I was digging around in my old Referly email account today, and happened upon an email update to our investors from over a year ago. It was May 2013, and we didn’t even know we would call our company Mattermark yet. Here’s what it said (typos and all):
Date: Thu, 16 May 2013 20:54:45 -0700
Subject: Referly Investor Update – May 2013
From: Danielle Morrill <danielle@refer.ly
Hello Referly Investors & Advisors,
Since I last emailed we’ve reduced our burn from $50k to $25k/month while Kevin, Andy and I have been validating where we’re headed next. We’re creating a business and technology news publication. Think of it as The Wall Street Journal but written for business people who are 25-45 years old (the average WSJ subscriber is 55). We’ll be focusing on data driven stories, technical analysis and occasionally breaking news. We are particularly interested in covering B2B and developer products, Kickstarter campaigns, and other under exposed news areas.
We’ve also started developing our own version of Bloomberg for startups – storing information on 145,000 businesses and ranking the momentum of private companies based on external signals. We’re calling it the Startup Index, and you can see the April version here.
It took 8 people 9 months to get Referly to 135K pageviews a month, but with just our team of 3 we have beat that for the past 2 months with experiments on daniellemorrill.com, and are planning to launch a standalone site soon (name TBD).
Fortunately we have 13 months of runway left, and a few of you have asked whether we will be open to raising additional funding for this new direction. We have opened a new convertible note for $500k, and about half of this committed. If you are interested in investing in this note, please let me know.
We’ll be back to our regularly programming of product updates, graphs and progress next month. For now, see the attached screenshot for a sneak peak of what Bloomberg for startups could look like (please keep it confidential this is not launched and no one knows what we are doing yet). This isn’t a mock, it is a working product. If you have time to meet up for coffee I’d love to watch you play with it and give me your feedback.
We’ve continued to refine our vision quite a bit since this announcement and are more data less media these days. You can read a lot more about that in “Introducing Mattermark, the Deal Intelligence Company”