5 Minutes with Jon Thralow: Internet Entrepreneur

Despite the turbulence of the economy these past dozen years, Jon Thralow has had a remarkable run of good fortune. In 1996 Thralow’s older brother Dan, founder of a Midwest sunglasses business called Peepers, took his first baby steps in eCommerce. In less than three years, with the company listed as one of the fastest growing Internet retailers in the country, they sold out to a New York City firm at the height of the tech bubble. When the bubble burst, the Thralows were able to re-obtain the domain names they’d sold… for a song.

The lessons learned only made them hardier. Instead of developing a mall that batched all their product lines under one domain, the Thralows embraced a specialized market niche concept, recognizing the power of defined domain names. Before long the new company, Thralow Inc., was rolling out niche eCommerce businesses with remarkable effectiveness so that they were once more catching the attention of major magazines like Inc. and Internet Retailer. At the end of 2006 Thralow Inc. sold its 30-plus domains and eCommerce sites to Netshops of Omaha, Nebraska.

Though not the founder of these ventures, Jon has played an integral role in their success. His specialized knowledge in Internet marketing has given him keen insights in how to take advantage of the efficiencies and opportunities offered by today’s cyber-arena.

ennyman: When did you join your brother’s first company and what role did you initially play?
Jon T: I joined Peepers in 1997 as an Intern. My job was to add products to the site and find ways to get us listed on the search engines. At the time Alta Vista, Web Crawler, and Excite had a lot of market share. I also taught myself two tools - Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Front page.

ennyman: What lessons did you learn from the collapse of the Internet bubble that might have value in today’s challenged economy?
Jon T: I went through a year of depression. Everything that I had worked to build was being destroyed before my eyes. I had a hard time sleeping at night. I went from having a million dollars in the stock of Eyecity to having the company become de-listed. Extreme high to extreme low. Looking back on it, I learned that if you keep plugging away things will work out, just never give up. I could not have seen the huge turnaround that was about to come, but if you focus on the core business rules and keep pounding away on it eventually you’ll gain traction which will give you something to build on.

ennyman: You mentioned that you have taken an interest in a company called Mozenda in Salt Lake City. What is it that so captivated you there?
Jon T: Over the years I’ve found that gold lives in the data and the trick has always been learning how to mine the data. In the early days the log files were mined to give a picture of our website's performance. Then I found that by mining our customer database and writing scripts around that you can market to people with the exact products they were interested in. Gathering and manipulating data became one of the biggest factors in growing our company. After the sale of the company I found Mozenda, a company that took this philosophy and applied it to the entire Internet. Mozenda gives people the tool to gather all of the Internet data they could want and store it in a usable method. This company gives its users real value.

ennyman: What is screen scraper software and how is it different from simply gathering information from search engines?
Jon T: Screen Scraping Software allows the user to predefine the exact data on a page that he or she would like to harvest. Most importantly a person can harvest certain patterns of data that repeat themselves on pages. In a way this is very similar to how a search engine works. So there’s a sense in which Mozenda gives you the power of your own personal search engine. You can train the Mozenda spider to follow links and grab the wanted data that you are looking for.

ennyman: What are the two or three most important things internet entrepreneurs need to understand in order to have the greatest probability of success?
Jon T: First, set up tracking mechanisms to measure every marketing penny that you spend. Second, find your niche and don't deviate; stay focused. Third, use the scientific method so that you can test for the outcome. This ensures that you do not make the same mistake twice. For example if you want to test a new layout for your home page make sure you A/B test. This is the only way to know if you are headed down the wrong path.

ennyman: Thanks, Jon. Good luck in all your new ventures.