iBegin Blog

Well - tomorrow I’m off to the Kelsey Group’s ILM:07. The last Kelsey event we attended (Drilling Down on Local) was also when we released iBegin Source.

With our recent update to our data-format and new design, I thought it would be throw out some statistics:

• We have over 50 sales now.
• We have over half a dozen Canadian sales.
• We have never communicated with over 80% of our customers. This underlines our efficiency and efficacy approach.
• We have an actual page outlining why iBegin Source is great. All buzzword-free. I thought this was notable as everywhere else all I did was run into buzzwords.
• We are self-funded. Mind you self-funded doesn’t mean we cobbled together $100,000 and went with it. The parent company was incorporated over four years ago, and we didn’t even look at local for over two years. The iBegin Story has more.
• We have pushed prices down. Compared to what the Big Three were quoting before, prices are down 15%!
• We’ve had quite a few buyout offers. One of them was basically a 9x return on our investment. But no thanks - that goes against our philosophy. Not to mention that we have a …
• Three year plan. Very concise and targeted in where we want to be. I will go so far as to say that if our objectives are met, the landscape of small business and online will be far different than it is today.
• We’ve had over 30,000 user edits/submissions for our US/Canada data. Less than 1 out of 300 were incorrect (please note that I said incorrect - malicious were even less frequent). All were manually verified.
• 75% of edits were by their business owners
• 95% of submissions were business owners
• Frequency and rate of edits/submissions were more directly related to the # of businesses in a state compared to how ‘tech-savvy’ people were in that state. You can extend this: “self-service is used equally by business owners, regardless of how tech-oriented their community/state is”
• 50% of deletions were by a business owner
• People still contact us no matter what font-size we use in saying “You can edit this yourself.” Self-service is great, but you will always need people to help them out.

Looking forward to the next three years

Much more clear and driven - check out iBegin Source.

We now also have a commercial sample from 10 cities for every state/province.

I’d really appreciate thoughts and comments on an important issue we’ve been thinking over.

For those that have been around for a while - you know our tendencies are slightly off kilter. How else do you explain an 8 point philosophy?

I came to Canada when I was 14. Starting off with $0 (I had no allowance), I’ve grown the parent company (Enthropia Inc) into a multi-faceted organization with over 25 employees and 6 divisions.

Due to my zero-sum beginnings (and being a naive immigrant integrating into high school is no fun either), I’ve always had a soft spot for the upstart. Someone that has the guts and passion to do something, but needs some support. I even created a scholarship at the University of Toronto that specifically rewarded students who had a job and had an average just below Honors (80%). The money would allow them to work a little bit less, study a bit more, and get onto the Dean’s List. I did this while a student myself (third year engineering). I’m not bragging here - I just want to underscore my commitment to the little guy.

So when we originally had the idea of iBegin Source and we began discussions with data providers and partners, I was adamant that we have a non-commercial option. While $1000 may not look like a large sum to some people, to others it is too much to spare. If there is one area of the internet that needs innovation - it’s local. So we wanted to help developers create something unique.

At the same time - there was no physical medium to track. So as a trade-off, the non-commercial listings had the phone numbers removed (to thwart telemarketers) and also geocoding removed (a separate service of iBegin - consider it a value-add).

We’ve had some interesting apps developed. We’ve supported projects we thought were interesting with the full data set. Overall I think we’ve done a fair bit to change the landscape - but it isn’t enough.

Two issues have arisen:

1. The lack of phone # and geocoding turns off people we want on our side. They understand our situation, but not having phone #s and/or geocoding limits the ‘usefulness’ of what they can build.

2. Some people have an odd sense of entitlement. Bulk mail companies have taken our data and used it for commercial purposes. My favorite was when a company emailed us thanking us for our data, and recommendations on how we could make it easier for them to send out mass-mails.

Before going further - I want to clarify. iBegin Source itself is a success. We even get fan-mail. The product itself is doing great - we did just launch Canadian data.

And while US data is (relatively) common, Canadian data is much harder to come across. It is much harder to get financing for Canadian-focused companies. This post is about fostering innovation in the local space (with our data as a critical component). We want to give users access to the full enchilada (phone numbers and geocoding). At the same time, we want to make sure businesses don’t see it as some freebie and use the data commercially without paying.

So the question is - “What should we do to make sure people with a great local idea have the data they need?”

A few thoughts and ideas we’ve kicked around (I’m keeping my personal opinion out of them):

• Require the end-user to submit a little description (50-250 words) on what the data will be used for.
• Add a small surcharge ($5-$25). This way you also have billing info, and so removes anonymity.
• Make non-commercial physical only. For a shipping & handling fee, you will Fedex them a DVD with the data.
• Create an API.

I look forward to your thoughts.

UPDATE: Great ideas already under way. I want to emphasize - the non-commercial requirements still apply. This is more about getting the data to people who can do interesting things with it. We are very cognizant of the fine-balance required between commercial and non-commercial users (if there were no commercial users iBegin Source wouldn’t work).

So a few major updates to iBegin Source today.

1. We’ve moved the actual business listings from the source subdomain to the www. domain. USA Business Listings. This was so that the actual iBegin Source focuses on why businesses should use us.

2. We’ve also put our Canadian data live. Check out Canadian business listings.

3. We’ve finished the beforementioned category update. Important links:
Category updates: Old » New
Raw list of category updates
New master list of categories

We started off with 11,094 categories, and ended up with 10,432. 662 categories merged into existing categories - a 6% reduction. A total of 5177 categories were affected (though this does include minor tweaks like the above mentioned ‘(Manufacturers)’ vs ‘ - Manufacturers’.

4. We are temporarily turning off the non-commercial downloads. We’ve had quite a few cases of commercial usage. It should be back within <2 weeks with tweaked regulations to get it.

5. The new data format will go live in a few hours for commercial users to download.

[b]UPDATE[/b]

6. You can now order Canadian data!

[b]UPDATE 2[/b]

For current customers, we have an update page which covers all the changes.