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the
Trellian founders, brothers Ren and David Warmuz,
successfully navigate the choppy waters that took so
many others down?
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The
Warmuz brothers, Ren & David,
were a great team from the start.
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Some of that ability to
adapt and prosper could stem from the fact that drastic
change is something the Warmuz brothers learned to
deal with when they were kids. David took us back to
where their story began. "I was born in the Czech
Republic back when it was called Czechoslovakia,
in a town called Ostrava. At the
age of 9, I vividly remember escaping with my
family across the border and living in a garage for a
few months until we were granted refugee status and
allowed to emigrate to Australia."
"My
parents were very courageous individuals. They
left a very good life in Czechoslovakia and sacrificed
everything to move to Australia in order to ensure
a better life for their kids. When we came to
Australia, all we
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had was a set of
summer clothes, so
the initial years were difficult. But my parents
were extremely hard working individuals and did a
great job providing for their family. Ren and I
learned a lot from them about working hard to overcome
challenges," David said. |
"Before
high school even started, Ren had developed a passion
for computer programming and gaming. He
went on to get a college degree in Computer Science
and became amazingly skilled at coming up with
innovative ideas and then writing the code needed to
bring those ideas to life," David recalled.
"For me, my passion was always for numbers,
math, and accounting. I remember at the age
of 16 working for a stock brokering firm. It was
just an awesome experience seeing so much money being
traded. It left a lasting impression and a strong
desire to get into business at this level. So I went
on to get a Bachelor’s degree in 1993 in Business
Accounting, Management, Marketing and Law."
Though
he had his degree in hand David experienced a problem
that still vexes many college graduates today. "I
spent a few months traveling through Europe and then
returned to Melbourne to face the reality of finding
a job. I must confess that I was a bit
disappointed at how difficult it was to find a job
worthy of my college business degree. To earn my
keep while looking for that worthy job, I had to work
as a construction laborer for my dad. Working as a
laborer and experiencing the challenge of finding a
good job in business taught me a valuable lesson.
You need to start somewhere – you start at the
bottom and you work your way up. And
regardless of what you do, you have to work hard
if you want to get somewhere," David added.
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"I
ended up working for a telecommunications company for
a few years before starting Trellian. It
gave me a feel for what a corporate business
environment was like. I learned a lot there, |
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especially about management styles and how red tape
stops progress. I was like a sponge absorbing
what everyone did and how. This experience
definitely helped when Ren and I started hiring
employees and shaping Trellian’s culture, values and
business processes." |
"Trellian
was established in 1997 and I’m proud to say
that we are celebrating our 20 year
anniversary this year! The company was
based on an idea Ren had to help him find
files on the internet. He was trying to
find a
specific file and every time he went somewhere
to get it, he discovered it was either moved
or deleted. So he wrote a meta-search
application that helped him find the
exact, current location of the files he was
looking for," David recalled.
"When
Ren realized this application could be helpful to
others, he packaged it, created a website, and within
the first day had a sale. That program became
known as Search Wolf. It had a great
slogan: “Don’t search the net, hunt it.”
"Ren
soon started developing a whole range of
different search applications to include in Search
Wolf, from image search, music search to MP3 search.
Search Wolf was a great product. So we
were anxious to broaden awareness and sales. But
back in those early days before Google, if you
wanted to broaden awareness for your website, you had
to manually submit your URL to thousands of small
search engines around the world. This could take
months.
So Ren wrote a program that automated this
process, completing submissions to all those
search engines in a matter of minutes. It was
brilliant!" David declared.
"Once again, we quickly realized that a
tool developed for our own purposes had
commercial potential. So we named it Submit
Wolf, got it packaged, and then released
it for sale on our website alongside Search
Wolf.
Submit Wolf was a huge success.
Within weeks we had to hire someone to handle
technical support and another person just to
manually process credit card transactions."
Ren
and David Warmuz introduce trade show attendees to
the Submit Wolf
search engine submission software that was one of Trellian's
biggest hits.
"I’ve
lost count as to how many industry awards
Submit Wolf received over the years.
Probably a couple of hundred. At that
time, it was groundbreaking new technology
that helped millions of businesses worldwide
promote their websites via search engines in
multiple languages. We had organizations of
all sizes using it, from startups to
universities to government agencies to
Fortune 500 corporations such as Microsoft
and Sony," David said.
"Now
here is something interesting that soon started
happening. Thanks to so many websites being
added to all the search engines, website owners soon
realized that they needed to start competing
for page one ranking for their keywords in order to
improve the chances of getting found and getting
clicks.
We spotted this trend early on and developed our
SEO Toolkit software to meet the growing need
to be at the top of the search results page. It
was another big success for us. In fact, over
the years many SEO company founders have approached me
with stories about how they were able to build multi-million
dollar businesses using our SEO Toolkit.
It is always rewarding to hear those stories.
"
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"Keyword
Discovery was a natural extension of our
SEO product line. It also represented an
important shift for us from developing boxed
software products to developing web-based
applications. You can think of Keyword
Discovery as basically a huge database of
search term statistics gathered from over
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search engines
worldwide. It includes search term
frequency, PPC bid values, seasonality
factors, misspellings, destination URLs based
on user clicks, and lots of specialized tools.
It is designed around knowing what your
potential customers are searching for and
making sure you have those keywords integrated
into your website content for SEO purposes and
into your paid search campaigns for improved
results," David explained, adding, "Domain
investors have also used Keyword Discovery
to help them make decisions on which
keyword-based domains to register, renew and
drop-catch.
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At the
same time the Warmuz Brothers were developing and
selling their groundbreaking software and tools, they
were also buying domain names of their
own. "We started acquiring domains when we
first launched Trellian back in 1997," David
noted. "Over the next several years, as our
portfolio became rather large, we noticed how
difficult it was becoming to find the best parking
service for each domain. It took a lot of
work to continuously be changing DNS and comparing
reports in order to keep up with which parking service
was currently the best at monetizing international
traffic, which was the best with US traffic, which was
the best with US traffic in a specific vertical such
as finance, and so on."
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"It was a
complex and time-consuming exercise. So
we created a program that automated the
whole process. It used algorithms to
test each domain’s traffic with the
different parking companies, analyzed the
results, and distributed each domain’s
traffic to the current payout winner.
For our own portfolio, we had a good 50%
increase in revenue, which was a huge
boost."
"Then at a
tradeshow in early 2008, we showed this
program to some domainer friends. They
loved it and convinced us to convert it into
an online platform for everyone to use free of
charge. This is how Above.com
got started. Since its launch in
2008, Above has optimized the payouts on over
20 million domains, generating over
$500 million in revenue. We are proud of
the fact that so many domainers have trusted
Above over the years to find the highest
paying monetization channel for each of their
domains. We now call this original core
technology our AutoPilot
platform."
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The
year after Above.com was launched Trellian's
Ren Warmuz and Nancy Bianchi at a public
exhibit for the platform at the 2009
T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Conference in New York City
where Above.com won the "Best New
Monetization Service" Award. |
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"Many people
don’t realize that when we launched
Above.com in 2008, it included our own direct
advertiser channel called Maximizer.
From the beginning, Maximizer has
delivered premium payouts by working
exclusively with premium advertisers from
company owned Trellian Direct Search
Network,” David said. “Within the
advertising industry, Trellian’s long-term
reputation for quality domain traffic has
generated strong demand that continues to grow
and it is this demand that helps Maximizer
produce unmatched payouts for domainers.”
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Beyond
the services they created and building their own
domain portfolio Trellian found yet another way to
fuel continued growth. "Over the years we have
made some acquisitions that fit nicely with existing
businesses or goals," David said. "For
example, we acquired Girl.com.au
and Femail.com.au
because they were two of the largest online Australian
women’s magazines with a lot of quality traffic
that had great upside revenue-generating
potential."
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"We also
acquired some SEO related niche sites,
including AddMe.com
and URLTrends.com.
In the domain investing space, we acquired DomainState.com,
a leading news and forum site that provides
helpful user generated content, free tools,
and domain industry related data. And recently
we acquired three new Australian registrars
plus Australian drop-catching services Drop.com.au,
Fabulous.com.au,
and DomainShield.com.au.
These acquisitions are in line with our plans
to expand Above’s Registrar into offering
.com.au registrations and boosting its
drop-catching capabilities into other TLDs and
ccTLDs," David said. |
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David
& Ren ready to hit the slopes. |
David
only wishes Ren was still here to share his
excitement about these new acquisitions. "I
have so many fond memories of time spent with
Ren," David said. "I remember doing a fair
bit of skiing together from an early age. We
both loved the snow. I also remember Ren
introducing me to Dungeons and Dragons
type books. The first book was called Magician
and since reading that book I’ve been hooked on the
genre ever since. Over the years we went through
hundreds and hundreds of those books, which not
surprisingly lead us into online gaming.
We were both big gamers growing up. But since
there was only one computer in the house as
kids, we had to take turns. I remember so many
times looking over Ren’s shoulder while he was
playing a game like World of Warcraft and
commenting on his game play. I suppose I was a back-seat-driver,"
David smiled, "but it was all in good fun.
And he would do the same to me. It’s always
good to reminisce."
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"Our
business partnership worked extremely well because we
had very different talents. We were two sides
of the same coin.
Ren was a creative and programming genius who was at
his best when focused on ideas and product
development. Whereas I was the business
operations, sales, accounting and management side of
the coin. Together, our different talents helped us
accomplish a lot. We were an amazing team.
"
Trellian
Founder & CEO Ren Warmuz
speaking at the 2007 T.R.A.F.F.I.C Conference in New
York City.
"The
two years following his passing were quite difficult
for me," David continued. "It helped to have great people and great
support around me, especially my wife and family. It also helped to have some great staff who stepped up
and took on new challenges and responsibilities in
order to keep the business moving forward. Ren and I
treated our team like family. I think this made
a big difference when it came time for people to make
the sacrifices needed to help out," David said.
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(L
to R): Ren Warmuz, Trellian EVP Nancy
Bianchi and
David Warmuz at the 2012
T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference in
Fort Lauderdale. (Photo courtesy of Barbara
Neu) |
Since Ren's
passing in 2013 the Trellian/Above team has
continued to roll out new services and make
strategic acquisitions at a furious pace. Some
of those have built on Above.com's
original core component (finding
the highest paying monetization channel for
each domain visitor, now known as AutoPilot) to
create an innovative suite of services
assembled in a single dashboard known as Portfolio
Manager.
"Over
the years, we added three additional core components
so that domain investors would have instant access to
all the data, technology and services needed to make
decisions and manage every phase of domain investing,"
David said. "Think of it as a complete domain
portfolio management solution. Buying,
selling, monetizing, registering and renewing.
All driven by Above’s core strengths in
technology and data analytics. The three core components added over time
included a Registrar, Marketplace, and recently, a
Domain Brokerage service."
David added,
"An example of a great new feature in
Portfolio Manager is its Consolidator Tool.
It takes all the work out of tracking expiry
dates by fetching and displaying expiry date,
DNS setting, and registrar
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name for every
domain in your portfolio from across all
your registrars. It lets you quickly and
easily make performance based renewal
decisions."
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"For
most domain investors today, selling domains
is the most important source of revenue so Above.com
has given that platform component a great deal of
thought and attention," David noted.
"Our Marketplace offers an industry low
commission rate and free escrow. Not to
mention some unique features to facilitate domain
buying and selling. With even more great features
soon to be released, all designed to help domain
owners sell their domains. Our Brokerage service is
also becoming very popular, with millions of dollars
in transactions completed. If you need help selling
your domains we can definitely offer a unique
solution."
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They
obviously have a lot going on already but if
the Trellian team has learned one thing it is that you don't grow and survive standing
still. While they keep a close eye on
advancing their current operations, they keep another on
future opportunities. "With respect to something
completely new, we are planning to develop
a few of our premium generic domain names
into actual online business units," David
said. "I can’t tell you which domains
yet. But stay tuned for details!"
Given
all of this and David's penchant for hard
work, you might think that "free
time" is non existent but he somehow
finds it here and there. "I wish there
was a little bit more of the free time,"
David admits, "but when it's there, I
love to spend that with the family.
The kids are very active in very different
sports, so being a part of that and attending
all of their sporting activities, I enjoy
doing that.
I also enjoy reading various books and having
fun with a bit of gaming, if there is time.
Helping out at local sport and charity clubs
is also an enjoyable pastime for me. In
fact, on Thursday nights I help the local
lifesaving club by working behind the bar.
So if you’re in the area, come down for a
drink on me," David closed with a
smile. |
David
Warmuz
Trellian/Above.com CEO |
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