Yaniv Ben-Saadon, CEO of FixYa: Using the Social Web for Technical Support (Part 3)

SM: How did you penetrate the market and get early traction?

YB: Since there was very little competition in the field, being so relevant and unique our content was quickly picked up by Google and we’ve successfully conquered top positions for relevant keywords. In addition, the uniqueness of the site, combined with our close relations with the internet industry sparked the imagination of many bloggers and reporters who wrote about us.

SM: What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Traffic? Customers? Users? Advertisers? Any other metrics you track?

YB: We’re seeing preliminary profits from both advertisements and community activity (premium services). This month we’re expecting to see over 2.5M users and as you can see at Alexa we’re growing very rapidly. We are also starting to see high conversions to premium services, of people who are willing to pay for getting their problems solved by Experts.

SM: How did you finance the different phases of the company?

YB: Our first investment was accomplished by a group of angels led by Yossi Vardi from ICQ. On Feb 2007 we’ve received first round financing from Pitango and Mayfield.

SM: What financing stage are you at right now? Will you be raising more money? What timeframe? What is your ideal investor?

YB: We are in the midst of round B of financing. My ideal investor is the one whose interest is aligned with mine – and that’s not an oxymoron!

SM: Describe some of your team building experiences. Is your management team complete now?

YB: We grew gradually and cautiously, and hired one employee at a time, making sure there’s constant utilization of current resources to the utmost maximum before we add additional staff. The company is currently recruiting its Product Marketing and Biz Dev executives. We are 15 people, almost all in Israel. We’ll probably be about 5 in Silicon Valley.

SM: What is your growth strategy?

YB: I believe that once the product is good and complete and users receive the best experience on the site, growth is just a matter of time. We’re investing most of our efforts into improving and adding services to Fixya. In addition we’re working on collaborating on our crowed sourced potential with large manufacturers, since we believe that this can be a great way to save on customer support for them.

SM: What are your thoughts about exit?

YB: The great adoption by users and monetization validation we are seeing, prove there’s a potential to build a large company around that space, at least at the size of any Pre-Sale Aggregator, like Shopping.com, Nextag, or even Ebay. Anything less than that as a goal, would be missing the opportunity. At the same time, getting there independently or through a strategic alliance with a large & synergistic player, are two valid options for us.

SM: What are some of your key learnings from this journey so far?

YB: If you believe in your business, never give up. When the idea is good and the competitive landscape is right you have to be persistent and always look forward until you get things right. If you have a good plan and a strong team, eventually it has to break through.

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]

This segment is part 3 in the series : Yaniv Ben-Saadon, CEO of FixYa: Using the Social Web for Technical Support
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