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Personally a sad day. I was an employee of the company acquired back in 2011 who went on to build this. I left Google in 2013 but most stayed on to see this thr

by chuhnk 11y ago

Personally a sad day. I was an employee of the company acquired back in 2011 who went on to build this. I left Google in 2013 but most stayed on to see this through. I will say, as a standalone company we operated phenomenally and had solid revenue. I think that was entirely crippled once we got to Google and has a lot to do with the way Google operates versus a startup. Plus bureaucracy, plus big companies, plus people leaving after golden hand cuffs are off. To the team. You guys were awesome, it was a pleasure, I know you'll go on to do great things. End of an era.

mathattack 11y ago
How much of the issue was internal (how Google builds) versus external (how Google sells)? The popular myth is that Google is much better at the former than the latter. I'm curious about your insider's view with respect to acquisitions.
- chuhnk 11y ago
  I'll start by saying these are my opinions and perspective based on my experience. I can't speak for senior management or other acquisitions. I agree with the sentiment. Google can build anything but they struggle to sell. I think part of that is being subject to anti-competitive practices and constantly under scrutiny which makes it difficult to use typical sales practices. It's also just not part of their DNA. They underestimate the need for the sales process and the human element of customer service. Being an acquisition that gets dropped into the big machine, everything slows down and all those tools you once used aren't so effective anymore.
  - mathattack 11y ago
    Interesting - thank you for sharing your views. I wonder how much of it is senior management attention too. Google is very good at building 20x better mousetraps. Enterprise companies (say Oracle or Salesforce) are better at tackling immediate needs. Part is the market, part is the style of CEO. It takes a big shift to say "Build something incremental because someone will pay for it."
aikah 11y ago
Thanks for your testimony, so that service did make money. What was the name of the company that build it at first place?
- tyingq 11y ago
  A semi-educated guess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeatThatQuote.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeatThatQuote.com And a funny footnote there: "BeatThatQuote.com was penalised by Google for search engine spamming the day after it acquired it."
  - chuhnk 11y ago
    Yea that's the one. That quote is quite amusing. We didn't do anything different the day after the acquisition, Google didn't do anything either. People just started talking about us, posting articles, blog posts, etc which had an effect on rankings. We dropped down in natural search because hey a thousand other higher ranked publications posted stories about us.
rlander 11y ago
Honest question: what did you guys do differently from moneysupermarket, uswitch or confused? AFAIU the "financial services comparison site" vertical in the UK was already very crowded by the time of the acquisition.
- chuhnk 11y ago
  So the thing to understand here is that it's a two sided business. On one side the you're serving the consumer who wants price comparison of loans, mortgages, credit cards, insurance, etc and on the other side are financial services that want leads and are willing to pay for them. In essence, a two sided marketplace. In many ways we weren't different, we provided the same services as the others. On the flip side, we were faster to release new products, integrate with financial service providers and we had a variety of business models that our partners preferred. When the financial crisis hit in 2007 we pivoted the model to include affiliate partnering which meant price comparison under our partners brands. Our competitors weren't really offering that. And that's actually one of the reasons Google acquired us, they wanted the contracts, the relationships, the partners and they wanted to use their own Google brand.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

by chuhnk 11y ago

mathattack 11y ago

How much of the issue was internal (how Google builds) versus external (how Google sells)? The popular myth is that Google is much better at the former than the latter. I'm curious about your insider's view with respect to acquisitions.

chuhnk 11y ago
I'll start by saying these are my opinions and perspective based on my experience. I can't speak for senior management or other acquisitions. I agree with the sentiment. Google can build anything but they struggle to sell. I think part of that is being subject to anti-competitive practices and constantly under scrutiny which makes it difficult to use typical sales practices. It's also just not part of their DNA. They underestimate the need for the sales process and the human element of customer service. Being an acquisition that gets dropped into the big machine, everything slows down and all those tools you once used aren't so effective anymore.
- mathattack 11y ago
  Interesting - thank you for sharing your views. I wonder how much of it is senior management attention too. Google is very good at building 20x better mousetraps. Enterprise companies (say Oracle or Salesforce) are better at tackling immediate needs. Part is the market, part is the style of CEO. It takes a big shift to say "Build something incremental because someone will pay for it."

aikah 11y ago

Thanks for your testimony, so that service did make money. What was the name of the company that build it at first place?

tyingq 11y ago
A semi-educated guess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeatThatQuote.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeatThatQuote.com And a funny footnote there: "BeatThatQuote.com was penalised by Google for search engine spamming the day after it acquired it."
- chuhnk 11y ago
  Yea that's the one. That quote is quite amusing. We didn't do anything different the day after the acquisition, Google didn't do anything either. People just started talking about us, posting articles, blog posts, etc which had an effect on rankings. We dropped down in natural search because hey a thousand other higher ranked publications posted stories about us.

rlander 11y ago

Honest question: what did you guys do differently from moneysupermarket, uswitch or confused? AFAIU the "financial services comparison site" vertical in the UK was already very crowded by the time of the acquisition.

chuhnk 11y ago
So the thing to understand here is that it's a two sided business. On one side the you're serving the consumer who wants price comparison of loans, mortgages, credit cards, insurance, etc and on the other side are financial services that want leads and are willing to pay for them. In essence, a two sided marketplace. In many ways we weren't different, we provided the same services as the others. On the flip side, we were faster to release new products, integrate with financial service providers and we had a variety of business models that our partners preferred. When the financial crisis hit in 2007 we pivoted the model to include affiliate partnering which meant price comparison under our partners brands. Our competitors weren't really offering that. And that's actually one of the reasons Google acquired us, they wanted the contracts, the relationships, the partners and they wanted to use their own Google brand.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]