opened its doors to the world outside college students, Sun knew he had some thinking to do. “I had to make the decision, do I stay and compete with Facebook, or do I go back to R&D and build something unique?” he said. “Some of my colleagues stayed in social networking and got crushed by Facebook. In hindsight, we made the right decision, but it put us back in R&D for another year and a half.”
Zoodango has nearly $1 million in funding from Seattle’s Alliance of Angels and other investors, including ex-Microsoft senior vice presidents and the founder of Classmates.com, Randy Conrads. The company will be profitable in 2009, Sun said, most of its revenue this year coming from licensing deals for its search engine technology. Sun wouldn’t say who is licensing the engine, but said that a lot of companies are interested and one deal is already closed. That revenue model seems crucial, as lots of local search sites have struggled in a tough advertising climate.
“The new offering from Zoodango appears to have a more unique and defensible value proposition than the run-of-the-mill Web 2.0 deal,” said Rebecca Lovell, program director at Alliance of Angels, in an e-mail to Xconomy. “From what I can tell, the Zoodango team has leveraged a strong foundation in technology and social networking, and has more clearly defined a niche within the location-based marketing space.”
Later this year, Zoodango will launch a premium coupon service, whereby users can pay to view good deals posted by other users, and an ad service through which local businesses can post their own coupons that will pop up if a user is searching in the businesses’ neighborhood. “I believe the next step will be using intelligent tools for all the data that’s out there,” Sun said. “There’s a lot of information, so how do you blend that and integrate it into an intelligent system that helps people make decisions?”
As for his stint on The Apprentice, Sun said it helped him realize the power of a small team. “Some of the projects we did on the show, a normal company would have put 30 to 40 people on them. But three minds did it very effectively.”
Zoodango currently has 11 employees, and Sun plans to expand to 15 or 16 by the end of the year. “A small company is way more agile,” he said. “In today’s down economy, agility is key.”