
Mattermark (Formerly Referly) Wants To Be The Data Signaling Platform For VCs - aaronbrethorst
http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/04/backed-by-nea-andreessen-horowitz-mattermark-formerly-referly-wants-to-be-the-data-signaling-platform-for-vcs/
======
programminggeek
Wow, Referly only generated $33,883.38? All that press and effort and only 33k
in commissions? That is seriously terrible.

I don't know what all the fuss is/was about, but in terms of affiliate
marketing money, that's not a large amount of revenue for one solo affiliate,
let alone a whole company...

~~~
orangethirty
Why is it terrible? Sure, money was lost. But terrible it is not.

~~~
programminggeek
I meant that it's not a lot of money, it's wasn't very successful for the
amount of time/effort/marketing/press it got.

It was all over TC and other publications. One would assume that would
correlate to more success, but I guess that would be a false assumption.

~~~
orangethirty
"Press" coverage does not a success make. It does, however, buy a lot of cheap
VC money for later investments. One thing to learn from this is that media
coverage won't do much for you if the business model is skewed. Still, there
is always Cherry.

~~~
dsugarman
not very many startup business models work from day 1. Startups are
interesting if they are growing, not necessarily a foolproof business model;
you are consistently patching the holes.

If you get a lot of press coverage, it probably means you are a good hustler
and marketer, which is pretty vital to your success. If the market is bad,
switch markets. Kudos to Danielle & Kevin.

------
PaybackTony
The biggest problem here is that on average (as in, the vast majority of
start-ups that never get mentioned anywhere outside their niche) a majority of
successful start-ups don't generate any buzz or otherwise measurable data
because they are too busy developing their product.

Maybe that's what the product does, tries to gather data on start-ups that
produce little in the form of buzz but a lot in the form of revenue. It
doesn't appear so. Danielle helped me a couple times when I was using the
Twilio API, she's a nice person. Hopefully this works out for her.

------
crapshoot101
Hmm, I'm skeptical, but would definitely like to be wrong. There are a lot of
people trying to be the VC data source (VentureSource, Dashboard.Io, Datafox,
internal proprietary tools), but the problem is that most aren't that useful
at capturing what's valuable. @PayBackTony has the right point below - the
problem is that the majority of relevant data here is qualitative, and by that
very nature, harder to capture. Additionally, there really aren't that many
VC's out there - I assume the goal / scope is to go beyond that.

------
imjk
Not to sidetrack too much, but was there ever a postmortem on Referly? I
thought it was a great idea, and the Referly homepage currently only shows
stats that ostensibly show strong usage. I still think a user-curated
affiliate referral platform has a lot of potential. My only criticism of
Referly was that it was too overtly publicized as a platform for publisher to
make money versus platform to display your curation talents (a la Pinterest,
Tumblr, and even other blogging platforms), a subtle but important
distinction. I think a platform built with curation in mind first, and then a
secondary means to make commissions would do well.

~~~
thesash
There are two actually: <http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/zombie-
startups/>

and <http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/04/double-tap/>

~~~
SparksZilla
Actually one more as well: <http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/numbers-in-
action/>

------
eclipxe
I'm adding this as another data signal for my "are we in a bubble index"

------
minimax
This seems like a good idea. There are a lot of wealthy traders in NYC, but
the richest guy in the city is the one selling all the traders neatly packaged
financial information.

~~~
larrys
Correct but keep in mind that was a different era and also that involved a
hardware (bloomberg terminal) component that was a barrier to entry (in
addition to the data gathering that is). Also there are many more well healed
participants in that market I believe.

------
sethbannon
Neat idea, though I wonder how large the market really is for selling data to
VCs.

~~~
jenntoda
VCs might not need this (yet). But I can see this selling like hotcake to the
impending ballooning new group investors in the startups scene enabled by the
ranks of wefunder.com, fundersclub.com, etc. Go Danielle and team!

------
tomasien
So that's what all those blogs were about! Remarkably similar to what Paul is
doing with Dashboard.io except he's been doing it for a while. Not that that's
a big negative, I think it's good when smart people are seeing similar
opportunities at the same time.

Best of luck!

------
orangethirty
dmor,

I just won a $100 bet by calling this. _Thank you_.

Anyhow, their marketing strategy has been very fun to watch and unfold. It has
literally been done live on this site and most people did not get up in arms
offended. Which is the smart way to do content marketing. They have also
launched a business with what is simple an excel spreadsheet of data. I know
they have code for it, but they could have launched with _off-the-shelf
software_. Imagine that!

~~~
citricsquid
Someone took that bet?!

~~~
orangethirty
The bet was:

Mine - refer.ly would die and a new company would arise. The new company would
be about business meta data. Then as she published the blog articles, I
modified to state they would be selling data to VCs. I knew the so called
pivot to compete with medium was a bluff, because there was no financial
incentive to do so. Plus this team had always been very data driven.

The other bet - They would pivot into a medium with social features (AKA a
social blogging platform(whatever that means)).

~~~
larrys
"I knew the so called pivot to compete with medium was a bluff"

Um you are wrong about that. I worked with someone who was helping them, with,
let's call it branding, on that idea. So unless that was part of the elaborate
ruse, they _were_ thinking of doing the pivot.

------
intropic
Danielle's new blog strategy now makes a lot more sense! :)

------
codex
Intriguing and promising idea. I think the most interesting market here is
angels; the bigger firms already get a good look at the most promising deals.
If the execution proves successful, Mattermark should become accredited
investor and ask for a small number of shares per deal in each VC (or angel's)
fund in lieu of a subscription fee.

------
photorized
It's a neat concept. However, with any product or service that's so narrowly
defined - wouldn't you be concerned about your markets size? There are only
around 500 active VC firms in the US... How much would they pay for the
intelligence?

------
tocomment
What happened to Referly? That seemed like a good idea.

~~~
uncoder0
Yeah. I would love to read a retrospective about refer.ly if one exists.

~~~
zmitri
Amazon referrals are too good that there is no reason to use referly. If
anyone clicks on an Amazon referral link, and ends up buying something else on
the site -- not just the item you blogged about -- you still get the money and
leave the hard part to what amazon is best at -- suggesting things you might
like and getting people to checkout.

------
andrewhillman
Data is always nice but most investors invest via gut, but this is probably
more about not missing a company than finding a company.

------
rdl
This seems really useful for everyone, not just in investors. Learning about
customers/vendors is useful.

