Kyle
Don’t you just love it when a startup comes up with an idea and the name of the startup directly reflects that idea. Such is the case with Romanian startup MonitorBacklinks. Founder Razvan Girmacea has created MonitorBacklinks to make it easier for any publisher, webmaster, or blogger to monitor their backlinks.
Girmacea’s software checks all of a websites backlinks and then sends a notification when the status of a backlink changes, for example if it disappears, reappears or moves.
When vying for pagerank backlinks play a big part into the SEO of any website.
In the interview below Girmacea talks about MonitorBacklinks and how easy he has made it for the end user. He also sheds some light on the budding entrepreneurship and startup scene in Romania.
What is MonitorBacklinks?
Monitor Backlinks is a link monitor service that helps SEO developers and agencies keep track of the backlinks by automatically checking the backlinks statuses and alerting the user when they get removed or nofollow. We offer an easy to use and useful service for SEO freelancers giving affordable prices. The difference between us and the big players from the SEO Tools market is that we focus on a specific and very useful feature, which allow us to give low prices.
Video presentation: http://vimeo.com/45564237
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
My name is Razvan Girmacea ( http://girmacea.com ), founder of Monitor Backlinks (http://monitorbacklinks.com ). I am 30 years old, developer for 9 years now and this is my second start-up. My last start-up was an e-commerce website that I’ve build and sold after two years. I am very passionate about business and I am very good at web developing, so everything I do I do because I like it. I dedicate my free time to my family and to my start-up.
In my team there is also Daniel Damian, passionate and very good at creating and managing communities.
Where are you based?
Monitor Backlinks is based in Romania, but we target out product globally, because we think that anyone doing SEO will benefit from our product.
What’s the startup scene/culture like in Romania?
In Romania, entrepreneurship is just growing, but we have so many talented people and there are already some start-ups from Romania very well known internationally, like UberVU ( http://www.ubervu.com/ ), Brainient ( http://brainient.com/ ) and MavenHut ( http://www.mavenhut.com/ ).
There are investors, there are start-up hubs, there is enough information for a starting entrepreneur to start his journey.
What problem does MonitorBacklinks solve?
Many SEO’s need just the monitor backlinks feature from an SEO Tool, but they have to pay a lot for a sophisticated tool just to use this feature. So we are putting all our efforts to make this tool exactly what a lot of SEO freelancers and agencies need, at a very reasonable price.
We also focus on user experience on website, making even non-tech guys use this, like they use Notepad or Excel.
What’s your secret sauce?
For a start-up that is bootstrapped, you have to be very careful how use the resources and the team. We are very efficient and we optimize the costs and tasks management to be able to offer a very low price to the user.
Having 5 years experience of SEO, I understand the users very well and I know their needs. There was a need in the market for such a tool and that is what we’ve done fast and well.
What’s one dilemma you’ve encountered in the startup process?
It’s really hard to find the right channels to advertise, to reach the right people. After you’ve built your product, you are like “Now what? Where are the users?”, and it starts a continuous process of researching and investing until you find out what works for you.
You can read a lot about how many experts suggest investing in social media, blogging, basically free advertising, but when you have a product ready, you can’t wait 6 months to one year for the blogging and social media to start bringing customers, so you have to do more.
What’s one challenge you’ve overcome in the startup process?
Testing that the product you build is viable and will have a market, will have users actually pay for it is one of the most important step for a successful start-up. If you spend too much time and resources building a product that no-one will use or pay, you can find out too late that the start-up is actually a bad ideea and the losses can be significant.
We successfully tested our product, we already have premium users that gave great feedback even after month of usage.
What’s next for MonitorBacklinks?
We are going big now. We already have a viable product and it’s time to mass market it. In few months we hope that tens of thousands of users will test our tool and the ones that find it useful will become premium users.
We offer premium users, premium support, answering and implementing requested features really fast.
Linkage:
Check out the Monitorbacklinks blog here
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