Archive for March, 2006

Site updates

Friday, March 17th, 2006

We’ve made a few updates to the site recently that are worth mentioning.

The net worth statistics page has been updated with the latest numbers.

The comparison report is now super fast. This data is calculated on a daily basis, so we’re not running the calculations everytime somebody runs a report like we were before.

The public profile page has been rearranged a bit. We’ve already got one complaint, so feel free to let us know what you think of it. This tweak was made to support an AdBrite ad block, and what do you know, we already sold our first ad. What’s that? You mean you actually can make money by selling ads? I know I was pretty excited to see that. If you’re interested in advertising, proceed to our AdBrite profile to purchase.

Ka-Blog writes about NetworthIQ

Friday, March 17th, 2006

Ka-Blog, the new personal finance blog on the block, writes about NetworthIQ in the first post. Some great stuff in there including a nice testimonial from one of our users and an interview with me. Ka-Blog is written by Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Kara McGuire. This is the first major media outlet to have a net-worth tracking blogger. Very cool!

3000 users

Monday, March 13th, 2006

Just hit 3000 users, with GenXFinance being the lucky 3000th.

Progress Report

Friday, March 10th, 2006

It’s been a while since I’ve reported on NetworthIQ. Here’s where things stand after almost 8 months.

Total registered/verified users: 2966
Users with net worth entered: 2503
Public Profiles: 969 (33%)
Median net worth of all users: $84,500
Alexa Ranking: 58,962

Looks like the public profile percentage has leveled out at 33%, being that it was about the same 3 months ago. Going into this project we were expecting maybe 25%, so it’s nice to see that the community has embraced this openness.

In the search engine world, we hit a big milestone this week, now cracking the top 5 for “net worth” on Yahoo. Still #1 on MSN as well. But, still nowhere to be found on Google, which yes I know, is probably the only one that really matters. We are however on the first page in Google for “compare net worth”. With no PR/Ad budget, organic and viral growth is essential, so these are important things to consider.

One area that has recently taken off is the community aspect. Comments are way up since the Business Week article and there are now several very active users helping the community. In particular, moominoid and stealthbucks are all over the place, leaving helpful bits of advice all around. We envision NetworthIQ as being the place where you can share all of your financial experiences and advice, so this is great that it’s already begun before we develop the more specific features in this area.

As far as what’s coming next. We’re working on a beta exit realease with a new design (I know, that’s been mentioned before, it’s still coming). It looks like we’re also going to get a NetworthIQ score into this release, that should be interesting (and yes, we are taking steps to account for the top net worths). WOPM (to borrow the term from Brad Feld) is on the horizon too, which will allow users to cross-post their entries into their own blog. Time is still the enemy, as there’s so much we want to do to push NetworthIQ forward. Hopefully, we can take some steps in the near future to solve that problem.