I recently had a chance to talk to Tal Cohen, one of the founders of the people search engine Copenda. Tal was kind enough to not only give some insight into what Copenda is all about but also give us a backstage pass into what it’s like to be an entrepreneur in Web 2.o.

Copenda

Copenda is a revolutionary social people search engine that allows people to search for their soul mate or new friends in leading social networks and dating web sites. Our complex algorithms crawl semi-structured data from multiple social networks and online dating sites. Copenda uniquely integrates an innovative user interface with dating site features such as personality search and social network features such as ranking, comments and tagging.

Our first public beta, which is focused on dating, was launched on December 07 (currently available only in the US).

Why Copenda

More and more people are using the web to meet new people and communicate with their friends. The main places people use to meet new friends or look for dating are social networks and online dating sites.

One of the major problems in meeting new people in social networks is that users need to scan and dive deeply into the profiles to initiate a connection for relationships or dating. Although many users use social networks for dating purposes, the social network user experience is not suited for this purpose.

Online dating sites, on the other hand, are designed for this purpose but suffer from low status among the younger generation.

Currently, the only options to perform a cross-site profile search are limited to:

• Google (or similar search engine) regular text searches. Drawback: these are not suitable for people search, because users cannot filter the search results by gender, age, location, etc.
• Emerging white pages people searches. Drawback: the user must know the name or the email of the desired person in advance, which is not suitable for dating proposes or even when the user just wants to meet new friends with similar interests.
• Copenda address these problems by letting the users to perform a rich cross-site profile search, Copenda uses a unique algorithm to define relevance in search results based on activity, ranking and popularity.

A Few Lessons

Well, we’ve learned few lessons during the short period after launch:

No one is waiting for you (unless you are an apple product ) – No matter how we thought (and still think) our product is great and innovative, we didn’t get the media and the blogger community coverage as we thought we get. I really like Techcrunch , but there’s a great chance they will ignore you, Fortunately in our case Mashable published our press release and helped us to get important traffic.

For internet startup with limited funding it is almost impossible to hire professional PR and public relations companies so my recommendation to the new entrepreneurs is to map the leading relevant blogs and submit the PR to as many blogs as possible.

Another lesson is that you can never predict how users will use your site so be prepared. In our case we invested a lot of development efforts parsing keywords from the profiles and enable user filter the search results base on those keywords. For our surprise (Although it might be too early to jump into conclusions), only small percent of the users use this feature. On the other hand , the one on one section which was not in the original plan and was added just before the launch as a content filler in the homepage, gets a lot of page views. We are now planning to expose a variation of the one on one as a Facebook app.

Web 2.0 Roundup

I just wanted to thank Tal for taking to time to talk to us. If you are an entrepreneur with a story to tell, drop me a line.

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