In 2012, we developed a beta version of a do-it-yourself responsive website publishing tool that I named MySiteAnywhere. Much of what we’d been doing at Gumiyo was an adaptive approach to mobile. In other words, we dynamically generating separate web pages for mobile devices rather than creating pages that responded to the device using CSS—responsive web design. We also could see that this was the future of the Web, and time has proven us correct.
Shuki had this core idea to enable the mass production of responsive websites by leveraging the hundreds of thousands of records in our database for car dealers, real state agents, and small businesses. While we saw great potential to sell this capability directly to SMB customers, we also knew that various other online classifieds providers and publishers could privately label a tool like this to expand the breadth of their online products. However, we needed capital to really get this going.
Shuki and our CFO, John Hoang, hit the road to see about raising money. I split my time marketing MySiteAnywhere and designing the next version of the interface and user-experience. Before I could get it completed, however, Shuki and John had transformed a couple of strategic corporate investors into potential Gumiyo acquirers. It is noteworthy that by early 2013 Gumiyo had been in business for over 6 years. While we were excited to see where we could take MySiteAnywhere, we also knew that we were going to have to trade a lot of equity and potential dilution to generate success in a very competitive marketplace. Not only that, we were tired, stressed and our existing investors were anxious to see a return on their investment. So in the Spring of 2013 we successfully sold the company.
