Emo Storm Trooper

via Flickr

Why I Chose to Work at Lijit

by Micah on June 9th

I am beginning to really like the Skribit widget in my sidebar. It allows people to leave suggestions on topics I should write about. What’s interesting, is sometimes the suggestions are things that I either never thought of, or are topics that I have shied away from.

The other day, “what are the top reasons to use Lijit?” showed up. I cringed because I have really tried to keep my work life out of my blog. I dont want this to become a place where I shrill companies I am involved with, either as an employee (like Lijit), investor or advisor.

The right place for that, in my mind, is on those companies blogs.

But, I thought an interesting twist on the topic would be to answer the question of why I chose to work at Lijit. And, I might take the oportunity to list a couple of the top reasons the Lijit widget is a necessary tool for publishers. ;)

After selling my company, I went to work for the acquiring company, with the intent to work there for approximately a year. Then we would evaluate the situation and figure out what the next best move for me and the company.

As the year came to a close, it became apparent that the best move was for me to walk away. Not because there was anything inherently wrong with the situation, but because I had provided all the value I could and sticking around was not helpful to anyone.

When evaluating opportunities (which ranged from starting a new company to joining a growing startup), I met Todd Vernon, CEO of Lijit. To be honest, I met Todd through Tara, who reached out to me after installing Lijit on my blog. I had a client that I felt Lijit fit with, and we (Todd and I) spent some time together discussing the possibility.

After a little while, it became apparent that my skill set fit with Lijit, and Lijit was in need of someone with my skill set.

Initially, I balked at the idea of working for someone else (I had been on my own for 5 years building Current Wisdom), but at the same time, I was exhausted from running my own company, and was hesitant at the propsect of starting another company so soon.

Also, my long term goal is not to be a serial entrepreneuer. I dont want to start multiple companies over and over again. Rather, I have a strong desire to move to the investment side of the equation, and after talking with my mentors, it became clear that the best decision for me was to join Lijit. So I did.

To date, it has been a blast. I have been able to shape the product, bring in some decent deals (you may have read about one in TechCrunch), and really be a positive member of a growing team.

I have seriously learned a ton from so many people. Every day I wake up with a wierd mix of excitement to talk about Lijit both internally and externally, and straight fear that somehow I am not going to push the business forward that day.

How do we pitch Lijit? (you can skip the rest if you dont want to hear my pitch).

When I started to pitch Lijit to publishers, we worked through several messages, and it became quite clear as to what the real benefits of using Lijit for a publisher are:

1) The ability to aggregate all the publisher’s social content and trusted sources and make it searchable, creates a better search experience for the reader. Content that would be buried in Google is uncovered. After all, Google wants to index everything; Lijit just indexes what important to the publisher, and all that content is trusted by the reader.

2) The “re-search” function (do a search on google for “iphone flip” and click on my blog post. You will see re-search in action), helps to drive reader engagement by presenting additional content items, which reduces the times a reader clicks the back button.

3) Deep analytics around search behavior. My favorite is the section about “searches that return no results.” Similar to Skribit, I am learning inherently things that my readers want me to write about.

There are other benefits, such as our flexibility around the widget design itself, and the corresponding lightbox, but those are the three main items we discuss with publishers, and they are important, especially if you have a publication that gets a fair amount of traffic, as re-search and our improved contextual search drive more engagement and page views.

But, for me, there is one overriding reason why I like what we are doing at Lijit and why I think we are a perfect fit for all publishers.

Lijit understands that our purpose for existing is to increase the value of the publisher to its readers.

Meaning, for us to be successful, the publisher has to be successful. I see so many other widgets that really only provide value AFTER the publisher is successful. Rather than sharing in the journey, those widgets enjoy the spoils of success. This is why so many publishers hate widgets. The widgets provide no real intrinsic value.

So, the final answer as to why I work at Lijit is:

We are publisher focused. We understand that the publisher’s job is to provide value to their readers and Lijit’s job is to make the publisher’s job easier.

(And our shirts are comfy.)

If that makes any sense.

lijit Add to del.icio.us  Digg This

Viewing 10 Comments

Trackbacks

blog comments powered by Disqus