Recently on Genlighten we’ve had an influx of new users registering for the site and posting lookup offerings. While most of them represent exactly what we have in mind — local researchers visiting nearby repositories to retrieve and digitize records that are only available offline — some have gone in a different direction than we’d like to see.

These “lookups from online sources” have offered to look up records for a fee that are already available on Footnote or the FamilySearch Record Pilot for free. We see nothing inherently wrong with this (presuming the client is made aware of the free alternative should they wish to search it themselves) but it doesn’t really fit the vision we have for Genlighten.

Genlighten is all about Offline genealogy records

Just as Footnote calls themselves “The place for original historical documents online” we’d like to be, in part at least, “the place to get help retrieving original offline historical documents”. That’s how we’d like to position/differentiate ourselves relative to our competitors. It’s become obvious that we need to spell that out more clearly on our site and in our promotional materials, and you’ll see us doing that in the weeks and months ahead.

In the meantime, one of the things we’re now doing is reviewing each new lookup offering we get before letting it go “live” and making sure that the records the provider offers to search aren’t already available online for free. A great place for us to go and check this out is Joe Beine’s marvelous sites listing birth/marriage records and death records available online. [He has several other sites worth checking out for other record types as well.]

Joe’s performed a tremendous service for genealogy researchers everywhere. He’s constantly updating his sites; when he does, he lists those updates on his Genealogy Roots Blog. You won’t find a lot of posts here about Joe’s own research or on the usual geneablogging memes — just high-quality links and actionable advice on places you can find the records you want (usually for free!)

If you’re not already following Joe’s blog, I encourage you to do so… you’ll come back again and again and find stuff you never would have guessed was online.

Back in June of 2008, at the conclusion of my Entrepreneurship and New Venture Formation class at Kellogg, our class group pitched the concept of Genlighten to a panel of VC/Entrepreneur judges. Our presentation was a success, but one of the judges warned us that the older demographic we were serving would have more customer service needs than we had budgeted for in our financial plan.

Now fast-forward to March 2010. At this point, given our small userbase, my wife has been able to deal quite effectively with the daily emails and occasional phone calls we’ve received. But over the last few weeks as our traffic has begun to pick up, we’ve seen the volume of customer service inquiries increase right along with it. Several of our experiences with concerned customers have proven quite challenging to deal with, and I like to think we’ve grown as a result. I thought I’d share a few of  the lessons we’ve learned.

Episode #1: Panic Mode

I recently created a new PowerPoint presentation for prospective providers called “Genealogy Lookups 101“. I uploaded it to Slideshare.net,  and posted a link to the slides on our Facebook Fan Page.  Later that night, my daughter sent me an agitated e-mail. Someone was posting on our Facebook wall that our site was a scam, that the records we offered weren’t free like we claimed they were, and that he’d learned that only after wasting $29.95. Since I knew these comments would potentially show up in all our fans’ newsfeeds, I went into panic mode. We don’t ever claim the lookups we offer are free, and we don’t charge subscription fees… nothing on our site is priced at $29.95. What was going on? Who had he mistaken us for?

Guilt By Association

I replied to the poster’s message, asking for details. After some research, it became clear what had happened. Slideshare.net is a little like YouTube. They host the slideshows you upload for free, they ask you to tag your presentations with keywords, and they display Google AdWords ads next to your slides corresponding to the keywords you choose. One of the ads that was being displayed next to my “Genealogy Lookups 101″ slides was for a site that appeared to offer free lookups. As it turns out, our Facebook fan had visited this site several months back, signed up for a $29.95 subscription, and found nothing useful at all — certainly not free genealogy lookups.

So when he saw that ad next to our presentation on our Slideshare.net page, he assumed that the ad was from us, and that we were the ones who’d previously disappointed him. It took some time, but I eventually convinced him that the ads he’d seen didn’t have anything to do with us. After a while, I quietly deleted our message thread from the Fan Page wall. But the damage had been done… a good number of our Fans unsubscribed from our page, presumably lost forever.

The lesson here was clear: wherever we put our content, we need to be conscious of the environment it’ll be placed in. People will associate Genlighten and our brand with the web company we keep. If we’d had a business account on Slideshare, for example, instead of an ad-supported free account, we might have avoided being associated with questionable ads.

Episode #2: Transaction Pending

As part of the checkout process on Genlighten, we reassure clients that their credit cards or PayPal accounts won’t be charged until their lookups are completed. Technically, the process includes these steps:

• The customer clicks on the “Proceed to Checkout” and the “Complete Checkout” buttons
• We submit an “authorization” to the customer’s credit-card issuer to verify that the card is valid and that the payment amount can be successfully charged. At this point the charge should show up on the customer’s credit card as “pending”
• The lookup provider performs the lookup, completes it, and clicks on the “charge client” button
• The earlier “authorization” on the customer’s card is “captured.” This is the moment at which the card is actually charged.

“It’s Deceitful”

Recently a client checked her bank balance and was told that a charge from Genlighten had come through on her debit card. She checked the site and noticed that the lookup was still in process. Perturbed because we had explicitly promised she would not be charged prior to lookup completion, the client called to complain. She liked the site, was pleased with the lookup provider’s efforts, but was NOT happy that we had “deceitful” language in our explanation of the charging process.

I listened, took responsibility for the “you won’t be charged until…” language (I had written it!) and explained that as I understood things, the charge should show as “pending” rather than “cleared.” I offered her a full refund if that wasn’t the case. She agreed to check again with her bank, and that’s how we left things as the call ended.

Welcome News

A few days later, the client e-mailed once more. She’d checked with her bank, and they had clarified what the automated teller had told her earlier: the Genlighten transaction was indeed “pending” rather than “cleared.” Her money was still in her account. She was relieved, and so we’re we. It felt like we’d regained her trust.

Two lessons this time. First: perception is reality. The client felt she’d been deceived, and only once she’d discovered the truth for herself was she convinced otherwise. By listening and offering to make her whole, I motivated her to check the situation out in more detail. If I’d come across defensive, I probably would have lost her for good.

Second: customers read the promises we make and will hold us to them with exactness. In this case, it probably wouldn’t hurt to add some language to the site that explains the possibility that their bank may show their transaction as “cleared” when it’s really still “pending.”

This is What We Signed Up For

When we chose to start a business, we simultaneously chose to face challenges like these. We knew we’d be small and face large well-established competitors. And we decided right from the start that we’d need to differentiate ourselves through our personalized customer service. We’re starting to understand just what we’ve signed up for in that regard.

We want to be like the Founder of Groupon, Andrew Mason. This is what he wrote in a recent blog post about his attitude towards customer service:

I don’t know if it’s some kind of weird complex, but the idea that there’s even one customer out there that is less than thrilled with Groupon horrifies me.

We know that feeling. When things don’t work the way we want on Genlighten and customers are unhappy, it’s hard for us not to take it very personally. Our customer service strategy is simple: keep listening to our customers and work to make Genlighten a little better every day.

I’ve spent a sizeable fraction of my evenings the past few weeks working on applications to summer startup accelerator programs. Genlighten’s to the point where we could really benefit from the mentoring, community, focused intensity, and access to seed-stage funding that these programs offer. The ones we’re particularly aiming at are:

• Y Combinator
• Techstars (the Boulder version)
• NYC SeedStart
• Dreamit Ventures
• Excelerate Labs

The application questions reflect each program’s unique personality, but they also share some predictable common elements (What will your startup do? Who are your competitors? How do you plan to make money?) Though none of them specifically ask for revenue estimates (they’re smarter than that), they all imply that they’re looking for startups that are attacking large potential markets.

The Challenge of Sizing the Genealogy Market

That’s a problem for us. Just how big is the genealogy market? This question has been addressed in numerous forms over the years, usually phrased as “Just how popular is genealogy anyway?” Dick Eastman has taken a serious crack at answering this question in the past and arrived at the answer (paraphrasing slightly) “probably not as popular as we think.”

When I tell people I meet at startup-related events that I’m working on a genealogy website, they usually say something like “Oh… that sounds like a nice little niche.” Their body language sends the message that they don’t think I’m going to be getting rich anytime soon. I’m tempted to offer a response like “It’s actually a pretty big market,” but  I just don’t have the numbers to back that claim up.

My Estimate and How I Arrived At It

For the applications I’ve submitted so far, I’ve basically tossed out a made-up genealogy market size number: $1 billion in annual revenue. How did I come up with that number? Here’s my back-of-the-envelope calculation (all figures annual):

• Ancestry.com 2009 revenue: $225M
• All other genealogy websites: $100M
• All other genealogy software: $50M
• Professional genealogy services: $100M
• FHL microfilm orders: $10M
• Government archive film/document orders (NARA, State, County): $100M
• Vitalchek: $50M
• Other genealogical record retrieval (libraries, historical societies): $25M
• Genealogy societies (membership, conferences,  transcriptions): $15M
• Other genealogy merchandise (books, accessories, etc.): $25M
• Specifically genealogy-related travel: $300M

Feel free to check my math, but I get that to add up to $1B annually.

Probing My Assumptions

Of the figures I’ve listed, only the Ancestry revenue number is anything other than a wild guess. The travel number is particularly suspect. I’m thinking about “pilgrimages to ancestral homelands” like Ireland, Germany or Poland, so they’re probably pretty expensive, but how many people are actually making those kinds of trips in this economy? And what about professional genealogists? Are they really making $100m in annual revenue, or is the real number more like $50M?

I feel a little more confident about the web and software company revenue figures, though they’re also probably a bit generous. But very few genealogy-related firms are public, so it’s always going to be difficult to refine these numbers without direct input from the leadership of these firms.

Does It Matter?

To the majority of family history enthusiasts, the size of the genealogy market probably isn’t that important. But if we’re going to encourage entrepreneurs to build innovative genealogy-related companies, and if those companies are going to receive the funding they need to grow and succeed, someone’s going to have to come up with a better estimate than I have. Hopefully a much bigger one!

In a fun blog post entitled “The Genealogy Instant Answer Line“, Arlene Eakle educates her impatient (and by implication, naive) clients on just how long it’s going to take to pole vault them over their brick walls:

Please do not expect to have your 20-year problem resolved, with documentation, with full analysis, with pertinent comments and follow-up in supporting sources, in 20 days.  Not happenin’–with your ancestry nor anybody else’s.  When you engage me to solve your hardest-to-find ancestor and link him to an unknown family unit, allow sufficient time for me to do it.

I love this kind of candor. Arlene’s obviously a truly professional genealogist who’s going to be completely straight with you. And she’s clearly right. You probably wouldn’t have come to her for help unless yours was the kind of problem that needed her unique divergent thinking skills and research expertise, applied over months, not days.

But what if the “Instant Answer” was available from a single offline document?

Would it be realistic to expect to have that document retrieved on the same day you decided you wanted it? What about if you wanted it in an hour? A few minutes?

“Just In Time” On-Demand Genealogy Document Digitization

Consider the following (admittedly contrived) scenario. You’re browsing the Family History Library catalog online  at about 9 pm Central time on a Thursday evening. You notice there’s an FHL film (say 1671673) that has a pretty good chance of holding the marriage record for your great-great-grandparents. It hasn’t yet been digitized and indexed on the FamilySearch Record Pilot, unfortunately. You could go to your local FHC tomorrow and order it for $5.50. It’d probably arrive in 2-3 weeks.

But what if you wanted to know RIGHT NOW if film 1671673 contains that marriage record, or if you should try a different research avenue instead, all without interrupting your genealogy flow? What if you could log onto a website, enter that film number, and immediately see a list of people who were at the FHL right this minute and who could go pull the film for you? What if the researcher you selected could then browse through the film on a reader, locate the marriage record you’re after, scan it directly to a digital image, and upload that image to the website for you to view and download, all within about 15 minutes of receiving your request?

We have the technology…

As it turns out, this scenario is completely plausible. In fact, here at Genlighten we’ve already begun building the infrastructure to make it real. It will probably end up relying on web-enabled smartphones and make use of Twitter’s APIs. Clients who want this kind of near-real-time response will need to pay a premium for it. But the cost of this service will still be comparable to that of requesting the film.

So… are you interested?

Can you think of a situation where you might use this? How much would an “Instant Genealogy Answer” be worth to you?

I had the chance to visit with leaders of two of the most influential players in the online genealogy market today, and I was struck by the completely different attitudes they each take toward APIs. FamilySearch has at least four distinct APIs that I know about, including ones for:

• Family tree data
• “Authorities” (standardized dates, places, and names)
• “Record Search” bibligraphic metadata
• “Research Wiki” page content

Footnote, by comparison, doesn’t have any (that they’ve made public, at least.)

API => Startup; No API => Old-media dinosaur

At first glance, this seems backward and counter-intuitive. APIs tend to be the preferred mode of growth and communication used by successful startups like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. By granting access to their data in a format that can readily be consumed by other services, these companies create platforms on which others can build — entrepreneurial ecosystems that nourish other startups (think Facebook or Twitter application developers) — and generate income by applying ad-based monetization approaches or revenue-sharing arrangements.

So-called old-media “dinosaurs” like the New York Times and News Corporation, on the other hand, have tended to throw up paywalls and to resist calls to make their content available via APIs. For them, the mantra of the free content movement: “information wants to be free” has been an anathema to be fought with all the weapons at their disposal.

Before today, I would have tended to tag FamilySearch with the “old media dinosaur” label while filing Footnote under the “startups that get new media” category. So it should be Footnote touting its APIs to the developer community, while FamilySearch stays closed and protective of its data. But instead it’s the reverse. What’s going on here?

False Dichotomies and “New” Old Media

What’s going on here is that both print and online media are undergoing a period of radical disruption, in which old assumptions are overturned or abandoned and previously valid dichotomies are rendered false, or useless, or both.

Prime example: the New York Times has introduced its own set of APIs, while simultaneously rolling out a new consumption-limiting paywall.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that genealogy “content providers” are grappling with the same issues and evolving their business models in response.

Business Model Differences Shape Policies Towards Content

One obvious explanation for FamilySearch’s API-centric strategy lies in its non-profit status. As a Church-sponsored entity whose mission is to facilitate and accelerate genealogy (and temple) work throughout the world, it would be self-defeating if FamilySearch treated its content as scarce and proprietary. Footnote, on the other hand, relies on a subscription model that can only succeed if the majority of their most desirable content is kept behind a paywall. [As a small, nimble startup, Footnote is also constrained in how much development in can do with its scarce resources -- robust APIs are not easy or cheap to develop and maintain.]

Consider the Possibilities

But what if Footnote (or Ancestry for that matter) tried to become more of a research platform and less of a “walled garden” of content? In a prescient 2008 essay, VC Fred Wilson makes this prediction about the promise of “Content” APIs:

Content is data, but it’s a bit different. Content is unstructured data with the benefits of a lot of context, semantics, relationships. Once the vast databases of content that exist inside the big media companies start becoming available via APIs, we can start to do some amazing things.

What kind of “amazing things” could for-profit “big media” genealogy companies do if they opened the spigots on their content using APIs? And if they did so, could they still make enough money to continue to fund the record digitization efforts that have so greatly benefited genealogists? I believe they can.

A Modest Proposal

I haven’t fully baked this idea yet, but I’m going to toss it out there anyway. I propose that genealogy content providers develop a two-tier model. The first tier would include popular, entry-level content such as the crucial censuses, family tree data and “Google Books”-type content such as published family histories, county histories, and the like. This data would be offered for free, but with an “as is” consumer-beware caveat regarding the accuracy and reliability of the facts and details included.

The second tier would include vital records, church records, land records and other more “primary” source material, including (naturally, since this is the Genlighten blog) offline documents. These records would be accompanied by some sort of “provenance”, perhaps tied to the reputation of the researcher who had uncovered them or the repository that held them. That reputation would be dynamically determined by a combination of authoritative genealogy luminaries and the crowdsourced ratings of clients and users. Those interested in such records would be asked to pay for:

• Indexed online access
• Record provenance, detailed source citation information and a community-determined “reliability score”
• On-demand retrieval, digitization, transcription and/or translation of records not yet available online, particularly “long tail” records
• The help of skilled and experienced researchers in interpreting the records and acting on their implications

Both sets of records would be made available via APIs, but the second-tier data would have a monetization mechanism attached,  allowing content providers, researchers and digitizers to be compensated for the value they added.

A Starting Point

I hope to develop these ideas further, and I’d appreciate your help in doing so. I know there are plenty of smart people in the genealogy community who are already pondering these issues (Thomas MacEntee, for one) and I’d love to hear from as many of you as possible.

Thanks to Gordon Clarke and his FSDN team members, and to Justin Schroepfer at Footnote, for meeting with me today and stimulating my thought processes.

I visited the NARA Great Lakes Regional Archives this last week to fulfill a Naturalization Record lookup for a Genlighten client. As I was waiting for my researcher card paperwork to be processed, I looked through the finding aid brochures to see what other records this facility had. One caught my eye:

Selected Records Relating to Lighthouse Service Employees, 1801-1912

Cool! So if someone had an ancestor who they thought might have been a lighthouse keeper, I could look that person up and perhaps produce a document containing some basic info about them. For example, here’s what NARA says is contained in publication M1373:

Lighthouse Keepers and Assistant Keepers. NARA microfilm publication M1373, Registers of Lighthouse Keepers, 1845-1912 (6 rolls) includes lists of keepers and assistant keepers. The lists typically consist of the names, the district and the name of the light, the date of appointment, the date of resignation or discharge or death, and sometimes the annual salary. Most of the lists do not actually begin until 1849.

The NARA finding aid implies that these records would also include the birth place of the lighthouse keeper.

The Long Tail of Genealogy Records

So I immediately wondered: how many people would be interested in these records (and thus might request my lookup?) I managed to find a Rootsweb message board about lighthouse keepers. Between 2004-2010, there were — get this — 13 messages posted. I looked to see if either Ancestry or Footnote had digitized the NARA microfilm rolls. Nope.

These lighthouse-related collections seem to fit fairly well my definition of “Long Tail Genealogy Records“: to a small number of people they’d probably be quite interesting. But that number’s too small to make it worth Ancestry’s or Footnote’s or FamilySearch’s time and effort to scan them, index them, and make them available online.

Could Genlighten Help? Should It?

I suspect I’ll go ahead and offer a “Register of Lighthouse Keepers” Lookup, just for the heck of it. But if I decide to, I’ll need to ask myself a lot of practical questions first:

• What happens if I actually get a request?
• Will the price that the lighthouse keeper’s descendant is willing to pay be enough to make it worth my while to drive out of my way to the NARA facility just for that lookup?
• Or should I offer a bunch of other lookups from NARA in hopes of aggregating enough requests to justify a weekly trip?
• What should I call the lookup so it will Google well?
• What search terms would someone use who was looking for such a record?
• How should I define the locality for this lookup? By the state or state/county where the lighthouse was located?

Why Our Business Model Matters

A lot of these issues would go away if Genlighten’s business model involved simply quoting an hourly rate and than billing the client for my time. But because we’re all about fixed-fee lookups, it’s trickier. I have to carefully define the scope of the lookup I’ll perform for the fee I decide to charge. And with few requests likely to come in, it will be hard to iteratively adjust my pricing in response to client feedback.

Of course, I could define an “off-the-shelf” lookup for part of the research and then direct the client to use our custom request capability to pursue the remainder. That’s what we encourage our providers to do for probate records and other hard-to-know-the-scope-in-advance lookups. Hmm… lots of possibilities there.

Was Your Ancestor a Lighthouse Keeper?

If so, I’d love to hear from you. Likewise if you need naturalization records for states in the NARA Great Lakes Region, or any other lookup for a record held by NARA Great Lakes that isn’t available online.

When my wife and I were first thinking about creating Genlighten, we tried to imagine who should make up our initial target audience. We actually found it easier to decide who it wouldn’t be:

• Complete beginners, we thought, would be too focused on tapping all the online resources, both free and fee-based. They wouldn’t be ready to look for offline records and thus wouldn’t have a need for Genlighten yet.
• Certified professional genealogists might eventually make use of us once we’d earned a solid positive reputation, but we didn’t expect many of them to be among Genlighten’s “early adopters.”

We finally settled on two categories of genealogy enthusiasts who we hoped would become, respectively, Genlighten’s first buyers and sellers:

• Advanced beginner/intermediate genealogists — those just starting to explore offline records by visiting archives or ordering records from remote repositories — would be our initial clients
• “Transitional” genealogists — those contemplating the leap into the ranks of professional genealogy but not quite there yet — would be our initial providers.

It hasn’t worked out as we expected (almost nothing about this adventure has!) but I can still say that it really warms my heart when I meet someone on Twitter or at a genealogy conference who I find fits one of those two profiles.

Which brings me (finally!) to my Follow Friday recommendation for this week: Sarah Beth Davis, author of the Lessons From My Ancestors blog.

In the “About Me” section of her blog, Sara says:

I never really explored anything other than what my family had already and what I could find free online.  For the past two years I have been becoming what I like to call a “recreational genealogist”.  I research when I have time (usually a few hours every weekend) and am using online resources that are available.  In the future I would like to take my research offline by ordering vital records certificates and visiting archives.

That’s exactly what we’re hoping to help all sorts of people do: begin to document their genealogy research using offline records.

Sara writes in a warm and open personal style, mostly about her key surnames, brickwall people, and research discoveries. She’s also a strong presence among the genealogy community on Twitter (one of the most prolific among those I follow) and I love her Twitter “handle”: @InnerCompass.

She’s had some marvelous experiences discovering the diary of her ancestor Sylvia Lewis. It’s her “Sylvia’s Diary” posts that first caught my attention on Twitter. Sara says:

Sylvia is my maternal 5th great-grandmother and her diaries have opened by eyes to a world of struggles, migration, and joy.

The title of her blog says it well: “Lessons From My Ancestors”. I encourage you to subscribe to Sara’s blog… and learn those lessons right along with her.

This week Amy Coffin’s 52WtBG challenge directed us to explore the online library catalog aggregator Worldcat.org. Here’s how Worldcat defines itself:

WorldCat.org lets you search the collections of libraries in your community and thousands more around the world. WorldCat grows every day thanks to the efforts of librarians and other information professionals.

I wasn’t sure what to expect here… would I find lots of historical records about my distant ancestors, or would most of the results returned in searches be modern ones?

Initial Success

After creating an account and a profile (you don’t need to but I was interested in the social features a personal account offered) I started out by typing ancestors’ names into the search box. My first try was Benjamin Trafford, my great-great grandfather who eventually rose to the rank of Colonel in the Civil War. I had heard he’d authored a book on military tactics, but no luck there. Instead, the following entry was second in the results list:

It’s hard to read at this resolution, but the catalog entry was quite a find: military orders issued by Benjamin Trafford to the 71st Regiment, N.G.S.N.Y., New York, February 6th 1865.

Can I View It Online?

Naturally I was hoping Worldcat actually had digitized the “book” so I could view it and download it. But alas, no. Instead, I was shown a list of repositories from which I could theoretically inter-library loan the record (or retrieve it in person if I lived near any of them.) Turns out the New York Historical Society has it.

Sounds Like a Job for Genlighten

Since Genlighten has several lookup providers who live in the New York City area, I could go create a custom lookup request and ask for a provider to retrieve this document, scan it and upload the resulting image to my account. Or, since our daughter works reasonably close to the New York Historical Society, I could ask her to make the trip. Either way, it sounds like it’d be worth it. I would have had no idea this record existed if WorldCat hadn’t found it for me.

What Else Can I Do on WorldCat?

The site offers all the Web 2.0 features you’d want in a modern online catalog. Using nearby links, I can:

• Add the record to a list of my favorite finds (I can even customize different lists with different titles)
• Tag the entry to help future searchers
• Write a review or rate the document from zero to five stars
• Share a link to the entry via email, on the usual social networks like Facebook or Twitter, or via social bookmarking sites like Digg or Delicious
• Find similar items in the WorldCat catalog (in this case, a great collection of books about the 71st Regiment, NY State National Guard.)

I promptly created a personal User List (one of the benefits of actually registering and creating an account) and added the Benjamin Trafford entry to it.

Wouldn’t it be Cool…

As I tried each of these social features out, I couldn’t help but wish that WorldCat had the Family History Library Catalog entries available with all of this functionality. But of course, that’s where Genseek is supposed to come in, right?

“Click Here to Order Digital Images of this Item”

Missing of course, was the feature we at Genlighten are particularly eager to see: the “Click Here to Order Digital Images of this Item from Genlighten.com” button. Not to worry, we’re working on that.

As my wife and I use Genlighten day by day, we notice things it does well and things it’s not so good at yet.

On the Plus Side

One of the things Genlighten does well is handle the iterative back-and-forth communications between client and provider that lead to a successful lookup result. Short notes from each party to the research transaction are displayed together in chronological order on a summary tracking page for each lookup request, along with the documents and report that are eventually produced.

Discovering Providers, on the Other Hand…

But when we go looking for a specific lookup provider (say, one that specializes in Jewish research or one who can access a certain repository in California) Genlighten doesn’t have a well-designed way to do that yet.

There’s a reason we didn’t build that feature in initially. We view ourselves as an e-commerce site (like Amazon.com) for genealogy lookups — NOT a Yellow Pages-like directory of genealogy researchers-for-hire. The distinction is an important one, and it arises out of our focus on fixed-fee lookups rather than on open-ended hourly research.

Buying a Camera vs. Hiring a Photographer

I’m not sure about you, but when I go to buy a digital camera, I focus on the product first — the features, price point and customer ratings — and pay attention to the brand second. On the other hand, if I wanted to hire a photographer, I’d focus on referrals from friends, professional credentials, portfolio… and only then would I look at specific packages the photographer might offer.

The initial design of Genlighten has a distinctly product-oriented e-commerce mindset, where the “products” are lookups. If our products appeal to you, you can then check out the profile of the providers who offer them, and evaluate their background, experience, and customer ratings before deciding to submit a lookup request. We made the assumption that most potential clients would approach the site in that order, and our information architecture reflects that.

The Problem with Assumptions…

Four months in, it’s becoming apparent that some of our site visitors don’t use Genlighten like we thought they would. One piece of evidence showed up recently in our Google Analytics logs:

Notice the Google site search for the keyword “California”. It’s hard to tell exactly what the site visitor had in mind, but my guess is they wanted to see if we had any providers that could do lookups either in California (i.e., at California repositories) or for California records. Or they might have read Randy Seaver’s blog post about Genlighten the week before and tried to find out if we’d added any California providers. Either way, they didn’t find our UI sufficiently intuitive and decided to take a shortcut.

“Hidden” Lookup Providers

A second indication that users aren’t behaving as we expected showed up when I went to do a census of every registered user so I could count the number that were offering lookups. To my surprise (and dismay!) I discovered sixty-some users who had filled out a provider-oriented profile (listing their qualifications, repositories they could access, etc.) but who weren’t yet offering any lookups. Because of the design assumptions I mentioned above, these providers are effectively hidden from our users. They won’t show up in any lookup search results, and we don’t yet offer a purely provider-oriented search capability. That’s starting to look like a problem.

Now perhaps the hidden providers don’t want to bother with basic lookups, but instead are just interested in quoting on custom requests that clients post. We do offer that capability in addition to off-the-shelf lookups, and it’s seen a fair amount of use.

But our thinking on custom requests was that providers would first establish a reputation for reliable, high-quality service with their off-the-shelf lookup offerings, and then be more likely to have their custom lookup quotes accepted based on high ratings they’d received. I still think this is a sound approach, but it’s become clear that we’ve done a poor job of communicating the idea.

Unfortunately, I suspect that some of these hidden providers don’t know they’re hidden. They assumed we’d make it easy for users to find them, like the yellow pages does, even if they didn’t offer any products in our online marketplace. And we haven’t.

So What to Do?

As a result of the thought process I’ve described, we now plan to:

• Reach out to our hidden providers and explain the advantages of offering off-the-shelf lookups so they can gain credibility and exposure to potential clients
• Invite our users to participate in usability testing so we can get feedback on typical flows through the site
• Develop search tools that let users discover providers based on the contents of their profiles, not just on the lookups they offer.

Glass Half Full

I’ve decided to take a positive view of these discoveries about our users. If I’d followed Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany when we were first building Genlighten, I might have uncovered these design issues during the Customer Development process. But now that I’m belatedly trying to adhere to Lean Startup principles, customer-centric iteration is a sign that we’re heading in the right direction. Now if we can just work on making those iterations “ferocious” and “rapid”!

Want to Help?

Are you interested in helping us make Genlighten easier to use? We’d love to have some 15-20 minute chats with clients and providers willing to talk with us over the phone while navigating the site and pursuing basic tasks. E-mail us at support@genlighten.com if this sounds like your idea of fun!

Courtesy California Genealogical Society and Library

David Rencher, FamilySearch’s “Chief Genealogical Officer” stopped by the Genlighten booth at NGS in North Carolina last year and we had a pleasant chat together. He asked a question that I’ve thought about often but never come up with a perfect answer to:

How will Genlighten’s business model stay viable over the long term as more and more records become available online?

As you already know if you’ve been reading this blog for long or if you’re one of our users, Genlighten’s unique selling proposition is that we help you find offline genealogy records — the ones that are only accessible in libraries, archives, courthouses, historical societies, etc.. In fact, when a provider signs up and offers to do lookups solely using their Ancestry or Footnote subscriptions, we ask them to modify those offerings to utilize an offline source instead.

Beneath the Tip of the Iceberg

Our unspoken assumption here is that many more records are available offline than online. Or as the marvelous image shown here depicts it, the biggest part of the iceberg is below the surface. I stand confidently behind that assumption, despite the fact that I can’t back it up with any meaningful data or statistics.

David’s question implied that he foresees a time when the statement “Most genealogy records aren’t online” won’t hold true anymore. And in fact, he’s in charge of an organization — FamilySearch — that is working hard to digitize and index every single reel in its vast collection of microfilmed records. Whether it takes five years or ten, they will eventually achieve their goal. Whither offline genealogy research (and our business model) then?

The Power of Family Search Indexing

This point hit home particularly hard for me this last December. I visited the Massachusetts State Archives just outside of Boston, mostly to see what kinds of records Genlighten providers could retrieve there, but also to do some of my own research. I was excited to see how many records were available on microfilm and could be scanned at low cost. Within minutes, I easily found the marriage certificate for my Walter Ferdinand Knapp and Rosamond Guilford.

A local Boston provider, I reasoned, (or one with access to the corresponding FHL film) could just as easily provide Massachusetts marriage record lookups for a reasonable fee and still be well-compensated for their forty-minute trip on the Red Line. Cool! Now I just needed to recruit the right providers and help them take advantage of the opportunities available.

Just as I was about to tweet or blog about this discovery, though, what should appear in my Twitterstream but a link to a post about Massachusetts marriage records becoming available on the FamilySearch Record Search Pilot. I tried the site out, and lo and behold, in seconds I had the image of the very same marriage record I had just finished printing out. Thanks to FamilySearch indexing, that was one lookup opportunity that no longer seemed as attractive. Massachusetts Births and Death records still weren’t available online, but for how long?

A Prediction

I don’t know how FamilySearch decides which records to digitize and index next, but I can guess. They must know which FHL film sets are ordered most, and I suspect those ones get bumped up in priority. So in the short term, we should expect that films of records towards the left end of the long tail will become available online. FamilySearch and other organizations will gradually work their way down the long tail, digitizing and indexing as they go. Over time, more and more long tail records will become available at low or no cost online, just as obscure bands’ music can now be found on iTunes and films that only a few thousand people even know about are now available on Netflix.

Another Prediction

So Genlighten has four, maybe five years before its business model begins to evaporate? I can’t be sure, but I suspect not. At least, not due to a lack of offline records. I will go out on a limb and predict that for many years to come, as fast as old records are brought online, “new” old records will be discovered. In other words, the entire curve will rise.

Where will these new records come from? Diaries, generic government agency paperwork, medical records (despite HIPAA regulations), legal proceedings, SEC filings… I bet you can think of many more. The types of offline records that Genlighten providers will be asked to look up will change, but there will still be plenty of them to perform lookups for.

Of course in five to ten years paper, microfilm, and even electronic data storage as we know it may have been completely superseded by some grand and glorious new medium. Or Google may simply have achieved by then their goal to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” In which case, they’ll hopefully have already acquired us!