Been awhile since I posted the going on's of Emurse. Growth rate is really solid and is compounding (meaning, our growth % stays in our target range even as we add more and more users). Raw traffic, as defined by returning visitors and new visitors (unique), is exploding. Raw traffic this month is about 2000% higher than March, to give you an idea. On one hand, I want to say it's surprising, but I think that's only because I remember how this all started -- just a simple utility to help Gavin, myself and our friends.

We've been getting some blog press lately, which is great. Lockergnome, a favorite of Gavin and I's, posted a really glowing review. Always cool to wake up and find a site you enjoy talking about you!

We have some new features in the works, and some features that were postponed are now once again on the short list. Expect some exciting things over the next weeks/months.

Wow

June 30, 2005 I have an e-mail thread between Gavin and myself where we outline exactly what Emurse would become. The idea was that the job hunt, especially for younger folks, centers largely around the resume. They're a royal pain in the butt to create, hard to maintain and difficult to keep track of. We set out to create a ridiculously easy method for accomplishing these tasks. Our stated mission is to "Improve your job hunt," putting technology to work on the traditional aspects and not trying to replace them.

We launched initially just as a private thing between us and a few friends. Soon after we added an invite system, and eventually we opened it up to the public. The first time we publicly mentioned the project was June 22, 2006, right here on this blog.

On July 11th, a user/friend of ours sent a link to Brian over at SolutionWatch.com. From there, it was all she wrote. Lifehacker, Digg, Delicious, C|Net, USA Today, PostBubble and a host of others ran blog posts regarding our site and our user count soared. We went from hundreds of initial users, to tens of thousands over the next couple of days.

User Feedback

Overall, the feedback has been incredibly positive. We've had countless testimonials and compliments sent in via our feedback link. We've grown the feature set by listening and adapting our service to meet user suggestions. We've user tested just about every aspect of the site, and have scored extremely high marks. (Side note: people still miss the drop down menu on sections. If anyone has any suggestions here, we're most certainly open to it ;)

The web resume screen and the privacy centric details have almost entirely been user driven. We've kept many of the form elements on the resume open ended, despite many business pressures to standardize and validate. We're committed to maintaining a job seeker focus, and we've followed through on these suggestions. We aim to give our users 100% control of their resume.

Growth and Traffic

We have, for all practical purposes, never made a serious marketing push on our product. We've experimented with a few advertising channels with various degrees of success, but our growth largely centers around word of mouth and viral activity. Most of this, of course, was spurred by July's flurry of blogosphere coverage.

Here are some graphs...

Here's our raw traffic log graph (May 1st, 2006 to December 28th, 2006):



Orange represents first time visitors. Yellow represents total visits.

August is a bit skewed, as stats were dead for a decent portion of the month. The low-point for us traffic wise was actually late August, early September. It's safe to estimate that August traffic with a tad bit higher than September.

And Alexa (Internet Explorer users only, June 1st, 2006 to Dec 28th, 2006):



The big discrepancy in terms of the graph patterns is due to the inaccuracy of Alexa, which is furthered by the fact that the majority of our user base uses some variant of Netscape/Firefox/Safari (the long tail of the browser world ;). This traffic, sadly, doesn't get factored into Alexa. Sure is pretty though ;)

We're especially proud of our numbers in November and December, as these are traditionally slower traffic months due to the holidays, and we were swamped with other initiatives (not much Emurse activity during that period). Much of what offset us in December was the blog relaunch. We're planning one article a week related to our space. We've done two articles so far (negotiating and personal branding), and both have been picked up on various social news sites and other blogs.

Our SEO efforts have paid for themselves 10 times over as well. Search traffic has seen strong increases in the last few months.

Revenue

Without going into specifics, Emurse is paying it's own way and the bank account is growing. As of December 28th, this month has seen an increase of 29% above our average for total monthly user transactions. Bot filtering lowered our overall cost, and refinement in our very limited marketing campaign increased our ROI. Mix that with our increasing conversion rate, and we're left with a very positive outlook.

Not too shabby for a boot-strapped project that turned down both acquisition offers and repeated investment attempts in 2006. The future prospects for Emurse look bright.

Looking Ahead

We expect 2007 to be an even bigger year for our small company. There are a number of new features planned for the first quarter, including some long tested aspects of the site. We're finishing up a small beta test of something we're especially excited about (hint: it's on the share tab). We've written it, tested it, and rewritten it probably three times over completely based on user feedback. It's simple and to the point. No frills is actually a pretty tough thing to do ;)

There are also some completely off the wall, unexpected and unannounced features planned for 2007 as well. We'll be running a beta test for these, and if you'd like to join, simply drop us an e-mail at service@emurse.com.

One of the only criticisms we've seen repeatedly is the lack of spell check. With many of our users moving towards more advanced browsers that have spell check built in (FF2), this feature stalled in beta testing. I'm very happy to announce though that you will see spell check added in the next couple of days. You can also expect smaller feature releases, such as updated resume templates and hopefully a wide scale roll out of the hResume micro-format (premium templates already have it).

The first half of 2007 will be very active development wise, and we're very excited about the next couple of roll outs.

Thank you for supporting us.

Without the suggestions, criticisms or occasional pats on the back we would have undoubtedly gone insane. Our product is a user product, and we're extremely grateful for all the blessings that we've had this past year.

Can't wait to recap 2007 ;) And if you haven't already, Create an Emurse account!

Lots of people have been wanting to know how well Emurse has been doing. We've been doing quite a bit over in Blogsmith land preparing for the next round of growth, but that hasn't slowed the adoption rate over on our other project. Traffic (as counted by unique visits) from September to October grew 42%. All across the board Emurse experienced growth (revenue, signups, traffic, page views) -- despite the slow down in press coverage.

This increase is the result of word of mouth, google page rank updates, increasing the width of our funnel, and general (free) marketing approaches. Blog coverage has slowed down a tad, but still accounts for a sizable chunk. Our current (public) goals are to continue improving our SEO and to finish our next development cycle. We have a few surprises to announce along the way, but... stay tuned ;)

We've noticed the arrival of a few copy cat sites lately, and at least one posting on a popular outsource site seeking someone to create a product "at least as good as emurse." As a creative type, it's incredibly flattering. As an entrepreneur, it justifies our space. I can only imagine some of these folks keep tabs on my blog (as I tend to speak pretty openly, which I'm sure gives Gavin the willies).

So.. let me just put it out there like this -- We make our living producing the most powerful blogging platform on the face of the planet. For us, this is our passion project and what keeps us sane. It's a game of poker and we welcome you to the table. E-mail us and say hello, and be prepared when we up the ante. ;)

So that Emurse article by Kim Komando keeps getting picked up by a different metro papers. I'm not sure where it was yesterday, but a user mentioned to me that something ran in the Denver Post. For a site such as ours, getting paper coverage metro by metro is absolutely great. It helps us build mass in each of our target geographies. Something like the Komando article, which was unexpected/unsolicited, is a total blessing. Even a slight mention in an article, like the C|Net's Top Websites for Students, brings in a slew of traffic for us. I wonder if its directly proportional to how many words are written on us? ;) If we hire a publicity person, is that what they do? Get things written about us? No idea. Maybe one day we can have a "blog relations" person, with slight press responsibilities. I think that's probably more our speed.

Maintaining solid % growth day after day is a tough thing to do (linear and all), but between the excellent word of mouth and the coverage we've been getting, we're continuing to meet our goals. I think we've been spoiled by all of it to some degree. I heard the other day that Kiko, a site that garnered a ton of Web2.0 press within the community echo chamber, only had a few thousand users. Seriously?

I tend to remind myself that we're not really a web business. We aren't out to leverage the long tail or create a social network or do everything 100% automated. We're looking to fill the need of the every day job seeker, something that after 12 years, the web community has still failed to do. If we happen to strike a web2.0 chord along the way (like we've done with our use of Ajax), then rad. Bring on the hype. Other than that.. It's the traditional job seeking folks in Denver, reading their paper, that we'd like to attract ;)