Naymz Interview: Tom Drugan on Identity Management and His Roots in Orbitz SEM
I recently interviewed Tom Drugan of Naymz, a paid search identity management start up.
For $5 a month (first month free, you can also buy a discounted yearly subscription for $47.50.) Naymz delivers its users an ad for searches on their names, a customized ad on MSN, Google and Yahoo, and a customized landing page.
Full disclosure: I got the Naymz hook up. See Garrett French.
The full interview (link at bottom) is 3,068 words long, which would take about 12 minutes or so to read. Drugan spoke at length about the startup process and how the 5 person team formed from the talent base at Orbitz, so it’s well worth reading if you’re a budding web entrepreneur.
Here are my key takeaway quotes from the Drugan interview:
* Google and Yahoo work closely with Orbitz to help push the envelope in regards to search engine advertising. Orbitz was doing some really cool, cutting edge stuff. Google and Yahoo would also look to Orbitz to test out a lot of efforts.
This allowed us to get a good grasp of how to run large scale PPC campaigns and what the current limits are with the various ad platforms (Adwords, Yahoo Search, AdCenter, etc).
* The original product plan was called “Gunked.com” which was a mash-up of “Google” and “Punked” ala Ashton Kutcher.
* The majority of early adopters have been industry folk such as web developers, designers, search engine marketers, and your typical Slashdot reader. This has been great, but we hope to attract the general masses as we see Naymz as a potential tool for just about anybody as one’s online identity continues to become increasingly important.
* What’s been amazing to us is the amount of international sign-ups we have had. Currently our non-US accounts outnumber our domestic. We got some decent blog coverage in Spain, Denmark, Germany and Japan which has led to a good number profile creations from those Countries.
* Our platform could also possibly be repurposed for small business names (i.e. Joe’s Pizzeria) and we can add local targeting to our product suite. However, before we do that, we have 6.5 billion people on this planet we would like to sign up for individual Naymz profiles first.
* We want to become the table of contents for your story. We want to be the binding that holds it all together. We also want to help people who are interested in you to be able to find your life story.
We are also looking at some different ways to build a community around Naymz that will be released by the end of the year.
If you’d like to dig a little deeper into the Naymz story check out Naymz Interview: the Online Dating/Orbitz Roots of a Paid Search Identity Management Start-up.
