Jodi Marchewitz can see the building in her mind — a modern, brick and glass, five-story structure. Her employees are eager to come to work because they know they’re on the forefront of change-the-Web technology.
“It would be super cool to be able to grow this into a really big company,” Marchewitz says, her voice animated by an idea that propels her to work 80-hour weeks, jaunting home to get her twins off the bus then working on her laptop while they’re at swim practice.
Her idea is iGuiders, a patent-pending decision technology that helps Web users quickly find the exact information they are looking for online.
If you’re like JumpStart venture partner Ted Frank, however, that idea doesn’t exactly grab you like a TMZ breaking-news update.
When Marchewitz applied for her first JumpStart grant, she was rejected. She refined her concept, applied again and was told to prove herself to Frank.
“He’s your biggest skeptic,” Marchewitz remembers hearing. “If you can win him over, you can win anyone over.”
“I constantly hear about cool things,” Frank says. “But at the end of the day, cool things don’t matter. What I care about is, ‘How do you make money?’ ”
At first, iGuiders seemed to fall in the cool category. But the more Marchewitz elaborated, the more Frank could see the profit potential.
Here’s how it works: A company buys a monthly subscription to iGuiders, costing between $100 and $1,000 depending on the package. Guiders are then incorporated into its Web site. At iGuiders’ core, it’s just “finding out what customers want,” Marchewitz says.
That happens with a series of questions. For example, if you’re looking to buy a new door on a home-improvement Web site, you would be asked what style of door you desire, how much you want to spend and several other questions that would lead to specific door suggestions.
The process is intended to reduce frustration, which would prevent people from leaving the site.
“Bounce rates are really high,” says Marchewitz about visitors who visit a site and view only one page before exiting. “Companies are really frustrated by that.”
iGuiders Works Like This...
- STEP 1: Clients subscribe to iGuiders, which costs between $100 and $1,000 depending on the package.
- STEP 2: Guiders are incorporated into the company’s Web site.
- STEP 3: Consumers who visit the site are asked a series of questions that help guide them through it. For example, at a site for a home improvement store, customers looking to buy a new door might be asked what style of door they desire, which might lead to a question about the door’s material and so on. iGuiders hopes the simple decisions lead to less consumer frustration and more frequent transactions.
Marchewitz sees opportunity in that frustration.
“It’s the next-generation search, which goes way beyond what Google already does,” says Phil Bessler, a former co-worker of Marchewitz’s at Rockwell Automation who is an associate professor at Baldwin-Wallace College and director of its Business Clinic. “There’s been a lot of belief in the entrepreneurial community that this could be a major development.”
Say, for example, Amazon subscribed to iGuiders. It has thousands of vendors, each of which would pay a subscription fee. Amazon would then get an undisclosed percentage of the profit. Equally important, customers could find what they want more quickly, resulting in more shopping cart conversions.
Although she can’t disclose the name of the company yet, Marchewitz says one of her most recent deals approaches that magnitude. The company has 3,000 vendors, which over five years could translate into $23 million in vendor revenue, of which the unnamed company would get a cut.
That is the heart of the strategy. “One of the best ways to make money is to help other people make money,” Frank says. “Jodi built something that can easily help lots of people in the market make money.” And that is what won over Frank.
Marchewitz says she expects iGuiders, which incorporated in February 2008, to break even at the beginning of 2011. In the meantime, JumpStart Ventures invested $275,000 in the company and is looking to raise more funds. Based in the Beachwood Business Development Center, iGuiders has eight employees.
Marchewitz, 39, exudes determination — a trait she attributes to her childhood. Her parents divorced when she was young, and although her mom was great and always there, she also was forced to work.
“I just had to figure out how to do stuff,” she says.
She grew up a bit of a techie, learning programming at a young age through a course at Beachwood High School, where she worked on a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer. But when it came time to choose a major at The Ohio State University, she intuited that, as a woman, a business degree with a focus on marketing would be a better fit for her than computers. It was the last time that kind of stereotype held her back.
Her postcollege track included stints at Eaton and Rockwell, an MBA earned at Cleveland State University and marriage. After that, she landed a job at Ingram Micro, got pregnant with twins and was put on bed rest. The babies were born seven weeks early. She didn’t leave the hospital for more than a month.
Her new family demands showed her that she needed a job with flexibility, so she started her own consulting firm. That’s when the idea that would lead to iGuiders occurred: “If I could help companies help themselves on the Internet, that would be pretty cool,” she says.
It’s that vision that drives her and leads her to think beyond even what success could mean for her personally. “How great would it be if we actually got kids to stay here in Cleveland,” she says. “I just think it would be super cool.”