How Urchin Web Analytics Got Started
Monte: Welcome back to Domain Masters. I’m Monte Cahn; I’m your host. And we just got finished up with Jake Baille, who’s not only a top SEO in our space, but also he’s started TrueLocal.com, which is a great local search engine built for brick and mortar businesses.
My next guest is Brett Crosby. Brett’s one of the founders and the VP of Marketing for Urchin. Urchin is a web analytics company, one of the best in the industry. I’ve heard a lot of great things about them, and we’re gonna be working with them from a registrar standpoint, and we’re gonna talk about how Brett got started in the business, what’s made Urchin successful, why it’s important when you have a website to have probably the best, you know, analytics packages on, and what you can learn from analytics to make your business successful.
So Brett, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me.
Brett: Great, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
Monte: So obviously you’ve been in the business for quite some time. I understand that you got in in 1996.
Brett: That’s right.
Monte: Tell me a little bit about the start of Urchin, how you got involved with the company, and what’s made it successful to date.
Brett: Okay, sure. Well, we basically started back in ’96. We were doing building of websites and a lot of the technical back end work for other people with websites, and we were also doing hosting out of our closet at the time, when, you know, before data centers were what they are today--
Monte: Right.
Brett: --with all the thumbs getting, you know--
Monte: So you had a bunch of big servers sitting in your closet inside--
Brett: Well, yeah.
Monte: --your bedroom?
Brett: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Monte: Just like me.
Brett: And we had a small area where we were hosting all these guys, and we were doing, you know, getting businesses online. I actually--before I started with these guys doing Urchin, I actually started doing--I was doing agency work, getting agencies in LA, talent agencies to put their talent on line so they can search and find and, you know, kind of--the idea was just avert the whole casting process.
Monte: Oh, cool.
Brett: ‘ Cause I graduated from USC at the time, right in 1995.
Monte: Go Trojans.
Brett: Yeah, that’s right.
Monte: Yeah.
Brett: That’s what was going on right then, you know, everything was starting to go online, and we’d go into these agencies to talk to them about these things and they would say, “Okay, show me what you guys can do,” I said, “Pull up our website,” and they’d say, “Well, how do you do that?” And it was pretty obvious we were a little in the game at that point, so.
Monte: Right.
Brett: Then I went down and started working with these guys and helped them build this business. We had a company called WebDepot, and then so as I said, we were doing the hosting, building the sites, we did some pretty big sites. We worked on the back end of sites like Honda, for example.
Monte: Oh--
Brett: Did some--
Monte: --great.
Brett: --of the java script work so that you could select all the custom variables for your cars. And then we--so we built Urchin as an internal tool back then when we were doing, you know, the hosting of these sites, because we wanted to be able to bill for bandwidth, which back then, that was the expensive thing, you know.
Monte: Right, right.
Brett: So we had to make sure we were billing appropriately for that. So that’s actually--Urchin’s humble beginning was doing that sort of thing.
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