

Seeing Interactive (YC W10) Raises Seed From Baseline & Lerer Ventures - lloydarmbrust
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/28/seeing-interactive/

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timcederman
Congratulations guys. I am very impressed with what you've done so far.

By the way, I didn't know joshu was part of this round?

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pmjordan
$1m is a "seed round" these days? The mind boggles. In any case,
congratulations!

I find it fascinating how crowded the local advertising space seems to be, but
different approaches seem to work in different places.

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aditya
Local is a _really_ hard market, and having cash in the bank removes atleast
one big obstacle which threatens your survival.

That being said it seems like since there's so many angels around these days,
raising money for a startup perceived to be hot is not that hard. The problem
with raising a large round is obviously that you're either diluting yourself
too much early on or raising the valuation too high for the next round. But
hey, if you need the cash, why not?

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thunk
My, these headlines can get difficult to parse. "What is an 'interactive
raise'? And what does it mean for one to seed?"

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lloydarmbrust
Yeah. Poor company name. Maybe we should have gone with "Newpaperly".

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jnovek
Don't you mean that we should have gone with "Newspaperly"? The .net is
available!

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callmeed
Newspapers aren't exactly in a "growth industry" ... I'm trying to see how
this threatens the Yellow Pages to any degree.

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lloydarmbrust
Really? The YP industry lost 25% market share last year. Print YellowPages is
gone in 5 years. Local businesses literally hate YP reps because they only
enter their market once a year looking to collect their "protection money".
Contrast that to their Newspaper reps who they actually like and have an
industry average of 10 years experience.

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callmeed
I agree the YP industry is dying, but that is happening regardless. I doubt YP
print is losing market share to print papers, and I'd like to see sources
showing that newspaper websites are taking share from yp.com ... my guess is
that they're both losing market share to Google, Yahoo!, AOL, and (soon)
mobile ad networks.

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lloydarmbrust
Pretend you're a local locksmith in a town of 10k, or an auto mechanic, or
hair dresser. You're been paying the Yellow Pages $199/mo for 20 years but
less and less people are coming in from that ad. Now, you have two options:
one, do you go with Google or Facebook, or YP.com, or some other company
probably from "California" that you just don't trust; or two, go with your
local newspaper who has a very similar product and who you've done business
with your entire life?

These people are our customers. I've actually heard folks say "I don't trust
those California people"--wrap your mind around that and get back to me.

The truth is that by partnering with newspapers Seeing Interactive has a
potential sales force of 30,000 trusted-local reps. Even if the newspaper
industry is dying--which is a ridiculous claim--we still have the feet on the
street and technology today to sell markets that Yelp or Google will never
reach.

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mkramlich
I like that angle. I too figured that there's one thing that web SaaS can't
really effectively replace well: feet on the street, and people interacting
with other people they trust in 'meatspace'.

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drusenko
congrats guys! good to finally see a public launch!

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troyk
Congrats -- Go get'm texas!

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rgrieselhuber
Congrats!

