Alerts.com - Case Study in Innovative Domain Development
Alerts.com - Building a Category Leading Service on the Category Defining Domain in an Exploding Market.
Overview:
What do you think of when you hear the term "alerts"? The buzz of your cell
phone? The RSS notification that a stock has major news or hit a target price?
The ding of Southwest Airlines special deals? Alerts stand for these things and
more. They deal with information that is not only relevant to you, but also
important and possibly urgent. The Internet is re-evolving into a more dynamic
push utility since the advent of RSS feeds, but they don't go far enough in
terms of breadth, aggregation, control or immediacy. The concept of alerts
represents the next frontier is user requested content and addresses these
opportunities.
Alerts.com is an emerging start-up that is combining a category-defining domain
name with an easy to use personal information management (PIM) platform to help
people find, create and manage alerts. It is capable of sending reminders and
notifications to help them keep up to date, save time and be more organized.
The alerts category includes emerging services like alerts.Yahoo.com,
alerts.aol.com, alerts.live.com which all brand the category of alerts, but
focus on alerts based on their own services. Other smaller players such as
AlertPedia.com are also showing rapid growth as aggregators, but they don’t
have the breadth of scope of Alerts.com or the category defining brand name.
The market for Alerts will be enormous - already larger than RSS - and is
largely untapped. To become the category leader in a major new market you need
visionary leadership, intuitive technology and a memorable brand name.
Alerts.com has all of these.
Domain Strategies enables success by identifying and realizing an untapped
potential in a market such as alerts. We identify a category defining domain,
find seed capital and create a business plan with a management team to build a
"get going" infrastructure. In the case of Alerts.com an experienced CEO was
identified to develop the plan while the domain was being purchased from IBM by
Monster Venture Partners (MVP) and Internet Real Estate Group (IREG) in late
2007. $650,000 of start-up capital was infused into the company through the
financial network of MVP and IREG including a significant participation from
the identified CEO and Co-Founder, Pascal Stolz. During Q1 2008 over 600
content feeds where identified and strategic partnerships were put in place for
unique content sources such as traffic data, gas prices, travel fares, etc. An
Alpha site was completed and pitched to venture capital for a Series A round.
By the end of Q1 '08 Alerts.com had an experienced CEO, a rock solid business
plan, a staff of seven developers, and a senior VP of business development. In
the span of five months, Alerts.com went from a $400,000 debt funded investment
to a startup business ready to launch with a pre-money valuation of 10x the
investment. This is the model of Domain Strategies.
We believe that every category defining domain name has an innovative business
that can be built upon it and monetized in a much more significant way than
either a quick sale or pay per click advertising. Whether the domain is
HealthCare.com, WiFi.com, Patents.com, or Alerts.com - the opportunity exists
to apply creative business planning, working capital, international vision and
next generation technology to fill a consumer need. The Domain Strategies
approach is proving to be repeatable, scalable and successful.
If you have a premium domain that youd like to launch to the next level,
please contact us.