Internet Start-Up GoProfit Offers Investors One-Stop Browsing
The weather is perfect, the beach is a stroll away, and the Chamber of Commerce is user-friendly.
Good reasons for a start-up Internet company to call Ventura home, says David Firestone, former president of the financial search engine GoProfit.com.
Firestone and five others started GoProfit last spring in an abandoned building off Main Street in Ventura. Eight months, much renovation and a high-speed Internet connection later, 22 people now hustle about the headquarters, getting set to launch a Spanish-language version of the company’s Web site.
A Japanese version will follow.
“We could not do what we did in either Santa Monica or Silicon Valley,” Firestone said of GoProfit’s rapid expansion. “Ventura is a throwback to what Silicon Valley was 10 years ago. There’s a low cost of living and the Chamber of Commerce wants to foster our growth.”
Firestone and his staff created a financial information directory based on the Inktomi (NASDAQ: INKT) database--the power behind popular search engines Yahoo! and Hotbot.
What separates GoProfit from other search engines, he said, is its focus on data aimed at investors.
“We have a very specific directory,” said Firestone, who is now consulting with the company. “If you go to Merrill Lynch or one of the other brokerage house’s sites, and, say you want to look up housing stats in Arizona, you’re going to have to leave their Web site because they won’t have that info.”
In contrast, he said, GoProfit offers one-stop browsing.
The site focuses on the U.S. capital markets and related information, but Firestone’s goal is to provide worldwide information, hence the Spanish and Japanese Web sites.
“Next we’ll be looking to do Mandarin for Hong Kong and China,” he said. “Then we’ll go over to Europe and focus on the U.K.”
GoProfit uses a computer code that allows different language sites to exchange information smoothly, he said. Advertising pays the bills, so the site is free to users.
When all seven proposed language sites are up and running, GoProfit will have 40 employees, Firestone said. He expects to turn a profit next spring.
