(Jan 2007 – Dec 2007) Adclick begins
On January 2007 me a three other persons created the start-up Adclick lda. How idea was to implement a price comparison website for the Portuguese retail market.
Price comparison websites where booming in other countries like US , UK and Germany and in Portugal there was still no players. The time seemed right as online retail stores were being created daily and the stores would have the need a ground to compete with the established big retailers.
Our original focus was the Electronics and Computers market. The reasons was the amount of stores that already existed online that would cause stores to pay for customer, the fact that this were standard products which would reduce the technological effort into mapping the products from the stores and the fact that these goods were typically the ones that the consumer would buy online.
The first stage was to analyze existing shop comparison engines in different country and design the core comparison engine.
The sourcing of the data for the comparison was through web-parsers that would retrieve the product information from the stores websites and store it on and defined format. The web-parser technology we used had been previously developed by me for a previous project and offered reliable results. The second phase of the project was the design of the back-office platform that would manage the web-parsers and then work on the data to serve the comparison engine.
My role in the project was deeply involved on the design as the development was made by another member of the team.
The comparison engine was set to productive on October 2007 and by the end of the year the results were bad. We where not been able to either generate traffic to the site and also we were not able to convince the stores to spend money on us.
