“Our market is really any website that wants to have more user engagement and know more about those users.”

Interview by Mike Sullivan

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Mike:
Hey, everyone. I’m Mike Sullivan. This is MO.com, where we feature small business owners and entrepreneurs bringing you hints, tips, insights, and perspectives on what it takes to be successful.

Joining me today is Larry Drebes of Janrain. Janrain is a company that provides it service to over 300,000 websites, and you may have used the service yourself. If you have gone to a website and have logged in using your Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google account, you may have been using a Janrain service.

Larry, thanks for joining me today. Can you just start telling us a little bit about Janrain? Give us some background.

Larry:
Sure. We’re a startup in Portland, Oregon. We have a suite of SaaS products that provide user management functionality to websites, everything from authentication – so onboarding account, the user might already have a Facebook or Google or Yahoo – to actually storing the profiles and acting as a user database for the website. We do have a great distribution network. We do have free offerings. We do have more enterprise offerings that have more features and more support.

Mike:
Larry, can you tell me a little bit more about the social login profile product?

Larry:
Yes. Our engage product is really where authentication happens in social login or third-party login it’s called a lot. We actually make onboarding of that functionality very, very simple. So instead of learning all of those APIs and staying up with all the technology and trying to figure out the security and how the profile data happens, our product allows you to do just very quick integration. We do act as a pipe. The data flows through us. We do not store copy. We make it very simple for the customer to consume that data, so we pull it all apart, put it back together. Whether you come in from a Twitter account or a Facebook account or a Yahoo account, it all looks the same to the website.

Mike:
So I imagine as a user, part of the draw would be I don’t have to fill out a new user registration form for every site I go to. Have you seen improvements or is there any metrics in conversion rates of people logging in using existing accounts versus setting up a new profile?

Larry:
That is a big part of our sales story. Our market is really any website that wants to have more user engagement and know more about those users. So, logging in through an account rather than creating a new account greatly increases your conversion rate. It definitely varies website to website. A lot of that is UI treatment. A lot of it is what you get when you log in and how it’s presented. We do pride ourselves in being able to show lift in conversion and definitely repeat visits. We’ve all been to websites where we know we have an account but we cannot remember the password. It’s a point there where drop off can happen, and we want to make it simple. You just hit the Google button, you just hit the Yahoo button, and boom you’re back in.

Mike:
Larry, you pioneered the development of Rocket Mail, which later became Yahoo Mail. Can you tell me about that acquisition?

Larry:
Sure. That was a while ago and we had a great team. The company name was Four 11. We had a suite of products. It turned out the Rocket Mail product was where the value ended up being. We were in the Bay Area. We knew Jerry and Dave. We were running the people search for Yahoo, so we already had an established connection there. When it came time to look at Yahoo, did it make sense to go with Yahoo? It was a very simple conversation. I guess simple is the wrong word, but they were just down the street. Culturally they were very similar to us. We were much smaller and they were ahead of us in scale. So it turned out to be a great combination I think. I think it was good for the product. I think it was great for the employees and it was great for the investors. Yahoo Mail is a big piece of Yahoo right now.

Mike:
What is your advice to small businesses out there that are trying to keep up with the rapidly changing technology and Internet landscape?

Larry:
I think in small business or enterprise stitching together a website now is easier using vendors who specialize in niche core technologies. Every website should concentrate more on their unique content or functionality, and the pieces that can be better served by someone faster and cheaper than you could do yourself, there are lots of services out there. That’s a market we play into. It’s a market we use. We outsource our email, our DNS, our CDN network, and certainly we have the engineering capability to do it ourselves, but there are vendors out there who do it much better for much cheaper. So I think that is a trend. I don’t think that takes any advice from me, and I think it’s a trend that’s going to last years and years.

Mike:
Thanks, Larry. Nice talking to you.

Larry:
Thanks a lot, Mike.