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Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 7)

Sramana: You have identified a sweet spot of $10 million-plus e-commerce companies. How many of those are there in London?

Graham Cooke: In the UK, we think there are a couple of thousand of these businesses. The UK Internet market is around $80 billion. >>>

Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 6)

Sramana: Adobe definately did not have this path in their original plans. They are a bunch of technologies bolted together.

Graham Cooke: Omniture bought a lot of companies before Adobe bought them. Then Adobe added all of the other things. Their vision is definitely correct but the execution is difficult to do.

Sramana: When you went into the market you decided that your positioning would be to target ecommerce companies and focus on conversions. Did you also benchmark a particular size of company?

Graham Cooke: We target ecommerce businesses with online revenues exceeding 10 million dollars. We help those businesses grow 20% per year. The customers on the platform are able to build new solutions into their site for different user segments. That allows them to drive conversions for each of these segments. It may not be 100% of all users, but they are able to drive conversion uplift in their segments. >>>

Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 5)

Sramana: What were you doing with your technology? I understand that you collected and categorized customer feedback. Where you then making recommendations when they cam eback to the site?

Graham Cooke: It’s more than that. We wanted to learn, from the 4% of users who gave feedback, how to solve issues for all users on the website. >>>

Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 4)

Sramana: In the first few quarters of 2010, you released a minimum viable product by outsourcing to India and hiring some freelancers. Can you tell us a bit more about that process?

Graham Cooke: It is not easy to go that route. Luckily, Emre is a great coder, and he could build the architecture and complex parts of the product. I think it would be very difficult to build a technology business entirely through outsourcing. What Emre was able to do was break the problem down into different areas and let them do front-end Javascript and web development remotely. He would compile the entire project himself. >>>

Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 3)

Sramana: What was your first minimally viable product?

Graham Cooke: There were two things that we wanted to do. In 2010, web analytics was not getting feedback. When you are on a website, why do people do things? We wanted to understand why people did stuff. We wrote a very simple survey system to ask a user a question when they were about to leave a website: Why are you leaving the website without buying? >>>

Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 2)

Sramana: Did your work at Google lead you into starting Qubit?

Graham Cooke: My last three years at Google were spent working on a product designed to measure how advertisers on Google’s platform were investing their media budgets on different campaigns. If you were a company like Amazon and you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on many different products, how could Google talk to you about how you were performing at a granular product level. Google could come in and have a category conversation, showing them where they were doing well, where they could prioritize spend, and where they could have the most impact. >>>

Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 1)

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Graham Cooke is the CEO and co-founder of Qubit, a conversion optimization company. Prior to founding Qubit, Graham worked for Google, where he ended up as the global leader in charge of conversion rate optimization. Today he is focused on Qubit’s mission of helping businesses get close to their customers by discovering behavioral insights in visitor data and delivering personalized content to improve the online experience.

Sramana: Graham, let’s start with some of your personal background. Where are you from and where were you born? What circumstances lead up to your entrepreneurial journey?

Graham Cooke: I was born in New Jersey and I lived in the United States until I was seven years old. My father had the opportunity to move our family to London, and we ended up living there for two years. We all loved the UK and we ended up staying. I have had the benefit of having US roots while living in both the UK and the US. I essentially grew up in England. The British people make you feel like you are an American living in England. >>>

Successfully Navigating a Slow-Growth Healthcare IT Industry for 10 Years: Stan Nowak, CEO of Silverlink (Part 7)

Sramana: How are your investors navigating the length of the investment? Have they switched between funds?

Stan Nowak: I have been impressed with my investors. They are patient, and nobody is running for the exits. We see the best days for the company right in front of us. The consumer influx from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as well as the risk bearing provider shift as the hospitals assume new rules. These are both massive opportunity areas for Silverlink. >>>