Recently we caught up with Clark Benson, Founder and CEO of a great startup called Ranker. During our interview, Clark Benson introduces us to Ranker while sharing advice abut fundrasing, applying to an accelerator program and creating a business plan. Ranker is a graduate of the LaunchPand LA accelerator program, and our first interview with a startup to go through the LaunchPad LA accelerator. A must read for all non-technical founders.
What is Ranker all about?
Ranker’s primary goal is to crowdsource answers to “what are the best” type questions – or any questions that are best answered in a ranked list. Although our traffic acquisition has strong similarities to “answers” sites (since we get a lot of traffic from search engines), Ranker doesn’t feel like an answers site. We are not a vertical-specific site – you can find anything from best movies of alltime to best board games to best gluten-free crackers on Ranker. There isn’t really anything quite like Ranker – you can find crowdsourced rankings when you do searches in the travel and local verticals, but outside of that, when you look for answers you will find plenty of lists out there, but they usually will be just one person’s opinion. We have a proprietary algorithm that combines votes on items with users lists to generate Ultimate Lists. Ranker is an openended platform, and a lot of our users make individual lists that reflect just their own opinion – but the aggregated rankings are our unique value proposition. Additionally, we have built a large and rapidly growing “taste graph” based on the voting on Ranker lists, and although at the present moment we are more focused on growing the graph than licensing it, we see massive potential as a unique consumer opinion data play – we’ve already got over 3 million “edges” in our graph – datapoints like “people who like the show Modern Family also like Heineken 400% more than other beers.”
To read the original article: Our interview with Clark Benson Founder & CEO of Ranker | How to Write a Business Plan
