developingeyes Entrepreneur of the week: Shawn Gupta and Reman Child

This week’s entrepreneur of the week is actually a team of two. Shawn Gupta and Reman Child are the co founders of Expensr. Expensr is a free online personal finance manager. It is explained in very basic terms so that anyone can use it.

In addition to that these guys have put a social networking component to their web application in true web 2.0 fashion. The idea behind the social networking aspect is depending on your tags and categories you can compare yourself against other persons similar to your financial situation and as a result determine whether your spending practices are good or bad. They have even developed a nice lite version of expensr for facebook, called iSpend so that you can have a similar experience while using your facebook account.

From what I’ve observed from reading the information on the site, Expensr makes its money like many social networking sites, through targeted advertising fuelled by the information and traffic provided by its users.

I really think these guys have got something going here. The finance and debt industry is a milti billion dollar industry and I think they are handling the niche well. You can read more about Gupta and Child at the expensr blog or in the September 2007 issue of Business 2.0.

Hope you enjoyed the post. Thanks for reading

StumbleUpon Traffic Trips

My initial attempt to build traffic for my website involved the use of StumbleUpon for almost a year and I love the concept. I figured it would be a good way to get persons aware of my website easily. There are a number of posts and articles I’ve read which suggest the same and give you tips on the best way to get good traffic from StumbleUpon and some that suggest that StumbleUpon traffic isn’t worth getting. My experience has me between both points of view. I have yet to understand the secret of StumbleUpon traffic. I have used StumbleUpon a total of five times on two websites, one being this blog. I can say for certain that almost all StumbleUpon visitors do not go any further than the landing page. I myself am guilty of that when I am stumbling; I simply review the site and click stumble again, if the website interests me intensely I will bookmark it in hopes of coming back to at some time in the very far future.

Here is a table showing the visitor responses I got for my website and for my blog when i stumbled a few pages. The visitors are those that I got within the first 24 hours of submission.

As you can see there is a fluctuation in the traffic when a new page of my site is newly stumbled. I have yet to figure out what exactly makes a new stumble more popular than another, but I’m guess it has something to do with the tags used in describing the particular page. Another strange thing is there was a time I was averaging about 40 - 50 new visitors a day from stumble upon, a steady flow of traffic without me creating any new stumbles from pages on my site, and then it just stopped suddenly one day.

Granted all of this I currently take the stance that StumbleUpon traffic is extremely unpredictable. I recommend it for ordinary websites but not so much for blogs. StumbleUpon users bookmark as they go along but bloggers are more interested in getting rss subscribers.

I will continue to experiment with StumbleUpon and give further observations when I have much more comprehensive and conclusive data.

Thanks for reading.