To clarify - The GenieTown Series “A” funding was authorized up to $2m of which $1.5m went into the company early in 2007. We will seek Series “B” funding in Spring 2008. Hassan Chafi is the CEO and as Crunchbase shows, a PhD student on leave and not a professor at Stanford.

“Off Line Yellow Pages”

I didn’t take you for a fan of a multi billion dollar off line business that has falloff of over 10% annually due to Internet Yellow Pages, local search engines and search and listing services.

develop and grow either a local business site, or college site

Let numbers do the talking. If you’ve got a great company, post your user numbers? Traffic? That would be far more impressive than saying your site is the best.

You totally missed a major player in this space. This site is loaded with useful functionality and has Q&A, groups, video reviews, ratings, etc. The founder sold his last company to internet brands.

http://www.mojopages.com

They have been around for over 18 months and are gaining traction and traffic. You should do a story on them.

If you look at 99% of all successful companies (outside of the Internet), this is the basic business plan…it has worked for hundreds of years and it works online, too -=)

Some suggestions based on a 60 sec visit.

For a newcomer to the site, GenieTown (terrible name) doesn’t say they are focusing on Bay Area only. This is a problem for a local-focused directory. Your visitor is going to see your crappy 4 architects, find an alternative and never go back.

In addition, newcomers are taken to an introductory splash page that really isn’t clear about what the site will do for a person looking for a local service provider. It almost looks like you have to register in order to find someone to help you….that is really bad. Take people directly in to the directory. If a service provider wants to sign up, I guarantee they will find the link. Make sure your site works with all sorts of browsers including the iPhone. iPhone sounds stupid I know, but you could theoretically get some traction there with an application-like offering.

Once in the directory, the site almost looks like one of those crappy domain squatter listing sites…Something isn’t quite right yet, but take this with a grain of salt….I’m not very good with aesthetics. One thing you should do is refine the categories on the left. On my screen, the first category was expanded, pushing the others off the screen. It almost looked like that was all you offered.

For what it’s worth…I would make it clear you are bay area only right now and then continue your strategy of focusing on getting as many providers signed up as possible, and then driving traffic. There is a very good chance you are going to find it extremely expensive to get service providers AND users, and that there is no way you’ll do it on a national level.

Oh, and no offense, but think about changing your name while you can. I think it is going to be hard to create a strong brand around. Oh and tell the CEO to remove his title “Mayor”. Maybe I’m jaded but it just makes you look like another about-to-fail dot com.

At worst you fail early while gaining a bunch of insight. If you’re lucky you might end up with a small local directory that can earn a few bucks and sustain itself.

Good Luck!

We just launched in alpha a digg style voting system for local businesses at http://www.yokld.com. The best will rise to the top.