Geni.com: A really expensive piece of gum
Written by TJ Mahony (contact - e-mail) -- April 16th, 2007 | Recommend ThisSeveral weeks ago a new “social network for the family” called Geni, made the headlines with a big time valuation of $100M. Pundits are going back and forth on whether Geni’s valuation is reasonable or gonzo.
I could not help but investigate so I jumped into Geni and began playing around.
I found Geni to be like a piece of gum. It tasted great at first, but quickly wore off. I successfully got about 50% of my immediate family to join Geni. Working together we quickly built out our family tree, but now what?
Are we supposed to network with each other? They are my family – the market segment I least need to network with. I don’t get it and my family doesn’t either. We used Geni for about a month and I haven’t seen any activity on it since.
Despite my efforts to engage my whole family on Geni, the network isn’t growing that fast. Compete only saw 42K US visitors in March, which translates the recent investment to about $2,380/vistor.
However, people are spending quite a bit of time on the site. Although time/visitor has trended down from January, people are still spending over 20 minutes per month on the site.
So, why is this piece of gum worth $100M?
- It really is an engaging site for the first few visits and the viral nature of the offering successfully converted half of my family. From a marketing perspective Geni is brilliant – loyalty is the real challenge.
- Geni has the potential to be a viable social commerce platform. If Geni can connect and communicate with an entire family, Geni can position itself as the one-stop resource to manage family affairs.
• Holiday Gift Lists? Check Geni
• Family Reunion Planning? Check Geni
• New Kid – Wanna see the pics? Check Geni
• Birthdays? Check Geni
• Blood Type Matches? Check Geni
If I was the CMO at Geni I would establish the following tag line: “Geni, putting the function back in to dysfunctional families”. My Mom would love it!
Did you like that post? You'll love these.
Done reading? subscribe: To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email enter your email address in the box in the right column.
Link to This Post:
Posted under: Social Web |
Trackback Link | Permalink | 
Get the 
April 17th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
compete.com and the articles here in the blog are a great resource i work in e-commerce and i use this compete at lot of check the ranking of site as well as other information on them.
thanks
asim
my blog: http://www.unlockedcellphone.blogspot.com
April 17th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
Thanx
April 18th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Thanks for the mention on your blog. Our team has been busy building new features that will be rolled out during the coming months–features that have been requested by our users through emails to us or on either our blog or our forums.
BTW we did just roll out birthday reminders. Today we received a message on our forum about a baby that was added to a Geni family tree within 1.5 hours of her birth along with a photo to announce her birth–that same family is planning a niece/nephew day because of the Geni-activities.
The Geni Team
April 24th, 2007 at 9:28 am
ROTFLOL :D
100 MM$US…. they will probably even be sold for that cash if BULL like this continues to circulate… i am more sure they will SPEND 100MM$US to earn that 100MM$US… anyone buying that crap (mind me i haven’t saw the website nor ever will… :D)
you guys at Geni first have to MAKE MONEY to be barging that your worth 100MM…