OK, my quick reactions to Footnote’s pitch to the TechCrunch50 event today:

• Starting off with a personal vignette about attending a funeral… a good idea?  Worked for Arcade Fire, I guess.
• Note to self… make sure that personal experiences I relate about deceased friends or relatives help my audience associate warm, positive feelings with our website.
• Yikes… do VCs/serial entrepreneurs get the  genealogy space?  Another reason not to go looking for VC funding, perhaps.
• Loic Le Meur’s concerns are likely shared by quite a few… among his points:

“Honestly, I find it disturbing.. i wouldn’t like to have my family exposed, can I opt out for my family?”

“I would hate to see a blank profile with my father’s name when he (and I) can’t control it.”

“Monetizing my family… I have a problem with that.”

• Give the Footnote team credit for rolling with the punches.  They seemed confident, at ease, not defensive.  If I were them, I would have found the “you’re just like Ancestry” comment annoying… I thought they turned that one around well.

I’m here at the FGS Conference in Philadelphia looking out from our booth on the exhibit hall, which is buzzing with conference-goers.  We’d originally hoped to announce our beta release at this event, but as with many software projects, our milestone estimates turned out to be optimistic, and we’ve had to move our anticipated launch date back by several months.  We now anticipate the public beta being ready by early 2009, with access to the private beta available towards the end of this year.

What’s Taking Us So Long?

For the most part, the delay is a natural consequence of our business strategy, which can be summed up as “Don’t quit your day job!”  Genlighten continues to be primarily a “nights and weekends” project for Justin and me and it will likely stay that way until revenue justifies otherwise.

Of course, we could put a lot of effort into getting angel investors to fund our early-stage development, allowing us to work full-time on Genlighten and hopefully get it launched and producing revenue a lot faster.  That’s a strategy we’re considering, but our team is well aware of the immense challenges and pitfalls involved, so for the time being we’re not ready to head down that road.

In the meantime, just in time for FGS, we do have a few updates to the Alpha site to announce.

Updated Flyers, Document Delivery Strategy, and Provider Criteria

First, the PDF flyers available on the site have been revised to reflect our new anticipated private and public beta availability dates.  The new flyers also reflect our intention to deliver most (if not all) documents as digital images via download from the site itself, rather than having our providers mail paper copies.  Accordingly, we’re looking for potential providers who have ready access to a digital scanner and are confident creating good-quality images from scanned documents.  These adjustments to our strategy reflect input we’ve received from several generous advisers in the genealogy research community.  Look for more details on this approach in a future blog post.

New Mailing Address

Second, we’ve changed our mailing address.  The new one is:

Genlighten
P.O. Box 893
Wilmette, Illinois  60091

This move doesn’t reflect anything particularly strategic.  Our previous commercial mailbox provider just happened to go out of business (about a month after we had business cards printed, unfortunately.)

Privacy and Security Policy

One of the main unfinished tasks from the initial alpha version of the site was developing a privacy and security policy.  I’ve noticed from our traffic logs that many people visit the blank placeholder page we’ve had up to this point.  I’m happy to be able to say that we now have posted our Privacy and Security Policy here.  Please take a look and let us know what you think.

Thanks for your patience…

I’m keenly aware that some of you have been following our progress for the better part of a year now.  I just want to let you know that we appreciate your patience and we’re working hard week-by-week to deliver what we’ve promised you.  Thanks for your ongoing encouragement and support — it means a great deal to our entire team.

It’s been a heads-down week here at Genlighten.com, with pretty much every spare moment devoted to trying to recruit more genealogy researchers to our lookup provider network. Beginning last Saturday night, we began composing and sending out individual e-mails to around 760 genealogical societies in the US and Canada. Our basic pitch was simple. It boiled down to:

“We’re building an e-commerce platform dedicated to making it simple to offer fee-based genealogy lookups. If your volunteers sign up to provide lookups through our site on behalf of your society, we’ll return 90% of the fees they earn to you. In return for our 10% commission, we’ll handle payment processing, tracking of incoming lookups, communication between client and provider, etc..”

The last of the e-mails went out last night. Here are some stats we’ve gathered thus far:

• Number of messages sent out: 759
• E-mail addresses that bounced: 68
• Societies that weren’t interested: 5
• Societies considering our site: 15

Those numbers definitely tell a story, though I’m not sure yet exactly what it is. Here are some preliminary reactions:

• The bounced addresses all came from sites that I’ve visited within the last several months. Admittedly, some said they hadn’t been updated since 2001(!) so I anticipated plenty of undelivered messages. But it’s still kind of jarring to think that almost 10% of county genealogical sites that currently exist aren’t being actively maintained.
• Several of the societies that wrote back to say they weren’t interested explained, in polite terms, that they were philosophically opposed to charging for lookups as a source of revenue. That’s a sentiment I both understand and respect. Only one message thus far had any hint of “we’re morally above any such thing.”
• Many of the interested respondents indicated that they’d need to consult their society’s board of directors before proceeding. That certainly makes sense. But it hadn’t dawned on me that it might be a while before they would next meet. So perhaps some of those “no response” societies will meet and get back to me over the next month or so.

All in all, I’m cautiously optimistic about these results.  Now that we’ve made an initial effort to inform genealogical societies about our online lookup marketplace, we plan to expand our recruiting efforts to encompass an even broader potential audience.  This coming week, we’ll be reaching out to APG members and other fee-based genealogy researchers who we’ve learned about through exhaustive web searches.  Wish us luck!

Three days without a post — bad sign from a novice blogger. One of the things that impressed me about the participants in the recent Genealogy Blogger Summit was the consistency and frequency with which they post. I’m determined to follow their example, but I also want to get at least five hours of sleep! Sleep has won out the past few days. But enough blogging about blogging.

Revisiting our Customer Surveys

I thought it might be interesting to try to mine more insights from the surveys we administered to ChicagoGenealogy.com customers (and a few potential Genlighten users) earlier this year. To summarize the basic parameters: we surveyed 469 genealogy enthusiasts who had either ordered a document lookup from ChicagoGenealogy.com or met me at a genealogy conference during the last half of 2007 and early 2008. Roughly 230 completed the survey. 70% of them were female; 70% were also 50 years old or more.

One of the things surveys like this are supposed to do is help marketers define “personas” that reflect their customers’ preferences and behaviors, in hopes that the personas serve as a kind of shorthand for “who are our customers and what to they want?”. In theory, a good persona helps answer questions like “how many cupholders should we put in this minivan?” or perhaps more relevant to us at Genlighten, “what kind of navigation elements should our homepage have?”

We asked several questions in our survey that were aimed at developing personas from our potential customer base. The first asked basically “Why do you pursue genealogy research?” We offered six possible answers; respondents could also write in their own “other” response. The results are shown below:

“To feel a sense of connection with my deceased ancestors” was the number one choice, followed closely by “it’s a genuinely fun use of my time and skills”. No big surprises there for most of us, I suspect — those would probably have been my main choices too. Richer insights emerged in the “Other” responses, however. Two respondents thought genealogy helped them “to get a better sense of ‘who I am’”. And several others hoped their research would “leave a family legacy”.

Our next question tried to determine which components of the family history process respondents enjoyed most. It was basically a four-way tie among “pushing back further generations”, “finding source documents”, “sharing them with others”, and the narrow favorite “solving genealogical puzzles”. The average level of enjoyment for these activities fell between “Greatly Enjoy” and “Tremendously Enjoy”.

Given that we’re building a website that helps researchers get documents from distant archives without the need to travel there themselves, it was of course gratifying that survey respondents found traveling long distances the least enjoyable of the activities we listed. Whew!

Lessons Learned

Since the questions we asked (and the possible responses we offered) strongly reflected our own personal biases, the survey results didn’t yield as many startling new insights as we might have hoped. More open-ended short-essay-type questions might have corrected that, but the response rates to those kinds of questions would probably have been much lower.

The beginnings of some useful persona definitions did emerge. I’ll postpone a detailed description of them for a later post, but here are some key points we took away about Genlighten’s likely target audience:

• They want genealogy to be a fun experience that builds lasting bridges to their ancestors
• They see genealogical documents as key pieces of the puzzles they need to solve if they are to successfully reach back additional generations in their family history
• Once they’ve found those documents and solved those puzzles, they’re eager to share what they find with others

These ideas are constantly in our minds here at Genlighten, and we’re determined to let them shape and refine the user experience we’re working hard to create.

This post from the folks at 37Signals is the most powerful and positive piece of startup advice I’ve seen in the year I’ve been working on Genlighten.  I read it in breathless disbelief.  Disbelief that David could so clearly grasp both the quiet counsel that got me started on this path and the loud fantasy that often tries to drown out that counsel.

“The classic argument for enduring 80 to 100 hour work weeks for years on end — sacrificing relationships, hobbies, and anything else that doesn’t progress the mission — is that at the end of the rainbow lies early retirement. The reward for risking it all on a crazy startup idea. This wonderful place is filled with anything you want it to be. Never a dull moment again, all the flexibility and freedom in the world.

Why does the idea of work have to be so bad that you want to sacrifice year’s worth of prime living to get away from it forever? The answer is that it doesn’t. Finding something you to love to work on seems to be a much more fruitful pursuit than trying to get away from the notion of work altogether.

It’s much easier too! The likelihood that you’ll strike gold after year’s of death-march living is still pretty low. The chance of finding something you love doing? So much more achievable. Millions of dollars not required.

If you come to the realization that work in itself isn’t evil, you can stop living your life as a waterfall-planned software project too. No need to divide your timeline on earth into the false dichotomies of Sucky Work Era and Blissful Retirement Era. Instead, you can just fill your life with a balanced mix of activities that you can sustain for decades.”

Thanks David.  I needed that.