in it. It is a free tool. Take it for what it is worth. I was thinking of some premium stuff. Then I’m like, “You know what? It’s not going to work in this competitive space.”
Everybody was building a Twitter app at that point, if you remember. There was TweetDeck. HootSuite came soon after. Everybody was doing it. It was so easy to do that anybody could just dominate the market. I didn’t think it was worth my time. If you look back, it probably was a good decision, because no one was making money off of any of these. They are just free tools. You have one your site, you don’t pay for it. It’s just there. People like HootSuite a year and a half later are now starting with the premium plans. That’s how long it takes. TweetDeck is still free.
That’s my take on that. It is there for what it is. People are using it. People are happy. It’s still working. People come up with suggestions, I’m like, “Too bad. You can buy the application from me and do your own thing to it, but I’m not going to make any more feature enhancements.”
Andrew: Here is what I am seeing from entrepreneurs who don’t have a lot of finances behind them. A lot of it is testing to see if people become raving fans. Sorry, what I mean is, they launch these small projects, and they are testing to see if the audience for them become raving fans, or if they themselves become a raving fan. If one or the other is insanely crazy for it, then they build it and make it big. If not, they just move on.
Adarsh: Exactly. I completely agree. That’s the same thing with TwitPic. I bet TwitPic was a tourism project that came about, and he suddenly saw all this traction. He was like, “Okay. Now I’ve got something to work on because people really need the service.” Tweetizen never really got that kind of traction. I mean, people are using it, but not that tipping point, that traction. At that point, you just walk away. As long as it works you kind of leave it there. Don’t touch something that is working, right? That’s my whole policy on that.
Andrew: I see. Okay. All right. In some way the TIMalerts was like that. You come up with an idea, you toss it out there. If the public loves it and they buy it the way they did, $10,000 within a day, then you say, “All right. Let’s grow it. That’s exciting us.” If they don’t, it would have died, and you guys would have created something different.
Adarsh: Yes. We’ve done so many things. I don’t even remember now. We tried so many things, before TIMalerts, that lasted maybe a week and we killed off.
Andrew: Tell me some of those because that is pretty inspiring. For somebody out there who is listening and is going to hear about all the success stories from you, they’re going to say, “Screw it. I’m not going to have that.”
Adarsh: I think there was something like TimBucks or TimDollars.
Andrew: I remember that. When I first interviewed him, we talked about that.
Adarsh: Yeah, where we kind of gave away, I don’t know why, but we gave away this fake currency for something, because it was cool to give away fake currency at that time. Maybe because Facebook was coming out with fake currency or something. I don’t know. We did it. It didn’t really work. Nobody really cared for them. It was kind of like an incentive to get people to submit something. I don’t remember the details. It was a few years ago now. We spent maybe a week building it, putting the platform in place. No one cared for it. So we scrapped it.
There was something else in there we tried to do, too. I can’t remember now. But I know it didn’t work and we scrapped that as well. TIMalerts eventually caught on. Again, TIMalerts, we had no clue that it would catch on. If no one paid for it, why keep it up. If only ten people pay, there is no point keeping it. It caught on. People don’t mind spending $30 a month.
Andrew: TimBucks was, it looked beautiful to me. I loved what you guys were able to do with it. The idea was, if you commented, I think, you would get a Tim Buck. If you submitted something, you would get a Tim Buck. If you had enough of those, then you could get a T-shirt or I don’t remember what kind of things.
Adarsh: Yeah. We came up with all these fake prizes to give away. Not that we had any of that. I think the idea was to display these things and then figure it out when somebody reaches that level. Some people did reach the level, and they were upset that they never, we were giving an iPod Nano at that time, because that was when the iPod Nanos first came out. We never had a Nano. They were out of stock or something. We promised one though. We may have given one or two. Tim may have done that. But it wasn’t worth our time, obviously, to keep it.
Andrew: Can you talk to me about when you build something that is pretty impressive and you have to close it down. What is that like?
Adarsh: It kind of sucks a little bit. You only, at least from my point of view, you only really close something down when you’ve already built something to take over. When we closed TimBucks down, we already had TIMalerts, I think, to some extent, hashed out. We were excited about that. So there is no sorrow of, “I am just going to shut it down and go and cry for a bit, and then think of something else.” We have already thought of something else that is much better. We’re excited about that. Let’s just close this down and stop wasting our time on it. I can’t have, I can’t even spend time crying about it because it is not worth our time. We’ve got something much bigger here to play with. So I think that is the mentality that a lot of us took, and I still do, to all the stuff leading up to Geotoko. There has always been, “Hey, there is something much more exciting down the road, so let’s worry about that and not worry about the one that may have passed.”
Andrew: I see. You just keep launching these projects. You see if people love them. If they love them or you love them, you build on them. If it doesn’t work out, you don’t feel bad about closing it down, or in the case of Tweetizen, just leaving it there.
Adarsh: Exactly. Just leave it. There is no harm in leaving it if people are using it. There’s still traffic, so why shut it down.
Andrew: Damien in the audience posted a link to your website. I want to be clear about the spelling of the site. It is Geotoko, G-E-O-T-O-K-O, Geotoko (Geotoko.com). Your personal site is P-A-L-L-I-A-N dot com (pallian.com). Okay, so, Tweetizen, you launched that. What is the next thing that you launched?
Adarsh: Tweetizen had a whole bunch of blur happened. We launched Tweetizen. Got in touch with Howard Lindzon and gang, because StockTwits just launched at that same time. Tim wanted to get active with StockTwits. Tim had known Howard from a previous, somehow they knew each other from the hedge fund world. Tim likes visual and StockTwits was all about a stream of tweets, which it still is today. So he said, “Why don’t we have charts on it. It kind of makes sense. I like to look at charts.” And I’m like, personally, I don’t care because I don’t trade. Tim said, “Let’s build something together.” I said, “Yeah, we can build it.”
So we built that, we built Chart.ly. Called it Chart.ly because it sounded cool. We kind of hinted to Howard along the way, “Hey, we’re building this cool application that can sit on top of your StockTwits application, using your StockTwits API.” Actually, we don’t use StockTwits API at all. We actually use just Query API. All it is, it is like a TwitPic but for stock charts. So it’s the same idea that built TwitPic. It’s the exact same thing where instead of uploading a photo, you upload a stock chart and you put a tweet attached to it. If you have the dollar sign before it, it will show up on the StockTwits stream.
He kind of like it. He said, “Cool idea. I like it. Can I buy it off of you?” I’m like, “I don’t know if we want to sell it, but sure we’ll entertain the idea.” Tim, obviously, didn’t want to sell it. He’s like, “Screw that. I can build this much bigger and better.” That’s obviously his mentality. I was like, “You know, I’m okay either way.” Again, I’m not a trader. So I knew that for this application to work, it really needed StockTwits not to ban us, because there no point people uploading stock charts if they can’t get the tweet showing up on StockTwits. So we kind of needed the StockTwits integration.
What I was hoping for was a much bigger payout, which we never got. Instead, we got a chance to invest and get some stock in StockTwits. From my point of view, I think it worked out a little bit because it helped build the relationship with Howard Lindzon, which he’s an awesome guy. That was always the case. Even today with Geotoko, I emailed him a week ago and said, “I’m looking to get these angel investors.” Within a minute, he was able to introduce me to them. I think that relationship is what I was trying to build. That comes with trust. Chart.ly was such an easy application to build. It didn’t take a lot of time. It didn’t take any effort. So I thought to look at the long run, you build this application and give it away. It is almost like giving it away to StockTwits, but what you build out of that is this trust relationship with Howard and something better will come along the way in the future. So that’s what we did.
Tim was unhappy about it. He supported whatever I wanted to do with it, but he was not too thrilled about it, to say the least. But I think at the end of the day, he ended up getting a nice chunk of StockTwits equity. So it kind of helps out. At the end of the day, everybody is happy. There is no grudge. So that’s what happened with StockTwits.
If you go to the link I’m going to send you right now, you can see the new version of it. It looks pretty nice actually. I’m very happy about it.
Andrew: It’s not up on Chart.ly?
Adarsh: No.
Andrew: Can I tell people what it is?
Adarsh: Yeah, that’s the new version. It’s much more polished, highly integrated version of Chart.ly with StockTwits.
Andrew: It’s beta.Chart.ly.
Adarsh: And it looks awesome I think. They have done a really good job. They have moved over all the stocks. It’s a huge number. That’s another thing. Before we even talked to StockTwits, the minute we went live, we saw that we had about 3,000 charts getting upload the first four or five days. I’m like, “Holy smokes. That’s a lot charts.” I was hoping like maybe 100, maybe 200. We had 3,000. We knew right off the bat that this is something that can scale really fast, and we’ll have a TwitPic kind of issue with the serve and costs and all that. So it may be good to just give it to StockTwits and let StockTwits take care of the whole bandwidth issue.
Andrew: So the idea was just like you share photos on TwitPic, you would share charts on Chart.ly. But why couldn’t people just go to Google Finance and create a chart there and link to that?
Adarsh: If you go to beta.Chart.ly, you’ll see that every chart has all of these crazy annotations on them. People love that s***. I don’t even know why. But people who love to trade, they like to make these little notes on charts, that they get from Google Finance or wherever, with their own predictions of where things are going to go. Again, you have to be a good trader to understand and really be involved in this. But they love that. There is a whole sub-community of people who will take any given chart and put their own random stuff on it, predictions of where it is going to go and get critiques from people. So that’s why Chart.ly worked. Again, I had no idea that this was going to work. I thought, oh, some random guy is going to put an Apple for stock chart. What’s the point? I can just go to Google Finance and get it. But when you have an Apple with his predictions on it, then it becomes a little bit more. If you’re a heavy trader and the guy who is making the prediction has some weight behind him, it kind of makes sense.
Andrew: I see. So they would take a screen shot essentially of these charts. Then they would use some drawing tool to draw on it and say, “This is what I’m seeing here. This is where I expect it to go.” They upload it to Chart.ly, and from Chart.ly they could get it on Twitter and they could get it onto StockTwits.
Adarsh: Yeah. And then they get feedback on it. Then people critique them. They compare what they’ve done four months from now to see how good their predictions have been.
Andrew: So, I’m now looking at two companies. Tweetizen and Chart.ly. Chart.ly takes off right away. Tweetizen is a little bit slower. Is that because you had an audience of stock traders through Tim Sykes’ website and through his audience? They were natural customers of Chart.ly.
Adarsh: Exactly.
Andrew: Where if you had an audience of people who were web developers or people who were building websites or trying to make money from websites, if you had that audience, then Tweetizen might have taken off.
Adarsh: Exactly. Again, with Chart.ly it was easy because we had built a base of people. Tim would just say, “Use Chart.ly.” Everybody would use it. So we built that base first. Tweetizen was all about I had to come to you and say, “Hey, Andrew Warner, have you heard of Tweetizen?” Or, hey, whoever, “Have you heard of Tweetizen?” So it was a much bigger scope and people would either get it and they would use it, or they won’t care. People who got it, used it. People who didn’t care, didn’t care at all. And they still don’t care.
So that’s what it is, and that is with any startup I think. You build something. You get a lot of press if you can get a lot of press. Even if you get a lot of press, that doesn’t mean that your product will succeed. It just means that you will get a lot of press for that one week. People will use it, and then they will never come back to it because they don’t really have a use for it at that particular point in time. So getting press is good, but it’s not the end of everything. You’ve got to learn. The good thing about these things is that when you build a small app like that and you build it up quickly, you learn along the way. You build a relationship with the press. Every time I want an article on Mashable, it’s real easy for me to get an article on Mashable because you have built that relationship by doing these small things. So that’s what you learn. It takes time. Obviously, you spend a year doing that, but it pays off I think in the long run.
Andrew: Another thing I’m seeing as I’m doing the interviews is entrepreneurs who have an audience before they have the product and if they have that audience, then when they launch the product, they people who give them feedback and help them improve it. They have people who use it and help them grow it and so on.
Adarsh: Yeah.
Andrew: But the audience and the product need to fit well together. So if Chart.ly was created by 37signals, even though they have a bigger audience than you and Tim Sykes and I combined, it still would have flopped because their audience wouldn’t have gotten it. They would have been like I was when I heard it, “Who needs it.”
Adarsh: Yeah, exactly. So you have to be at the right place at the right time. If StockTwits did not exist, Chart.ly would have a much harder time to get momentum. This worked because StockTwits had already spent all that time and energy building that user and convinced people that they needed to be talking about stocks on Twitter. So since they have already done that, it became such an easy progression at that point. It almost came like, “How come we never thought about this earlier?” With StockTwits, we should have been doing this from the get-go. So that’s how it worked out. It really kind of complemented each other, and it worked out really well. But there is no guarantee that it would have worked out at any other time. If I was to build it five months before StockTwits, no guarantee people would use it.
Andrew: I see. Okay. I was thinking because you had the audience with Tim Sykes’ following in the trading community, that would be enough. You’re saying that’s good, but it is also that StockTwits existed with its own audience and they also embraced it.
Adarsh: Yeah, exactly. Apparently, these guys wanted an application like this for a while, but StockTwits never had the time or the people to build it. So it worked out that we came up with the idea and they pitched it to the audience and they loved it.
Andrew: Okay. All right. Why don’t we talk just a little bit about JustBought.it, and then we move on to Geotoko.
Adarsh: Okay. So JustBought.it came soon after Chart.ly. We sold that, and I had nothing else going on for a while. So Boris Wertz, who is a Vancouver based venture capitalist, he approached me I think from an article on TechCrunch or something. He said, “You sound pretty cool. I’ve got some money. Let’s do something.” So it wasn’t a traditional VC engagement. It was more like we are business partners in this new venture. We just incorporated a new company. It was fairly straight forward to do that. He put some money in it and said, “The money is yours. Go nuts with it.” So I said all right.
Andrew: How much money?
Adarsh: $50,000.
Andrew: Okay.
Adarsh: So it’s $50,000 to begin with, and he would put another $50,000 if need be and it would just go from there. So $50,000 to get me started on essentially. I was like, okay, that will keep me busy for the next little while, I thought. He kind of threw in a few ideas. This again the whole Twitter app ecosystem. Everybody was building something with Twitter at that point, and it was the cool thing to do. That’s what he wanted. He wanted something Twitter related. He wanted to take a risk, because he was an entrepreneur himself, and he sold his app to a company that eventually got sold to Amazon. So he has made some money off of that Amazon sale and he wanted to do something on the side on top of the VC things that he currently does. So it was a low risk for him, and for me it was just kind of a fun thing to do.
He was really excited about the consumer space. He’s a big consumer VC, so we came up with JustBought.it. It was just an idea to share what you just bought on Twitter. Then again, that was one of those applications where it did not get critical mass. It did not get to the tipping point, and so we aren’t working on it anymore. It’s there. For some reason, a lot of Koreans and Japanese people are using it now. No idea why, but it’s just the way things go. It’s big in Japan. If you go to the site now, you will see a lot of the posts are from Korea or Japan, and people are sharing it there.
Andrew: The website, as Tobin just put in the chat room, is JustBought.it. Was there an idea that you guys had on how you would monetize it in the future?
Adarsh: You know, it wasn’t a well thought out idea. It was just let’s do it. Let’s go with the flow. We never really put a lot of thought in the beginning because it was part-time for him, obviously. Right? It was part-time for me. It was full-time in the beginning, but it was never going to be a full-time gig unless there was more money in and we saw traction. As soon as we launched, we got some traction feedback. But we started seeing that people really don’t care about sharing it as much as we thought they would, and it just went from there. At the same time, I think about six or seven months later, what’s that site that Pud made up?
Andrew: Blippy.
Adarsh: Blippy. Yeah. Blippy came about and that made sense. I don’t use it. I still don’t understand Blippy, but some people don’t mind using it and that took on. That’s what, when it comes to shopping on Twitter, Blippy’s the number one name in that game.
Andrew: Your site, which is JustBought.it, is when you buy something, you go and you tell JustBought.it that you bought it and you let people talk about it on Twitter.
Adarsh: If you’re going shopping and you can’t make up your mind, if you have an iPhone app, you can download the app, take a photo of the stuff you’re going to buy and tweet it out and say, “Should I buy this?” Share your ideas with friends and get feedback on it.
Andrew: Blippy is essentially doing the same thing, but they’re a little bit more automated because they tie in with your credit card and they automatically will grab what you’re buying.
Adarsh: Exactly. It’s the same idea, they just automated the whole process. It makes sense to automate it. Actually, we thought about it from the very beginning, but the whole idea was privacy. If I was uncomfortable giving my credit card, how can I try to sell that to my customers? Right? Blippy said, “Screw that. Let’s do it.” They did it. It works. You learn from that, right?
Andrew: Tobin in the audience is asking what happened to the $50,000? Did you use it all?
Adarsh: No, no, no. We didn’t use it all at all. There’s still quite a few money left in the account. I’m not going to take it. I can if I want to, it’s there. No, we didn’t burn it all.
Andrew: It’s just sitting there. The idea didn’t take off the way you wanted it to, it was a test, and you’re just leaving it all there for now?
Adarsh: We’re going to leave it there for now until Boris and I talk about what we want to do with it. We’ve been talking about selling the code. If someone out there wants a solid code, use it to build something else, then it’s for sale. Get in touch.
Andrew: I’m going to ask this. I did an interview with Boris here. We talked about how he invests, how he got into it. We talked about where the money came from that he’s investing. What I’m wondering is once he saw the article about you in TechCrunch, why would he just reach out to you and say, “Hey, you know what? I want to back you and an idea”? You didn’t have to pitch him. You didn’t even have to have traction. You didn’t even have to have an idea. Why? Why did he back you?
Adarsh: I honestly do not know. I have no idea. I wish I knew the answer to that. I think it was just he had some money and he wanted to get into the whole Twitter. In his portfolio, he never really had any applications in it. Now he does, he’s got a few. But at that time, there was nothing that he wanted to invest in. The initial conversation we had, he asked me, “How easy or how expensive is it to build an application?” I said, “About $5,000, $10,000 to make an application.” He said, “Okay. I’ll put in $50,000, go ahead and build something and we’ll see what happens.” That’s all it is.
Then I got to know him a lot better. We worked together. He comes to the office every week. He’s next door actually, literally next door. He could probably hear this conversation. We got to work together. He’s a cool guy to know and is well-connected. Again, it’s one of those things you build, you have a connection now, right? It worked out. It’s there, like I said, if people want to buy it. I’ve moved on. He’s moved on. The code is there for sale, so that’s where we’re at.
Andrew: Have you considered selling stock tips by email newsletters on maybe a $30 a month basis?
Adarsh: Me?
Andrew: Yes.
Adarsh: Stock tips?
Andrew: Have you considered maybe subscribing to Tim Sykes’ alerts and then selling the responses to other people, just forwarding it?
Adarsh: Yeah, exactly. I could have, but I haven’t thought about that actually.
Andrew: If anyone uses that as an idea, please email me and let me know how it goes. All right. That brings us up to Geotoko. The idea behind Geotoko, you told us what the concept is. You’re plugging into . . . actually, can you give me a use case? How would I, as somebody who’s into my iPhone, into technology, use it?
Adarsh: Geotoko is not for you to begin with. It’s not for Andrew Warner. It’s not because Andrew Warner does not want Geotoko. It’s for businesses. For example, that office you’re sitting in, in Argentina, they can sign up to Geotoko and entice you to come check into the office because they’ll say every time you check in, we’ll make sure we deduct $5 from your rent, and that will then entice you to check in. What they’re hoping is that when you check in, your Foursquare account is connected to your Twitter and you Facebook and all that, and you’re going to put a good message saying, “I love this place. I come check in here every day and I get $5 off.” I check in 30 days, I get 30 times $5 off. So that’s the kind of things we help businesses do.
We came up with this idea with my co-founder who had a lot of agency experience and had been working in the promotion space, the million dollar prize giveaway space for big brands. Taking that idea into a location-based platform and came up with the idea in March, actually April, applied to TechCrunch Disrupt with an idea. We didn’t have an application. They will kill me if they heard about this, but we didn’t have a working prototype at that point. We just had mock-ups and they looked good. Applied to TechCrunch Disrupt, they called me and said they loved it, come to New York and present at the first annual TechCrunch Disrupt. I said, “Oh, my. We’re so screwed.” We had nothing. We had no idea. We had no traction. We had no idea if people will like it. We were not supposed to tell this to anybody because part of the deal of getting TechCrunch Disrupt is they make you shut up about it until you go on stage, so we couldn’t tell anybody about it.
One of those things where we just did it, did some mock-ups, got approved, did a couple practice rounds with them. They gave us some feedback. Their feedback is really not feedback you need for your application. Their feedback is all about how to present properly. That’s all they care about at the end of the day, make a compelling presentation. Went on stage, present it, got really bad feedback. Everybody’s just like, “What the hell are you building? This is garbage.” The problem was, I realized, is the way we presented is not what we’ve learned since then. We were presenting it to the wrong crowd, talking, oh, you can go to TechCrunch, type in Geotoko and you can watch our entire presentation, and you’ll see Skobel’s eyes are just like, “You guys have no chance.” Jeff Gablia [SP] just, “You have no chance. It’s just garbage of an application.” I shook my head and was like, “We just got to walk off stage at this point, it’s just so bad.”
I’m fine with it because what we did, we learned along the way. We came back. We said, “Okay, got the feedback. People finally got to see it. Let’s improve on it.” June, we improved on it. Did a complete overhaul of the user interface, applied again for Jason Calacanis’ Open Angel Forum. He said, “Awesome. Come to San Fran, do this.” I flew to San Francisco, to L.A., all the same group of people. I said, “I don’t know if I should come. I’m not convinced yet.” He said, “No, you have to come.” I literally bought a ticket the night before I flew into San Fran. Good thing I went because in that small group of angels were Chris Sacca. He loved it. By then, we had a much better platform, it looked better. He loved it. He said, “You should talk to. . .” I shouldn’t probably say this.
We kept building it. We kept building up our application. We are finally now what you see at the site is the finished first version that we launched a couple of weeks ago with that Mashable post. It’s been great. We got huge sign-ups and 90 percent of the sign-ups being from agencies. I can’t tell you any of the names or anything yet because of NDAs we had to sign with them, but think Fortune 100 companies wanting to use our platform to do contests and promotions coming up in the fall. Lots of stuff happening. Coming up with case studies. I can’t say anything more until maybe December. We’ll have awesome case studies to show you, what these campaigns are and how they’ve used our platform to manage that campaign.
Andrew: Let me give you one other example of a company and see how Geotoko would work with them. How about Starbucks? How would you work with Starbucks?
Adarsh: Starbucks right now has an exclusive agreement with Foursquare. But say they didn’t have that, they would use us to essentially do the exact same thing they’re doing with Foursquare, but not just limited to Foursquare, but to go. . .
Andrew: What’s that? What do they do with Foursquare?
Adarsh: I think they have this thing where every mayor gets $1 off their frappuccino. I think that’s all it is. We let them do the same thing, but not just limited to Foursquare, go with Gowalla, Brightkite, and all the other checking services.
Andrew: So whoever tweets the most about each location gets to drink free? That kind of thing?
Adarsh: It could be anything. They can come to our site and customize the way they want to price. To give you an example, I can’t give you an example. Man, what example can I give? I can’t give you an example, but there’s a lot of big chains out there who are using our platform right now to give all kinds of stuff from a free tweet every time you check in to the first five people checking in will win something to a mayor will win something to. Music promoters for concert venues, I can’t give you the names of the artists, but if you check into this concert venue, you get a free link to a tune, for example. Stuff like that.
Andrew: Ah, I see. You check into a venue, they get your tweet to your friends and you posting on whatever service, and then you get a free Mp3, which is nothing for them to give away.
Adarsh: Yeah. Our analytics lets you see everybody who’s checked in. We’ve got all kinds of great analytics like heat maps of how your location is doing and how your neighbors are doing. If you have, for example, if I’m, say, a movie theater and I see that Starbucks, all my customers come from after they check into Starbucks, I can then go to Starbucks and then give them a coupon. I’ll come up with a relationship with them, saying, “I know a lot of your customers are coming to our movie theater after they drink your coffee, so here’s a coupon, put it on the counter.” Say, $5 off the movie. They can build that kind of relationship. We help them understand that space a lot better.
Giving a lot of analytics and being able to manage, for example, 180 locations. If McDonald’s came to us and said, “We have 3,000 locations,” we can handle 3,000 locations for them and give them that whole analytic dashboard. Instead of having 3,000 windows opened up on Foursquare and 3,000 on Gowalla, they can have one window and manage the whole thing. It really works. Really, really good feedback, so I’m really excited about it. It’s one of those things I’m actually getting excited about. It’s getting traction. I’m not going to shut it down so fast. I’m going to keep it going. We’re making money, that’s the best part. Nothing is free.
Andrew: You’re already profitable?
Adarsh: Not profitable, but all the campaigns running right now, people are paying us for it.
Andrew: I see.
Adarsh: Because this is an agency, like you see on an application, they can pay for it, because that’s part of the mentality, they’ve got to pay for it. So we’re charging people right off the bat to use it. The live beta version you see on the site is free, obviously, but a lot of it is customizing by solutions we are building with agencies and they are all paying for them.
Andrew: All right. Looks like we’re starting to lose our connection for some reason. All right. Did you ever get funding for this business?
Adarsh: No. What happened is I haven’t officially started yet. I was actually going to reach out to you soon. We have been talking internally to a bunch of people and just been so busy that I never had a chance to finish my deck and actually present. Again, Howard Lindzon, I asked Howard, I said, “Howard, I’m looking for investors. I’m looking for New-York-based investors, because this is all agencies in Chicago and New York. I don’t want a Silicon Valley investor. I want someone who’s connected to this space.” He was all up for it. I have to follow up with him. I’m trying to follow up.
I spoke with Fred Wilson. He connected me to a bunch of other angels. I just have to do a lot of following up at this point. Then go from there. It’s getting to a point where it’s almost too much, where I have to follow up to clients. That’s why when you called the first time, I was talking to the agency, then I talked to you. Then I got to go back to the deck. It’s good. It’s good times.
Andrew: All right. Well, congratulations on doing so well with Geotoko. Thanks for talking about how you got here. I’ve been wanting to get you here to do an interview for a long time. I keep hounding you and thankfully . . .
Adarsh: The story gets better every time you call, right?
Andrew: That actually is true. You know what? I would have taken you just for the story of how you met Tim Sykes by calling him up and telling him that his website sucked and then improving it and building that relationship with him. That would have been enough. Then Tweetizen, I love Tweetizen enough I would have had you on just to talk about that.
Adarsh: Sure. I didn’t want to just waste your time. We should probably have a call a year from now. I think that would be the awesome time.
Andrew: Do another one a year from now. I’d love it. Let’s connect after this about people who I could help introduce you to.
Adarsh: Sounds good.
Andrew: Cool. All right. Thanks for doing the interview. Everyone, check out Geotoko. Thanks for watching.
Adarsh: See you.
Andrew: Cool. Bye. Thanks, bud.
Adarsh: Bye.
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