Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 3)

Eyal Magen: We quickly found out that the best way to market our product is by working together with a small industry that provided content for Myspace pages. It was the beginning of the mashup era where you can grab a piece of code and post it on your page. This content could be a music video or a small game. We called them and said, “Why not post your content through email?” They started to promote us, but we looked at the very early results of the analytics and saw that we got a lot of traffic from these content providers. However, users weren’t converting very well. They started using the service but didn’t use our email. We did a very quick analysis and said, “We have an opportunity, which is we have hundreds of partners who are helping us to do something. But what they’re helping us to do is not really helping.”

It’s very important for entrepreneurs to make quick and drastic decisions. We were literally sitting in a small office and our state of mind was, “What can we do this week that by the end of the week, we will not be in the same place?” Every week is important. Our VC gave us money for half a year and said, “Show us results and then we’ll give you more money.”

Sramana Mitra: How much money did you raise in that round?

Eyal Magen: We got $600,000 for half a year. Then if we were to show good results, the whole round will be $3 million. It’s very risky.

Sramana Mitra: If you can avoid it, that kind of financing needs to be avoided.

Eyal Magen: On one hand, you’re right. In our case, we turned to the VC one month after we started and told them, “It was a very nice idea but we’re not sure our original idea is going to work. We have a bigger opportunity. The bigger opportunity is in social networks.”

From there on, many things happened. Facebook came up. Suddenly, they opened their API. Slowly, we found ourselves serving all kinds of content providers with the goal of helping them connect with their users and put their identity at the center of what they’re doing. That’s another lesson that we always talk about. It’s like a surfer in the sea. It’s very hard to create waves. You can only ride the waves. The wave we were riding is the fact that identity is now at the center in the Internet.

For several years, there was a trend starting with Microsoft password and other entities trying to help the user travel through the Internet with their identity. Facebook was the first one to do it successfully. After that, it was copied by Twitter and Google. Now, users can very easily move with their identities to different websites. That was a revolution because early on in 2000, sites were against users to open accounts. Everything was supposed to be based on cookies. Now, identity is so central.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen
1 2 3 4 5 6 7