Over the years, GoDaddy’s mildly pornographic commercials featuring a scantily clad Danica Patrick, the racecar driver and model, peddling web-hosting and domain-registration services have become something of a Super Bowl tradition. But that’s about to change.
On Sunday, one of the company’s Super Bowl ads will focus on Get Found, a tool for small businesses created by Locu, a start-up GoDaddy acquired in August. While the purchase price for Locu, which had raised about $4.6 million in investment funding, has not been disclosed, AllThingsD reported it was $70 million.
Get Found, which was introduced this week, plans to help small businesses manage their online profiles across major search engines, social sites and directories, including Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook, Yellowpages, Citysearch, TripAdvsior, OpenTable and others.
Having inaccurate information online can cost a small business. In fact, industry research suggests that as much as $10 billion a year is lost in small-business sales because of incorrect or missing data online. Get Found’s subscription service, which costs from $17.99 to $26.99 a month, allows businesses to go to one place to update their information — name, address, phone number, location, menu offerings, new products and services — all over the web.
Get Found’s precursor, Locu, was founded by Rene Reinsberg, Marek Olszewski, Marc Piette and Stelios Sidiroglou-Douskos (who has since left), all graduate students at M.I.T. They met while taking a seminar called Link Data Ventures, taught by Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web. The class was focused on the concept of using structured data to make it easier to access information online.
Mr. Reinsberg, now general manager and vice president of a GoDaddy division that includes Get Found, uses the analogy of a person who has moved: “You would normally have to contact all these places — your bank, your friends — and update everyone with the new address,” he said. “With structured data, you have a single place to enter that updated information, and every other entity — your bank, magazines, your friends — will ask that single location for the updated information.”
That concept led to the idea for Locu. Mr. Reinsberg and his co-founders initially built a tool to help restaurants — a web crawler with machine-learning technology that could take and organize information from a menu in any form, be it a scan, a photo, a Word document or a PDF.
Locu’s first major partner was OpenTable, which wanted to organize menu information from restaurants so that it was easily accessible to consumers. Last spring, Locu released a paid product — after a test phase — to help any merchant make corrections, updates and additions to the information about their business available online. In June, GoDaddy became a reseller of Locu’s services. A few months later, when it was bought, Locu had about 30,000 businesses on its platform; today, it has 60,000.
While Mr. Reinsberg said Get Found doesn’t really have competitors that focus on the small-business market, there are other services that update online information, including Local Market Launch, UniversalBusinessListing and Yext. Howard Lerman, a co-founder of Yext — which says it has 250,000 customers, almost half of them small businesses — said Get Found misrepresents itself as being comprehensive. “Get Found updates data across 11 sites,” he said, “we do it across 50.”
Mr. Reinsberg responded that those 11 are just the biggest and best-known sites used in Get Found’s scanning tool, which gives businesses a free scan of the information about them that is available on those sites. “It’s a snapshot of some of the sites where a business appears, but we have hundreds of partners,” he said. “We decided showing users how they appear across 50 or 100 sites could be overwhelming.”
Mr. Lerman and others have questioned whether Get Found can truly update data on Google. Greg Sterling, a founding principal of the research firm Sterling Market Intelligence, wrote in his blog “Screenwerk” that when he asked Mr. Reinsberg whether Get Found had direct access to the Google index, Mr. Reinsberg “wouldn’t discuss whether the company can directly update Google’s index through the program. My suspicion is that Google is not allowing that.”
Mr. Reinsberg said GoDaddy and Get Found have an agreement to provide data to Google. He declined to comment further but said: “We wouldn’t promise our customers and say we can update your information on Google and not be able to do that. If a business updates its data with us, we provide that data to Google.”
Going forward, Get Found’s biggest challenge will be to, well, get found. “We have to get the word out, that’s a key objective,” Mr. Reinsberg said. Hence the Super Bowl ad. In addition to trying to sell to GoDaddy’s current customers, the company wants to attract small businesses to the platform.
Mr. Reinsberg said that Blake Irving, the former chief product officer at Yahoo who took over as GoDaddy’s chief executive last year, is intent on changing the company’s image and becoming more product and technology focused. “The new commercial for Get Found that people will see during the Super Bowl is the first time GoDaddy is talking about the product and what the product can do for customers,” Mr. Irving said. “That’s a big departure. It’s going from making noise to telling a story.”
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