The short answer is yes (at least for now). After changing strategies from Riya.com to Like.com, this is the $64 million dollar question.
The data is promising.
While the Alexa graph shows a flat growth, this is misleading.
When you look at our revenue growth you see this (I have removed the scale for competitive reasons).
I can't tell you how happy we all are. You can see that after the inevitable drop off after the first week of launch our sales quickly recovered and moved to set a new high. As a comparison point, even after 8 months our Riya.com service has never reached it's launch day high.
Why the difference between Alexa and our internal revenue?
It seems that many of our early customers were technologists who were trying see how cool our technology was ... not to shop using our site. In fact this was one of the largest lessons we learned about traffic from the Like.com launch. For a new shopping search engine, tech blogosphere traffic doesn't always convert. As more shoppers have found our site all of our key metrics such as conversion rate and click through rate have improved significantly.
I wouldn't declare victory yet... we still have some major milestones to meet in January, but it does seem that our 2nd company strategy is faring much better than our first.
Now what? Well now we are making revenue... which is great... but also now we have to play by the rules of a real business...profitability.
Well we need to grow the revenue to meet our cost structure so we break even. Eventhough Riya has several years of cash left in the bank, as 2nd time entrepreneurs we know the key now is to lower you cost structure and grow your revenue so break even comes as fast as possible.
Some people in Web 2.0 land don't agree with this... but I am not one of them... So we trim around the edges and make sure we are spending every dollar as efficiently as possible.
However, our main focus now is on growing revenue significantly. We are off to a good start, but profitability is still a ways away.
