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I'm a big fan of first round in general, and this is a cool idea and great data. But this index seems to be extremely sketchy, especially for B2B companies. The
by hammerzeit 13y ago
I'm a big fan of first round in general, and this is a cool idea and great data. But this index seems to be extremely sketchy, especially for B2B companies. The article says:
"This index is built on a weighted points system which considers the following factors: website traffic, social media following, social media engagement, employee count, page rank, inbound links, and SEOmoz domain trust score. Funding information is provided to give the reader context, but is not factored into a company’s ranking position."
First of all, many of these factors would seem to be correlated and self-reinforcing (is the ranking data published somewhere?) Also, the vast majority of these factors ultimately come back to publicity -- which is not necessarily remotely correlated with success outcomes. Companies like Invite Media, which certainly qualify as a substantial success, would rank low on this index.
Ultimately, this index seems to reflect less about which startups are actually sound businesses per se and more about which ones are generating excitement and hype. Ultimately I'd be more excited to see an index doing the former not the latter. Are the data sources for this linked to and/or explained anywhere in greater depth?
- dmor 13y agoCouple things: 1. I could post the raw data, I've held back doing so because it is quite expensive to collect and organize and I'm hesitant to give it away for free. 2. I agree that this data may skew toward companies with a great deal of hype, there is more data I look forward to collecting down the road to produce a more complete picture. Employee count is quite meaningful for B2B companies, and because B2B companies are not ranked against B2C companies their respective Twitter followers do have some meaning. If you build a "boring" B2B business and it is doing well on social media, you probably have a pretty strong brand.
- codewright 13y ago>because it is quite expensive to collect and organize Right so why aren't you working on pivoting Referly instead? I do enjoy hearing from members of the community but I'm reaching the point where I feel like you need to have a blogging intervention or something. Do you need one?
- orangethirty 13y agoAre you a refer.ly investor?