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