LinkedWords.com Seeks Buyer or Investor
Last revised on March 23, 2009
Ok, here we go, after almost 4 years (Since Sep 2005) of hard and successful work to manage both the LinkedWords.com's scale and the rapid growth relying just on an angel round of funding, now coming to an end, based in the small Eastern European country Bulgaria (though registered as a company in both locations Monte Carlo, Monaco & Calif., USA) while trying to compete with some of the most successful and popular sites in Silicon Valley, we have finally realized that it is may be about time for us to:
1) offer LinkedWords.com for sale and hand this large-scale, controversial and highly ambitious project over to people that feel are (technically and financially) capable enough to achieve what has always been part of our plan - turning LW into one of the most popular sites on web; or
2) publicly announce that we are looking for an investor to join and help us move the company over to Silicon Valley, USA, once and for all (planned since 2006), and safely get through the next 2 years 2009 and 2010.
What have we done so far? Well, we believe a lot. LW took off in 2006 and in less than 2 years it has grown from literally zero traffic to over 1M people per month in 2008 and since then it kept on growing further up to the point where it reached almost 1.5M uniques per month. The site had then even crashed down in the second quarter 2008 due to not having scaled up in time, and we lost our traffic for almost 4 months after staying offline for 3 weeks. This has already been overcome and LW keeps on growing and growing again. Here is how our growth looks like: for the entire 2006 (only 6 months online) - 300K unique visitors; 2007 - 4.5M; 2008 - 10M; 2009 /est./ - 15M uniques, 2010 - !?. If you believe you can handle this fabulous beast we now think it is about time for the next stage - it is time for you to take over or help us take LW there with your investment.
Care to read more? Below you can find all the information you might need to know to make your initial decision. Contact details are enclosed at the bottom as well.
Table Of Content
- Description/Overview
- Mission
- The Problem It Solves
- The Solution
- Facts At A Glance
- Price
- Owner Financing
- Reason For Sale
- Employees
- Year Established
- Invested So Far
- Growth Potential
- Competition
- Support & Training
- History of the Company/Team/Development in Pictures
- Executive Summary
- Business Plan
- The Latest News/Press Releases
- Contacts
- NDA
LinkedWords (LW) is an innovative contextual platform built upon millions of English words and phrases based pages organized into contextual categories, paths, pages and URLs using basic semantics whose mission is to maximize contextual linking among web sites across the Web. Since its launch in June 2006 LW's concept has essentially 
proven to be a very effective vehicle in helping web sites get contextually linked in on a content area level so that Internet users and smart robots discover their information in context resulting in highly relevant visitors for them.
Think of LinkedWords (LW) as of a “social networking site” aimed at and meant for web sites instead of for people. The way people connect to each other, gather together in family, friend and professional groups by interests at social networking utilities like Facebook™, MySpace™ and LinkedIn™ the same thing web sites do at LinkedWords. Here web sites get contextually linked in LW's platform on a content area level through targeted linked words to connect to each other on relevancy principles and group by context and by interests in an effort to become more visible and be found in context on web.
Networking your web site among and in competition with more than 100M web sites worldwide has never been an easy thing to do, but sites contextually linked in LW's platform are gathering together by context, relevancy and interests to stand out, share targeted communities, users, visitors and reach to potential clients all for free. So it seems LW is the first and only “social networking site” not for people, but for web sites. In other words, LW does for web sites what popular social networking sites do for people!
Today, 2.5 years since its launch, LW is reaching more than 1M unique visitors per month, mainly shared among the sites linked in, thankfully to and derived from more than 100,000 content areas from around the Web contextually linked in its platform through targeted linked words. While LW's platform current capacity has some 38M more words organized in proper contextual paths that remain yet to be contextually linked in, the platform itself has been organized in a way to support virtually unlimited expansion on demand.
LW's ultimate mission is to build the next generation of the web data graph where relevant information will be less searched for, but more organically found in context while both web sites and common users will then still be relying on, but be less dependent upon today's search engines.
With the rapid increase of the number of web sites (over 100M*) and so does the cost of indexing and classifying them there will be more and more web information (possibly billions of pages) that will simply be left in the darkness (the invisible web) where neither algorithmic robots nor people will find it.
Having more relevant sites on Web linking to your site is known to be effective for staying visible in tomorrow's web, but just like with today's mass search engines already struggling to keep it up with the ever growing amount of information on Web the situation with small to mid level sites seems even worse when trying to have third party sites link back to them, let alone in context. Even for sites that think they are successful in obtaining links from third party places the natural limitations are still in place and unless they are top brands or already popular on the Web their chances of having more than 100 sites linking back to them are very slim and it would take years to achieve .
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* Data 2005 -> news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4325918.stm
* Data 2006 -> edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/11/01/100millionwebsites** Depends on the number of content areas your site has (e.g. a site with 2000 pages can possibly create up to 6000 contextually linked words that can potentially connect that site to 600,000 [6000 linked words result in 6000 contextual listings at LinkedWords and each page with contextual listings at LW can contain 100 relevant listings on average from other sites] relevant content areas across the web while a site with 1M pages can possibly have at least 3M contextual links in LW that can potentially connect to virtually endless number of relevant content areas across the web)
• More than 38 Million static web pages organized in a unique contextual platform;
• More than 4 M page views per month; 2.5 M page views ads are served on;
• More than 1.5 M visits/month;
• 400,000 unique visitors mark was outreached for first time in April 2007;
• For the period of 30 days between Mar 09, 2008 and Apr 10, 2008 the traffic was more than 1,210,000; Google and Quantcast measured traffic reports available; Quantcast reported for over 1,300,000 during the same period;
• For the entire calendar year 2007 LW ended up with more than 4,500,000 unique visitors to its contextual platform;
• In April '08 our platform experienced an unprecedented growth in the traffic reaching over 1.3M unique visitors, which resulted in a failure on one of our servers causing major downtime of several weeks. For the 12 months prior to the “major downtime” from April 2007 to April 2008 LW ended up with more than 7,700,000 unique visitors to its contextual platform;
• Both Google Analytics (viewed upon request only) and Quantcast measured traffic are currently reporting for over 1,000,000 unique visitors per month;
• Despite the major downtime that took place during the entire month of May '08 and had later affected our traffic for from the May - August '08 period the consolidated traffic for the entire 2008 was more than 10M , which is a double increase compared to 2007;
• As of September 2008 LW has 451,000 back links according to Yahoo!; 450 (public) and 48652 (Google Webmaster Tools) external links according Google (used to be over 350,000 before the major downtime) and more than 3,876,716 internal links according Google Webmasters Tools (viewed upon request only);
• As of today the highest number of daily unique visitors is 47,546 registered on April 07, 2008; According to Quantcast the highest number of daily unique visitors was 51,000;
• More than 100,000 contextual links done around the web (in-text linked words) through LinkedWords.com's contextual platform;
• More than 60,000 new English words and phrases (pages) were added in 12 months, in addition to the 38M already existing;
• More than 6000 new categories and sub-categories organized on demand so far in addition to the 100,000+ already existing within the structure;
• Indexation level at Google varies from 2,500,000 to 4,450,000 pages (also varies when accessed from different parts of the world); 25,000,000 indexed at Yahoo before the major downtime, today it is 2,500,000; 30,000,000 used to be the indexation level at Ask.com before the downtime, today is 2,900,000;
• Presently Google contains in its data centers information about more than 5,000,000 pages from LinkedWords;
• Alexa Ranking falls in the range of 10,000/20,000, the highest ever being 4,888; Quantcast rank is in the 5000 - 6000 range for the American traffic only;
• Currently the web platform runs on 4 dedicated servers - 2 (two) front web servers load balanced and 1 (one) data base server organized into a cluster as well as one back up server;
• LinkedWords is registered as company in both locations 1) LinkedWords SCP, registered in Monte Carlo, Monaco and LinkedWords.com LLC registered in California, USA, but it is effectively managed by the team in Sofia, Bulgaria;
• XP Solutions Ltd is the in-house IT firm that takes technically care of LW and is based and registered in Bulgaria since 2005.
• Initial steps of moving LW over to Silicon Valley have already been undertaken in 2008 by engaging top Palo Alto, Calif. based attorneys specialized in Global Migrations and International Executive Mobility.
1) Below are the price components we believe are vital, listed in no particular order.
- 1M unique visitors per month; 10M unique visitors per year*
- Almost 3 years of proven traffic records (Since June 2006)
- Expert team in place ready to stay on (knowledge, expertise and experience in software engineering, web development, programming, large-scale directory structures, library science, linguistics, taxonomies and basic semantics)
- LW's founder, a serial entrepreneur and conceptualist working over Internet since 1995, brings knowledge, expertise and experience in all things Internet from conceptualizing various ideas in an effort to take on giants, disrupt business models and address unmet market needs over the Web to the technical side of the Web with specific expertise in all aspects of the contextualization of Web, semantics, data mining, taxonomies, intelligent content tagging, textual analysis and large-scale Web based data structures and concepts
- LW's current popularity
- Unique people per year*
- Uniqueness
- Innovativeness
- No competition
- Entry barrier
- Maturity
- Growth potential
- Ambitious mission
- Proven concept (almost 3 years online)
- Concept's effectiveness
- Platform's size and complexity
- Platform's scalability on demand
- Search engines acceptance
- One of the few web sites on Web with successfully applied basic semantics in the practice
- Perhaps the most popular application among all semantic based web concepts of today's Web
*From 15 million visitors expected during this year, at least 10M on average will be unique. For example, the popular site Digg is having more than 20M unique visitors per month, but the total unique people visiting their site per year is perhaps no more than 30M. In LW's case it is 10M on average per year
2) Final price will also depend on the ownership percentage / equity stake the buyer wants to acquire. Proposed ownership schemes are as follows: 40%, 60%, 80% and 100%.
3) If you are coming in as an investor, and not as a buyer, the deal conditions will depend on the amount of your funding commitment (min. $600,000).
3) Please note that Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) needs to be signed either by you or by your representative before further negotiations and discussions involving price, valuation and equity are carried out.
Not available
1) The angel round is coming to its end;
2) We were unable to raise series A round of funding due to the location / jurisdiction of the business (entire team based in Bulgaria), despite the fact we had a talk with a couple of major VCs over the past 2 years and a number of angel investors (proof can be provided, upon request);
3) The current private investor can not continue to provide sufficient funding for the company;
4) The site is rapidly growing and it is getting harder for us to keep it up with the growth;
5) Getting the site effectively monetized, despite its 1M uniques per month, is close to mission impossible from the location / jurisdiction Bulgaria (problems with English speaking customer service, problem with cost-effectively processing payments from Bulgaria and more).
Funding Alternative
Alternatively to the sale option, we still welcome a solid investor to join us with his investment (min. $600,000) thus allowing the company to get fully installed in Silicon Valley, USA, and safely get through the next 2 years 2009 and 2010.
More than 30 people took part in building the site during 2005 and 2006; then it was only 8 full time employees taking care of the site; now only 6 full time employees are left (software engineers, librarians and directory specialists).
In 2004 the linked words concept has been tested in private beta for first time in real web environment; in 2005 the development begun and since June 2006 the site has been fully up and running online.
$600,000 invested to date since September 2005 coming from a private investor.
The site is expected to reach 3-5M unique visitors per month within the next 24 months. Currently more than 1M unique people visit the site on a monthly basis. For the entire 2007 the site had more than 4.5M unique visitors; 2008 it ended up with 10M uniques for the entire year while the estimates for 2009 are for 15M uniques before the end of the year.
As of today there is no competition known; the concept is unique, no followers and copy/cats yet. (more information on this is available in our executive summary, which will be made available upon request).
Team is willing to stay on with the new owners; founder will also be available for an agreed period of time post sale or for good as it depends on a number of other factors to be additionally negotiated and agreed upon. Either way he will also be available for help on a per case basis.
Full History Of The Company/Team/Development In Pictures
Upon request.
Will be made available upon request.
Will be made available upon request.
The Latest News/Press Releases
February 2009 [Web 2.0 Innovations] -- 2008's Most Popular Web 2.0 Sites -( The full list and the blog coverage for it)
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Contact The Principals At
ventures_group@hotmail.com
holzeinv@monaco.mc
info@linkedwords.com