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BetterBid.com LLC

Company Name: BetterBid.com LLC – www.betterbid.com

Mission: Making paid search advertising manageable.

Started: June, 2009

Where: Palo Alto, CA

Contact Info: david@betterbid.com

Employees: 1 founder, and a few interns

Founder’s Past:

David Hewlett
David Graduated from University of Southern California in 2003 with a degree in psychology and the entrepreneurial bug.  In 2004, he and his good friend Micah Winkelspecht started up a poker chip company which sold high end chip sets on E-bay.  Through the process they learned about the difficult process of startup e-commerce websites finding a place to source their products and the capital intensive issue of having enough capital for inventory.  So, as margins started to decrease on E-bay, the company moved into a re-seller of wholesale chips to other companies selling online where the advantage was that we could dropship to end customers, removing the need for inventory.  They decided that if they could do this for poker chips, they could do it for any product.  So, Micah & David went out and raised 2 round of financing totaling $380,000 which they used to build a product that provided over 1 million dropship products to small internet retailers at wholesale prices.  Unfortunately, development of the technology took much longer than expected, integration with suppliers was difficult and they were burning too much cash to survive.  So, although a great idea, the product hit the ground.

After this David went to work for PriceGrabber where he started out helping merchants advertise on the website by using conversion optimization efforts.  He then was promoted to the paid search marketing department where he got as high as Search Engine Marketing Manager, Americas, managing millions of keywords in the US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil.

David left PriceGrabber to come to Babson’s prestigious MBA program in 2008 which is where he came up with the idea for BetterBid.

How The Idea Began: David was at Babson when he decided to start the BetterBid company.  He had gone through a process where he weeded out other ideas like a virtual 3D model of oneself which could be used to try on clothes and play around on facebook to an online dating website which brought together many forms of dating under 1 roof.  At the end, BetterBid was chosen because it solved a real urgent problem that small businesses had and David’s experience in the field would mean he would not need to hire on other employees which might use up the capital already invested.

Most of the paid search management available to small businesses today is very complicated and typically prohibitively expensive.  BetterBid offers a very simple and affordable bid management solution for your pay per click marketing campaigns.  We provide pay per click recommendations to our customers so they can remain competitive in the paid search market and so they can spend more time on their business, not their keywords.

Favorite Thing about the Business: Analytics.  At BetterBid we dive deep into the numbers to make sure we are providing the best bid recommendations possible.  Number crunching and performance analysis is fun for us.

Worst Thing About The Business: In the world of more expensive options than ours for bid management, we have trouble getting found in a cost effective manner.

Lesson Learned: What you think your customers want is often quite different from their needs.  We reach out to stay in touch and try to adjust our product to meet the needs of our customers.