Company description
YourVersion
is a real-time discovery engine that continuously discovers new and
relevant web content tailored to your specific interests. You can then
easily bookmark and share pages via email, Facebook, or Twitter. YourVersion also offers an optional Firefox browser toolbar and a free iPhone app. YourVersion
harnesses collective intelligence using explicit and implicit attention
data, so that the results grow increasingly better as more people use
the system. YourVersion
launched at the 2009 TechCrunch50 Conference where we won the People's
Choice Award. We also won the People's Choice Awards at FailCon and the
Play Berkeley Digital Media Conference.
Team
The
YourVersion team has a strong track record of success with consumer
Web. YourVersion’s founder and CEO, Dan Olsen, has 18 years of
high-tech experience. Mr. Olsen holds a BSEE from Northwestern, an MSIE
from Virginia Tech, and an MBA from Stanford. At Intuit, he led product
management for Quicken and launched an online brokerage. Mr. Olsen also
led product management at Friendster. Before starting YourVersion, he
consulted to many startups, including Box.net, YouSendIt, MoodLogic,
Xing, and Epocrates. Mr. Olsen is a speaker at the O’Reilly Web 2.0
Expo and Startonomics. Visit Olsen's LinkedIn profile for more info: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danolsen98.
The other YourVersion team members have experience from companies including Apple, AOL, and Intuit.
Business model
Market Opportunity:
Discovery
and real-time search are two nascent spaces that offer a significant
market opportunity for the mainstream internet audience. YourVersion
believes these two spaces are closely related and that the winning
product will combine the idea of real-time focus (recency) with the
idea of personalized discovery (relevancy). The winner in the real-time
discovery space will be a key part of the consumer Web landscape with
valuable information about consumers’ interests and which Web content
they find most relevant. In the long term, as the Web evolves, the
leading discovery engine will enable fundamentally new ways of
connecting users with the Web content they want. For example, the
YourVersion user profile could be used as an information agent to
filter and prioritize any stream of information for a user.
Revenue model:
Due
to the nature of the product, YourVersion will be able to deliver
highly relevant ads. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads such as Google AdSense
represent a straightforward monetization alternative. The clickthrough
rate for YourVersion PPC ads will be very high, since the ads are
highly relevant and are tailored to exactly match the user’s interests
and the topic they are browsing.
In
addition to this proven form of advertising, YourVersion will have the
opportunity to experiment with innovative advertising models such as
sponsored results. Given how the YourVersion product revolves around a
user’s interests, which are effectively keywords, a self-service
keyword-based system for advertisers would be easy to offer. Due to the
rich dataset YourVersion will build over time, it can offer advertisers
an unprecedented level of targeting information, which could be used to
improve ad performance across the Web.
Viral growth
Because
sharing interesting content is a natural part of discovery, YourVersion
has an intrinsic viral nature that will greatly benefit user growth and
reduce customer acquisition costs. YourVersion’s CEO has significant
experience optimizing viral growth.
Low cost structure:
YourVersion
has very low costs, as it is neither bandwidth- nor storage-intensive.
The company has operated very cost-effectively to date.
Competitive advantage
Our
closest competitors are StumbleUpon, Digg, and Alltop, which all try to
help users discover relevant content. The limited success of these
competitors has provided a glimpse into the potential market
opportunity. A leading product has not yet emerged to capture the full
potential of the real-time discovery market.
YourVersion is better than other solutions because it:
-offers the highest degree of content personalization
-combines relevance with recency to deliver the best results
-has an innovative, easy-to-use user interface for users to browse recommended content
-provides a complete discovery solution that integrates sharing and bookmarking
-provides increasingly better results as more people use it by harnessing collective intelligence
Content Personalization
YourVersion
has been designed from the beginning to be a “long tail” product.
Rather than requiring users to select their interests from a finite,
pre-determined list, YourVersion users have the freedom to enter any
interest they like. This fundamental design decision enables
YourVersion to deliver significantly more relevant results. We also
make it easier for users to consume recommended content by organizing
it by content channel (News, Blogs, Twitter, Webpages, Videos, and
Products). Users can easily view content by channel or by interest.
Personalized results based on recency plus relevancy
YourVersion
focuses on delivering real-time results to users based on their
interests. YourVersion’s algorithms take into account the recency of
the content as well as its relevance. Unlike Digg and StumbleUpon, the
YourVersion product does not rely on users submitting content to the
system, which will result in faster growth. Unlike Alltop, YourVersion
does not require human editorial effort, resulting in a more scalable
approach.
Innovative, easy-to-use interface
Relevance
algorithms aside, the winner in this space has to deliver a great user
experience. The YourVersion team has significant product design
expertise which provides a competitive advantage. YourVersion’s
innovative UI makes it easy for users to scan and consume recommended
content. YourVersion has run over 80 usability tests with users to
ensure our UI is intuitive and easy to use.
Integrated Sharing and Bookmarking
While
some sites focus only on discovery, YourVersion believes sharing and
bookmarking are two closely related product benefits that need be
integrated to provide a complete discovery solution. YourVersion offers
the best bookmarking functionality on the Web. As users bookmark pages
of interest, the bookmarks are auto-tagged and automatically organized.
YourVersion also provides a streamlined way to share content in just a
few clicks. Users can easily share pages via email, Facebook, or
Twitter. The YourVersion browser toolbar lets users easily share or
bookmark any page while they are browsing the Web.
Harnessing Collective Intelligence
As
users interact with recommended content, YourVersion analyzes explicit
and implicit attention data to improve the relevance of results. This
information is aggregated across the entire user base, so that the
results grow increasingly better as more people use the system.
YourVersion user testimonials: