Yesterday, almost 1 year to the day of Vlytics’ 1 year anniversay, one of our clients won a very close race in CT. As a first time entreprenuer in the notoriously difficult tech start-up arena I feel like a rookie baseball player hitting a walk-off homerun in they’re major league debut, I am ecstatic not only for the win but for also making it this far.
Given our thirst for accurate numbers and precise data you would think I would know the exact moment at which point Vlytics became more than just an idea. Well I don’t, it could be when I couldn’t sleep and around 7:30am on July 7, 2007 after 8 hours of writing/diagramming came up with a 24 page document that served as the foundation for the Vlytics platform and algorithms. It could be when I took my first meeting with some politicos to get some feedback on the idea in August 2007 or maybe it was when I filed my first patent on January 24, 2008? It could be February 23, 2008 when I almost died driving to CT to pitch my soon to be first clients. Rather I chose March 3, 2008 as the inception of Vlytics as a company as this is when I accepted my first round of private financing and thus crossed the threshold of theory to the realm of execute or fail.
I am happy to say that Vlytics will be around for another year and we expect growth in both our platform as well in our revenue (and yes we had some significant revenue in 2008). I read back in July of 2007 that only 1 in 10 startups make it longer than a year – I don’t know if its true but I certainly feel like I beat the odds.
Google Analytics tells me that if your reading this you probably have read this blog before. Common sense tells me that if your reading this I have probably met you and told you about Vlytics, because of that I owe you thanks – thanks for listening, contributing, criticizing, and using Vlytics – without you I wouldn’t be looking back at the past year as a success.
These are aggregate across all of Vlytics clients so as not to give away any campaign methods.
Some campaigns knocked on a lot of doors and some didn’t. Some sent out A LOT of email or relied on mail more than phones. More in depth stats on what seemed to work later – we are rolling in vote histories so as to get some real in depth aggregate data so we can figure out the effectiveness of these methods – keep an eye out for that report later this spring/summer.
One thing for sure is that every single one of my clients now has the best database in they’re respective districts – the next person who runs in that district will have the benefit of knowing who turned out and who didnt and what issues motivated them and what issues didnt. The goal is to create a truly invaluable information source that gets more intelligent as the years go by – a true foundation for success now and in the future.
The entire concept is absolutely brilliant.
There is never enough data; and data is to a political race what ordinance is in battle.
Thanks for the note ACR – good to see you around my neck of the woods – I enjoy your posts on CTLP and your own blog.
Keep an eye out – Vlytics was heavily tested in CT so we’ll have plenty of stats to throw at you all for your upcoming muni’s and next years state/federal.