I've been swamped lately and haven't had too much time for the poli-talk. Plenty of it going around as it is anyway, though I've been itching to critique some of the things going on with the McCain campaign.

I wanted though, to jump in on the small business discussions going around. I have had a few people tell me that small businesses making more than $250,000 are the exception, not the rule, and they'd love to be banking 250k ebt, etc.

I think this is where it's important to keep a little perspective.

Small business is defined in the U.S. has companies with 100 employees or less. Let's take a 100 person company, and divide $250,000 in revenue out. That leaves you with $2500 for each employee to cover costs, salary, etc -- with nothing left over for reinvestment, growth, rent, utilities, supplies, etc.

$250,000, more likely, is about enough to cover 5 employees with enough left over to reinvest, pay benefits, taxes, rent, utilities, etc. etc. Even with that, thats assuming each employee makes/costs around $30,000-$40,000 a year.

But, but, that's all a write off! Yep. But it's a discussion about growth, not maintaining. If you want to grow your company, you'll need to reinvest a substantial amount. Keeping $250k isn't something that will get you very far, especially in the midst of a credit crisis where no one can borrow anything. It's a lot of money when looked at as take home revenue for one individual owner, it's not when looked at from a re-investment stand point. For my tech friends -- think about blowing up a startup with full time employees with $250,000 in total VC money. It may be enough to get you going, but heaven forbid a speed bump shows up.

And thats the argument. Companies looking to grow need to keep every penny they can in order to properly reinvest and survive economic swings. If we're looking to create jobs, we need to grow business. We're heading into a questionable economy that will likely take years to play out. Companies, specifically small ones with out a lot of resources, need to be very, very cautious of cash flow. Higher taxes will almost certainly play a part of that. And regarding companies banking far more than that, if we want to keep jobs here, we need to provide manageable corporate tax rates (one of the major reasons AB sold to InBev earlier in the year.) We're global now and "them's the breaks".

It wasn't that long ago when it was the primaries. Obama, when pushed, admitted he may not be able to implement his tax policy immediately depending on the economy. He knows, precisely, what the costs of this are. And that's fine. He calls it like he sees it, which is, to quote him, "to spread the wealth around." (the joe the plumber discussion).

I'm just surprised by how many Obama supporters aren't willing to call it out the same way. Look past the talking points (for both candidates). Tax increases do not equate to higher revenue. Tax cuts do not equate to lower revenue. There are pros/cons to both plans, and truthfully it likely maps out to a bell curve when it comes to growing the economy properly. Our goal is to find the right mix of tax rates to reach the highest point of efficiency. With a decreasing amount of growth, the answer isn't to raise taxes to cover spending, it's to cut spending and provide as much relief as possible to tax payers. Specifically tax payers looking to grow revenue (and even more specifically, companies looking to take revenue in from other economies around the world, but I digress).

We had another record setting month over at Emurse.com. Traffic was up something fierce, largely from various SEO improvements (all of the new traffic was organic, no paid links/ads/whatever)

I really think it was the result of ongoing work throughout the first quarter. April was big, but if you zoom out and measure from say, February, its been astounding. We're looking at 200% growth easy. Combine these improvements with the new look we launched a couple weeks back (mike is the man), and we get the month of April.

As far as accomplishing the objectives we laid out at the start of the year, we changed gears a little bit in late February. We started assembling the pieces to the "new" emurse project and realized that a complete I.A. overhaul was in order. Our focus then became the new look and feel, and it has really paid off in spades. Our conversions are up, we're all buzzing with excitement, and really, we just look much more like we ought to now. Sometimes it helps to stay flexible and responsive I guess ;)

We're focused on getting back to some of these shelved things now, though we've decided to break apart some of the components and bolt a few of the features on independently. This lets us easily test out the concept (much like we're doing with contact manager on network). It's a lot easier to get a solid idea of how something will play out once you can measure, tweak and change based on the responses. It's kind of like having a beta, but a bit more effective in that they are completely usable features on their own. (less about bug testing).

We'll probably contact our beta list about participating in a limited trial first though, so stay tuned. Also, drop me a line if you would like to be considered.

Recent Emurse Blog Posts:

• Phone Interview Tips
• New Resume Design
  

Make sure to check out, and get involved with, MyRegion.org.

Simply put, the projects goal is to figure out a plan for how to best grow the region. Our population is slated to double over the next 40 years, and it's important to decide now the things that are important to us. Green space, transportation, community structures, etc.

Over the next couple weeks, every night at 9pm there will be a program on WMFE-TV outlining the various choices that have been drawn up. If you can't watch/tivo it, make sure to poke around on their website. Invest 30 minutes of your time and make your thoughts known. Spread the word to anyone else in the area as well.

You can also follow along with the MyRegion at howshallwegrow.org (props to Josh Hallett)

Wow

June 30, 2005 I have an e-mail thread between Gavin and myself where we outline exactly what Emurse would become. The idea was that the job hunt, especially for younger folks, centers largely around the resume. They're a royal pain in the butt to create, hard to maintain and difficult to keep track of. We set out to create a ridiculously easy method for accomplishing these tasks. Our stated mission is to "Improve your job hunt," putting technology to work on the traditional aspects and not trying to replace them.

We launched initially just as a private thing between us and a few friends. Soon after we added an invite system, and eventually we opened it up to the public. The first time we publicly mentioned the project was June 22, 2006, right here on this blog.

On July 11th, a user/friend of ours sent a link to Brian over at SolutionWatch.com. From there, it was all she wrote. Lifehacker, Digg, Delicious, C|Net, USA Today, PostBubble and a host of others ran blog posts regarding our site and our user count soared. We went from hundreds of initial users, to tens of thousands over the next couple of days.

User Feedback

Overall, the feedback has been incredibly positive. We've had countless testimonials and compliments sent in via our feedback link. We've grown the feature set by listening and adapting our service to meet user suggestions. We've user tested just about every aspect of the site, and have scored extremely high marks. (Side note: people still miss the drop down menu on sections. If anyone has any suggestions here, we're most certainly open to it ;)

The web resume screen and the privacy centric details have almost entirely been user driven. We've kept many of the form elements on the resume open ended, despite many business pressures to standardize and validate. We're committed to maintaining a job seeker focus, and we've followed through on these suggestions. We aim to give our users 100% control of their resume.

Growth and Traffic

We have, for all practical purposes, never made a serious marketing push on our product. We've experimented with a few advertising channels with various degrees of success, but our growth largely centers around word of mouth and viral activity. Most of this, of course, was spurred by July's flurry of blogosphere coverage.

Here are some graphs...

Here's our raw traffic log graph (May 1st, 2006 to December 28th, 2006):



Orange represents first time visitors. Yellow represents total visits.

August is a bit skewed, as stats were dead for a decent portion of the month. The low-point for us traffic wise was actually late August, early September. It's safe to estimate that August traffic with a tad bit higher than September.

And Alexa (Internet Explorer users only, June 1st, 2006 to Dec 28th, 2006):



The big discrepancy in terms of the graph patterns is due to the inaccuracy of Alexa, which is furthered by the fact that the majority of our user base uses some variant of Netscape/Firefox/Safari (the long tail of the browser world ;). This traffic, sadly, doesn't get factored into Alexa. Sure is pretty though ;)

We're especially proud of our numbers in November and December, as these are traditionally slower traffic months due to the holidays, and we were swamped with other initiatives (not much Emurse activity during that period). Much of what offset us in December was the blog relaunch. We're planning one article a week related to our space. We've done two articles so far (negotiating and personal branding), and both have been picked up on various social news sites and other blogs.

Our SEO efforts have paid for themselves 10 times over as well. Search traffic has seen strong increases in the last few months.

Revenue

Without going into specifics, Emurse is paying it's own way and the bank account is growing. As of December 28th, this month has seen an increase of 29% above our average for total monthly user transactions. Bot filtering lowered our overall cost, and refinement in our very limited marketing campaign increased our ROI. Mix that with our increasing conversion rate, and we're left with a very positive outlook.

Not too shabby for a boot-strapped project that turned down both acquisition offers and repeated investment attempts in 2006. The future prospects for Emurse look bright.

Looking Ahead

We expect 2007 to be an even bigger year for our small company. There are a number of new features planned for the first quarter, including some long tested aspects of the site. We're finishing up a small beta test of something we're especially excited about (hint: it's on the share tab). We've written it, tested it, and rewritten it probably three times over completely based on user feedback. It's simple and to the point. No frills is actually a pretty tough thing to do ;)

There are also some completely off the wall, unexpected and unannounced features planned for 2007 as well. We'll be running a beta test for these, and if you'd like to join, simply drop us an e-mail at service@emurse.com.

One of the only criticisms we've seen repeatedly is the lack of spell check. With many of our users moving towards more advanced browsers that have spell check built in (FF2), this feature stalled in beta testing. I'm very happy to announce though that you will see spell check added in the next couple of days. You can also expect smaller feature releases, such as updated resume templates and hopefully a wide scale roll out of the hResume micro-format (premium templates already have it).

The first half of 2007 will be very active development wise, and we're very excited about the next couple of roll outs.

Thank you for supporting us.

Without the suggestions, criticisms or occasional pats on the back we would have undoubtedly gone insane. Our product is a user product, and we're extremely grateful for all the blessings that we've had this past year.

Can't wait to recap 2007 ;) And if you haven't already, Create an Emurse account!

Lots of people have been wanting to know how well Emurse has been doing. We've been doing quite a bit over in Blogsmith land preparing for the next round of growth, but that hasn't slowed the adoption rate over on our other project. Traffic (as counted by unique visits) from September to October grew 42%. All across the board Emurse experienced growth (revenue, signups, traffic, page views) -- despite the slow down in press coverage.

This increase is the result of word of mouth, google page rank updates, increasing the width of our funnel, and general (free) marketing approaches. Blog coverage has slowed down a tad, but still accounts for a sizable chunk. Our current (public) goals are to continue improving our SEO and to finish our next development cycle. We have a few surprises to announce along the way, but... stay tuned ;)

We've noticed the arrival of a few copy cat sites lately, and at least one posting on a popular outsource site seeking someone to create a product "at least as good as emurse." As a creative type, it's incredibly flattering. As an entrepreneur, it justifies our space. I can only imagine some of these folks keep tabs on my blog (as I tend to speak pretty openly, which I'm sure gives Gavin the willies).

So.. let me just put it out there like this -- We make our living producing the most powerful blogging platform on the face of the planet. For us, this is our passion project and what keeps us sane. It's a game of poker and we welcome you to the table. E-mail us and say hello, and be prepared when we up the ante. ;)