In part 1 I described the somewhat chaotic way we got the bobsguide website started and how it was turned into a business. We had a lot of advice that we needed editorial content to attract the visitors we needed for a really successful site. A lot of people obviously believed the same thing. The web now has a number of financial technology sites with news items, interviews and and opinion pieces1.
So why did I ignore that and focus on a product directory?
- It was the information that I had when I started.
- We are tech people not journalists
- It didn’t fit our business model
The last one took a long time to understand. Our idea at first was that the entries are advertisements for the vendors. They were paying us for the space and our job was to get as many eyeballs seeing it as possible. This is partially true, but not the whole story.
The factor that dawned on us after a long time is the nature of the visitors. You visit a directory for one of two reasons:
- You are checking out the competition.
- You a interested in buying something.
You rarely visit a directory because of a passing interest.
In other words the site visitors were disproportionally packed with buyers. Any salesman will tell you the value of a buyer is hundreds, or thousands of times more valuable than a visitor casually browsing a site. What is more – quite often we knew who they were because they came in from the newsletter at some point. Salespeople spend their day hunting leads – and we had them.
We were in the business of lead generation.
Part 1: The casual start.
Parr 2: Why just a directory?
Part 3: A missed opportunity?
- There is a starter list here: https://tech.feedspot.com/fintech_blogs/. ↩︎
Bob Browning's blog 
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