Aodhan Cullen got off to an early start. The top vote-getter in our annual contest to find Europe’s most promising young entrepreneurs started his first business, a résumé-typing service, when he was just 12 years old. Then, as a teenager, he began designing Web pages for paying clients, who often wanted to know how many people were visiting their sites.
Lightbulb moment. In 1999, at the age of 16, Cullen launched Dublin-based StatCounter, an online service that lets clients measure the number of hits they get on their Web sites, plus the geographical location of visitors, the pages people view, and the keywords they use to find a site.
That turned out to be a smart move for the young Irishman, now 24. Web analytics, a field which grew rapidly doing the dot-com boom and then fell out of favor, is “exploding again,” says Bill Gassman, a research director specializing in Web analytics at tech consultancy Gartner (IT). It’s already a $400 million market, and analysts expect it to more than double in size by next year. Big players in the field, such as Omniture (OMTR), in Orem, Utah, are growing at more than 50% year over year.
Latching onto such a hot growth market may have been what gave Cullen the edge among voters in our second annual contest to identify the most promising young entrepreneurs in Europe. Out of a field of 16 companies run by 19 Europeans age 25 or younger, StatCounter rose to the top. But not far behind were equally promising startups such as communications firm JT International of Sofia, Bulgaria, and software social-networking site Wakoopa of Amsterdam.These and other winners were likely helped by a strong show of support from friends and colleagues. But thanks to a new screening system, this year’s poll was free of the manipulation that dominated the contest in 2006 (later eliminated by filtering). And not being ranked in the top five takes nothing away from the promise and achievement of startups such as BytePlay, Moneytrackin, and Friend Media Technology Systems.
Still, Cullen’s company stood out for its strong growth. StatCounter currently has more than 1.5 million users and tracks more than 9 billion page views per month across its network of 2.2 million Web sites. Cullen won’t discuss revenues for the privately held company, but says he’s signing up 1,500 new members per day.
That helps explains why Alexa Internet Web Search (AMZN), which ranks sites by traffic, currently lists StatCounter as the 34th-most-visited site in the U.S., ahead of household names like Adobe (ADBE), Dell (DELL), and Wal-Mart (WMT), as well as Internet fixtures such as CNET Networks (CNET), Ask.com (IACI), and Expedia (EXPE). To keep up, Cullen has opened an office in Dublin’s Guinness Enterprise Center, hired six employees, and added 80 powerful servers.
StatCounter doesn’t really compete with Omniture or other players such as WebTrends that target multinationals and big corporations. Rather, it’s going after small and midsize firms that don’t need highly sophisticated analytical tools—and can’t afford to spend $10,000 and up to buy them.
Info taken from BusinessWeek.com
