Trulia Goes After Zillow’s Real Estate, Files $75M IPO; Now Has 22M Monthly Users
Trulia, the online real estate listings giant, has now publicly filed an IPO of up to $75 million — effectively confirming reports from the end of July that the company had already filed for an IPO privately. The company’s S-1 also provides an update on the state of the business, showing some encouraging signs of user growth.
It says that as of June 30, 2012, it has 22 million monthly unique visitors, up from 5 million in June 2009; and paid subscribers — its primary source of revenue, in addition to online ads — have also grown massively. They’re now at 21,544 versus 2,398 two years ago. Revenues in the last six months appear to be growing compared to last year: $29 million today versus $16 million for the period a year ago ($38.5 million for all of 2011). Meanwhile, net losses are also growing: they’re now at $7.6 million ($6.2 million last year).
Kayak For Textbooks: How BIGWORDS Raised $80M, Went Bankrupt, Then Got Profitable Again
In 1998, seeing an underserved niche in the textbook market, Jeff Sherwood and his three co-founders launched BIGWORDS. By the beginning of 2000, they had grown from a team of four to a team of 250, had a warehouse in Kentucky, raised close to $80 million in outside funding, made a few commercials featuring Tom Green and even had a $100 million acquisition offer from a young Amazon. Although it stings a little in retrospect, Sherwood tells us that the board shot the offer down because it believed BigWords could be a billion-dollar company.
Not to be. The bubble burst, and less than a year later, the company was bankrupt and was forced to close shop — a familiar tale for those who went through the dotcom crash. And like so many others, the BIGWORDS team dispersed after the company closed shop and was left to pick up the pieces and
SoRewarding Rebrands, Gets Half-Bought, Launches Deals & Events Platform That Lets You Give Back
The daily deal model has seen better days, with the market shrinking and consolidating, and the market leader’s share price in the can. But one startup hopes that it differentiate its deal platform from the rest by offering consumers and merchants a deeper package that includes consumer-driven deals (CDDs), events and ticketing, while allowing people to give back to their favorite charities and non-profits.
The consumer-driven (or reverse) deal has been tried before without mind-blowing success, but SoRewarding thinks its holistic approach will have appeal to local businesses. We first covered the company last year, when it was just getting started under the name SoBiz10. Today, the company is officially announcing that it has relaunched as SoRewarding, sold 51 percent of its business to CardFree and is launching an events feature that brings a little Eventbrite to its suped-up reverse Groupon model.
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