Mon

Dec 10
2007

Brady Forrest

Brady Forrest

The Seattle Start-Up Index

seattle index
The Seattle Start-up index tracks the traffic ups and of local startups and sites. There are 231 companies in the Index. To belong the company /site must be based in the Puget Sound area, be less than 5 years old, and be a technology company. The index ranks sites with the average of its Alexa and Compete score -- flawed, but still gives us something to work with

The sixth month of the index was just released and there are a number of interesting things to note:

  • iLike is at the top of the chart. Their Facebook app has really benefitted them. They first reached the top in May.
  • Intelius, number 2, is a people search and background checker site.
  • Picnik is #16 -- before their integration with Flickr. I expect them to be in the top ten next month.
  • 43Things is the top site from the Robot Coop. 43Places comes in at #35.
  • SEOMoz, demonstrating the desire for a better understanding of SEO/SEM, enters at #5.
  • Noonhat, the hobbyist lunch site, comes in at 116 -- higher than many funded sites. Update: From the comments I learned that Infinite Hoops, a site for finding basketball pickup games, is at 115 and is also unfunded.
  • Zumobi (formerly ZenZui), the mobile UI site, Invitastic (from Jackson Fish Market), and Faves (formely BlueDot) were the big gainers this month.

The index is maintained by Sampa CTO and founder Marcelo Calbucci (whom I used to work with at MSN (not Live yet) Search). Sampa provides tools for creating your own website. They've recently added genealogy tools.


tags: web 2.0  | comments: 3   | Sphere It
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Comments: 3

  mike [12.10.07 11:07 AM]

love how Alexa skews the SEOMoz results. Nothing like having a dedicated audience of audience-measurers (toolbar users) to help your results. Compete's toolbar has less skew-offset by some ISP data.

You can kinda infer how much skew the toolbars give. Especially when you compare the consumer sites, Farecast and Jobster.

  TM [12.10.07 02:02 PM]

InfiniteHoops is also unfunded and is right above Noonhat at 115.

  Sawickipedia [12.11.07 11:55 PM]

Good review Brady - I penned my own personal take on the rankings as well given my ties to a number of companies on the list. Here's the link:

http://www.sawickipedia.com/blog/2007/12/08/seattle-20-latest-startup-rankings-released/

Intelius's high rank strikes me as a bit odd at first. No one I know has ever used it and to be a top 100 site you generally have to be a fairly well known consumer site. Given it's a paid service on top of that and it would have to be the most well trafficed paid site in the US. But looking at their Quantcast profile I think I found my answer - they have a number of white-labeled distribution deals with sites like cellphonedirectory.com so my guess is Alexa isn't counting that traffic while compete and quantcast are counting it for them.

iLike really shows the power of Facebook for consumer web apps. Truly an amazing platform for consumer adoption and distribution.

Some other thoughts that i left out of my blog post:
- shocked at where cozi is ranked given how much money they raised.
- surprised at how few top 10k sites are based in seattle - At #12 we're above 10k. Interesting to see how that changes.

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