November 28, 2007

Geni Clone Growing A Lot Faster Than Geni

Nick Gonzalez

56 comments »

Family genealogy and social newtork Geni got to five million profiles in the first five months after launch. Their early growth propelled them to a $100 million valuation and a lot of positive press.

In August the inevitable German clone launched. The clone, called Verwandt.de is a near carbon copy of Geni.

But unlike most clones, which never do as well as the original application, Verwandt is growing at nearly twice the rate that Geni is. In Verwandt’s first five months, CEO Sven Schmidt says they have spread to six languages (German, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English). One million family trees and 9.5 million profiles have been created (4.5 million more profiles than Geni’s first five months).

They’ve cannibalized a lot of early adopters in the Europe and South America with strong execution in localized markets and languages. Verwandt is even taking on Geni on its home turf. They’ve just launched in the U.S. under the domain ItsOurTree. Same design, different words.

Geni’s simple Flash interface was an innovation among genealogical sites (see our coverage of established competitors like MyHeritage and Ancestry.com). Verwandt is nothing more than a blatant rip of of Geni. But they are executing perfectly, and those 9.5 million user profiles are likely gone for Geni forever. Verwandt’s success means other clones will pop up even quicker than befoe. And that means startups need to think about international strategies right at the start, perhaps even before launch and before the application is proven.

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November 29th, 2007 at 9:37 am

MR JOURNAL - Technologie, Startups, Web und Gründerszene » Schlägt Verwandt.de das Original?

November 29th, 2007 at 10:10 am

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vrox

November 28th, 2007 at 11:02 pm

This is why “barrier to entry” is important. I feel like VC’s just tend to look at users without looking at how easy it is to clone a lot of apps(twitter for example). The stronger and more unique your tech, the harder it is to copy.
Duncan Riley

November 28th, 2007 at 11:04 pm

Not a lot of info on their site, but do they support the general file import/ export standards in genealogy? That was something Geni didn’t offer and were working on last time I heard, but it’s the one thing that would hook the hard-core genealogy community (my mother is in to this, so I know a little bit about it). If these guys offer that sort of support…well, it’s a big advantage over Geni.
Pachinko

November 28th, 2007 at 11:06 pm

Without knowing anything about either company really, this proves one thing: everything is up for grabs online unless you have a really, really convincing competitive edge.
anon

November 28th, 2007 at 11:25 pm

spellcheck?

quicker than BEFOE
Otis Gospodnetic

November 28th, 2007 at 11:56 pm

I definitely agree about the language/internationalization and related efforts. That is why Simpy, http://simpy.com/ , has been translated to about 10 languages. However, that doesn’t always help. See Netlog, a SN that has 20MM+ users supposedly, is available in a *number* of languages, yet it doesn’t seem to be growing super fast. Compete actually shows its traffic going down, but who knows…
Eduard

November 29th, 2007 at 12:07 am

Verwandt may grow up faster, but IMHO genoom.com is way better than Geni or this one.
Daniel Tietze

November 29th, 2007 at 12:21 am

@Duncan: According to their “Infocenter” page, verwandt.de supports the import of Generalogy data in the GEDCOM format. See:
http://www.verwandt.de/infocen.....ortexport/

Is this the kind of standard you were referring to?

Dan.
Duncan Riley

November 29th, 2007 at 12:30 am

Dan
I couldn’t remember the name before but yes GEDCOM is the standard most use (thx). It’s a definite advantage this site has over Geni and you’d be surprised how big Genealogy is worldwide…indeed it’s the No 1 recruiting tool of the Mormon Church (family history libraries run by Mormons are all over Australia).
Forumer™

November 29th, 2007 at 12:37 am

ah this is painful for geni developers; a clone growing faster

you develop something nice, somebody clones you, and because of marketing know-how surpasses you.
Simon

November 29th, 2007 at 12:43 am

funny posting - I personnaly use another rapidly growing site http://www.kindo.fr that already exists in 11 langages !!!
Rajeev

November 29th, 2007 at 12:57 am

See they founf their competitive adge in better strategy and execution.

http://tekno-world.blogspot.com
james

November 29th, 2007 at 1:13 am

I just want to tell the Geni developers that they will never be forgotten for the awesome interface they designed. As for the copycats. It’s really sad, lazy and greedy. Stealing a design pattern is one thing, but then not modifying the original design significantly is kinda disrespectful and immoral to the creators. Yes, of course people get away with it, but their should be some kind of moral code that people adhere to in regard to each other’s creations out of freewill and respect. At least change the copy text to something else and write on your site a paragraph of homage to the original creator, “a thanks to” note. This whole discussion is a tough one to judge…..
Matt

November 29th, 2007 at 1:24 am

Geneology sites are hard to switch from. I chose Geni when I first saw the article on TC, and while there are some newer attractive options out there, you don’t really want to have to tell your whole tree (275 in mine so far) that they need to register on another site now. It is important to be one of the first, but you also have to keep updating to keep those original signups plus attract new ones. Geni could use a few more features, but so far I think they are doing just fine.
Daniel Thomaser

November 29th, 2007 at 2:11 am

I guess the strategic thinking seperates the boys from the men. It’s easy to launch a startup, but hard to keep alive. But somehow most of the founders refuse to think about basic strategic decisions. (As a German) I have the feeling, that it’s way to easy to get funded in the states.
ok - maybe I’m just jealous…
Darren Stuart

November 29th, 2007 at 2:47 am

I think this won’t be the first non-English language site to do well. Lets face it sites are popular for a reason and people will want them in their own language and if another site gives it them they will use it. Once they do this and get large numbers they then get the experience of what those users wanted etc and then can implement that into English sites and come back with a much more mature product and thus make gains into the market.
Misery

November 29th, 2007 at 3:36 am

James @ 12

There’s nothing particularly interesting with Geni’s interface except they did it using Flash. A friend of mine worked on a similar type of site with an AJAX interface and we were testing it internally for a few months before Geni even appeared on the scene. Either way, it’s a crap niche to be in
Christoph Kluge

November 29th, 2007 at 3:41 am

James wrote:
“It’s really sad, lazy and greedy. Stealing a design pattern is one thing, but then not modifying the original design significantly is kinda disrespectful and immoral to the creators.”

James, I agree with what you said there. On the other hand, most (german-)cloned services are profiting from the situation that the original services are often too centered around the american customer base, so it’s hard for, say, the german customer base, to adopt. I guess what I am trying to say is:

Step 1: Find a cool and working U.S web 2.0 service that doesn’t care about non-english speaking viewers/customers

Step 2: Analyze, take everything they have, blatantly copy them (just because you can) and learn from their mistakes.

Step 3: Profit.
Paul J

November 29th, 2007 at 4:00 am

If anyone is interested in seeing how they went about cloning it have a look at their bid proposal on Elance
http://www.elance.com/c/rfp/ma.....d=12039961

By the look of their feedback on this project they weren’t too pleased with the end result. Not bad however for a $4,800 outlay.
Parul Bindra

November 29th, 2007 at 4:11 am

I’ve been looking to write on an online, collaborative family tree building tool lately. I’ve finally found one that looks like it’s going to deliver exactly what I was looking for in a site of this type. This whole site works like a giant, personal LinkedIn. As I keep clicking on more features, I’m more and more impressed with what they’ve thought to add and include on the pages. Keep it up!

Parul
http://www.bhopu.com
Joz

November 29th, 2007 at 4:54 am

Talking about copycats.. Genoom as someone refered above started like Geni but is now improving it at a really fast pace.. Multilingual, import/export of Gedcom, clean interface and easy features…

So there is room for more players and for improvement..being first is cool, but keeping the innovation is another thing.
V

November 29th, 2007 at 5:04 am

it’s up to who gets the subscribers so … well done verwandt.de
David

November 29th, 2007 at 5:06 am

Thanks Eduard for your support:

// Verwandt may grow up faster, but IMHO genoom.com is way better than Geni or this one.//

We’re working hard to keep satisfying users needs. We’re also working to support more languages than the ones we already have (currently 11).
Sven Schmidt

November 29th, 2007 at 5:13 am

Hi!

Full disclosure at start: I am the co-founder of verwandt.de. To address the issues raised:

* We support the im- and export of family trees via the Gedcom standard. Both (!) are completely free of charge (as is our full site). We consider us an open plattform, we have on purpose NOT created a lock-in effect.

* It is our belief it is all about execution. We must deliver a compelling user experience. It is NOT about taking a user as an hostage!

* Nick is calling us a carbon copy. We won´t complain about that. However, we have launched some very innovative features already like verwandt.de/karten (mapping the distribution of surnames). These features will be rolled out globally the next months.

* In addition, we are about to launch a unique feature initiative the coming weeks. The last months we worked on making our platform scalable to cope with our growth.

* “Ideas are a dime a dozen”: How many phone companies are there out there? Execution is key and will be key.

* We now focus on nine countries and are available in seven languages (we have different language versions for Portugal and Brazil accounting for local differences). Being local is key in our eyes! Not every Internet user prefers an U.S. site only available in English.

Best, Sven
(http://www.itsourtree.com/)
Dr. Martin Winkler

November 29th, 2007 at 6:03 am

I don´t think this webpage is familiar to most German internet users. Maybe some people found this page and tried to log in to see what it is all about. So you are a regular user (like me starting today). But I don´t expect anyone to use it for a longer period.
There are a lot of web2.0 clones in Germany but this one forces to register. So that´s the only reason for the high numer of “users”.
Marc

November 29th, 2007 at 6:32 am

Why is that that US companies don’t get the localization done in short time?
Don’t they care about the European market?

I mean right now Facebook could have ten thousands of new registration in Germany per day, but they are not able to translate their navigation…

So don’t complain about clones, if you’re not able to make the move yourself!
John

November 29th, 2007 at 6:35 am

Boo hoo! An american company who can’t get their head out of their arse long enough to understand that there are languages other than english and markets who want similar products.

I thought taking an idea, running with it, and actually executing it was part of the entrepreneurial (sp?) spirit?

I also thought when geni launched it was a rip off of an hack day /start up weekend type of activity.

Instead of calling it a clone why don’t you give them the props they deserve?
Mike Potter

November 29th, 2007 at 6:36 am

The site was built using Flex - I’m sure that’s one of the reasons that they were able to get it up and running so quickly.

Mike

Adobe Flex Team
Cedric

November 29th, 2007 at 6:46 am

@Paul J : how do you know that this project on elance has resulted in this specific website?
(http://www.elance.com/c/rfp/main/rfpBid.pl?jobid=12039961)
I’m sure plenty of people ordered clones of geni on odesk, elance etc.
c.
Chris R.

November 29th, 2007 at 6:49 am

Good for them. It shows that you truly can do better than the original.
Robin Hood

November 29th, 2007 at 7:06 am

Well I just tried to signup and am getting an error: “Error while sending email.”. Hopefully we can get that execution to work.
Antje Wilsch

November 29th, 2007 at 7:16 am

@paul J- ouch! Yeah, how did you find that? Says front end should be in English. We found an elance bid asking for a clone of our full site. It was rather disconcerting
Paul J

November 29th, 2007 at 7:22 am

@Cedric - I was in talks with this company (Romania based) to do some work for me some months ago (not a clone I hasten to add), they said they did verwandt.de. I then had a look at their feedback and stitched it together.
Sebastian

November 29th, 2007 at 7:38 am

As far as I know, verwandt.de counts every “entry” as a “profile”. So the counts are by far not comparable.

With friendly remarks from Germany,

Sebastian
Jessica Mah

November 29th, 2007 at 7:41 am

It’s one thing to think about international strategy from the start, but it’s another thing to act on it.

It’s really difficult to place a real focus overseas when you’re yet to monopolize the market locally. Which battles do you want to fight? How do you properly prioritize?

Acquisition of international companies is also an option. Definitely not ideal, but what can you really do?
Sven Schmidt

November 29th, 2007 at 7:48 am

Hi!

Full disclosure at start: I am the co-founder of verwandt.de.

Sorry to people currently trying to sign up: Due to our “normal” growth AND being on Techcrunch we are currently experiencing some performance issues. We are aware of these and will fix them shortly!

To address some comment:

* To our best knowledge we are using the same metrics as Geni.com. So we do believe that one can compare the growth rates!

* It is well-known that we did some offshoring at start. However, given our growth rates and the resulting need to scale we have redone the whole platform since then.

* We are very happy with our reach and user base in Germany. But there is certainly room to grow left

Best, Sven
(http://www.itsourtree.com/)
Tech Adviser

November 29th, 2007 at 8:23 am

Acquisition or mrger seems the natural route here.

This would certainly cement the competitive advantage for the global platform.
Scott

November 29th, 2007 at 8:26 am

Cloning profitable ideas isn’t just on the net. Just look at American Idol, The Bachelor, and other reality-based TV shows. It’s all about supply and demand. If one show can’t grab the whole market, there will definitely be other to pick up the slack.

Do I think that copying another’s idea VERBATIM is sick, wrong, greedy, immoral, dishonest? Maybe. But overall, we’re better off for it.
Antje Wilsch

November 29th, 2007 at 8:32 am

Seb - all the companies in this area do that including the big players like Ancestry. It’s the media who erroneously picks up that a profile = a user. Most average people would just think they had 5m users, not 100K users and 490,000,000 profiles of dead people I think Geni is brilliant but another commentor above is right, how can you go after 2, 5, 10 different markets well as a start-up? Just putting a site in another language is not going to make it a success. There is translation (not always easy), nuances of culture, interface differences, THEN add on the entire marketing to a different country etc. spectrum and it can quickly eat up all resources.
UberInvestor.com

November 29th, 2007 at 8:58 am

“five million profiles in the first five months after launch.” - Did they buy profiles from somewhere? Because its hard to believe that you can have 5 million profiles in 5 months. (seems like an exaggeration)
Bill Templeton

November 29th, 2007 at 9:13 am

The U.S. only represents ~20% of worldwide Internet users, and this percentage is constantly decreasing. Any company that only launches a U.S./English-centric service is obviously at risk for losing out on the other 80%, either due to not adequately serving them or having local competitors crop up. Given Geni had launched first and plenty of funding, they can only blame themselves for getting their butt kicked in Europe by Verwandt. Or maybe they only want to be a U.S.-centric company.
Fabian Schonholz

November 29th, 2007 at 9:20 am

@37 (and possible other)

While to some extent I agree - and not a very large extent - you need to think in terms of the modern world and modern economy. We may still be somewhat segmented in economic clusters (or markets) but the clusters are closing on each other and overlapping. The borderlines of markets have been blurry for a very long time. Therefore, you really need to consider an international strategy rather than just a local one.

10 years ago I was pitching an idea to VCs that included an international strategy. Their point of contention was that you first needed to prove it in the US and then, expand internationally. The bottom line is that either they did not get it, or most likely, I did not explain it well and clearly. It is not about executing in all markets from the get go, but building the possibility of easy execution in multiple economic clusters. And once you get going on one market and get a little traction, you can start opening other markets.

Internationalization is easy. But I do agree that there are cultural differences that MUST be understood. But that is also not so hard either. Get the right people and it will happen easier than you expect.
John Schell

November 29th, 2007 at 9:31 am

Business case?
Michael

November 29th, 2007 at 9:36 am

How many users are ACTIVE, in the sense of coming back to actually using the site, not just starting a tree and never returning? To me, that seems to be the most important question.
D

November 29th, 2007 at 10:30 am

I did some further digging.

As quoted the project was posted on: http://www.elance.com/c/rfp/ma.....d=12039961

Also attached to the requested project (readable if logged in) is::
“Please note: The plattform should be mult-lingual. The frontend will be in english but all text visiblie for the user should be separate from the code so the plattform can easaly translated into another language. For us quality and timing for completion extremly important.”

If you look at the developers feedback page you can see the feedback that was given by the project creator (Tobias??).
Looks like the project didn’t get off the ground as they would of liked.

06/26/2007 $4,800.00 Website Development - Clone
Category: Website Development > Other - Website Development
Buyer: Dirk07 (1 feedback)
We were not satisfied with the work. The Project was delayed by 150% and the specifications were not read or not understood: - Different DB enginge than specified - Code not commented - Partrally used Romanian variable names On top the code was monolithic. Although requested multiple times, code fragments werde not shown. They were presented, when it was too late to change (e.g. HTML user table layout). In general: Before assigning the project the team was very nice. We made very clear, that time is a very important issue for us but promised time lines were not kept - even short terms (e.g. “tomorrow”). We are sorry but we will have to code at least 80% of the software again to meet the defined requirements.

Provider Response: Cratima
Dear Tobias, Let me say that this was one of the most surprising and unfair feedbacks we have ever received. Let me break it down for you: 1. “We were not satisfied with the work.” - That is not what any of the press releases you posted on your homepage say. 2. “The Project was …Different DB engine than specified”: - You were the ones to insist on longer than needed bug testing; your feedback was terribly slow for this process, only a few bugs every week over an extent of few weeks. - The DB was rewritten only because you failed to provide a clear specification about the relations between relatives. You wanted to add more degrees of kinship than initially agreed upon in the contracts we both signed, not us. - Different DB engine is a reason to complain? When you changed the specification we had to adapt to your needs so we used a more expensive, more stable, more difficult to configure engine just to meet your requirements; all of this free of charge. (You were fair enough not to deny the fact that we adhered to your budget). Again we take the brunt, when in fact you should thank us. 3. “Although…when it was too late to change (e.g. HTML user table layout).” - the HTML can always be seen on a web page in any browser without having to get a hold of source files, and can be viewed in the source code; actually HTML code is client side, so it is entirely surprising a man in your position does not posses this elementary piece of information. 4. “We made very clear that…” - like I said, you also delayed the project. 5. “We are sorry but…” - you held press releases long before the site was launched, so you were sure that the code was alright; - you also had no hesitation in paying us at the end; so why would you pay for something you were not satisfied with if indeed the code was poorly written? That is all, I hope you can take some time to reflect and realize you have caused us a great injustice. Best of luck in the future,XcellenceIT
al gore globa lwarming

November 29th, 2007 at 10:33 am

where does the $100mm valuation come from?
Inez Tikus

November 29th, 2007 at 12:13 pm

I don’t see anything remotely close that resembles revenues. Not now and not in the near future. Unless… unless selling email addresses is a legitemate source of income according to Charles River Ventures
Steve Ballmer

November 29th, 2007 at 12:43 pm

Zuneology.com the real happenin’ place for this kinda stuff!

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
John Philip Green

November 29th, 2007 at 1:08 pm

Languify.com would be super relevant to Geni and most other web apps… there’s such a huge opportunity in supporting multiple languages.
Vince

November 29th, 2007 at 2:12 pm

A “profile” is merely a record of a person, not an actual user. Given that Verwandt has GEDCOM import, it would be easy for a relatively small number of genealogy buffs to import large trees creating rapid growth in the number of “profiles”. This growth might be disproportionate to the number of actual registered users they have. My understanding is that Geni hasn’t launched GEDOM import yet, so all of their “profiles” were almost all entered individually.
The real reach of Verwandt can only be measured by the number of actual registered users they have. So the question is, how many actual users came and registered on Verwandt’s site?
Monkey Lab

November 29th, 2007 at 2:53 pm

test
Jason

November 29th, 2007 at 7:11 pm

It tells you that the first and best doesn’t always win. I just re-watched Triumph of the Nerds documentary about Apple/MSFT appropriately titled “Artists Steal.” We’ve seen this in the dot-com age a thousand times more because of the ability to steal. Review: MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Hi5, Bolt, Piczo, etc…
Steven

November 29th, 2007 at 7:51 pm

Just as a point of comparison, ancestry.com’s online family tree product (which has been live for a little over a year) has over 350 million profiles, and users add 7 million more a week. Geni and Verwandt have a lot of catching up to do!
Jon

November 30th, 2007 at 1:22 pm

Just wait until Geni gets their import GEDCOM feature working. As Vince mentioned these “profiles” on both Geni and Verwandt.de are mostly dead people. Geni reached 10 million profiles Oct 31st with no import function (active users had to manually enter these profiles), whereas Verwandt.de reached 10 million yesterday (the 29th of November) with import working from the start. Lets see actual living user numbers from both companies and then we can see who is growing faster. Geni touts 750,000+ active living users as of Oct 31st. Verwandt.de blog makes no mention of active users (and apparently doesn’t know the difference between 1 billion and 10 million).
Gustavo

December 2nd, 2007 at 2:49 pm

Maybe Geni.com is getting behind, but how am I going to transfer all 770 profiles in my tree to another service?

I’m from Brazil and basically all the people who are active in my tree don’t understand English very well. Therefore, the Portuguese version of Genoom and Verwandt are quite appealing. But again: how am I going to tell every body to move to another service?

I guess it’s easier to demand Geni to translate their interface!